Locating Agency

Abstract

In psychology as in physics, we postulate systems of unseen entities to explain phenomena that otherwise would seem to us insufficiently intelligible. Proponents of what might be called ‘the new scientific realism’ in the philosophy of the natural sciences (e.g., Harré, 1986; Bhaskar, 1985; Hacking, 1983) — and Rom Harré is among the best of these — have important things to say about the phenomena that guide the construction of theory and the way they guide it. These phenomena, the new realists remind us, are created experimentally. They are created by means of interventions, which are conducted by investigators deploying experimental devices, into the basic material, the ‘ur-stuff’, of the world, to which Harré gives the non-committal nickname, ‘glub’. It’s how the apparatus is built that determines the phenomenal ‘shape’ of the glub in the experimental situation, within constraints dictated by the glub’s intrinsic character. The apparatus as it were ‘mobilizes’ the glub in some particular way. (What makes an experimenter great is the ability to make nature do things it otherwise would not do, in order to provide a better basis for theoretical conjecture.) Thus the phenomena that are most critical for theory construction exist only in conjunction with human intervention, and not in a pure state of nature. (See Hacking, 1983 for a cogent exposition of this view.) Harrée quotes Niels Bohr — “No sharp distinction can be made between the behavior of objects themselves and their interaction with the measuring instruments” (Bohr, 1958, p. 61) — and adds:“We cannot single out an aspect of the apparatus/glub meld and assign it to some hypothetical object as [a] property of which the reaction of the apparatus might be a measure” (Harrée , 1986, p. 305).