Sensorica Knowledge

Donald Davidson

an action

is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’

there have been many attempts to map the relations between intentions for the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certain intention.

There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action

rendered the action intelligible in his eyes

things that merely happen

things they genuinely do

distinction between

the doings, are the acts or actions of the agent

what distinguishes an action from a mere happening or occurrence?

An agent performs activity that is directed at a goal

adopted on the basis of an overall practical assessment of his options and opportunities

awareness

that he is performing the activity

and that the activity is aimed by him at such-and-such a chosen end

It is frequently noted that the agent has some sort of immediate awareness of his physical activity and of the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing.

‘knowledge without observation.’

It is also important to the concept of ‘goal directed action’ that agents normally implement a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

For many years, the most intensely debated topic in the philosophy of action concerned the explanation of intentional actions in terms of the agent's reasons for acting

Davidson and other action theorists defended the position that reason explanations are causal explanations

In the foregoing, reference has been made to explanations of actions in terms of reasons, but recent work on agency has questioned whether contemporary frameworks for the philosophy of action have really articulated the way in which an agent's desires and other pro-attitudes have the distinctive force of reasons in the setting of these ordinary explanations

"Places to Intervene in a System," followed by nine items: 9.  Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards). 8.  Material stocks and flows. 7.  Regulating negative feedback loops. 6.  Driving positive feedback loops. 5.  Information flows. 4.  The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints). 3.  The power of self-organization. 2.  The goals of the system. 1.  The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.

an invitation to think more broadly about system change.

Numbers ("parameters" in systems jargon) determine how much of a discrepancy turns which faucet how fast.

some of which are physically locked in, but most of which are popular intervention points.

Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in them.

Not that parameters aren't important—they can be, especially in the short term and to the individual who's standing directly in the flow. But they rarely change behavior. If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it.

Spending more on police doesn't make crime go away.

Numbers become leverage points when they go into ranges that kick off one of the items higher on this list.

Probably the most common kind of critical number is the length of delay in a feedback loop.

A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change (growth, fluctuation, decay) in the system state that the feedback loop is trying to control.

Delays that are too short cause overreaction, oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. At the extreme they cause chaos. Delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.

delays are not often easily changeable

It's usually easier to slow down the change rate (positive feedback loops, higher on this list), so feedback delays won't cause so much trouble

Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay out of sensitive parameter ranges. Mostly, the numbers are not worth the sweat put into them.

The plumbing structure, the stocks and flows and their physical arrangement, can have an enormous effect on how a system operates.