Dynamics in action

"Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation - one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanations to be prooflike - underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions - as historical narrative, not inference - follows if one…