WG 2

Question 1

. Individualism and agency

Answer 1

Agent
- An ‘agent’ is a thing that takes an active role or produces a specified effect.

• So, ‘agent’ is an abstract concept.
• It is anything we can assign an active roles to or attribute effects to.
• An agent is just whatever can cause things to happen!
• It’s an empthy concept

Question 2

Actor

Answer 2

An ‘actor’ is a person with a language, culture, abides by norms, etc.
- So, ‘actor’ is not an abstract concept: it is a being in the world with a lived
(subjective) reality.
- An actor has intentions (beliefs, desires, etc.) and we treat them as responsible for
actions.
- Actors don’t just cause things to happen; they have reasons, wills, doubts,
uncertainties, etc.

Question 3

How does agency relate to instrumental rationality?

Instrumental rationality =

Answer 3

“If an agent wants to achieve a goal, and believes that doing A is
the best means of doing so , then an instrumentally rational agent will do A.” (Risjord pg. 82)
What makes this instrumental?
- Belief+ desire to fulfill a goal is sufficient to bring about that goal. It is entirely
conditional (if, then)
- It does not matter:
o Whether agent in fact has the right kind of belief to achieve A.
o Or whether achieving A is good for the agent.-Rationality only consists in the
achievement of the goal.

Question 4

Explaining individual action

Answer 4

For positivists, the social sciences should emulate the natural sciences
- Positivists take an objectivist attitude.
- They want to create a scientific framework which can predict and explain the world
precisely.
- Their general explanatory framework is the deductive-nomological (DN) model (or
method).
- Hempel’s covering-law model (CLM) is an example of the DN model.