The Shape of Agency

Abstract

After offering accounts of basic building blocks of agency in chapters 2 through 5, this chapter serves as a hinge. Here, drawing on Tyler Burge’s work on primitive agency, this chapter discusses the most primitive features of agency, and considers what must be added to work towards more sophisticated kinds of agent. The main aim is to articulate a kind of (metaphorical) ladder that allows us to see, not only the shape of agency in relief, but also the place of key capacities like a capacity for representation of targets for behavior, and a capacity of practical reasoning. This leads, at the chapter’s very end, to a brief discussion of the role of mental action in an understanding of agency.