One of the
most interesting philosophical discussions today is the free will debate. When
I was rethinking the free will problem again, Berent Enç’s book How we act came to my mind. Although it
is in the field of action theory, it contains insights that might help to solve
it. So, a good reason to present here a few of its main points.
Enç sees
his book as a naturalistic approach to action. However, he explicitly wants to
show that there is room for agency in a world of causally connected events. It
is here, I think, that the idea of a free will has a place. Enç makes a
distinction between what one does deliberatively
and what one does automatically. In
order to substantiate this, he discusses examples from biology. For instance, a
cricket has a built in mechanism for singing. If the weather conditions, the
time of the day etc. are correct, its brain cells fire and the cricket sings.
But this mechanism will also cause it to sing, when stimulated in the
appropriate way by a researcher. Of course, automatic behaviour needs not be
innate. It can also be learned, like the behaviour of a pigeon that has been
reinforced to peck a key when a light flashes in a Skinnerian paradigm. Likewise
a human agent either can do something automatically because she has been born
to behave that way, or she can learn to do something automatically, e.g. tying
her shoelaces: As a child the agent had to learn it and each time she initially
tied her shoelaces, she had to think about the right movements; as an adult,
the agent simply does, probably without even being able to tell any longer what
she exactly does. However, an agent does not tie the shoelaces involuntarily,
like when she sneezes, but she has a reason for it. By arguing this way, Enç
substantiates that an agent has macro-units of behaviour controlled by higher
centres that determine the reasons why the agent does what she does and micro-units
of innate or learned behaviour that are subsystems that control the limb
trajectories. The macro-units determine the agent’s purposes, beliefs, desires
and intentions, and what the agent thinks on the macro-level triggers the
behaviour of the micro-units that produce the specific limb movements needed to
fulfil the agent’s specific goals. It’s here that deliberation plays a part.
Essential in rational action is that deliberation involves weighing the pros
and cons of what the agent might do. However, for Enç deliberation is not a
process that finally is independent of the world around the agent. It is to be
explained by reference only to events, states, and the causal relations among
them in the world around the person and by the way they are represented within
the person. Once the process of deliberation has been finished it will set to
start the actual behaviour, which, at least for a part on a basic level, will
be executed automatically without further thinking.
Enç has
embedded his analysis in a discussion of current problems of action theory. For
example he discusses the question whether it is possible to take volitions as a
starting point of action. But how is it then possible to avoid an infinite
regress: For what determines the volitions and what determines this and so on?
Enç accepts the idea of basic action, but if so, what is then a basic action,
he asks. These are problems that Enç discusses, and for which he tries to find
an intelligent solution in developing a complicated causal model of deliberation.
It is not, as he shows, that the deliberation-action process is simply
unidirectional, going from events in the world to representations of these
events in the agent to deliberation to the triggering of a preferred kind of behaviour
to fulfilment of the purpose. There is ample room in the model for feedback
loops. Moreover, at each level the agent can choose what to do, according to her
preferences, beliefs, desires, action possibilities and intentions, depending
on the circumstances in which the action takes place. Once the decision has
been taken and the final intention has been determined, it is the intention
that triggers the agent’s basic acts at the right time, and that guides the
agent in the execution of the action chosen.
Enç’s book
is an important contribution to the naturalistic approach, but it has also much
value for the interpretive approach and with that for the idea that there is a
free will (which Enç ignores, however). An interpretive approach does not
explain what people do by analyzing objective causes, as the naturalistic
approach does, but understands the subjective meanings that the acting people
themselves give to their actions. Enç analysis potentially brings the two
approaches closer together.
This
becomes clear, when one looks at the action theory of Alfred Schütz, one of the
founders of the interpretive approach. Schütz sees behaviour as a more or less
automatic thoughtless activity, while action is performed according to a plan.
Naturalists explain what an agent does in terms of the way it is determined by
her beliefs and desires in an objective causal way. Interpretationists,
however, emphasize that an agent’s reasons are subjective interpretations that
make certain actions the thing to do. Enç’s analysis makes is possible to put these
approaches together. When analyzing what naturalists do, one can say that they
have in mind a Schützean notion of behaviour. In terms of Enç, it is the behaviour
done by the micro-units. Beliefs, desires, reasons and intentions are then
formulated as ways of explaining what the agent does on the level of the
micro-units that execute the actual behaviour. On the other hand, interpretationists
see action as a way of thinking what to do according to a Schützean action
plan. In terms of Enç, this is the process of deliberation executed by the
macro-units of behaviour. Seen in the light of Enç’s causal deliberation model,
naturalism and the interpretive approach are partial approaches to the problem
of how to explain what an agent does. With the help of Enç’s model these approaches
can be integrated. It is in this integration that there is room for a free
will, not as an epiphenomenon of the bodily process but as an autonomous
phenomenon.
Enç, B.
(2003). How We Act: Causes, Reasons, and
Intentions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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