Despite many points of divergence, social scientists and social theorists seem united by one primary concern: to identify what it is people are doing. The thought that this might count as not only a viable but centrally important concern is grounded in a scepticism about the ability of societies’ ordinary members to reliably correctly identify their own and others’ actions. In this scepticism, such social scientists and social theorists usually situate themselves in opposition to ethnomethodologists and Peter Winch. This scepticism (...) is grounded in a belief that ordinary or competent members of societies are unreliable authorities on the identity of their own and others’ actions because they are subject to systems of sociological refraction. The idea being that ordinary members of society are systematically misled as to the identity of their actions and those of their peers because they — or their perceptions of actions — are subject to the refractive properties of ideology, or folk theories of action, and so on. In this paper, I subject to analysis this core commitment of much social science and social theory. (shrink)

Werner Heisenberg was, from a technical point of view, the principal founder of quantum theory. He discovered in 1925 the completely amazing and wholly unprecedented solution to the puzzle: the quantities that classical physical theory was based upon, and which were thought to be numbers, must be treated not as numbers but as actions! Ordinary numbers, such as 2 and 3, have the property that the product of any two of them does not depend on the order of the factors: (...) 2 times 3 is the same as 3 times 2. But Heisenberg discovered that one could get the correct answers out of the old classical laws if one decreed that certain of the numbers that are used in classical physics to describe the physical properties of a material system are not ordinary numbers. Rather, they are actions having the property that the order in which they act matters! (shrink)

COVID-19 is compromising all aspects of society, with devastating impacts on health, political, social, economic and educational spheres. A premium is being placed on scientific research as the source of possible solutions, with a situational imperative to carry out investigations at an accelerated rate. There is a major challenge not to neglect ethical standards, in a context where doing so may mean the difference between life and death. In this paper we offer a rubric for considering the ethical challenges in (...) COVID-19 related research, in the form of an ethics toolkit for global research developed at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with more than 200 global researchers from around the world. This toolkit provides a framework to support confrontation of ethical conflicts through the integrated and iterative analysis of Place, People, Principles and Precedents, throughout the research journey. Two case analyses are offered to exemplify the utility of the toolkit as a flexible and dynamic tool to promote ethical research in the context of COVID-19. (shrink)

The spiritual and psychological insights of these essays were nurtured in a monastic milieu, but their issues are universally human. Merton lays a foundation for personal growth and transformation through fidelity to "our own truth and inner being." His main focus is our desire and need to attain "a fully human and personal identity." This classic is a newly restored and corrected edition and the inaugural volume of _Gethsemani Studies_, a series of books that explores, through the twin perspectives of (...) psychology and religion, the dynamics and depths of being fully human. (shrink)

Manifest Activity presents and critically examines the model of human power, the will, our capacities for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural world of one of the most important and traditionally under-appreciated philosophers of the 18th century: Thomas Reid. For Reid, contrary to the view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks, that our actions are not merely remote (...) products of forces that lie outside of our control. Reid holds, instead, that actions are all and only those events that spring from active power and he produces insightful and imaginative arguments for the claim that only a creature with a mind is capable of having active power. He believes that only human beings, and creatures 'above us', are capable of directing events towards ends, of endowing them with purpose or direction, the distinctive feature of action. However, he also holds that all events, and not merely human actions, are products of active power, power possessed either by human beings or by God. This collection of theses leads Reid to the view that human behaviour and the progress of nature are both essentially teleological. Patterns in nature are the products of laws of which God is the author; patterns in human conduct are the products of character and the laws that individuals set for themselves. Manifest Activity examines Reid's arguments for this view and the view's implications for the nature of character, motivation and the special kind of causation involved in the production of human behavior. (shrink)

Nicholas Saunders claims that, in my view, divine action requires and is confined to indeterminacies at the quantum level. I try to make clear that, in speaking of “gaps” in physical causality, I mean that the existence of intentions entails that determining law explanations alone cannot give a complete account of the natural world. By “indeterminacy” I mean a general (not quantum) lack of determining causality in the physical order. Construing physical causality in terms of dispositional properties variously (...) realized in more or less creative ways in different contexts may be most helpful in developing an account of divine action. (shrink)

