Agent Tracking: A Psycho-Historical Theory of the Identification of Living and Social Agents
- Editor
- Apr 29, 2014
- 1 min read
Author
Nicolas J. Bullot
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-identi-fication. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to partic-ular 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 investi-gates 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 epis-temological principles regarding agent-identification, the theory can generate novel hypotheses regarding the distinction between recognition-based, heuristic-based, and explanation-based agent-identification.
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Reference
Bullot, N.J. Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents. Biol Philos 30, 359–382 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9447-x
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