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Dear Jeremy, Thanks for a thoughtful post. When I wrote, I stated that I didn't want to argue the meaning of such words as “think,” “know,” “intend” or “act.” I understand your argument about intentions and ascribing intention -- this is one of those issues that turns on definition, and in great part, it also has much to do with the research communities in which we take part. So for the purpose of this thread, I'm perfectly happy to use the word "desire." A human, a dog, or an orangutan can desire. A machine cannot desire, and neither can software. Of course there is no faculty of intention. Whatever it is that "intends" is the same entity that "desires." I wasn't referring to specific faculties or organs, but rather to the sentient or knowing or feeling creatures that desire and act. And I'd suggest further that one cannot see or show the "desire" of a person or a dog any more than one can see or show their "intention." Either way, we require some kind of inference or listening to a report. But here we come to a problem. We can indeed say that a machine or a software system is an actant. Interestingly enough, I've been re-reading George Polti and Vladimir Propp, as well as Algirdis Greimas. This has to do with some of Ditte's work on hermeneutics and the Western movie. When we move over to Bruno Latour, actant takes a slightly different shade -- but, in fact, the problem that I sometimes see in actor network theory is similar to the problem I see in neo-formalism and some flavors of structuralism. These sometimes seem to posit a world in systems and artifacts are accorded the same ontological status and existential privileges as living creatures. The issue of "agency" has two senses. One sense involves those entities that act in the world regardless of ontological status, whether independent or dependent, whether acting on their own desires or serving the desires of another actor. The other sense involves the agency of those creatures that act as independent agents. The term "agent" can take either meaning, and -- in fact -- the very word and concept have that ambiguous nature. I possess agency as an independent decision maker. I can also serve as the agent of another person who delegates responsibility or authority to me as his or her agent. What I have tried to say is that an existential being, a living and knowing creature able to function as an acting person, can design. A machine cannot. Because a machine cannot desire or know in any responsible sense, it cannot select among preferred states and it cannot therefore design. It may be programmed in some cases to enact design as programmed by a designer. As noted in my earlier post, I understand the value of actor-network theory as a thought experiment. Even so, I am not prepared to "start treating things in the world symmetrically." Things in the world are not beings, and the world goes seriously out of balance when we ascribe to things the ontological status of beings. This is a world in which an automobile is more to be valued than a person -- or perhaps it is a world in which the automobiles of a class of wealthy people are more greatly to be valued than the lives of another class of people. It is a world in which we have designed cities for the flow of automotive traffic regardless the cost to people, even though it became apparent over forty years ago that this would soon make our cities unmanageable and now unsustainable. When we treat all actants within a system as ontologically and ethically symmetrical, we have a world that rapidly becomes dysfunctional outside the kind of thought experiment that can shed light on how things and people work together in socio-technical systems. If, to use Flichy's words, all technologies are social technologies, this does not mean that all technical apparatus are social creatures. They are not. A dog, an orangutan, a human being -- these are existential beings that can design, and it is for these existential beings that we have design responsibility. I may wish to design a better car, I may desire a better designed car, but I do not design for my car. In my case, of course, it goes further than that. I chose a place to live that permits me to walk to work, so I no longer have a car. But if I did, my car would be a tool and not a being. There are deep ethical problems involved in the epistemology of this thread, and the ethical problems arise from the ontological status we ascribe to beings and to things. A being is a "who." A thing is an "it." When I ask, "who designs?" I speak of beings. Warm wishes, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS Professor Dean Swinburne Design Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia Jeremy Hunsinger wrote: --snip-- I don't think it involves intentionality, I tend to think that intention and intentionality, which refer to some state of the brain/ mind/nous are much like 'will'... they are concepts that solve a particular theoretical problem of the middle ages or modernity, but alas don't exist. What we mean when we say x intends, is merely to say that person will act or person will not act according to what he knows and desires, there is no special faculty of intention that separates persons from non-persons, etc. In short, i don't think intention or intentionality exists as anything other than shorthand for knowing our own desires and realizing them in the world. And really, that is all we need, we don't need 'intend' anymore than we need 'will', except as literary constructs. To design then, does not require to intend, it merely requires knowledge/thought/desire+action which is equivalent to planning+action. --snip-- So we can turn back to the dog examples and say... what really happened if we do not infer 'intention' because intention doesn't really exist... and at least i find, that the dog saw a plan, modeled a plan, and acted on a plan because it had a desire. --snip-- Which then brings us back to the question of agency... agency has nothing to do with intention, and agency is merely the ability to act in the world. Most things have agency, likely more things than some people are comfortable with, for instance, the concept 'intent' has acted in the world through humans and other beings to perpetuate itself as an analytic tool in a system of tools, or technologies that we use in sensemaking activities. Is it the best tool, perhaps not, is it real, sure it is real in the sense that it exists as a concept and can act, does it have any relationship to the state of the mind that it claims... perhaps metaphorically, but not in any real sense of saying that 'a person intends to do x, then does not do x' which is merely saying, 'i have a set of accepted stories about people, and in that set of stories, i use the world intend to mean that a person knows he or she should perform some act and desires said act, yet may or may not do so' however, you don't know the person knows, nor the person's desires beyond anything they say, and even then they may be misrepresenting their knowledge or desires for other purposes. What you have in the end though... is merely the persons actions... which exist in/as a system of relations, which exist. You can posit all kinds of other things in the world and tell stories about them though and perhaps they'll enter into the analysis or not. So... while intention may play a part in a descriptive narrative, it is shorthand, but in agency all you can really see is what people do, what machines do, what animals do, what nature does, what ecologies do, systems and relations do, what exists. Not everything that exists has agency, granted, but it is surprising as to what does when you take a much stronger sense of skepticism toward traditional descriptions and start treating things in the world symmetrically. --snip--