Abstract
What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
On Velleman’s understanding this way of drawing the act/happening distinction coincides with Anscombe’s epistemic strategy as outlined in the introduction. As we will see, for Velleman the reason-governed way in which the past shapes the future in agency is a function of the distinctive epistemic relation in which an agent stands to her acts.
- 2.
- 3.
Velleman (2009) appears to have changed his mind on this score, claiming that the drive towards narrative self-understanding is an optional supplement to the drive towards causal-psychological self-understanding for practical reasoners, ‘at least to some extent’ (p. 204). Below I argue that this is a mistake—it is more plausible to construe causal-psychological understanding as built on a foundation of narrative understanding.
- 4.
The degree of compatibility between Velleman’s views on practical rationality and selfhood and the narrative theories cited above is a delicate issue. A key tenet of Velleman’s work on personhood is that ‘self’ is a multi-purpose reflective pronoun, rather than the designator of a single entity or topic of enquiry (Velleman 2006a). In this chapter our concern is with the mode of reflexive self-understanding that Velleman argues is constitutive of agency. But Velleman is at best agnostic about the relationship between the self-understanding constitutive of agency (understood, roughly, in terms of a drive to act in ways that make sense to ourselves) and the kinds of self-conception with which narrative theorists are frequently concerned (e.g. conceiving of oneself as a loving spouse, committed parent, or hopeless loser). See e.g. Velleman (2001a, 2007, 2009).
- 5.
- 6.
In the interests of simplicity I’m writing as if we can legitimately pull apart the explanatory projects of characterizing the constitutive structure of some phenomenon and spelling out how that phenomenon does or could arise in nature. But note that many will be inclined to resist this separation, holding that empirical inquiry and data are our best guides to metaphysical structure. Such folks should be especially sceptical of Velleman’s intellectualism about practical reason.
- 7.
One question that a fully developed version of the present proposal should address concerns the origins of the practices of intersubjective understanding that scaffold development. Given the design specifications above, a suitably developmentally plastic creature will acquire a drive to act intelligibly by the standards of whatever practices of intersubjective understanding are present in its community—hence sophisticated folk-psychological understanding can emerge from primitive narrative understanding. But how do sophisticated practices of intersubjective understanding come to exist in the scaffolding environment in the first place? A naturalistic story here must show how folk-psychological practices like our own can bootstrap themselves into existence from humbler beginnings given the existence of a community of creatures with the psychological structure described above. Sterelny (2003, 2012) and Zawidzki (2013) in particular have provided plausible, empirically informed suggestions about how such bootstrapping could occur.
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Ward, D. (2019). Moving Stories: Agency, Emotion and Practical Rationality. In: Candiotto, L. (eds) The Value of Emotions for Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15667-1_7
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