Abstract
The distinction between personal level explanations and subpersonal ones has been subject to much debate in philosophy. We understand it as one between explanations that focus on an agent’s interaction with its environment, and explanations that focus on the physical or computational enabling conditions of such an interaction. The distinction, understood this way, is necessary for a complete account of any agent, rational or not, biological or artificial. In particular, we review some recent research in Artificial Life that pretends to do completely without the distinction, while using agent-centred concepts all the way. It is argued that the rejection of agent level explanations in favour of mechanistic ones is due to an unmotivated need to choose among representationalism and eliminativism. The dilemma is a false one if the possibility of a radical form of externalism is considered.
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Notes
The reference to persons in “personal” and “subpersonal” should be read as accidental. We use the adjectives to refer generally to agents and to their internal machinery.
This is, in fact, the position we find in Dennett’s paper mentioned above. His take on these issues is far more complex and oscillating than this. For instance, we can observe a move from blunt intrumentalism (1971) to some form of transcendentalism regarding the presumption of rationality for agents (1981) and back again to instrumentalism with realistic undertones (1991). Each of these accounts of intentionality are worth studying on their own. However, the position defended in his paper from 1978 is sufficiently popular to deserve discussion independently of the subtleties of Dennett’s work.
It could be argued that even the simplest designed artifact or program (say, a thermostat) would also demand both agent-level concepts and an appeal to macroproperties to explain its behaviour. In this paper we are only committed to the idea that it is a sufficient condition for treating something as an agent (and, in parallel, to defend the need for concepts making reference to features of the environment that are relevant to the agent as a whole) that the thing in question is the result of an adaptive evolutionary process. Whether this is also a necessary condition for agenthood is a question that we would like to leave open. We will briefly return to it in our discussion of ecological explanations of animal behaviour.
Having said that, we have insisted on the need for agent-centered concepts to make sense of subpersonal explanations and place them in their proper context, and we have suggested that functional and ecological explanations work both at the personal and the subpersonal level.
However, we have endorsed Hurley’s idea that a simplistic understanding of the subpersonal, such as the roughly Cartesian input/output picture, may work as a hidden assumption guiding our conception of the personal level. We have praised Beer’s profound analysis of the dynamical system that makes possible the cognitive achievement of his agent precisely as acting as an antidote against representationalist reductionism and as being a perfect complement to an ecological and functional view of the agent/environment pair.
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de Pinedo-Garcia, M., Noble, J. Beyond persons: extending the personal/subpersonal distinction to non-rational animals and artificial agents. Biol Philos 23, 87–100 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9077-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9077-7