which course of action does the theory

by Halle Becker 9 min read

What is the action theory?

Jun 27, 2010 · Kant has two theories of action. One is empirical, a determinist account of actions in terms of the psychological causes that bring those actions about. The broad structure of this account will not seem particularly surprising nor particularly Kantian: certain kinds of beliefs and desires cause human beings to act in certain ways, and ...

Is there a philosophy of action in psychology?

the second of two Theory of Action tools that should be used in sequence. Before using this tool, you should use Theory of Action, Part I. Creating Communities of Innovation Educator Tool: THEORY OF ACTION Project ero Harvard Graduate School of Education This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.

Is there an empirical test for the theory of action?

where we want to go. If we had only suspended action and carefully examined what is happening in our settings, we might not have embarked on the wrong course. 2. Make your leadership the core of the theory of action. This tool prompts the principal and principal supervisor to consider not merely problems in general but problems of . practice

What is the main idea of the general theory of social action?

2.4 Action Theory. Many different theoretical social and behavioral science approaches go under the guise of ‘ action theory.’ Some of them play a major role in OB. A large body of German theoretical and empirical literature under the name of action control/regulation theory needs to be subsumed here (Frese and Zapf 1994). It combines elements of cybernetics and cognitive …

What did John F. Kennedy study?

He studied economics and later political economics. He became a lecturer at Harvard University and later the department of social relations chair and pioneered the combinations of sociology, anthropology and psychology in development of principles addressing social science.

What is action theory?

Action theory composes of theories that focus on the human action rather than concentrating on the structure. According to action theorists, action theory can be studied by looking at those that centre on meaning and interpretation and those that concerned themselves with the nature of human action. According to Weber, simple behaviour ...

What is social action?

A social action refers to an act which in its execution takes into account, reactions of other individuals as informed by social institutions that are the decisions of an actor in reference to the situation the actor finds himself in.

What is an action based on?

An action may be motivated by a number of relatively independent ends, without any having the actors’ absolute biasness but based on rationality . An action is rationally oriented to a system of discrete individual ends when the ends, the means and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and weighed.

What are some examples of environmental benefits?

Another example would be the move by president Kibaki and the prime minister to sign the accord and avert more deaths during the post election violence. The decisions agreed were taken despite the cost to the both parties.

What is voluntaristic action?

The voluntaristic action is regulated by how much freedom you have in making choices in action and what goes into the decisions that you make in order to act.

What is freedom of choice?

Besides the physical and social systems, freedom of choice is also determined by normative orientation of action. Human action is a distinctly cultural action. Norms, beliefs and values are behaviours with social meaning and sanctioned attached to them.

What is the theory of action?

theory of action is a connected set of propositions, a logical chain of reasoning that explains how change will lead to improved practices. It “connects the dots” explaining in a commonsense way which features are expected to produce results that lead to the final desired outcome (Haertel, National Academy of Science, 2009)

What is continuous improvement?

If we engage in continuous improvement (set high standards, evaluate based on those standards, collect evaluation information, and provide support based on that data) THEN all educators will become more effective, all students will have more equitable access to great educators, AND student outcomes will improve

What is the California Way?

The California Way rests on the belief that educators want to excel, trusts them to improve when given the proper supports, and provides local schools and districts with the leeway and flexibility to deploy resources so they can improve

What is a practitioner?

Practitioners know best. Practitioners are responsible for making research-based decisions that are in the best interest of clients (students). Unlike craftsmen who guarantee results (e.g., pipes that don’t leak or walls that stand) professionals are responsible for exercising judgment in a way that is consistent with the best research in the field.

What does an agent know without observation?

In this connection, Elizabeth Anscombe [1963] spoke of ‘knowledge without observation.’ The agent knows ‘without observation’ that he is performing certain bodily movements (perhaps under some rough but non-negligible description), and he knows ‘without observation’ what purpose (s) the behavior is meant to serve [see also Falvey 2000]. Anscombe's discussion of her claim is rich and suggestive, but her conception of ‘knowledge through observation’ is problematic. Surely, one wants to say, proprioception and kinesthetic sensation play some role in informing the agent of the positions and movements of his body, and it is uncertain why these informational roles should fail to count as modes of inner ‘observation’ of the agent's own overt physical behavior. What Anscombe explicitly denies is that agents generally know of the positions or movements of their own bodies by means of ‘separably describable sensations’ that serve as criteria for their judgements about the narrowly physical performance of their bodies. However, when a person sees that there is a goldfinch in front of him, his knowledge is not derived as an inference from the ‘separably describable’ visual impressions he has in seeing the goldfinch, but this is an instance of knowledge through observation nonetheless.

What is goal directed action?

It is also important to the concept of ‘goal directed action’ that agents normally implement a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior. An agent may guide her paralyzed left arm along a certain path by using her active right arm to shove it through the relevant trajectory. The moving of her right arm, activated as it is by the normal exercise of her system of motor control, is a genuine action, but the movement of her left arm is not. That movement is merely the causal upshot of her guiding action, just as the onset of illumination in the light bulb is the mere effect of her action when she turned on the light. The agent has direct control over the movement of the right arm, but not over the movement of the left. And yet it is hardly clear what ‘direct control of behavior’ can amount to here. It does not simply mean that behavior A, constituting a successful or attempted F ing, was initiated and causally guided throughout its course by a present-directed intention to be F ing then. Even the externally guided movement of the paralyzed left arm would seem to satisfy a condition of this weak sort. Alfred Mele [1992] has suggested that the intuitive ‘directness’ of the guidance of action A can partially be captured by stipulating that the action-guiding intention must trigger and sustain A proximally. In other words, it is stipulated that the agent's present-directed intention to be F ing should govern action A, but not by producing some other prior or concurrent action A * that causally controls A in turn. But the proposal is dubious. On certain assumptions, most ordinary physical actions are liable to flunk this strengthened requirement. The normal voluntary movements of an agent's limbs are caused by complicated contractions of suitable muscles, and the muscle contractions, since they are aimed at causing the agent's limbs to move, may themselves count as causally prior human actions. For instance, on Davidson's account of action they will since the agent's muscle contracting is intentional under the description ‘doing something that causes the arm to move’ [see Davidson 1980, essay 2]. Thus, the overt arm movement, in a normal act of voluntary arm moving, will have been causally guided by a prior action, the muscle contracting, and consequently the causal guidance of the arm's movement will fail to be an instance of ‘proximal’ causation at all [see Sehon 1998].

What is practical reasoning?

Earlier we introduced the Cognitivist view that intentions are special kinds of beliefs, and that, consequently, practical reasoning is a special form of theoretical reasoning. Some theorists of action have been attracted to Cognitivism because of its promise to vindicate Anscombe’s (admittedly controversial) claim that, in acting intentionally, we have knowledge of what we’re doing that we do not get by observation. But an opposing tradition has been at least as equally prominent in the last twenty-five years of thinking about the nature of intention. Philosophers in this tradition have turned their attention to the project of giving an account of intention that captures the fact that intentions are distinctive mental states, states which play unique roles in psychological explanations and which are subject to their own sorts of normative requirements.

What is action theory?

Action theory (or theory of action) is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of a more or less complex kind.

What is the meaning of rationality?

have a desire to do X). Rationality, in such theories, also involves responding correctly to the reasons an agent perceives, not just acting on wants.

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