Actions and outcomes: two aspects of agency |
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Authors: | Beth Huffer |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands |
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Abstract: | Agency can be construed as both the manner in which autonomous individuals embark on particular courses of action (or inaction),
and the relationship between such agents and the outcomes of the courses of action on which they embark. A promising strategy
for understanding both senses of agency consists in the combination of a modal logic of agency and branching time semantics.
Such is the strategy behind stit theory, the theory of agentive action developed by Nuel Belnap and others. However, stit
theoretic evaluations of the agentive relationship between agents and outcomes that are uncertain—due to either the presence
of indeterminism, or the possible intervention of other agents—yield counterintuitive results. This paper develops a pair
of alternative operators (the “act” operators) for modeling agency with respect to uncertain outcomes. Unlike the stit-theoretic
model, the act-theoretic model of agency with respect to a particular state of affairs does not require that the state of
affairs be realized in every possible history. If the state of affairs in fact obtains in the actual history, and its obtaining
was dependent on the agent’s pursuing a particular course of action, then the agent is deemed agentive under act theory. |
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Keywords: | Agency Action Responsibility Branching time Temporal logic Choice |
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