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Christian List: A Passage




Here's a passage from the book WHY FREE WILL IS REAL by Christian List. of the London School of Economics.

At one point (p. 74) List recommends what he calls the "naturalistic ontological attitude," that is, the view that "our best guide to any questions about which entities, properties, or phenomena exist in any given domain is to be found in our best scientific theories of that domain."

This is why we believe, and rightly, in the reality of gravitational force, electromagnetic fields, and much more recently the Higgs boson. "To follow up by asking whether they are 'really' real would be to ask one question too many."

Likewise it is, he says, with intentional agency -- the fact that some things happen because some human beings want to accomplish something, and have specific enumerable ideas about how those things can be accomplished  -- we naturally regard intentional agency as existing because "our best theories in the human and behavioral sciences" invoke such agency.

Thus there is a proper syllogistic chain here.

P1. If our best theories in the proper domain holds that X exists, X exists.
P2. The proper domain in the case of intentional agency consists of the human and behavioral sciences.
Conclusion 1. If our theories in the human and behavioral sciences hold that intentional agency exists, it does.
P3. Our best theories in those sciences do so hold.
Conclusion 2. Intentional agency exists.

The contrary to P1 would be a functionalist understanding of such hypotheses as gravitational force. A positivist might say that the force isn't really real, that only what we directly observe is really real, and gravitational force is only real in that it fulfills a function, it helps us to make accurate predictions, like when high tide (which we CAN observe) will next arrive at a nearby beach.

The functionalist understanding of intentional agency is ... behaviorism. Skinner treated ideas like "intention" or "agency" the way Mach treated gravitational force.




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