Dynamics in Action

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 theorythe branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action and between voluntary and involuntary behaviorhas been unable to account for the difference.Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken 350-year-old model of cause and explanationone that takes all causes to be of the push-pull efficient cause sort and all explanation to be prooflikeunderlies 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 actionsas historical narrative not inferencefollows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.