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- Beth Huffer (2007). Actions and Outcomes: Two Aspects of Agency. Synthese 157 (2):241 - 265.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.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Stit theory (a logic of seeing-to-it-that) is applied to cases involving many agents. First treated are complex nestings of stits involving distinct agents. The discussion is driven by the logical impossibility of "a sees to it that b sees to it that Q" in the technical sense, even though that seems to make sense in everyday language, Of special utility are the concepts of "forced choice", of the creation of deontic states, and of probabilities, Second, joint agency, both plain and strict (every participant is essential) is given a rigorous treatment. A central theorem is that strict joint agency is itself agentive.
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| | Scholar | More options ... The widely agreed view that actions are events faces the problem of how to describe the “branches” in so-called action trees, i.e. actions which are done by doing other actions. Moreover, the view is also inconsistent with the existence of two familiar species of agency: omitting something and letting things happen. In this article, an alternative conception of action is proposed which takes letting happen as the paradigm of agency. Agency should be construed as an explanatory relation between agents and things happening in the world. This relational view of agency can accommodate for all kinds of agency: doing, letting happen, omitting, prohibiting. And it also provides a satisfactory account of the ontological basis of action trees. We should at first say that to do something is to originate or to bring into existence, i.e., really, to cause, some not yet existing state either of ourselves or of someone else, or, again, of some body.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A structure is described that can serve as a foundation for a semantics for a modal agentive construction such as sees to it that Q ([ stit: Q]). The primitives are Tree,,Instant, Agent, choice. Eleven simple postulates governing this structure are set forth and motivated. Tree and encode a picture of branching time consisting of moments gathered into maximal chains called histories. Instant imposes a time-like ordering. Agent consists of agents, and choice assigns to each agent and each moment in Tree a set of possible choices, where each possible choice is a set of histories. All of these ingredients are referred to in the semantics suggested for [ stit: Q]. The most complex part of the discussion is the motivation for the definition of what it means for a typically non-terminating chain of moments jointly to witness the truth of [ stit: Q] at a moment.The paper begins with an informal account of the Refref conjecture, which says that the only way to refrain from refraining from seeing to something is to see to it. The paper ends with a consideration of an argument of Prior's that in a certain sense contemplation and action are inconsistent.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The paper presents an infinite hierarchy of sound and complete axiomatic systems for Two-Dimensional Modal Tense Logic with Historical Necessity, Agents and Acts. A main novelty of these logics is their capacity to represent formally (i) basic action-sentences asserting that such and such an act is performed/omitted by an agent, as well as (ii) causative action-sentences asserting that by performing/omitting a certain act, an agent causes that such and such a state-of-affairs is realized (e.g. comes about/ceases/remains/remains absent). We illustrate how the formal machinery of our systems can be used to reconstruct a number of interesting ideas in the Logic of Agency and Action that have been proposed by authors like von Wright, von Kutschera, Belnap and Segerberg.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Topic of the paper is Q-logic – a logic of agency in its temporal and modal context. Q-logic may be considered as a basal logic of agency since the most important stit-operators discussed in the literature can be defined or axiomatized easily within its semantical and syntactical framework. Its basic agent dependent operator, the Q-operator (also known as - or cstit-operator), which has been discussed independently by F. v. Kutschera and B. F. Chellas, is investigated here in respect of its relation to other temporal and modal operators. The main result of the paper, then, is a completeness result for a calculus of Q-logic with respect to a semantics defined on the tree-approach to agency as introduced and developed by, among others, F. v. Kutschera and N. D. Belnap.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Stit, a sentence form first introduced in Belnap and Perloff (1988), encourages a modal approach to agency. Von Wright, Chisholm, Kenny, and Castañeda have all attempted modal treatments of agency, while Davidson has rejected such treatments. After a brief explanation of the syntax and semantics of stit and a restatement of several of the important claims of the earlier paper, I discuss the virtues of stit against the background of proposals made by these philososphers.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The paper presents an infinite hierarchy of sound and complete axiomatic systems for Two-Dimensional Modal Tense Logic with Historical Necessity, Agents and Acts. A main novelty of these logics is their capacity to represent formally (i) basic action-sentences asserting that such and such an act is performed/omitted by an agent, as well as (ii) causative action-sentences asserting that by performing/omitting a certain act, an agent causes that such and such a state-of-affairs is realized (e.g. comes about/ceases/remains/remains absent). We illustrate how the formal machinery of our systems can be used to reconstruct a number of interesting ideas in the Logic of Agency and Action that have been proposed by authors like von Wright, von Kutschera, Belnap and Segerberg.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The sense of agency, that is the sense that one is the agent of one’s bodily actions, is one component of our self-consciousness. Recently, Wegner and colleagues have developed a model of the causal history of this sense. Their model takes it that the sense of agency is elicited for an action when one infers that one or other of one’s mental states caused that action. In their terms, the sense of agency is elicited by the inference to apparent mental state causation. Here, I argue that this model is inconsistent with data from developmental psychology that suggests children can identify the agent behind an action without being capable of understanding the relationship between their intentions and actions. Furthermore, I argue that this model is inconsistent with the preserved sense of agency in autism. In general, the problem is that there are cases where subjects can experience themselves as the agent behind their actions despite lacking the resources to make the inference to apparent mental state causation.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The aim of this paper, is to provide a logical framework for reasoning about actions, agency, and powers of agents and coalitions in game-like multi-agent systems. First we define our basic Dynamic Logic of Agency ( ). Differently from other logics of individual and coalitional capability such as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) and Coalition Logic, in cooperation modalities for expressing powers of agents and coalitions are not primitive, but are defined from more basic dynamic logic operators of action and (historic) necessity. We show that STIT logic can be reconstructed in . We then extend with epistemic operators, which allows us to distinguish capability and power. We finally characterize the conditions under which agents are aware of their capabilities and powers.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... We continue the work initiated in Herzig and Lorini (J Logic Lang Inform, in press) whose aim is to provide a minimalistic logical framework combining the expressiveness of dynamic logic in which actions are first-class citizens in the object language, with the expressiveness of logics of agency such as STIT and logics of group capabilities such as CL and ATL. We present a logic called ( Deterministic Dynamic logic of Agency ) which supports reasoning about actions and joint actions of agents and coalitions, and agentive and coalitional capabilities. In it is supposed that, once all agents have selected a joint action, the effect of this joint action is deterministic. In order to assess we prove that it embeds Coalition Logic. We then extend with modal operators for agents’ preferences, and show that the resulting logic is sufficiently expressive to capture the game-theoretic concepts of best response and Nash equilibrium.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Beth Huffer, Actions and outcomes: Two aspects of agency
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