Abstract: Being-in-the-world defines in Heidegger an ontological and practical existential situation that in a first approach characterizes intellectual knowledge, an approach related to the Husserlian notion of intentionality. In his Curso de teoría del conocimiento, Polo rectifies this characterization, stressing the primacy of theory regarding action, and interpreting the practical (technical) relationship with the world as a lower level of “having”. Making some comparisons between Husserl, Scheler and Jonas, in connection with Polo’s thought, the article presents different (...) accounts of the notion of the world (phenomenological, metaphysical, moral) that allow to clarify the problem of the relationship between contemplation and action in the world. (shrink)

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) (...) and its impact on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system. (shrink)

Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others –human and nonhuman actors. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised (...) by Classical Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency –what the author has denominated “adapting” or “adaptive agency” (yin 因). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad-hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world’s oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, opening a brand-new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

The main idea of this book is that perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. Think of a blind person tap-tapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skillful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. The world makes itself available (...) to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction. In this book I argue that all perception is touch-like in this way: perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do ; it is determined by what we are ready to do. In ways I try to make precise, we enact our perceptual experience; we act it out. (shrink)

This new textbook is an exceptionally clear and concise introduction to the philosophy of action, suitable for students interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of social sciences. Moya begins by considering the problem of agency: how are we to understand the distinction between actions and happenings, between actions we perform and things that happen to us? Moya outlines and examines a range of philosophical responses to this problem. He also develops his own original view, treating the (...) analysis of meaningful action as the basis for understanding the distinctive interplay of agency, intention and commitment. Subsequent chapters examine recent attempts to integrate our understanding of action with the view of the world provided by the natural sciences. The work of Donald Davidson is examined in detail. Moya also discusses the views of many other authors who have contributed to recent debates in the philosophy of action, including Anscombe, Churchland, Harman, Hornsby, Goldman and O'Shaughnessy. (shrink)

The world’s major monotheistic religions typically maintain that God freely chose, in the libertarian sense, to create the universe for a reason or purpose. Philosophers of religion often argue that the idea that God makes a free choice to create for a purpose is deeply flawed. In parallel with these philosophers of religion, philosophers of action typically argue that the idea that human beings make free choices to act for purposes is also flawed. I begin my article by (...) briefly summarizing what is involved in the idea of a human agent freely choosing for a purpose. I then examine criticisms of this idea by philosophers of action and suggest how they might plausibly be rebutted. I conclude by suggesting that if these criticisms by philosophers of action are suspect, then there is good reason for thinking that the same or similar criticisms by philosophers of religion are suspect. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

The equation of the world with 'life' and 'life' with consciousness ramified into the baffling account Wittgenstein gave of the 'philosophical self '. The physical world, as Descartes argued, is made of material substance, and the mental world 'is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal'. Conceiving of consciousness as a private realm populated by private experiences, one is bound to be puzzled at its evolutionary emergence. Consciousness is attributable to an organism as a whole, (...) not to its parts, no matter how complex. And it is attributable to the organism on the grounds of the behaviour of the organism, its exercise of its perceptual faculties, its susceptibility to sensation, and its voluntary action. A venerable tradition going back at least as far as Descartes conceived of consciousness as the immovable rock against which the waves of scepticism break. (shrink)

Despite heroic efforts, philosophers have found it increasingly difficult to evade discussion of metaphysical topics. Take the philosophy of mind. Take, in particular, the mind-body problem in its latest guise: the problem of causal relevance. If mental properties are not reducible to physical properties, how can we reconcile the role such properties seem to have in producing bodily motions that constitute actions with the apparent fact that the very same motions are entirely explicable on the basis of purely physical properties (...) of purely physical events in the nervous system? Familiar approaches to the problem include appeals to “supervenient causation,” to “higher-level” laws governing putatively higher-level entities and events, and to “realizing” relations that make room in objects for overlapping properties. (shrink)

Hans Joas is one of the foremost social theorists in Germany today. Based on Joas’s celebrated study of George Herbert Mead, this work reevaluates the contribution of American pragmatism and European philosophical anthropology to theories of action in the social sciences. Joas also establishes direct ties between Mead’s work and approaches drawn from German traditions of philosophical anthropology. Joas argues for adding a third model of action to the two predominant models of rational and normative action—one that (...) emphasizes the creative character of human action. This model encompasses the other two, allowing for a more comprehensive theory of action. Joas elaborates some implications of his model for theories of social movements and social change and for the status of action theory in sociology in the face of competition from theories advanced by Luhmann and Habermas. The problem of action is of crucial importance in both sociology and philosophy, and this book—already widely debated in Germany—will add fresh impetus to the lively discussions current in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

