ADR-025: Six topics for gaps the agency and self batches found

Context

Four batches in one session asked the vocabulary for words it did not have:

• psychopathology (ADR-021);
• self-determination theory (ADR-023);
• agency and self (ADR-024);
• the readings that followed them.

The filing agents reported the same gaps independently, and each time the work went under the nearest word. Learning in organisms went under learning-theory, whose blurb is the machine-learning sense. Meaning in life went under social-science. The demarcation of life went under natural-sciences and philosophy-of-science. The owner asked that the vocabulary be updated without hesitation.

ADR-021 and ADR-023 said each gap should get its word “when a second work needs it”. Each of these six now has several works that need it.

Decision

Add six words:

• well-being: how well a life goes for the one living it, as psychology measures it. SDT defines its needs by their effect on it. Sheldon & Elliot and Schlegel et al. take it as their outcome. McAdams ties narrative to it.
• learning-and-conditioning: learning in organisms from contingencies and consequences. It covers Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning, reward learning in brains, habit and goal-directed control, behaviour analysis, and relational frame theory’s relational responding. The blurb says it is not machine learning.
• psychometrics: measuring minds. It covers scales and their validity, latent-variable and network models (Borsboom), and model-based estimation of cognitive parameters (HDDM).
• philosophy-of-biology (philosophy group): what life, organisms and functions are. It covers organisational closure, biological autonomy and the demarcation question in NOTE-094.
• embodied-cognition (philosophy group): enactive, embodied, embedded and extended cognition, coordination dynamics, and situated robotics.
• free-will (philosophy group): free will and volition as philosophy and as science, from compatibilism and manipulation to the readiness potential.

The words were applied to existing documents in the same contribution.

Alternatives considered

• Broaden existing words. learning-theory would then mean two things, machine generalization and animal conditioning, and a reader of one would wade through the other. cognition is already the largest word in the philosophy group.
• One decision per word. Each would repeat the same context. They were found together and are recorded together.
• Not yet added. These gaps were also reported:
  • social cognition and intersubjectivity: one work so far, De Jaegher & Di Paolo;
  • cognitive-modelling methods: covered here by psychometrics and probabilistic-modeling;
  • language as behaviour: covered by learning-and-conditioning for relational frame theory.