Skip to main content

Chapter 1b: Agency as anti-reductive

Much of daily life consists of our responses to problems and opportunities.  Practical reasoning is the name for the mental processes that guide these responses.  It can be divided into four stages: first comes our recognition of some opportunity or problem, followed by our deliberation about how to respond to it; followed in turn by the adoption of one of those courses of action; followed by our ascertaining the success or failure of our course of action.   If we reflect upon this process, we may recognize that we have kept the very same goal in mind throughout our deliberations, or we may recognize that the goal itself has changed.  In either case, we are aware of not only the goal, but also of our having pursued one or many goals at many different times.  This characterization of ourselves as desiring, anticipating, planning, acting, and reflecting can be summarized in the word "agency."  Looking at ourselves as agents is not to characterize ourselves as inner, mental or spiritual beings but as energetically striving and reaching for more.   Looking at ourselves as agents, furthermore, offers the most important evidence that we are more than machines; more than just the sum of our parts: we are living beings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more