In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions–primitivism and the causal theory–fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. Primitivists postulate primitive agential capacities in their explanations. The latter neglect to explain how primitive capacities integrate with findings from natural science. The former do not explain why some feedback mechanism’s activity amounts to the agent’s guidance. In this paper I argue that both traditions should acknowledge a capacity to guide, as actually constituted by the executive system. I argue that appeals to this empirically discovered psychological system explain how individuals guide in a way that integrates with explanations from cognitive science. Individuals’ capacity to guide is embedded in the natural world through the activity of its constituent (mechanistic) components.

在代理的范式练习中，个人引导他们的活动朝着某个目标迈进。行动理论的一个主要挑战是解释个人如何指导。正如自然科学所解释的那样，这一挑战是一个更普遍的问题的例子，该问题涉及如何在自然世界中容纳个人及其行为。原始论和因果论这两个主要传统未能以令人满意的方式应对挑战。因果理论家通过反馈机制通过意图来诉说因果关系，以解释指导。原始主义者在他们的解释中假定原始的代理能力。后者忽略了解释原始能力如何与自然科学发现相结合的解释。前者没有解释为什么某些反馈机制的活动等同于座席的指导。在本文中，我认为两种传统都应承认具有指导能力，而这种能力实际上是由行政系统构成的。我认为，对这种经验发现的心理系统的吸引力解释了个人如何以与认知科学的解释相结合的方式进行指导。个人的指导能力通过其组成部分（机械部分）的活动而嵌入到自然世界中。