NDLI: Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Bullot, Nicolas J.
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identification. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to particular historical and sociocultural contexts for explaining agent-identification. Contextualist theories tend to adopt idiographic methods aimed at recording the heterogeneity of human behaviours across history, space, and cultures. Defenders of the universalist approach tend to criticise idiographic methods because such methods can lead to relativism or may lack generality. To overcome explanatory limitations of proposals that adopt either universalist or contextualist approaches in isolation, I propose a philosophical model that integrates contributions from both traditions: the psycho-historical theory of agent-identification. This theory investigates how the tracking processes that humans use for identifying agents interact with the unique socio-historical contexts that support agent-identification practices. In integrating hypotheses about the history of agents with psychological and epistemological principles regarding agent-identification, the theory can generate novel hypotheses regarding the distinction between recognition-based, heuristic-based, and explanation-based agent-identification.
Starting Page	359
Ending Page	382
Page Count	24
File Format	PDF
ISSN	01693867
Journal	Biology & Philosophy
Volume Number	30
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15728404
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2014-04-29
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Agent Animacy Apparent agency Misidentification error Heuristics Identification Psycho-historical theory Tracking Mechanism Philosophy of Biology Evolutionary Biology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Agricultural and Biological Sciences History and Philosophy of Science

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Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents

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