The Possibility of Naturalism by Roy Bhaskar

Author:Roy Bhaskar [Bhaskar, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317629856
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Agency

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756332-3

Introduction

In Chapter 2 I showed how the properties that societies possess might make them objects of knowledge for us. A key step in the development of the argument consisted in the demonstration of the ontological irreducibility of societies to people. I now want to consider how we can come to have knowledge of people.

In considering the properties that people possess that might make them objects of knowledge for us, I shall once more be concerned to demonstrate the existence of certain fundamental features or powers, establish their irreducibility to simpler or more basic ones, and show how it is in virtue of the existence and exercise of these powers that an autonomous science – in this case of psychology – is possible. The powers most naturally invoked here are those that involve consciousness, that is, those states of persons in virtue of which mentalistic predicates are applicable. And my aim here again will be to consider the extent to which the hypothesis of naturalism, viz. that there are generative structures, knowable to us, producing the manifest phenomena (in this case of consciousness), can be vindicated – in the domain now of the psychological sciences. This question can be transposed to the one familiar to philosophers as: ‘Can reasons be causes’ For the category of reasons, though not free from ambiguity, is that in terms of which we most naturally couch explanations for human conduct; and generative structures are, analytically, causal. It is my aim here to provide an affirmative answer to that question. Such an answer is of course already presupposed by the argument of Chapter 2 in which the reality of social forms was established by reference to their causal efficacy in affecting states of the material world, as mediated through intentional human agency. So that in this way I will also be completing the argument of the previous chapter.

It may be helpful if I indicate my position at the outset. I am going to argue that intentional human behaviour is caused, and that it is always caused by reasons, and that it is only because it is caused by reasons that it is properly characterized as intentional. The agent (and others) may or may not be aware of the reasons that cause his/her intentional behaviour. Now any explanation of the reasons that form the immediate (naturalistic) explanations of human actions may necessarily have recourse both to psychological mechanisms, unavailable to consciousness, and to non-psychological (e.g., physiological and sociological) ones. So although a stratified science of psychology is possible, its objects act in open systems co-determined by the effects of non-psychological mechanisms. Moreover, the mechanisms delineated as ‘psychological’ may be radically non-homogeneous and affected by the operation of non-psychological mechanisms; so that there can be no presumption that a unified, or say ahistorical, science of psychology is possible.

I shall commence my defence of naturalism here by more or less dogmatically asserting the existence of certain powers, postponing their elucidation until later. The argument of the second and

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