We think less than we think. My thesis moves from this suspicion to show that standard accounts of intentional action can't explain the whole of agency. Causalist accounts such as Davidson's and Bratman's, according to which an action can be intentional only if it is caused by a particular mental state of the agent, don't work for every kind of action. So-called automatic actions, effortless performances over which the agent doesn't deliberate, and to which she doesn't need (...) to pay attention, constitute exceptions to the causalist framework, or so I argue in this thesis. Not all actions are the result of a mental struggle, painful hesitation, or the weighting of evidence. Through practice, many performances become second nature. Think of familiar cases such as one's morning routines and habits: turning on the radio, brushing your teeth. Think of the highly skilled performances involved in sport and music: Jarrett's improvised piano playing, the footballer's touch. Think of agents' spontaneous reactions to their environment: ducking a blow, smiling. Psychological research has long acknowledged the distinctiveness and importance of automatic actions, while philosophy has so far explained them together with the rest of agency. Intuition tells us that automatic actions are intentional actions of ours all the same (I have run a survey which shows that this intuition is widely shared): not only our own autonomous deeds for which we are held responsible, but also necessary components in the execution and satisfaction of our general plans and goals. But do standard causal accounts deliver on the intentionality of automatic actions? I think not. Because, in automatic cases, standard appeals to intentions, beliefs, desires, and psychological states in general ring hollow. We just act: we don't think, either consciously or unconsciously. On the reductive side, Davidson's view can't but appeal to, at best, unconscious psychological states, the presence and causal role of which is, I argue, inferred from the needs of a theory, rather than from evidence in the world. On the non-reductive side, Bratman agrees, with his refutation of the Simple View, that we can't just attach an intention to every action that we want to explain. But Bratman’s own Single Phenomenon View, appealing to the mysterious notion of 'motivational potential', merely acknowledges the need for refinement without actually providing one. So I propose my own account of intentional action, the 'guidance view', according to which automatic actions are intentional: differently from Davidson and Bratman, who only offer necessary conditions in order to avoid the problem of causal deviance, I offer a full-blown account: E's phi-ing is intentional if and only If phi-ing is under E's guidance. This account resembles one developed by Frankfurt, with the crucial difference that Frankfurt – taking 'acting with an intention' and 'acting intentionally' to be synonymous – thinks that guidance is sufficient only for some movement being an action, but not for some movement being an intentional action. I argue that, on the other hand, Frankfurt's concept of guidance can be developed so that it is sufficient for intentional action too. In Chapter One I present and defend my definition of ‘automatic action’. In Chapter Two I show that such understanding of automatic actions finds confirmation in empirical psychology. In Chapter Three I show that Davidson's reductive account of intentional action does not work for automatic actions. In Chapter Four I show that the two most influential non-reductive accounts of intentional action, the Simple View and Bratman's Single Phenomenon View, don't work either. And in Chapter Five I put forward and defend my positive thesis, the 'guidance view'. Also, in the Appendix I present the findings of my survey on the intentionality of automatic actions. (shrink)

Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have (...) evolved for the perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function. (shrink)

This text investigates the procedurality inaugurated by the action of subjects, which can be seen especially in the developments devoted to the play Antigone, in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The conflict of irreducible rights entails the creation of a theory of action – in which the ends do not justify the means. Such an ethical requirement, always a posteriori, is imposed when the non-control of the relational world is verified, implying, finally, an open historicity. However, if (...) simply being in the world is an action since it produces effects, we ask ourselves about the conditions (background in a situation governing expectations, but also the history of thought) and potentialities (disruptive emergence that organizes expectations, in becoming) of action. Thanks to externalizations that generate a problematic field, in the form of language, work and desire, we contract alterity relations and arrive at ourselves, through the other, fatally different from the starting point. It is up to philosophy to judge the implications of each particular action. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper assesses the Everettian approach to the measurement problem, especially the version of that approach advocated by Simon Saunders and David Wallace. I emphasise conceptual, indeed metaphysical, aspects rather than technical ones; but I include an introductory exposition of decoherence. In particular, I discuss whether---as these authors maintain---it is acceptable to have no precise definition of 'branch' (in the Everettian kind of sense). (A version of this paper will appear in a CTNS/Vatican Observatory volume on Quantum Theory and (...) Divine Action, ed. Robert Russell et al.). (shrink)

