We can decide what to do now, for instance, cook dinner or order takeout, or we can think ahead, for example, buy ingredients now for a cake we intend to bake on Sunday. Sometimes, we plan far ahead. Thus, Lydia, who is 43, may make a plan now to retire in Florida when she turns 70. This ability to make plans and act on them makes us diachronic agents, that is, agents through time.
What makes us capable of planning? Distinctive psychological abilities. Above all, these include the ability to imagine (squirrels likely “plan” for the winter only in an inverted commas sense, because they probably lack the ability to imagine possibilities that are not actual) and the ability to remember the past: one cannot execute any plans if one does not remember what plans one made, and a person with severe retrograde amnesia can be expected to be incapable of planning. (See Jeanette Kennett & Steve Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency, and Responsibility” in Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Ps...
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Fileva, I. (2019). Planning Ahead. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1882-1
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