Determinism versus Free Will - Essay Example

Determinism Versus Free Will Of DETERMINISM VERSUS FREE WILL INTRODUCTION As Einstein's position suggested, onemight profit from challenging the belief that free will and determinism represent polar opposite extremes of a single dimension. Perhaps these two concepts are better understood as being located on two separate dimensions A similar conceptual revision (Constantinople, 1973) sparked an enormous surge of research in the domain of sex-role orientation. If 20 years ago one had complimented a man on his fine feminine characteristics, he might well have been insulted by the compliment. Why Until 2 decades ago, masculinity and femininity were thought to be polar opposites, so highlighting one's feminine characteristics typically meant denying the person's masculine traits. This was not only an accepted conceptual position, it was also a computational fact of life with all of the then-existing sex-role orientation measures. However, Constantinople's (1973) conceptual reorganization allowed for the possibility of two independent dimensions: masculinity and femininity. From this new vantage point, one is not forced to deny one set of characteristics in order to assert possession of high levels of the other. Now, people can be different combinations (conceptually and computationally): high on both masculinity and femininity (androgynous); high on one and low on the other (stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine); or low on both dimensions (undifferentiated). It was this simple, conceptual reformulation that appeared to spark the present revolution in sex-role research. DISCUSSION Might a similar reformulation of the free will-determinism question stimulate new solutions to an antinomy that has perplexed thinkers for more than 25 centuries Before sketching a re-conceptualization of the free will versus determinism issue, this article will offer a working scientist's or a counseling practitioner's specification of the issues--not a philosopher's reformulation of this seemingly everlasting controversy. That is, the definition of terms (such as free will, determinism, nonagentic mechanism) is empirically operationalizable and thus (in this form) amenable to empirical scrutiny. However, in so defining these terms, it becomes unclear exactly what the implications of these conceptual moves (and research findings) might be for philosophical debate on the issues of agency, mechanistic determinism, self-determination, and free will. There have been many different construals of free will (van Inwagen, 1983) over the last two and a half millennia. Some of these construals (e.g., free will results from the absence of any physical constraint upon the agent) clearly do not square with the arguments and research summarized herein. Whenever an agent makes a choice (and then acts for the sake of that choice), however, one might see it as a free choice (and act) if indeed the agent might have chosen to do otherwise ceteris paribus (i.e., all other things being equal). The notion of free will entertained herein is seen in Robert Frost's (1951) poem "The Road Not Taken." Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. If Frost's (1951) traveller had also been able to choose "the road more [italics added] traveled by" but instead opted for "the road less [italics added] traveled by," one might assert that he or she had made a free choice. But since the time of Heraclitus (with his point that one can never step in the same river twice), philosophers and scientists recognized the virtual impossibility of meeting the demands of the ceteris paribus condition in such cases. Fortunately, new experimental methodologies now allow for the testing of the causal force of free choice in studies that do fully meet the requirements of the ceteris paribus assumption (see Howard & Myers, 1989). Like free will, the meaning of determinism has changed over time. "Determinism" was until the mid-nineteenth century a theory of the will--a denial of human freedom--and some dictionaries give this as a first meaning. Partly as a result of statistical discussion, it assumed during the 1850s and 1860s its modern and more general meaning, by which the future of the world is held to be wholly determined by its present configuration. What then is the working scientist's definition of determinism It is the belief that events (or effects) are produced by some prior events (or causes). For this article's purpose, reasons can also serve as causes. The opposite of determinism, then, would be acausality or indeterminism. That is, things occur randomly, spontaneously, and are sometimes uncaused. Uncertainty (cf. Price & Chissick, 1977) is a distinctly different concept from the "acausality" that is being suggested as the polar opposite of "determinism." From this perspective, one can readily see why Kimble (1984) found that virtually all psychologists are determinists--as acausality represents the enemy of scientific analysis. Thus, the present reformulation does not suggest that psychologists should deny determinism in any way. Rather, it means that a psychologist can be both a free willist and a determinist. Now one can specify a second, independent dimension that is anchored on one end by free will or complete self-determination--this is defined as an agent's ability to act in a domain completely independently of all nonagentic, mechanistic influences. The opposite of free will, then, would be complete mechanistic determination (whether by physiological factors, environmental influences, unconscious motivations, social influences, genetic or predispositions). At this latter extreme, human choice is seen as completely causally impotent or human choice itself is seen as a completely mechanistically determined phenomenon