Stable agency and flexibility of planning

What is it about?

In this article, I examine Michael Bratman’s account of stability proposed in his planning theory of intention (PTI). Stability means that future-directed intentions should be stable over time, i.e. they should involve an appropriate resistance to change. It has been interpreted as a norm governing both intentions and plans. The aim of my article is to critically enrich Bratman’s account of stability by introducing plasticity as an additional norm of planning. I construct it as a different kind of stability of intentions which supplements the idea of ‘reasonable stability’. Unlike the latter, plasticity applies mainly to the cases of abandonment of our plan states without reconsideration. To show this, I focus on the intra-theoretical problems of PTI and I elucidate: (1) the distinction between future-directed intentions and plans, (2) the conceptual difference between stability and inertia, which is only implicitly present in PTI, (3) the factor of the environment of the planner, which has a vestigial place in Bratman’s writings. I also defend plasticity against one possible objection and I support it in the context of Bratman’s later works. Although critical, my proposal is in moderate harmony with PTI.

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Why is it important?

I criticize the well-known Bratman's account stability of agency by showing that the subject matter is much more than Bratman acknowledges. If my proposal is correct, action theory should draw much more attention on the idea of psychological flexibility (and its practical applications as plasticity in planning) and the factor of action's environment than the Bratmanian picture of psychological stability suggests.

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