Is “agentic” a valid category of social explanations? I feel fairly confident that I can phrase almost any positive social explanation in agentic or mechanistic terms. This confusion may well exist at the level of reality: inanimate objects not arranged in very specific ways are not agentic, and those arranged in those very specific ways are, but large collections of agents just don’t behave in ways that are adequately captured by our agent/nonagent binary language.
Of course it may well be that my agency-modelling has failed and this is just your point.
Is “agentic” a valid category of social explanations? I feel fairly confident that I can phrase almost any positive social explanation in agentic or mechanistic terms. This confusion may well exist at the level of reality: inanimate objects not arranged in very specific ways are not agentic, and those arranged in those very specific ways are, but large collections of agents just don’t behave in ways that are adequately captured by our agent/nonagent binary language.
Of course it may well be that my agency-modelling has failed and this is just your point.