The concept of action is playing an increasingly prominent role in attempts to explain how subjects can represent the world. The idea is that at least some of the role traditionally assigned to internal representations can, in fact, be played by the ability of subjects to act on the world, and the exercise of that ability on appropriate occasions. This paper argues that the appeal to action faces a serious dilemma. If the concept of action (...) employed is a representational one, then the appeal to action is circular: representation has been presupposed rather than explained. However, if the concept of action employed is a non-representational one, then the appeal to action will be inadequate: in particular, the appeal will fail to account for the normativity of representation. The way out of this dilemma is to develop a conception of action that is normative, but where this normativity is not inherited from the action's connection to distinct representational states. The normative status of such actions would be sui generis. This paper argues that such a conception of action is available. (shrink)

The utilitarian conception, which I call “action as production,” holds that action is a way of making use of the world, conceived as a causal mechanism. According to the rational intuitionist conception, which I call “action as assertion,” action is a way of acknowledging the value in the world, conceived as a realm of status. On the Kantian constructivist conception, which I call “action as participation,” action is a way of making the (...) world, qua causal mechanism, come to count as a realm of status. My rather limited aim in this paper is to identify three substantively different answers the question of how action relates an agent to the world, regarded as a context of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.4 (2006) 607-611MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byPaul Allen Miller University of South Carolina e-mail: [email protected] Habinek. The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. x + 329 pp. Cloth, $52.It has become increasingly evident that the texts we study from ancient Rome are embedded objects, implicated in a rich field of symbolic systems and (...) corporeal practices. The image of the poem as an isolated aesthetic object has become untenable as the field has become dominated by concepts of intertextuality, performativity, social construction, and self-fashioning. The text in books like Tony Corbeill's Controlling Laughter (Princeton 1996) is less an object than an action. Thomas Habinek's The World of Roman Song represents an attempt to make good on the promise of these developments by rethinking the entirety of Roman literature as an embedded social process of "song," of marked speech, that stands at the origins of the Roman social order. Ritual hymns, funereal laudations, convivial play, and comedic performances become so many moments in the constitution of what it means to be Roman, even as conflicts between center and periphery, masculine and feminine, vir and cinaedus are both played out and resisted in the various genres that constitute the world of ritualized speech and its formal derivatives.Any such sweeping endeavor brings with it both a necessary boldness—asking us to rethink the history of Roman culture from a new perspective—and the danger of reductiveness. For the most part, these are dangers that Habinek manages skillfully to skirt through a combination of fine-grained philological analysis and a sophisticated, but never overbearing, theoretical apparatus. The World of Roman Song features close readings of the usage of words such as cano, carmen, dico, ludus, convivia, and sodalis, from their earliest attestations through their appearance in later imperial literature. It also deploys an intellectual armature that draws upon contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt-school Marxism, object-relations psychoanalysis, and the theories of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Bataille. Yet, as we shall see, the very methodology that makes this sweeping [End Page 607] and important survey possible—the examination not of texts but of lemmata to trace the memes of Roman self-constitution through formalized language—leads to certain unavoidable distortions. Complex textual systems become reduced to exemplary moments of embeddedness. This reduction is an enabling gesture that like any mode of analysis, however, ultimately produces its own limit.For this reader, the heart of the book is to be found in chapter 4, "Song and Play." Here Habinek traces the relation between three primary sets of terms: dico, dictum, and implicitly dictator, meaning to make an authoritative statement; cano, canto, and carmen, meaning to perform a song (carmen) of one's own (cano), or to repeat that of another (canto), so as to establish a relation between the singer and the constituted social, and ultimately cosmic, whole, via ritualized speech; and ludo, ludus, and lusus, referring to scripted or formalized movements of the body. Thus a poetic ludus, such as that described in Catullus 50 between the poet and Licinius Calvus, would refer not so much to the acts of song (carmina) to which the game of composition gave rise as to the formalized interchange and embodied practice of writing capping verses in different meters in a convivial setting. The previous chapter, "Song and Speech," had established the difference between loquor and dico, with the former referring to unmarked speech and the latter to the making of statements that the speaker asserts as authoritative and hence true. It is thus possible for the terms cano and dico to overlap and those of ludo and cano as well. Nevertheless, the ultimate dream of aristocratic Roman manhood (and, as any number of feminists would point out, of patriarchy as a whole) is for carmen—the ritualized speech that constitutes the community as a living unity—to assume the status of dictum, authoritative speech freed from the... (shrink)

