CONTENIDO: Acknowledgments.-- Abbreviations.-- Introduction.-- Why Action Theory Rests on a Mistake.-- How the Modern Understanding of Cause Came to Be.-- Causal Theories of Action.-- Action and the Modern Understanding of Explanation.-- Action as Lawful Regularities.-- Action and Reductive Accounts of Purposiveness.-- Information Theory and the Problem of Action.-- Dynamical Systems Theory and Human Action.-- Some New Vocabulary: A Primer on Systems Theory.-- Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics.-- Constraints as Causes: The Intersection of Information Theory and Complex Systems Dynamics.-- Dynamical Constraints as Landscapes: Meaning and Behavior as Topology.-- Embodied Meaning.-- Intentional Action: A Dynamical Account.--Threading an Agent's Control Loop through the Environment.-- Explaining Human Action: Why Dynamics Tells Us That Stories Are Necessary.-- Narrative Explanation and the Dynamics of Action.-- Agency, Freedom, and Individuality.-- Notes.-- References.-- Index .- RESUMEN: "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 adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility."--BOOK JACKET.
