Abstract
Situational aspects of action are discussed. The presented approach emphasizes the role of situational contexts in which actions are performed. These contexts influence the course of an action; they are determined not only by the current state of the system but also shaped by other factors as time, the previously undertaken actions and their succession, the agents of actions and so on. The distinction between states and situations is explored from the perspective of action systems. The notion of a situational action system is introduced and its theory is expounded. Numerous examples illustrate the reach of the theory.
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Notes
- 1.
One may also encode each position by a sequence of length 9 of the digits 0, 1, 2.
- 2.
This sentence is a convenient conceptual metaphor. Situations are constituents of the real world. In this chapter situations are viewed as mathematical (or rather set-theoretical) representations of these constituents. We therefore speak of sets of conceivable situations.
Of course, any representation of the world of situations and actions does not involve mentioning all of them individually but it rather classifies them as uniform sorts or types. But token situations or actions can be individuated, such as the stabbing of Julius Caesar.
- 3.
Indeed, instead of the triples \((\mathrm {X}, A_\mathrm {X}, \mathrm {O})\) and \((\mathrm {O}, A_\mathrm {O}, \mathrm {X})\) it suffices to take the pairs \((A_\mathrm {X}, \mathrm {O})\) and \((A_\mathrm {O}, \mathrm {X})\), since the actions \(A_\mathrm {X}\) and \(A_\mathrm {O}\) are already labeled by \(\mathrm {X}\) and \(\mathrm {O}\), respectively (that is, they possess their own names). Defining labeled actions as triples is justified by the fact that elements of the set of atomic actions in elementary action systems are not basically linguistically distinguished through investing them with special names.
- 4.
The above example is taken from Jerzy Pogonowski’s essay Entertaining Math Puzzles which can be found at www.glli.uni.opole.pl.
- 5.
An interesting example which might be discussed with the problem of agency is that of micromanagement where pathological relations hold between individual and collective agents. Roughly, micromanagement is defined as “attention to small details in management: control of a person or a situation by paying extreme attention to small details”. The notion of micromanagement in the wider sense describes social situations where one person (the micromanager) has an intense degree of control and influence over the members of a group. Often, this excessive obsession with the most minute of details causes a direct management failure in the ability to focus on the major details.
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Czelakowski, J. (2015). Situational Action Systems. In: Freedom and Enforcement in Action. Trends in Logic, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9855-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9855-6_2
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