Dynamics in Action
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Dynamicsin Action Dynamicsin Action Dynamics in Action Intentional Behavior as a Complex System Alicia Juarrero A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge , Massachusetts London , England CD1999 MassachusettsInstitute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedin any form by any electronic or mechanicalmeans (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permissionin writing from the publisher. This book was set in Palatino by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America . Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data ]uarrero , Alicia . Dynamics in action: intentional behavior as a complex system/ Alicia ]uarrero. p . cm . Includesbibliographical referencesand index. ISBN 0 -262 - 10081 -9 (hardcover : alk . paper ) I . Act (Philosophy) 2. Action theory. I. Title. B105 .A35 ] 83 1999 128 ' .4 - DC21 99 -23910 CIP - ~ = = : ; ; MIT Press III ~~~21 0 0 819 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Dynamics In Act Ion For my mother, Alicia Valiente, and in memory of my father, FranciscoJuarrero Dynamicsin Action Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Part I Why Action Theory Rests on a Mistake 13 Chapter 1 How the Modern Understanding of Cause Came to Be 15 Chapter 2 Causal Theories of Action 25 Chapter 3 Action and the Modem Understanding of Explanation 43 Chapter 4 Action as Lawful Regularities 53 Chapter 5 Action and Reductive Accounts of Purposiveness 63 Chapter 6 Information Theory and the Problem of Action 77 Part II Dynamical Systems Theory and Human Action 101 Chapter 7 Some New Vocabulary : A Primer on Systems Theory 103 Chapter 8 Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics 119 Chapter 9 Constraints as Causes : The Intersection of Information Theory and Complex Systems Dynamics 131 VIII Contents Chapter 10 Dynamical Constraints as Landscapes: Meaning and Behavior as Topology 151 Chapter 11 Embodied Meaning 163 Chapter 12 Intentional Action : A Dynamical Account 175 Chapter 13 Threading an Agent's Control Loop through the Environment 195 Part III Explaining Human Action: Why Dynamics Tells Us That Stories Are Necessary 215 Chapter 14 Narrative Explanation and the Dynamics of Action 217 Chapter 15 Agency, Freedom, and Individuality 245 Notes 261 References 267 Index 277 Acknowledgments For those of us who try to write at the same time as we teach - full time and well- at a community college (and there are many of us), the encouragement and support of friends and colleagueswho take one's scholarly work seriously are a blessing without which life would be greatly diminished. Both my personal and professional lives have been enriched by countlesssuch persons, many of whom began as colleaguesbut in time becamefriends. For their incisive and helpful comments on my work, as well as for their friendship, I will be forever grateful. I wish I could name and thank you all . For more than twenty -four years it has been a joy to teach at Prince George's Community College, thanks in large part to the presence of my fellow philosophers, Marlene Carpenter and Clyde Ebenreck. Their dedication and devotion both to their students and their friends are unmatched . Portions of this manuscript were written while Visiting Research Associate Professor at George town University . I want to thank their chemistry department chairman, JosephEarley, for that opportunity . Isa Engleberg and John McCann provided valuable comments on early sections of the book, and Edward Pols, Carl Rubino, and Robert Ulanowicz trudged through the entire first and oh-so-rough draft of the manuscript. Not only did none of them suggest that I pack it in; they actually encouragedme, as did Isabel Padro. Thanks . I am very appreciative , also, of Stanley Salthe's insightful and thoughtful criticisms over the years. His questions and commentshave always helped me think and write more clearly. A special thanks goes to Robert Artigiani. Many of the ideaspresented in this book were first articulated during what has become a twelve-year-Long conversation . For patiently correcting my many egregious errors- and not complaining when I no longer could tell which idea or phrasewas first his and which mine - thanks . I am endebted more than I can say to David Depew for his supererogatory assistance. Anonymous to me until the very end, David not only served as reviewer of severalearlier drafts; he also provided valuable suggestionson the book's content. I am embarrassedat his having been x Acknowledgments importuned so. Elizabeth Stanton of the MIT Press deserves specialmen - tion for believing in this project from the very beginning , and for taking a flier on an unknown . Had she not championed my cause, this book would not have been published . To Melissa Vaughn , my editor at MIT Press, for her efficient and gracious guidance of both book and author , and to Shirley Kessel, for her thorough and elegant index , my sincerest thanks go as well . For the persistent and good -humored help of all of these people, I will always be grateful . Inevitable errors no doubt still remain in the manuscript . These