Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Free will and determinism, Human acts

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

John T. Wilcox

Second Advisor

Lawrence D. Roberts

Third Advisor

William L. Duda

Abstract

One of the most ancient and persistent of human concerns is that directed at understanding human nature. Out of both curiosity and necessity people have wished to come to grips with what they are and how they are like or unlike the other things they find in the world. We want to uncover our own particular role in the grand scheme of the universe. Yet, quite understandably, the answer to the question “What is man?” has differed greatly from age to age, and from culture to culture. Sometimes people are pictured as beloved children of the gods, and sometimes as beleaguered stepchildren, outcasts in an alien world. Despite the differences which exist between the portrayals which have been offered of our role, however, there is one point upon which there has generally been agreement: we are agents, that is to say, we act. In other words, it has traditionally been supposed that people (at least at times) do things, instead of merely having things happen to them, where this “doing” involves such things as purposes, beliefs, responsibility, and freedom.

....

It is evident, nevertheless, that the growing maturity of cosmology, astronomy, biology, and many of the other natural sciences has been coincident with a progressive “deanthropomorphization” of the world. The origin of the universe is now ascribed, for example, to an enormous primordial detonation (the "Big Bang” theory) or to the perpetual ex nihilo introduction of new matter into space (the “Steady State” theory). The movements of the planets can be explained by reference to the lifeless force of gravity. And, it is nowadays argued, the miraculous-seeming phenomenon of evolution can be understood without recourse to the activity of any special agent….In each of these cases, the advance in the comprehension of the world has been concurrent with an increasing restriction on the applicability of the concept of action. And today many thinkers would argue that anthropomorphic conceptions have no real place in the understanding and interpretation of the phenomena studied by the natural sciences.

So at this point a question naturally arises: What beings can legitimately be said to act? And this, in turn, gives rise to a host of further queries. Do plants, in virtue of their “tropic mechanisms,” qualify in any sense as agents? Do any animals, especially such higher animals as dogs, monkeys, and dolphins, perform actions? Or ought one only attribute the performance of actions to human beings? If so, can it be claimed that all humans act? For example, do children act? And if not, at what age or level of maturity does a human being begin to perform actions? And can persons afflicted with any of the different varieties of emotional instability or insanity be said to act? Or does the notion of action have its only (“truly”) valid use with reference to the behavior (all things being equal) of mature, stable, adult human beings? Or could it even be the case, despite the ancient and persistent tradition to the contrary, that no humans ever really act?

Most persons, at the present time, would assuredly aver that mature, adult, sane human beings act, though they might encounter some difficulty in the attempt to draw a precise line between agency and non-agency. Nonetheless, there exists an interrelated group of arguments which can be construed as essentially contradicting the general tradition of regarding persons as agents—namely, the arguments offered in favor of determinism. They claim to prove that occurrences and things in the world are so constrained by non-human factors that the possibility of genuine human action is excluded, despite whatever appearances there might be to the contrary. Hence, they push deanthropomorphization to its radical extreme. Indeed, the move is so extreme that the concept of anthropomorphism, because of the implied connection between man and agency, loses its legitimacy. Now it seems absurd to suppose that these arguments could be sound. However, though authors many times have claimed to have uprooted the erroneous assumptions upon which they are presumably based, the arguments continue to flourish and are defended by articulate spokesmen even today. The remainder of the present study will be devoted to an examination of determinism and some of its more influential critics in an attempt to shed light on the problem it poses.

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