Incorporative Agency

One kind of temporally extended agency involves planning your action in advance. This paper argues that there is also a different kind of temporally extended agency, characterised by planning that is partly retrospective in nature. Incorporative agency constitutively involves an agent planning to continue acting in such a way as to integrate some of their earlier activity into a to-be-completed extended action. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of incorporative agency, explicate the distinctive mechanism through which it is possible, and outline several kinds of conditions under which it can be rational to exercise. Finally, I argue that attending to the possibility of incorporative agency enables us to answer two sceptical challenges, concerning intentional skilled action that is initiated by automatic motor responses and intentional mental activity under content-involving descriptions.