are, of course, solely my own . How do I thank my family , not only for instilling in me a love of books and learning , but primarily for the sacrifice of leaving behind their possessions and comfortable lifestyle so that my sister and I could live in freedom? And for making what must have been a very difficult transition for them an adventure for us? Tatu , Lydia , and of course Nana- sine qua non . This one's for you , too . Finally , to Jose Dfaz-Asper : De fodo corazon, gracias. Portions of the following papers I authored have found their way into this book and are reprinted with permission . Dispositions, teleology and reductionism. PhilosophicalTopics 12 (1983): 153- 65. Does level-generation always generate act-tokens? PhilosophyResearch Archives 9 ( 1983 ): 177 - 92 . Kant's concept of teleology and modern chemistry. Review of Metaphysics39 (1985 ): 107 - 35 . Does action theory rest on a mistake? PhilosophyResearch Archives 13 (1987- 88): 587 - 612 . Non-linear phenomena, explanation and action. InternationalPhilosophical Quarterly 28 ( 1988 ): 247 - 55 . What did the agent know ? Manuscrito 11 (1988): 108- 13. Fail-safe versus safe-fail: suggestions toward an evolutionary model of justice. Texas Law Review 69 (1991 ): 1745 - 77 . Language competence and tradition-constituted rationality. Philosophyand Phe- nomenologicalResearch 51 (1991): 611- 17. Causality as constraint. In Evolutionary Systems: Biological and Epistemological Perspectiveson Self-Organization, ed. G. Van de Vijver, S. N. Salthe, and M . Delpos. 1998. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Abbreviations Works cited in this volume are abbreviated as listed here . Full references to theseworks and to other texts cited appearin the bibliography. Aristotle De animaDe an . Nicomachean Ethics EN Metaphysics Meta. The pagination of the Bekker edition of the Greek text, published in the first two of the five volumes of the Berlin Academy 's 1831- 1870 edition of Aristotle 's work has become the customary means to locate a passage in Aristotle . Unless otherwise noted, referencesto Kant indicate "The Critique of Teleological Judgement," in The Critique of judgement, tr. J. C. Meredith (Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1980 ). These references also cite , after " Ak ." , volume and page number in Kant's GesammelteSchriften, prepared under the supervision of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Introduction What is the difference between a wink and a blink ? Knowing one from the other is important- and not only for philosophers of mind. Significant moral and legal consequencesrest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. Jurors, for example, report that deciding whether the accused caused someone's death is relatively easy. They find it much more difficult , on the other hand , to determine " what class of offense- if any- had been committed" (Hacker 1995, 44). At Supreme Court hearings on the subject of physician-assistedsuicide, the discussion turned on the same issue. Supposea doctor administers a large dose of barbiturates to a patient in pain. The patient slips into a coma and dies. Was it first- or second-degree murder, or accidental homicide? Walter Dellinger, acting Solicitor General, testified at those hearings that "so long as the physician's intent was to relieve pain and not causedeath," the behavior was not unlawful . As Anthony Lewis, writing in the New York Times (January 1997), noted of the debate, "Everything turned on the shadowy question of intent ." Our judgments concerning moral responsibility and legal liability will be very different, therefore, depending on how we answer the question, "Was it a wink or a blink?" And yet that is precisely the problem: gauging intent in order to establish what the accused did so that jurors as well as the rest of us can then discriminate among degreesof responsibility. We are not responsible and cannot be held accountable for blinking. And rightly so. We think of blinks, unlike winks, as behavior that we do not intend and cannot control- something that "happensto us," a reflex reaction in which we are passive. Winking, on the other hand, is something we "do" (in some unclear senseof "we" that identifies us as agents). Only intentional behavior qualifies as moral or immoral; reflex es are amoral. But what marks off intentional actions from unintentional, accidental or reflex behavior? How do agents (as opposed to their bodies?) do things? And how do we tell? The branch of philosophy called "action theory" has traditionally been charged with articulating necessaryand sufficient conditions marking the 2 Introduction boundary between action and nonaction , as well as between voluntary and involuntary behavior . The philosophical issues with which action theory is concerned include such topics as the concepts of agency and free will , the relationship between awareness and behavior , and the role that reasons play in causing and explaining actions . Understanding these has required weaving together topics culled from such disparate disciplines as epistemology , metaphysics , philosophy of mind and, more recently , neurology and even genetics.