Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency

Michael E. Bratman
Stanford University

We are purposive agents; but we--adult humans in a broadly modern world--are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who are extended over time. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features--to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our self-conception as temporally extended agents. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. A theory of human action needs to say in what these features consist and how they are related to each other. And such a theory needs also to clarify the relation between these features of our agency and the possibility that we are fully embedded in an event causal order.

I argue that we best understand our reflectiveness by appeal to our planfulness and to our self-conception as temporally extended agents. My argument draws on aspects of an approach to intention I have developed in earlier work, an approach I call a "planning theory of intention".