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Preface
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Preface Most contemporary persons believe in both science and their own ability to direct their lives, a joint commitment reflected and encouraged by disciplinary and professional psychology. Nonetheless, it is by no means clear that such a commitment can be coherently maintained. While the determinism of science might fit well with the inevitability of death and taxes, it seems decidedly at odds with much of our everyday experience of ourselves as agents capable of choice and action that make a difference in our lives. On the other hand, a certain amount of order and predictability in our physical and social world seem necessary if we are to exercise any control over our circumstances.After all, chaos hardly seems conducive to self-determination. In this volume, we argue for a kind of agency that is both determined and determining and strongly recommend that both disciplinary and professional psychology embrace such a conception as central to their inquiries and practices. In fact, we go so far as to suggest that it is precisely because mainstream psychology has not developed an adequate conceptualization and theory of human agency that it has fallen prey to an overly reductionistic scientism that has failed to draw necessary distinctions between natural and human phenomena. More particularly, most scientific and professional psychology has failed to provide an adequate account of self-determination as emergent from, yet irreducible to, its sociocultural constituents and physical –biological requirements. We maintain that such an account is exactly what is required for a coherent conception of human agents as both determined and determining, in a manner that fits both our everyday experience of ourselves and acceptably rigorous forms of psychological inquiry and practice.The purpose of our book is to argue for and theoretically elaborate this position. Readers familiar with the philosophical canon will realize that the conceptualization of agency with which we will be concerned is a form of compatibilism. However, it is a kind of compatibilism that goes beyond voluntarism alone to allow for a modest kind of origination. In other words, our agency is not restricted to the kind of thing that the Stoic philosopher ix x Psychology and the Question of Agency Epictetus (ca. C.E. 50–130) apparently had in mind when he proffered his famous advice:“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen” (Epictetus, 1983, p. 13). Our kind of agency is not restricted to such attitudinal accomplishment alone. Instead, we believe that the inevitable uniqueness of any individual life within its sociocultural, developmental context, together with emergent capabilities such as imaginative projection, critical self-reflection, oppositional thinking, and dialogical engagement, enable an agency, which while certainly not radically free, is nevertheless capable of generating possibilities for action that might deviate somewhat from possibilities already experienced. Of course, how well we succeed in our attempts to argue for and theorize a situated, emergent, and deliberative agency ultimately is up to readers to determine.We are pleased to have the opportunity of placing our ideas in front of such a readership and want to express our gratitude to Jane Bunker, Michael Wallach, James Peltz, Laurie Searl and others at State University of New York Press for including our work in their “Alternatives in Psychology” series.We also want to acknowledge the assistance of Chris Holoboff in helping to prepare our manuscript.Thanks also to our friends and colleagues in the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (of the American Psychological Association ) for many informative conversations and for their general support of us and our work. Finally, we thank Robin Barrow, our good friend and Faculty Dean at Simon Fraser University for always encouraging us to put “ideas ahead of committees,” an all-too-rare bias in today’s university administrator. Some of the ideas set forth in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of this book have been developed previously, although much less formally and fully, by Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman in articles in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (1999), the American Psychologist (2000), Theory and Psychology (2001), and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior (2001), and in a chapter in the volume Between Chance and Choice, edited by Harald Atmanspacher and Robert Bishop (Imprints Academic, 2002). We thank Imprints Academic, and the publishers of the journals in which these articles have appeared (Sage, the American Psychological Association, Basil Blackwell) for permission to use some of...