Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System [Paperback]

Alicia Juarrero (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2002 | Series: Bradford Books

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Juarrero's lively text skillfully applies the kinds of causal analyses required in non-equilibrium, complex systems theory to the problems of action theory." Stanley N. Salthe, Biological Sciences, Binghamton University

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (February 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262600471
• ISBN-13: 978-0262600477
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new language for Philosophy, January 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Hardcover)

The book seeks a set of terms in which to discuss the actual complexities,and indeterminacies of human conscious intentions and actions. Who acts consciously, why and how ? It first reviews the history of causality from Aristotle onward, to see how present scientific models of causality have developed, such as Newtonian mechanism, and why they are useless in discussing messy real life. It then succinctly develops the terms of information and chaos theories as used in dynamical systems theory, applies these to real life situations, and develops a whole new language to discuss conscious thought and action. It then reconciles this sort of discussion with the explanatory values of traditional interpretive narrative, as in history and fiction. The crown of the work is to discuss the implications of this new description of conscious human behavior and action for such questions as free will, ethics, education, personal identity and the future. It is a quiet book, but its actual, and revolutionary, achievement is to return philosophic discourse to the real world with a set of terms adequate to its inescapable ignorances, unpredictabilities,uncertainties, contradictions and open-endedness. The range of material usefully invoked, from Aristotle to Prigogine, Eco,Thom, Gadamer, Ibsen and Flaubert, is matched only by the energy and clarity of the writing. It is one of the important books of philosophy for our time.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What is all the fuss about?, July 12, 2001

By 

Brandon N. Towl (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Hardcover)

I wrote a formal review of this book for the June issue of _Philosophical Psychology_....

Basically, I think this book is a good idea, but poorly executed. Juarrero makes an interesting conncetion between problems in action theory, the branch of philosophy having to do with human action and its place in the world, and information theory. And it is an interesting project to solve some of these traditional problems using modern neuroscience and dynamical systems theory. So I laud the attempt.

But no matter how interesting the project, a book has to sink or swim with the details, and Juarrero gets many of them wrong. She misinterprets Donald Davidson's theory of actions as causes, uses mathematical terms such as bifurcation in non-standard ways, and gets the laws of thermodynamics plain wrong. The casual reader may be impressed with her expansive technical vocabulary, but ultimately it detracts from the interesting ideas in the book. Read through the first 200 pages, and you'll realize that the most contentious issues in dynamical systems theory are not even discussed; indeed, Juarrero takes too much of the science for granted.

And so, while it's an interesting topic, the book could have used a lot more research and done a lot more "connecting the dots" for readers. If you're after some other books on causality, I would suggest instead Judea Pearl's new book _Causality_. If you are interested in dynamical systems theory, I would read the later works of Andy Clark (such as _Being There_) or some of the papers published by Chris Eliasmith (available on the web).

Hope this helps :) --BNT

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A radically new perspective on causation", June 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Hardcover)

Choice (November 00) calls Dynamics in Action (together with Judea Pearl's Causality, which Choice reviews together with Pearl) "a radically new perspective on causation and the explanation of human behavior. Juarrero proposes a new framework for explaining human action. She probes deeply into the springs of human action to explicate the secret link between mental intention and physical behavior. She begins with a critique of Aristotle's legacy in attempts to understand human agency, arguing that modern philosophy has largely lost the insight of his distinction of four causes countenancicing only mechanistic efficient causes, while perpetuating Aristotle's erroneous principle that nothing moves itself. Juarrero's work is a paradigm of the integration of philosophical analysis with neuropsychological research, evolutionary theory, complex systems theory, and the physics of nonlinear systems. Causes of human action appear as dynamic constraints on complex adaptive systems. She draws implications for the practical understanding of human freedom and responsibility, even proposing bridges between the literary world and science... Both works are highly ambitious in rejecting traditional views. Both are written clearly and enthusiastically... Juarrero's and Pearl's books will greatly interest philosophers and scientists who are concerned with causality and the explanation of human behavior."