Who Practices the Actions We Perform?

Actions are essential to giving meaning to any human experience. They are twofold concepts that bridge the subjective world of the individual's consciousness with the objective world, where their actions produce changes. Actions stem from interests and power: the interest in the actions' consequences and the power to act. Interests create motivations, and motivations promote actions. However, performing actions implies changing the world, which may challenge others' interests. Then, one may suppose there will be reactions. Even if not, the sheer inertia of situations is a hindrance to be overcome. That's why power is necessary to act.

Examining actions' objective consequences, we may infer the subjective motives that, because they are subjective, cannot be observed otherwise. The pragmatic theory of action is a theory of meaning; it's the use of the pragmatic criterion of meaning to assess human action and its consequences, plus the acknowledgment that meaning is essential to every human endeavor.

The core of the pragmatic theory of action is Peirce's pragmatism-the idea that the meaning of any action is given-and is only given-by its consequences. However, we soon discover that we cannot go without the subjective attribution of meaning and its related assessment. We deal with strategic actions, understood as purposeful. Then, it's essential to the interaction that each actor assesses the actions' results in the face of how they affect these actors' interests, which again requires attribution of meaning in a subjective procedure. So, we must understand the pragmatic principle as a departure from a metaphysical ground for meaning in favor of a practical, strategic one.

To develop these considerations, we make a distinction between agents, who perform actions, and actors, entities whose will commands their performative agents. That's very easy to understand in formal organizations, mainly strongly hierarchical ones, like in the military. However, we are all performative agents for formal and informal actors in society. How much our actions are our own or result from other actors' influence is the book's main focus.