Psychophysical unity and the structure of basic action
Psychophysical unity and the structure of basic action
I argue, along generally disjunctivist lines, and against both event-causalist and agent-causalist accounts, that the bodily movements with which we act are intrinsically agency-involving events, not intrinsically agency-neutral events that acquire their agential status purely in virtue of their causal histories. I also argue that there are no absolutely teleologically basic actions. All actions, including bodily movements, are in principle indefinitely decomposable into smaller, more basic actions, which can be re-composed in ways which greatly extend and deepen our agential capacities. We are not typically explicitly aware of doing this, but we can usefully become so.
The ‘action space’ within which this occurs – roughly speaking between the inception of the action and the overt bodily movement by which extracorporeal changes are effected – is occluded in causalist accounts by the brute causal relation the latter posit between, on the one hand, attitudes or agents and, on the other, bodily movements. The processes and events occupying this space are, however, accessible not only third-personally, but also first-personally. They are ‘doings’ of and by
the agent, belonging to what I call the agential teleological order, and are apt for incorporation into the rational teleological order, i.e., as items in practical reasoning. In fact, they feature in it more frequently than philosophers tend to assume.
Anticausalists such as Anscombe and Hornsby explicitly acknowledge that the events and processes that result in overt bodily movements are themselves agential, but do little to develop the thought. They do, however, spawn a loose tradition which does develop it, and which I seek to continue. The resulting account has, I believe, real-world implications for education, particularly in sport and the performing arts, and also, indirectly, for medicine and health care.
Action; agency; bodily movements; anti-causalism; psychophysical unity: Anscombe; Alexander Technique
University of Southampton
Kjeldsen, Tim
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3 November 2024
Kjeldsen, Tim
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Mcmanus, Denis
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Tanesi, Alessandra
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Kjeldsen, Tim
(2024)
Psychophysical unity and the structure of basic action.
University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 181pp.
Record type:
Thesis
(Doctoral)
Abstract
I argue, along generally disjunctivist lines, and against both event-causalist and agent-causalist accounts, that the bodily movements with which we act are intrinsically agency-involving events, not intrinsically agency-neutral events that acquire their agential status purely in virtue of their causal histories. I also argue that there are no absolutely teleologically basic actions. All actions, including bodily movements, are in principle indefinitely decomposable into smaller, more basic actions, which can be re-composed in ways which greatly extend and deepen our agential capacities. We are not typically explicitly aware of doing this, but we can usefully become so.
The ‘action space’ within which this occurs – roughly speaking between the inception of the action and the overt bodily movement by which extracorporeal changes are effected – is occluded in causalist accounts by the brute causal relation the latter posit between, on the one hand, attitudes or agents and, on the other, bodily movements. The processes and events occupying this space are, however, accessible not only third-personally, but also first-personally. They are ‘doings’ of and by
the agent, belonging to what I call the agential teleological order, and are apt for incorporation into the rational teleological order, i.e., as items in practical reasoning. In fact, they feature in it more frequently than philosophers tend to assume.
Anticausalists such as Anscombe and Hornsby explicitly acknowledge that the events and processes that result in overt bodily movements are themselves agential, but do little to develop the thought. They do, however, spawn a loose tradition which does develop it, and which I seek to continue. The resulting account has, I believe, real-world implications for education, particularly in sport and the performing arts, and also, indirectly, for medicine and health care.
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Published date: 3 November 2024
Keywords:
Action; agency; bodily movements; anti-causalism; psychophysical unity: Anscombe; Alexander Technique
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 495265
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/495265
PURE UUID: c61dd854-eb39-4217-9288-ef0e31cf587a
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Date deposited: 05 Nov 2024 17:37
Last modified: 06 Nov 2024 02:51
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Contributors
Thesis advisor:
Alessandra Tanesi
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