Causal Theories of Action

Traditional mechanistic accounts (Danto, Chisholm, Goldman) that Juarrero critiques as resting on outdated Newtonian causality.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

thinker

Alvin Goldman
mentions
Causal theory of action; critiqued for mechanistic assumptions.
Roderick Chisholm
mentions
Agent causation theorist; invoked for wayward causal chain problem and volitionalist account of action.
Arthur Danto
mentions
Introduced distinction between basic and nonbasic actions; cited as exemplar of causal theory approach Juarrero critiques.

claim

Intentional action is a far-from-equilibrium self-organizing dynamical process, not a mechanistic cause-effect chain.
contradicts
Core thesis: replaces traditional causal theories with dynamical systems account of how prior intentions constrain and guide action.

concept

Information Theory and Action
contradicts
Chapter 6 explores whether information-theoretic models (Dretske) can ground action causation; concludes they cannot dissolve equivocation problem.
Wayward Causal Chains
gates
Classic objection to causal theories of action; Juarrero dissolves it by treating intentions as semantic constraints that immediately guide motor dynamics.

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Causal Mechanismconcept0.822
Function determining the value of a variable based on its causal parents in an acyclic causal model.
Causal Influence Diagramsframework0.805
Framework informing path-specific objectives by identifying causal chains leading to risky behaviors
Causal powerconcept0.791
The ability of an agent to be a driver of subsequent events; a hallmark of cognition that causal emergence quantifies.
Causal Intervention via Activation Shiftmethod0.790
Intervening in model forward pass by adding/subtracting probe direction to group (b) hidden states to flip truth judgments
Causal Intervention via Activation Shiftingmethod0.782
Method of shifting hidden state activations along probe directions to cause the model to treat false statements as true and vice versa; evaluated on OOD inputs
Causal Geometryframework0.781
Chvykov and Hoel's geometric extension of causal emergence to continuous systems using Fisher information.
Causal Mediationconcept0.779
Whether an internal direction causally controls a target behavior, verified by intervention success
Causal Intervention on Representationsconcept0.775
The use of interventions (rather than correlations) to establish a causal link between representation geometry and behavioral geometry.