Agency in action. The practical rational agency machine (Q1189563)

This is first an essay in philosophy of action. And since we believe that an action is an object explanatory of its agency, our work took us into what ascriptions of action are revelatory of, namely, the practical rational states which causally precede action. As we dug into action and the process which explains it, we encountered a group of fundamental terms and relations -- conceptual archaeology, it seemed to be -- which lay beneath the main concepts off action and which created a temptation we did not resist. We wanted to realize and test the performance of these terms and relations in a computer program. This made a two year project into a five year project. The discipline of working back and forth between the exacting clarification needed by good computer analysts and programmers and the development of a philosophical theory took time. But the Practical Rational Agency Machine got written and PRAGMA, the computer program which is based upon it, got built.