Physicalism holds that the laws of physics are inviolable and ubiquitous and thereby account for all of reality. Laws leave no “wiggle room” or “gaps” for action by numinous agents. They cannot be invoked, however, without boundary stipulations that perforce are contingent and which “drive” the laws. Driving contingencies are not limited to instances of “blind chance,” but rather span a continuum of amalgamations with regularities, up to and including nearly determinate propensities. Most examples manifest directionality, and their very (...) definition encompasses intentionality. Contingencies, via their interactions with laws, can reinforce and maintain one another, thereby giving rise to enduring, ordered configurations of constraints. All of ordered nature thus results from ongoing transactions between mutualistic contingencies that constrain possibilities and entropic chance events that degrade order but diversify opportunities. Laws do not of themselves determine reality; interactions among contingencies do. For believers, the robust abundance of indeterminacies provides ample latitude for divine intervention, free will, and prayer. The priority of contingency also affords some insight into the meaning of suffering and evil. (shrink)

The work of Pere Alberch is crucial to study the early stages of evo-devo. In particular, it illustrates very persuasively why developmental systems have so much to say about the course of evolutionary change. In addition to an important empirical work, he elaborated a stimulating framework of theoretical ideas on biological form, morphological variation, and how developmental processes establish possible evolutionary paths previous to the action of natural selection. In this framework, the study of development and evolution are related (...) through the notion of possible morphologies. In his view, the morphology of organisms shows internal coherence and structure, emergent from complex non linear interactions among parts and with the environment. (shrink)

_Essays on Freedom of Action_, first published in 1973, brings together original papers by contemporary British and American philosophers on questions which have long concerned philosophers and others: the question of whether persons are wholly a part of the natural world and their actions the necessary effects of causal processes, and the question of whether our actions are free, and such that we can be held responsible for them, even if they are the necessary effects of casual processes. This (...) volume will be of interest not only to those who are primarily concerned with philosophy but also to students in those many other disciplines in which freedom and determinism arise as problems. (shrink)

Though many philosophers of mind have taken an interest in the great developments in the brain sciences, the interest is seldom reciprocated by scientists, who frequently ignore the contributions philosophers have made to our understanding of the mind and brain. In a rare collaboration, a world famous brain scientist and an eminent philosopher have joined forces in an effort to understand how our brain interacts with the world. Does the brain behave as a calculator, combining sensory data before (...) deciding how to act? Or does it behave as an emulator endowed with innate models of the world, which it corrects according to the results of experiences obtained by the senses? The two authors come from very different backgrounds - the philosopher Jean-Luc Petit belongs to the philosophical tradition of Husserlian phenomenology. Alain Berthoz has long been interested in the physiology of action (movement, posture, decision-making, perception, etc.). Drawing on cutting-edge research from the cognitive sciences, the authors have produced a highly original volume showing how phenomenology and physiology can interact to further our understanding of the brain and the mind. (shrink)

The paper presents a logical treatment of actions based on dynamic logic. This approach makes it possible to reflect clearly the differences between static and dynamic elements of the world, a distinction which seems crucial to us for a representation of actions.Starting from propositional dynamic logic a formal system (DLA) is developed, the programs of which are used to model action types. Some special features of this system are: Basic aspects of time are incorporated in DLA as far (...) as they are needed for our purpose. Names for states and for instants are simulated by formulas. It is possible to express formally that a formula is satisfiable or valid. A special program is introduced to reflect developments which are not caused by an official agent but by external influences. (shrink)

Real-time computer graphics and complex sensory input challenge past assumptions of highly constrained metaphors based on static imagery. Access to research and gaming interfaces have popularized the understanding of tracking technologies that tailor interaction to ambulatory displacement and dexterous handling of objects, expanding the realm of metaphors from visual to physical phenomena. But behaviour and the mind have been studied far before there were real-time computer graphics or digitally created synthetic environments. Dynamic relationships between environment, body and thought are being (...) dissected today by neuro-scientific research, and, conversely, synthetic environments are being utilized to address psychological disorders. This article examines research on scientific and philosophical fields that advance the definition of representation, from an image-based realm as limited by previous popular media to an understanding of action and immersion, where attention is activated by change, and rooted in the body. From this perspective, the advent of embodied representation may not be as much of a change of medium, but the perceptual relation with the medium, the medium being a created Umwelt, where the virtual world builds the mind through the body. (shrink)

