Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior As a Complex System

Juarrero, Alicia

ISBN 10: 0262100819 / ISBN 13: 9780262100816

Published by Bradford Books / MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999

About this Item

A few small abrasions to jacket back with some tiny patches of paper loss else a tight bright crisp unmarked copy in clean unclipped dust jacket protected in clear mylar sleeve; nearly as new, appears unread; first printing with no later statements.

Seller Inventory # 52822

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior As a Complex System
• Publisher: Bradford Books / MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262100819
• ISBN 13: 9780262100816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory"—the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior—has been unable to account for the difference.

Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation—one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions—as historical narrative, not inference—follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.

About the Author

Alicia Juarrero is Professor of Philosophy at Prince George's Community College, Maryland. She is a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the governing board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.