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4. The Underdetermination and Irreducibility of Agency
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81 Chapter Four The Underdetermination and Irreducibility of Agency WE BELIEVE that an adequate conception of human agency requires a compatibilist notion of self-determination but one that goes beyond traditional dissolutionist or voluntarist arguments and proposals to include a limited aspect of origination. This is so because, as we will argue, some human actions, especially in nonstandard situations of uncertainty and ambiguity , are not explicable in terms of biological and/or cultural factors or conditions alone but also require the actor’s own understanding and reasoning (including intentions, commitments, valuations, beliefs, and so forth). In this chapter, we present an argument for what we term the underdetermination of agency (cf. Martin & Sugarman, 1999).This is an argument that, unlike the classic arguments of libertarians, does not simply assert the existence of freedom of choice and/or action as an unassailable premise, thus begging the question of agency. Rather, we argue for agency, understood as a particular kind of self-determination, by eliminating possibilities other than self-determination as fully determinate of all of the choices and actions of a developed human being. Because our argument for agency is eliminative, it may not be as robust as more directly positive arguments, but in the absence of these, we believe it suffices for our purposes in this volume. After presenting our argument for the underdetermination of agency by factors and conditions other than self-determination, we turn to a consideration of recent proposals in the philosophy of psychology and mind that attempt to rationalize various reductions of psychological (agentic) kinds to 81 82 Psychology and the Question of Agency physical and biological factors in the interests of advancing a truly scientific psychology. Even though we already have indicated our general view of some such proposals in chapter 2 of this book, in the latter part of this chapter, we lay out the philosophical bases for several contemporary reductionist proposals in a more detailed manner. We then indicate what we believe to be their fatal flaws. These are flaws that, in our view, can be ameliorated only by abandoning the reductionist project and embracing the kind of nonmysterious, emergent, and irreducible agency that we began to describe in the previous chapter and will develop more fully in subsequent chapters of this book. AN ARGUMENT FOR THE UNDERDETERMINATION OF AGENCY As previously stated,our compatibilism is not a compatibilism of dissolutionism and/or voluntariness alone. Moreover, it issues in a kind of soft determinism that is not entailed by either of these more traditional compatibilisms. We begin our argument for agency as self-determination by offering a more detailed definition of agency than we have thus far advanced. For us, human agency is the deliberative, reflective activity of a human being in framing, choosing, and executing his or her actions in a way that is not fully determined by factors and conditions other than his or her own understanding and reasoning. Such other factors and conditions include external constraints and coercions, as well as internal constraints over which the person has no conscious control. Note several things about this definition of agency. First, agency need not be unaffected by factors and conditions other than an agent’s own reflective understanding and reasoning. It only must not be determined fully by such other factors, a state of affairs we refer to as underdetermination. Second, even if a given motive or desire may have been established initially by factors such as social conditioning or genetics, the actor (following Frankfurt , 1971) remains an agent so long as he or she has assimilated such motives or desires so as to make them objects of his or her own deliberation. Third, in saying that agency is underdetermined by “other factors,” we do not mean that agency is necessarily undetermined, only that it must itself figure in its own determination.This is what we mean by self-determination. We especially wish to emphasize the distinction we draw between undetermined and underdetermined because in our view the traditional Hobbesian framing of compatibilism is inadequate precisely because it fails to make this distinction. In the absence of the possibility of underdetermination , only two choices present themselves: strict determinism or randomness , either of which may be argued effectively to rule out a coherent sense of self-determination.The problem we see with the traditional Hobbesian dissolutionist argument is that, as Bishop Bramwell and many others have sensed, it reduces self-determination too radically to nothing more...