Defining actions in contradistinction to mere happenings runs into the problem of specifying the role of the agent and separating what the agent does from what they exploit or suffer. Traditionally these problems have been approached by starting with a simple act, such as an incidental movement, and considering causality, or by seeking to elucidate the connection between the act and the agent's intentions or reasons. It is suggested here that a promising approach is to shift attention from 'simple' movements (...) and start instead by exploring the general character of acquired skills. Balancing the body is one such skill and serves here as an exemplar. Some remarks made by Reid on balance are used in a Peircean framework for perception to suggest that, at least for humans, an action is always the performance of an acquired skill. Also, while action is constitutive of perception, bodily perception is the basis of action, providing in a feeling of ownership direct knowledge of an asymmetric opposition between the agent and the world. (shrink)

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris—a real-time interactive video game—certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as being used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction. To substantiate our position we have implemented a computational laboratory that lets us record keystrokes and (...) game situations, as well as allows us to dynamically create situations. Using the data of over 30 subjects playing 6 games, tachistoscopic tests of some of these subjects, and results from our own successful efforts at building expert systems to play Tetris, we show why knowing how to use one’s environment to enhance speed and robustness are important components in skilled play. (shrink)

Our eyes, bodies, and perspectives are constantly shifting as we observe the world. Despite this, we are very good at distinguishing between self-caused visual changes and changes in the environment: the world appears mostly stable despite our visual field moving around. This, it seems, also occurs when we are dreaming. As we visually investigate the dream environment, we track moving objects with our dream eyes, examine objects, and shift focus. These movements, research suggests, are reflected in the rapid (...) movements or saccades of our sleeping eyes. Do we really see the dream world in the same way that we see the real world? If we do, how could dreaming, usually assumed to be mind-generated hallucinations, replicate such an experience? This problem would be deflated if dreams are not hallucinations at all, but rather imagination, illusion or simply unrealistic. I argue that imagination and illusion views do not satisfactorily explain away the problem of vision and action in sleep. The imagination model is not a complete description of dreaming that is consistent with empirical research, and it is unlikely that the visual dream world is an illusion. Given that the dreaming visual experience is most likely active, hallucinatory, and at times a realistic world simulation, there are important implications for our understanding of visual perception and its relationship to movement. Evidence suggests that our dream eyes investigate the dream world as our waking eyes investigate the waking world. If changes to the unconsciously generated dream environment are perceived as external and unintentional while dream body movements are perceived as self-generated and intentional, current theory of visual perception may have to be expanded to account for how the dreaming mind generates a stable world in which we track and visually explore mind-generated objects. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that the logical form of action sentences are dependent upon the concept of 'agent' that one takes. A thing type of agent leads to the extensional form while a thinking type of agent leads to intentional form of action sentences. Consequently, it is important to note the locus of the describer who himself is also an agent. If the describer is someone other than theagent, the ascription of action is (...) based on a tacit counterfactual. The agent could have done otherwise, implying the agent to be a being-of-the-world, who acts on the things of the world to bring about a change which could not have occurred otherwise. (shrink)

