nucleation

ARG-047: Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy's "agency is a matter of perspective" supports the claim that perspectival, agential and institutional boundaries need not coincide

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Properties8
StatusRejected
Formsource
Tagsagency, social-ontology
Linedistributed-agency
GroundsTHEORY-1280 — Agency can be redescribed without agents, as the affective force by which one individuation process takes up another's excess action in a communicative event and both pass from a lesser to an augmented ability to act; agents are then effects of such events, and the absence of the force is disindividuation
ConcludesCLAIM-418 — Possessing, enacting or being shaped by an organizational perspective does not establish an independent agent, and perspectival, agential and institutional boundaries need not coincide: several agents can share a perspective, one agent can act through several, and a perspective can be reproduced with no agent governing it; where a perspective contributes to an agent's activity it can enable and constrain the exercise of agency, and that exercise can reproduce or transform it, while whether agency universally requires such a perspective stays open
UsesTERM-072 — perspective, and which sense: organizational, represented or phenomenal
Rendered intodocs/arguments-by-conclusion.md

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The inference

NOTE-1484, filed with the paper, says of CLAIM-418: “The paper’s ‘agency is a matter of perspective’ is a version of it.” The passage (p. 1357): “Describing an action by starting from a human being is but an analytical choice that isolates some aspect in a series of continuous individuation processes; it corresponds to an ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2003, p. 815) or the selection of a link in a chain of agencies … Hence, agency is a matter of perspective or perspectivism (Kuipers, 2022): Who or what has agency is a premature question.” If this supports CLAIM-418, it would be as a reading in which where agency lies can come apart from other boundaries.

Critical questions

  • Does the work say this, read in context? No. This is the question that fails. The paper’s perspective belongs to whoever describes the action, and it decides where the description begins. CLAIM-418’s perspective is TERM-072 sense 1: an organization of what can matter in practice and how, which a martial tradition or a firm can hold and an agent can act through. The paper’s sentence is about the analyst’s cut. It says nothing about whether an organized significance can be shared by several agents or exist with no agent governing it.
  • Is it said within the scope the claim needs? No. CLAIM-418 needs three kinds of boundary that can each be drawn and compared: the perspectival, the agential and the institutional. The paper declines to draw the agential one (“a premature question”), so it has nothing to set against the other two.
  • Does the claim lean on the reading for more than the reading holds? CLAIM-418 does not cite the paper. The over-reading is in the first filing’s note. What the sentence does bear on is CLAIM-405: whether an agent is found depends on where the description is cut. The paper leaves the cut unconstrained, and CLAIM-405 says a verdict becomes assessable once the criterion is fixed.

What would bear on the conclusion

Bencherki 2017 (LIT-1901, read in NOTE-1482) does. Its Table 1 (p. 787) separates whether an action may count toward a member’s individuation from whether it may count toward the organization’s. Usurpation, the army taking the spouses’ volunteer daycare as “one of the services we offer” (pp. 791–792), is a case where agential attribution and institutional recognition come apart. That is THEORY-1285’s connection, and it stands.

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