and not the creation of a free agent. Figure 1 outlines this reconceptualization of the old free will-determinism debate. There does not seem to be a serious scholar who advocates complete acausality in the world, as most scientists strongly (if not completely) espouse deterministic belief systems in their roles as professionals. Thus, few scholars would be far from the "determinist" pole of the first dimension. But what of the self-determination versus nonagentic mechanism dimension Scientists in the physical sciences would seem to be severely skewed toward the nonagentic mechanism pole in their professional work. While individuals in the biological sciences might not be as heavily skewed toward the nonagentic mechanism pole, they certainly would not approach belief in complete self-determination. For researchers in the human sciences, however, compelling arguments can be offered for the role of both self-determination and mechanistic determination in human action. And while the mechanist has always been free to offer a deterministic vision of human action that is scientific (simply by denying free will), because of the foregoing reformulation, a proponent of some version of human self-determination (or free will) can now also be deterministic in his or her theory of human action. THE ROLE OF SELF-DETERMINATION IN HUMAN ACTION The present reformulation of the free will-determinism question does not represent the first analysis to show that the ancient problem rests upon conceptual confusions. May (1981), Rogers (1959), and Rychlak (1979) each resolved the paradoxes of freedom and destiny in their own creative ways. Berger (1963) expressed a reasonable version (for the free will advocate) of the accepted wisdom regarding the relationship between free will (freedom) and determinism (science). Berger's characterization of the state of the human sciences was accurate at the time it was penned--there simply was no methodology for unequivocally ascertaining the proportion of human action attributable to self-determination. Until recently there always remained plausible, mechanistic explanations that might have been responsible for what appeared to be self-determined action in research studies. However, newer methodologies (Howard, 1984; Howard & Conway 1987; Howard, DiGangi, & Johnson, 1988; Howard & Myers, 1989; Howard, Youngs, & Siatczynski, 1989; Lazarick, Fishbein, Loiello, & Howard, 1988) now allow for the unequivocal partitioning of variance in human behavior into self-determination on the one hand, and various nonagentic influences on the other. The justification for this claim is complex and methodological in nature. Summaries of the arguments that support the claim are found in all of the articles cited above. Howard and Myers (1989) articulated, however, the justification in elaborate detail, and specifically addressed criticisms of the claims that variance due to self-determination can be experimentally isolated with the effects of all possible nonagentic, mechanistic factors methodologically removed. Science always strives for a deeper, richer understanding of powers (or capacities, or generative mechanisms) that underlie observed experimental relationships. Watkins (1984) noted, "And our supreme demand is that our science will penetrate deeper and deeper until eventually it achieves ultimate explanations of all phenomena" (p. 128). Recall, for example, that since the time of Gregor Mendel, scientists could specify the relationships between certain characteristics of parents and the likelihood that their offspring would exhibit those characteristics. But it was only in the last 30 years that the mechanisms responsible for the transmission of hereditary traits became clearly understood by scientists (cf. Watson, 1970). Similarly, demonstrating that humans can (to some extent) self-determine their actions represents an important experimental demonstration. But these demonstrations do not (in and of themselves) shed light on the particular mechanisms that enable humans to exhibit this remarkable power to self-determine. FROM A SCHIZOID PLURALISM TO A BINOCULAR VISION OF HUMAN ACTION William James's Principles of Psychology (James, 1890) is arguably the most influential book in the history of psychology. Boring (1929) called James the founder of scientific psychology in America, and it has been argued that his other principles (e.g., pragmatism [James, 1907] and pluralism [James, 1908]) represent the basic values that undergird the scientist-practitioner model in psychology (Howard, 1992). Finally, James is psychology's first and perhaps most steadfast advocate for free will. Why the lavish praise of James It is because this writer disagrees with his treatment of the free will-determinism problem, which has led many to a form of schizoid pluralism in the free will-determinism debate. The principle of pluralism helped James see unity within apparent contradiction, and allowed him to understand many of the paradoxes of human experience. It is well known that a good deal of his emotional torment as a young adult centered on his dread of the possible truth of deterministic analyses of human action, whether of a mechanistic or a biologically reductive sort. Like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, James had a dread of the demon of absolute determinism in human action, and this dread served to goad many of his creative philosophical moves. James eventually solved the free will-determinism problem to his own satisfaction. James's pluralism saved him from the dilemma of determinism. He believed that when viewed from humanistic perspectives (such as philosophy and theology) human freedom was a reality--thus, his famous quote "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will" (James, 1920, p. 147). However, science