One of the dominating themes in the first part is the negative treatment that Marx’s concept of labor has received by late critical theorists, particularly Habermas. While supportive of the rejection of Marx’s economic functionalism entailed by Habermas’s adoption of communicative action as the basic category of critical theory, Honneth worries about the indifference towards the normative potential of labor that he sees in most twentieth-century social theory. Honneth agrees with critics of reductionism that labor is neither the only (...) form of social reproduction, nor a primary source of emancipatory consciousness, as the fragmentation and depolitization of a working class that has suffered the effects of Taylorism clearly manifests. But Honneth is still convinced that the experience of recognition is to a large extent associated with work, and that Habermas tends to understand interaction in terms of instrumental action, making the concept of interaction inadequate to capture the sort of normative claims expressed by workers who do not see themselves sufficiently recognized in the labor they do. Although Honneth acknowledges that he has not settled how to navigate between these competing interests, the clarity of the call for a more complex concept of labor justifies the inclusion of these papers in the volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Theory of ActionLara DenisRichard McCarty. Kant’s Theory of Action. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xxiv + 250. Cloth, $74.00.This significant, stimulating contribution to Kantian practical philosophy strives to interpret Kant’s theory of action in ways that will increase readers’ understanding and appreciation of Kant’s moral theory. Its thesis is that Kant combines metaphysical freedom and psychological determinism: our actions within the phenomenal (...) class='Hi'>world are causally determined by our prior psychological states in that world and are appearances of our free action in the noumenal world. McCarty argues for a metaphysical, “two-worlds” interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction between appearances and things in themselves over epistemological or methodological “two-standpoints” interpretations familiar from Christine Korsgaard [End Page 533] and Henry Allison (along the way, McCarty also challenges Allison’s “Incorporation Thesis”). Some of the book’s arguments are textual, displaying perceptive readings of Kant’s lecture notes, published works, and philosophical influences. Others primarily concern the philosophical plausibility or moral tenability of various positions one might attribute to Kant. The book’s greatest strength is McCarty’s positive account of Kant’s theory of action. He presents a coherent, even elegant, two-worlds model. His interpretations of maxims, incentives, empirical character, and Gesinnung are insightful.The book’s first two chapters introduce McCarty’s understanding of maxims and incentives and begin tackling what he calls “the problem of justification and explanation.” Chapter 3 defends the claim that Kant embraced psychological determinism. Chapters 4 and 5 present McCarty’s two-worlds interpretation of the transcendental distinction, defend it from objections, and argue for its superiority over two-standpoint interpretations. Chapter 6 focuses on moral motivation, presenting respect for the moral law as an incentive capable of explaining morally justified actions, and distinguishing between morally worthy and virtuous action so as to defend Kant’s ethics from common objections. Chapter 7 similarly disentangles notions of a good will and virtue, provocatively claiming that all human agents have both a good will and virtue. The main task of chapter 7, however, is analysis of the radical evil in human nature. Chapter 8 raises questions about Kant’s conception of the highest good—particularly, the afterlife in which we are to continue our moral progress—as an object of rational hope.I read the book’s main argument as follows:1. Kant’s theory of action must solve “the problem of justification and explanation”: it must show how the reasons that justify a judgment that one ought to do something can also explain one’s doing it. Kant’s theory of action must solve this problem because if what justifies an action cannot also explain it, such justification is “irrelevant.” Only if our actions are explicable in terms of practical reasoning is justification of action by practical reasoning (e.g. by reference to hypothetical or categorical imperatives) “relevant” to our conduct. The problem of justification and explanation arises as it does within Kant’s ethics because Kant holds that pure reason is capable of issuing in action; yet he also holds that human beings and other imperfectly rational agents do not invariably act as we recognize we ought. So we cannot explain our acting as we ought (when we do) simply by appeal to “ought implies can,” internalism, or “the causality of freedom.”2. Psychological determinism, combined with a metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction, allows Kant to solve the problem of justification and explanation. Through a timeless, free act in the noumenal world, we each fix our empirical character, which serves as the “causal law” for our actions in the phenomenal world. Maxims, which function as both major premises in practical syllogisms and rules of our empirical characters, provide bases for both the imperatival justifications and motivational explanations of human actions. The “logical force” of a maxim justifies action on it; the “psychological force” of the maxim—specifically, of the incentive incorporated into the maxim—explains action on it.3. Psychological determinism is compatible with and beneficial for Kant’s moral theory. Most crucially, it is compatible with the freedom necessary for moral agency and responsibility.4. Two-standpoint... (shrink)

In this book the author treats art as an action performed by the artist as agent, rather than examining it from the point of view of its audience as ...

An analysis of the manner in which believers' "relations to the supernatural" influence and even rationalize their action is central to Weber's sociology as a whole as well as his analysis of the development of modern capitalism and to his sociology of religion. Yet Weber never systematically presents the highly differentiated analytic course followed by the "rationalization of action" in the life-sphere of religion to the "methodical rational way of life." This study reconstructs this meandering route. In doing (...) so, it emphasizes the ways in which action, according to Weber, is altered as believers alter their mode of interacting with the supernatural. A sharp distinction between the merely cognitive and ideational influence upon action of "world views" and the influence of "salvation paths" is held to throughout. Because they place "psychological premiums" upon action, the latter are seen to be of far greater importance for the rationalization of action. Most salvation paths, however, and despite the explanations they offer for injustice, fail to introduce the enduring "religious mood" and to rationalize action radically. Those few salvation paths that do so articulate an acute tension between the world view and human suffering, yet "virtuoso religious qualifications" must also be present if the methodical rational way of life is to arise. Throughout, the analyses by Tenbruck, Schluchter, and Habermas are critiqued as incomplete and misleading. (shrink)

Kosgaard claims that selves/agents self-constitute during actions by relying on principles such as Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This intellectualist approach neglects the body. Merleau-Ponty considers the “lived body” and its perceptual world as the source of the unity of action, an approach that I extrapolate to all biological organisms.

