Agential capacities: a capacity to guide

Abstract

In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions -primitivism and the causal theory -fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. Primitivists postulate primitive agential capacities in their explanations. The latter neglect to explain how primitive capacities integrate with findings from natural science. The former do not explain why some feedback mechanism's activity amounts to the agent's guidance. In this paper I argue that both traditions should acknowledge a capacity to guide, as actually constituted by the executive system. I argue that appeals to this empirically discovered psychological system explain how individuals guide in a way that integrates with explanations from cognitive science. Individuals' capacity to guide is embedded in the natural world through the activity of its constituent (mechanistic) components.

Difficulty

“…Far from what the name may suggest, cognitive control is not just aimed at controlling your mind or thoughts. It is intimately linked to self-control, goal-directed flexible behavior, attention, and action selection (Wu, 2011;Wu, 2016;Sripada, 2020;Buehler, 2021;Buehler, 2022;Hendrickx, 2023). Many philosophers care deeply about these topics, particularly because of their crucial role in agency: indeed, cognitive control instantiates many agential properties.…”

On Attention and Norms: An Opinionated Review of Recent Work

“…Overt visual attention, embodied in eye movements, is directed to the location of highest magnitude in the saliency map and the map biases spatial attention to yield automatic attention to a location. Denis Buehler (2022) provides a detailed account of the draw on attention by appealing to alterations to a priority map, a construct related to but broader than a saliency map in that it integrates more than basic perceptual features including many of the factors noted in Figure 5 (Bisley and Mirpour 2019;Todd and Manaligod 2018;Fecteau and Munoz 2006).…”

Nature immersions: teaching reading through a real-world curriculum

“…In alignment with Place-Based Education [PBE], contemplative engagements in nature offer slow, purposeful, kinesthetic and nonjudgmental awareness building of the ecosystem (Beuhler, 2021; Richardson et al, 2021). Additionally, these all-senses embodiments are known to have positive, long-term effects on people’s emotional and social development, particularly in educational settings (Alme & Reime, 2021; Charles & Senauer Loge, 2012).…”