Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of first personhood—the experiential dimension—in human agency, and how it informs the agentic trajectories on time-scales from immediate to distal. It is suggested that agency is theoretically divided into two categories, authorship and sponsorship to establish the differing aims of scientific approaches to agency and a phenomenologically oriented approach focused not on “origin of intent” or “emergence of behavior”, but rather on the role of the subjective in maintaining and managing actions and agentic trajectories on different time-scales. The theoretical offset is taken in a theory of temporality, which owes some of its notions to Roy Harris’s school of Integrationism. However, it finds the most traction in contested areas between the Integrationist line of thinking, Distributed Cognition, Memory Science, and a few other theoretical lines, which have dissimilar ideas about agency, cognition, and ecology. The neuropsychological case study of CW is examined and discussed to challenge the established views of these theoretical stances on the relation between first personhood and agency, and the need to explore how the background state of sponsorship facilitates, maintains, or obstructs action is emphasized.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar to the DCog perspective and pertinent to the topic of memory, Wegner (1986) provides the theoretical concept of ‘transactive memory’ to describe the social distribution of memory tasks.
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Hemmingsen, B.H. (2013). The Quick and the Dead: On Temporality and Human Agency. In: Cowley, S., Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds) Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5125-8_6
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