What is the connection between action that is caused by inauthentic antecedent springs of action, such as surreptitiously engineered-in desires and beliefs, and moral obligation? If, for example, an agent performs an action that derives from such antecedent springs can it be that the agent is not obligated to perform this action owing to the inauthenticity of its causal antecedents? I defend an affirmative response, assuming that we morally ought to bring about the states of affairs (...) that occur in the intrinsically best worlds accessible to us and that a version of attitudinal hedonism is the axiology for ranking worlds. (shrink)

Cultural Context of Multilevel Collective Social Actions: Framing, Reflection, Resonance and the Impact of Global and Local Anti-Poverty Movements In political science as well as in other social sciences much attention has been paid during recent years to the rapid growth of national and transnational activist networks and their increasing impact on domestic and world politics. Together with the proliferation of literature on the topic, concepts of collective action frames, framing processes, mobilizing ideas and meanings and their cultural (...) resonance have gained considerable currency. However, less has been written about the possibilities of and the constraints on the circulation of collective action frames or about the connection between the cultural adaptation of frames and the results of actual collective struggles. The paper explores this understudied issue both theoretically and empirically. After identifying possible links between collective action framing processes and the representational practices of particular cultures based on a review of existing theoretical approaches, the functional consequences are demonstrated by the example of the Global Call for Action against Poverty international campaign and the Czech national variant. (shrink)

(2006). A Review of: “Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership”. World Futures: Vol. 62, No. 5, pp. 404-405.

ABSTRACT One major problem in the process of knowledge assimilation is how to deal with inconsistency of new knowledge and the existing knowledge base. In this paper we present a formal, provably correct and yet computational methodology for assimilation of new knowledge into knowledge bases about actions and changes based on the slogan: what is believed is what is explained. Technically, we employ Gelfond and Lifschitz' action description language A to describe domains of actions. The knowledge bases on domains (...) of actions are defined and obtained by a new translation from domain descriptions in A into abductive normal logic programs, where a time dimension is incorporated. The knowledge bases are shown to be both sound and complete with respect to their domain descriptions. In particular, we propose a possible causes approach (PCA) to knowledge assimilation about evolving domains of actions, in contrast to Ginsberg's possible worlds approach (PWA) and Winslett's possible models approach (PMA). A possible cause of new knowledge consists of abduced occurrences of actions and value propositions about the initial state of the domain of actions, that would allow to derive the new knowledge. We show how to compute possible causes with abductive logic programming, and present some techniques to improve search efficiency. We use examples to compare our possible causes approach with syntax-based approaches, such as Ginsberg's possible worlds approach, and semantics-based approaches, such as Winslett's possible models approach, to belief revision/update. (shrink)

Hans Joas is one of the foremost social theorists in Germany today. Based on Joas’s celebrated study of George Herbert Mead, this work reevaluates the contribution of American pragmatism and European philosophical anthropology to theories of action in the social sciences. Joas also establishes direct ties between Mead’s work and approaches drawn from German traditions of philosophical anthropology. Joas argues for adding a third model of action to the two predominant models of rational and normative action—one that (...) emphasizes the creative character of human action. This model encompasses the other two, allowing for a more comprehensive theory of action. Joas elaborates some implications of his model for theories of social movements and social change and for the status of action theory in sociology in the face of competition from theories advanced by Luhmann and Habermas. The problem of action is of crucial importance in both sociology and philosophy, and this book—already widely debated in Germany—will add fresh impetus to the lively discussions current in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

This article argues the necessity of overcoming the hierarchical and pyramidal conception of the central nervous system that has subordinated the motor function to the higher brain activities for at least the last 150 years. The evolution of some motor modes of behavior?such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments?has given rise to an ?embodied logic? underpinning not only the development of models of action and prediction but also the production of gestures and sequences of syllables that are (...) at the basis of human communication. Whether it is a matter of shaking someone's hand, writing a letter, or whatever, each executive function?controlled by a series of nervous structures and mental procedures that process the information?requires behaviors that are oriented to a specific end. (shrink)