How Does Human Agency Actually Work? On Bratman's ‘Core Capacity Thesis’ and the Relation between Philosophy of Action and the Empirical Sciences

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21497527
AutoresJonathan Phillips (0000-0002-3073-1045, Dartmouth College), Dudley Plunkett (0000-0003-1293-5770, Dartmouth College Hanover NH USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen41
Número1
Páginas16-29
Fecha de publicación2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Applied Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0264-3758 • E-ISSN: 1468-5930
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/japp.12710
OpenAlexW4391151487
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas20

Throughout his career, Michael Bratman has developed a detailed model of individual ‘planning agency’, and, more recently, models of joint action and aspects of social life that he argues such planning agency helps support. How might we empirically investigate whether these models capture what is going on in actual human lives? In this article, we critically engage with this broad question by focusing on what Bratman calls the ‘core capacity thesis’, which is at the center of his most recent discussions of how his work in the philosophy of action hangs together. In his own words, the core capacity thesis claims that ‘our capacity for planning agency plays basic roles in multiple, interrelated systems of human, mind‐shaped practical organization, individual and social’. We explore how one might go about testing this thesis, focusing on Bratman's particular way of defending this thesis using the idea of ‘nested Cummins functions’. In so doing, we hope to contribute to a broader discussion about what the relationship is (or, perhaps more importantly, should be) between the kind of philosophy of action Bratman does and empirical work in fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and biology

Epistemology · Sociology · Complex Systems and Decision Making · Computer Science · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy