Agentic action requires only functional knowledge, not mechanical understanding
Evidence
In driving an automobile, the driver engages in coordinated acts of shifting gears, steering, regulating the gas pedal, and applying the brakes. The assemblage of auto subsystems makes up the intricate operational machinery. However, driving requires higher-order activation and regulation. The actions involved in driving, which the driver controls directly, regulate the mechanical assemblage to arrive safely at where the driver wants to go. But the driver neither has awareness of the chemical combustion processes in the automobile engine nor directly controls the chemical reactions that power the car. To act agentically, the driver does not have to understand the correlative mechanics whereby pressing the gas pedal gets the car to move. Knowledge of the functional relation between action and desired outcomes is sufficient. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 309
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The driving analogy elegantly pins down what it means to be agentic: know the action-outcome relation, not the underlying mechanics.