A Chance for Attributable Agency
Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incohere...
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| Format: | Online |
| Language: | English |
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Springer Netherlands
2015
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4821553/ |
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pubmed-48215532016-04-11 A Chance for Attributable Agency Briegel, Hans J. Müller, Thomas Article Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. The model, recently introduced by one of the authors in the context of artificial intelligence, shows that an agent with a sufficiently complex memory organization can employ indeterministic happenings in a meaningful way. We claim that these considerations successfully counter arguments against the coherence of libertarian (indeterminism-based) free will. Springer Netherlands 2015-08-04 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC4821553/ /pubmed/27076700 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9381-y Text en © The Author(s) 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Briegel, Hans J. Müller, Thomas |
| spellingShingle |
Briegel, Hans J. Müller, Thomas A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| author_facet |
Briegel, Hans J. Müller, Thomas |
| author_sort |
Briegel, Hans J. |
| title |
A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| title_short |
A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| title_full |
A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| title_fullStr |
A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| title_full_unstemmed |
A Chance for Attributable Agency |
| title_sort |
chance for attributable agency |
| description |
Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. The model, recently introduced by one of the authors in the context of artificial intelligence, shows that an agent with a sufficiently complex memory organization can employ indeterministic happenings in a meaningful way. We claim that these considerations successfully counter arguments against the coherence of libertarian (indeterminism-based) free will. |
| publisher |
Springer Netherlands |
| publishDate |
2015 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4821553/ |
| _version_ |
1613562566554943488 |