Explicating Agency: The Case of Visual Attention

Abstract How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explana...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Philosophical quarterly 2023-03, Vol.73 (2), p.379-413
Main Author: Buehler, Denis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Humanities and Social Sciences
Philosophy
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Summary:Abstract How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency.
ISSN:0031-8094
1467-9213
DOI:10.1093/pq/pqac034