Search results

The concept of agency has a role in a variety of fields and theoretical traditions and has recently taken on the strange role that Emre Amasyali and Axel van den Berg discuss in their two papers, as a term of moral or political approbation and blame, in cases where people fail to act against a structure that is supposed to be blameworthy. But this role is confused. Structures are made up of agents. But the kind of intentionality that is being blamed is ascribed to the structure, as though it is the agent. But blaming, it turns out, is not closely connected to cause but rather to social conventions of justification. Action explanation itself is culturally relative and faces the problem that intentions are unknowable. Self-reports are based on a combination of public facts and inner feelings, which are private. But the reports follow cultural conventions, particularly of justification, which vary wildly. We can resolve the apparent muddle here and make reasons into causes by appealing to a cognitive science view of action as involving predictive processing: the potential justifications are part of the expectations that go into a causal account of action. But they do not determine actions, much less represent them.