and psychology (in James's view) must be deterministic disciplines; when viewed from this (the scientific) conceptual vantage point, humans are not free, but rather are determined. Thus, James's position on free will-determinism was dualistic in that, "Free will is an issue of fact while being beyond the competence of psychological science" (Viney, 1986, p. 555). This is perhaps the point on which there are now grounds for transcending James's views. It is now possible to recognize free will (or self-determination) to be a causally efficacious agency within a world of nonagentic, deterministic influences. Although science can endorse James's final conclusion that free will-determinism is the correct philosophy, it does so for radically different reasons. It is now possible to be a free willist (to recognize the causal efficacy of self-determination) within the deterministic system of science. Thus, free will-determinists exist, but now from a unified perspective, not from James's dual perspective. James felt that science necessitated the assumption of determinism, but that ethics necessitated the contradictory assumption of human freedom. Thus, in James's thinking, a permanent wall was erected that separated scientific disciplines from ethics. This represents no particular problem for explanations in other sciences, as no one would, for example, want to render moral approbation on planet earth for "speeding" through the heavens, nor would one label sodium an "easy element" for choosing to combine with chlorine at too low a combination temperature. The assumption of determinism is important for the sciences of inanimate and/or insentient objects. But the assumption of freedom of choice is not appropriate, and so for the natural sciences there is no need for a metaphysician (la James's definition) to adjudicate findings from plural, incompatible perspectives (i.e., science and ethics). But the situation is quite different in psychology, and hence James's (1893) prophesy that our Galileos and Lavoisiers would be metaphysicians. FREE WILL-DETERMINISM AND THE PRACTICE OF COUNSELING Two images of human psychology compete for our attention. Academic psychologists, particularly those who work in the "experimental" tradition, make the implicit assumption that men, women, and children are high-grade automata, the patterns of whose behavior are thought to obey something very like natural laws .... It is assumed that there are programs which control action and the task of psychology is to discover the "mechanisms" by which they are implemented. Lay folk, clinical psychologists, lawyers, historians and all of those who have to deal in a practical way with human beings tend to think of people as agents struggling to maintain some sort of reasoned order in their lives against a background flux of emotions, inadequate information, and the ever-present tides of social pressures. I shall try to show that the great differences that mark off these ways of thinking about human psychology are not ultimately grounded in a reasoned weighing of the evidence available to any student of human affairs. They turn in the end on unexamined political and moral assumptions .... Although these profoundly different ways of interpreting and explaining human thought and action have their origin in preferred linguistic forms rather than any compelling facts of the matter, they do have profoundly different practical consequences. They carry with them very distinctive stances as to the moral, political and clinical problems with which modern people are beset. (p. 4) CONCLUSION Counselors have never had the luxury of waiting for the final resolution of great issues (such as the free will-determinism problem), since they have always been confronted in their work with a more pressing problem--the perceived needs of the client seated before them. James was one of the first to see knowledge as activity, not as a product of contemplation. For the counselor, "theories become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and on occasion make nature over [italics added] again by their aid" (James, 1920, p. 380). Counselors employ what James called funded knowledge. That is, knowledge whose chief claim to truth lies in the fact that it is useful and functional. "Funded" means it is based upon both common sense and scientific inquiries. Practitioners are often experts in the psychological phenomenon called coping and coping blends elements of knowledge, action, and hope together. These topics are addressed in Pragmatism (James, 1907). If there is a truth or reality about human nature, James claimed one will not come to know it solely through detached, dispassionate armchair philosophy or laboratory experiments. Counselors will gain insights into human nature by studying acts of self-creation, that is, by accompanying clients as they struggle with the important tasks of devising ways of (in James's felicitous phrase) being good at being human. Now if that is what counselors do in their work, then their philosophy is (as James suggested) Pragmatism--whether or not they know it or acknowledge it. REFERENCES Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to sociology: A humanistic perspective. New York: Doubleday. Beutler, L. E. (1983). Eclectic psychotherapy: A systematic approach. New York: Pergamon. Boring, E.G. (1929). A history of experimental psychology. New York: Century. Brammer, L. M., & Shostrom, E. L. (1977). Therapeutic psychology (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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People are the cause of mechanisms (e.g., environmental, their own actions. physiological, genetic, cultural) which are completely coercive. FIGURE 1 Free Will-Determinism Dichotomy in Independent Bipolar Dimensions Read More