Agency enlarges the actor’s effective choice-set.
People systematically mistake conventions, anticipated embarrassment, weak social signals, and uncertainty for hard constraints. High agency means testing those boundaries rather than merely obeying them.
Actor, goal, and choice-set are partly constituted through action.
Action is not merely execution of an antecedent plan. Through situated, embodied, social engagement, purposes become more determinate and new possibilities can come into existence.
The comparison works best if one separates a practical doctrine of agency from a general theory of action.
| Question | Hall | Joas |
|---|---|---|
| What is agency? | Seeing and acting on available degrees of freedom. | Situated creative reconstruction intrinsic to ordinary human action. |
| What blocks action? | Permission-seeking, fear, invisible rules, overresearch, learned passivity. | Established habits or patterns no longer fitting an emergent situation. |
| Are goals fixed first? | Often sufficiently fixed to orient experimentation. | Often not; action helps constitute and revise the end itself. |
| What is the environment? | A field containing more opportunities than the actor notices. | A situation constitutive of the action and its meaning. |
| What is the individual? | Primarily the locus of initiative. | Embodied and socially constituted before reflective autonomy. |
| Characteristic error | Mistaking convention for constraint. | Mistaking action for execution of antecedent intentions. |
| Characteristic intervention | Try, ask, test, bypass, expose yourself to possibility. | Engage, encounter resistance, reconstruct ends and conduct. |
The world contains options you are not currently treating as real options. Agency increases when you test them.
Metaphor: there are hidden doors in the room. Most people never try the handles.
Action does not merely reveal possibilities. It can alter the actor, situation, and practical meaning of what counts as possible.
Metaphor: opening one door can create a corridor that was not yet there.
The practical question is often: What do you want, and which alleged obstacles have you failed to test?
Goals frequently begin vague. Means, encounters, bodily capacities, collaborators, and resistance help make the goal determinate.
Hall says: act because action may get you what you want.
Joas adds: act because action may disclose what you want.
Choose a case, then switch lenses. The point is not that one answer is “right,” but that the two frameworks ask different first questions.
Hall becomes especially interesting when translated into Joasian terms: high agency can be understood as low inhibition of ordinary creative action.
Act more aggressively against pseudo-constraints. Ask. Try. Enter. Build. Contact. Submit. Test.
Do not assume the agent, objective, or relevant option set is fixed before action begins.
Explore hard enough that the world can alter your map, your objective function, and your sense of who is acting.
Explore more aggressively; allow exploration to transform the explorer and the goal.
That framing imports a metaphysical problem neither theory needs in order to work. The sharper question is:
How do new courses of conduct become available to an embedded organism?
Hall emphasizes discovering neglected degrees of freedom. Joas emphasizes the generation of determinate possibilities through situated action.
An inadequately sampled state space contains higher-value actions than the current policy ever visits.
The policy, reward function, and sometimes the state representation itself change as the agent acts.
Agent versus world?
Rhetorical polarity
Hall’s practical rhetoric favors the actor who acts on the world rather than letting the world dictate the script.
Transactional ontology
Joas, following Mead and Dewey, treats agency as relational. The social world both constrains and constitutes the capacities through which actors transcend it.
This is why Hall is often better medicine for under-agency, while Joas is the richer anthropology.