Philosophy Seminar: Dr Sean Bowden on Action as Problem-solving
Q-709, 6 Rue Colonel Combes, 75007
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Dr Sean Bowden (Deakin University) will be giving a research presentation on:
Action as Problem Solving
The aim of this paper is to develop some arguments in favour of understanding human action in general as a species of problem solving. The first part of the paper clarifies what the paper means by “problem solving”, drawing on Simon and Newell’s information-processing account of problem solving, some recent situationist and enactive treatments of Simon and Newell’s program, and a line of French thought about problematization running from Bergson to Deleuze via the tradition of historical epistemology. Of particular importance here will be an understanding of the relation between an objective task environment and the construction of a problem space; the distinction between well-structured and ill-structured problems; and a treatment of problematization as a “vector of structuration” that determines and correlates the thinking and acting subject and the objects of their thought and action. The second part of the paper involves a reframing of many of the main commitments of the standard theory of action in the language of problem solving. I will then, thirdly, indicate how this reframing can speak to several important open problems in contemporary philosophy of action, giving us reasons to adopt the account. Finally, I will raise and attempt to address some objections to the treatment of human action in general as a species of problem solving.
Bio
Sean Bowden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (Edinburgh UP, 2011), and the co-editor of Problems in Twentieth Century French Philosophy (Routledge, 2019 – with Mark G.E. Kelly), Deleuze and Pragmatism (Routledge, 2015 – with Simone Bignall and Paul Patton) and Badiou and Philosophy (2012 – with Simon Duffy). He is currently finalizing a monograph on action and agency in Deleuze, as well as a co-authored work with Timothy Deane-Freeman titled Process and Problems in the Ontological, Epistemological and Ethical Thought of Gilles Deleuze.
