Thursday 9 July 2009

acting pragmatically

"As an intelligent species we spent millennia successfully coping with the environmental changes using accumulated knowledge about cause and effects relations. Hume himself argues that the ability to match means to ends (i.e. the capacity for causal reasoning), is not an exclusively human ability but may be observed in other animals which use it 'for their own preservation and the propagation of species'... The subject or person emerging from the assembly of sub-personal components (impressions, ideas, propositional attitudes, habits, skills) has the right capacities to act pragmatically (i.e. it match means and ends) as well socially, to select ends for a variety of habitual or customary reasons that need not involve any conscious decision."

DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, London p.51-52

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