Free agency and its place within psychology.
Date
2011-11-08
Authors
Pitman, Michael M.
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Abstract
Philosophical tradition locates questions about free will and agency within a debate
characterised by deep cognitive tensions and a lingering sense of stalemate. Evaluating the
most promising libertarian account of free will, due to Robert Kane, confirms the
compatibilist worry that inserting indeterminism into moments of volition undermines claims
of agency; while testing the prospects for compatibilism in a deterministic universe confirms
the libertarian suspicion that free agency is not compatible with global determinism. An
alternative setting for the exploration and defence of free agency is proposed, located closer
to Psychology, and framed by the images of the Agent Automaton (AA) and the Hyperrational,
Hyper-reflective Agent (HHA). Giving psychological substance to the threat of the
AA helps provoke fresh explorations and defences of a distinctively human, conscious free
agency; while the evidence against, and questions about the normative desirability of our
being HHAs argue against securing claims of free agency by making empirically and
normatively unreasonable demands on our capacities for reflection, cool reason, and control.
The project of explicating and defending a psychologically-informed conception of free
agency, exploiting degrees of freedom in our imagination and externalised aspects of mind, is
given positive substance and direction, including a speculative hypothesis for locating a
freedom-friendly variety of indeterminism in processes of imaginative generativity.