Ricoeur and agent causation

I On the intelligibility of the idea of agent causation

The view that the idea of agent causation is unintelligible fits well with the standard picture of the world that modern science presents. This picture, in turn, meshes nicely with the basic principles that have long underpinned the main western intellectual tradition. This tradition, Isaiah Berlin says, rests on three related principles or propositions. The first of these is that all genuine questions can be answered. An unanswerable question is not a real question. The second principle is that all these answers are knowable. They can be discovered by the appropriate means and techniques and can be taught to every competent person. Third, all these answers must be compatible with one another. Otherwise, intellectual chaos would be unavoidable.

Taken together, these three basic principles provide the foundation for the following claim: ‘If all answers to all questions are to be put in the form of propositions, and if all true propositions are in principle discoverable, then it must follow that there is a description of an ideal universe – a Utopia, if you like – which is simply described by all true answers to all serious questions.’ ² Even if this Utopia is something we never in fact achieve, it stands as the ideal against which one can measure any genuine intellectual achievement.

Though there is no shortage of dissenters, the prevailing interpretation of the ‘picture’ of the world that modern science presents clearly satisfies the three principles that Berlin identifies. This interpretation takes the universe and all of its constituent parts as exhaustively material or physical. Both the things and the processes that occur in the world and the changes that they undergo are in principle fully explicable in terms of the law-governed regularities that the world manifests. These laws govern both the realized and the unrealized possibilities that the universe displays. Taken together, the empirical natural and social sciences, with physics and evolutionary biology enjoying a distinct pre-eminence, need no extra-scientific supplement to account for everything that is or can be.

On this interpretation, there is no basis for claiming that human beings possess some faculty or capacity, called freedom or free will, that makes them different from the other things and processes that show up in the world. Indeed, research in the modern neurosciences gives rise to claims that everything human beings do or undergo is fully explicable without appeal to any supposed special feature of their kind of being.

In sum, on this prevailing interpretation, there is nothing in or about the universe to explain which one needs to resort to anything like the idea of ‘agent causation’. Given the intelligibility of the world and its constituents that modern science provides, the idea of agent causation is unintelligible.

But if the idea of agent causation is indeed unintelligible, what accounts for its persistence, its ‘irresistibility’? On the prevailing interpretation, this idea and its irresistibility are illusory or, at best, epiphenomenal. As the neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux, for example, argues, the science of the brain can, in principle, fully account for all the brain’s activity and what that activity yields. That is, neuroscience can and ought to account not only for its own occurrence but also for the occurrence, in some cases the ‘irresistible’ occurrence, of non-scientific thoughts of all sorts. Indeed in his discussions with Ricoeur published under the title What Makes Us Think? Changeux does not dispute the charge that, in his view, ‘everything takes place in the brain’. ³ Though the prevailing interpretation is not obviously logically incoherent, the record of science’s long history of research, in which later findings either amended or refuted earlier ones, gives one reason to be skeptical about assuming such a ‘Utopian’ interpretation of the work and prospects of modern science. In the matter at hand, namely whether there can be such a thing as agent causation, there is good reason to adopt the working hypothesis that the prevailing interpretation of the scientific picture of the world is somehow defective. Could it be that this interpretation has ignored, in its pursuit of a latter-day Ockhamist simplicity, evidence that some worldly entities, here human persons, are different from and irreducible to other kinds of things or processes? Such is the working hypothesis that guides Ricoeur’s multifaceted studies of what it is to be human.

Ricoeur’s working hypothesis is that, notwithstanding all the ways in which human beings and what they do are analysable in the same terms as are other worldly things and events, they have capabilities and vulnerabilities that are fundamentally different from and irreducible to any other worldly entities, processes, or events. These differences, on Ricoeur’s interpretation, do not provide grounds for adopting any form of ontological dualism. But they do support an interpretation that fully respects the distinctiveness of human beings. On that interpretation, the idea of agent causation is not unaccountably irresistible. Its irresistibility turns out to be integral to the intelligibility of all sustained inquiry, including scientific research.

My purpose in this article is to show that there are compelling, even if not definitive, reasons for adopting Ricoeur’s interpretation. My point of departure is Ricoeur’s multifaceted reflection on the discursive character of human existence. For him, as for many philosophers, the distinguishing feature of human beings is their ‘linguisticality’. They are essentially discursive beings.

II The ‘transcendental’ conditions of discourse

At the root of Ricoeur’s conception of agent causation is an analysis of the ‘transcendental’ conditions of all discourse. These are the conditions without which there could be no discourse. It is first and foremost by way of discourse that the intelligibility of the world and its constituents comes to light. ⁴

All discourse has the form A says p about x to B. As such, it is open to both semantic and pragmatic analysis. Semantic analysis focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the p that is said about the x. Pragmatic analysis focuses primarily, but again not exclusively, on the A who says something to B.

Consider first semantics in general. All discourse is about some ‘thing’. A ‘thing’ is whatever we can speak about. In this sense, physical bodies, events, relations, numbers, persons, etc., are all ‘things’. To speak about any of these things, we must identify it. To identify something is ‘to be able to make apparent to others, amid a range of particular things of the same type, the one of which we intend to speak’. ⁵ It is to specify some particular that both the speaker and others can recognize to be the ‘same thing’, the individual thing that is the topic of the discourse. It is the logical subject of the sentence p to which predicates of some sort may be attached.

For present purposes I focus on one of the things distinguishable by identifying reference, namely a human person. Persons are among the things that can be individuated by definite descriptions. Thus they can be identified and reidentified. Furthermore, we generally take it that a person is able to designate himself or herself, to refer to himself or herself.

Semantically, the notion of the person is determined by means of the predicates we can ascribe to her or him. Thus the person is the ‘same’ thing to which two different sorts of predicates are ascribable. We can ascribe physical predicates to her or him, just as we can to any physical body. But we can also ascribe mental predicates, such as ‘happy’ or ‘anxious’ to her or him, predicates that cannot rightly be ascribed to non-personal bodies. Mental events as predicates ‘have the remarkable property, precisely as predicates, of retaining the same sense whether they are attributed to oneself or to others, that is, to anyone else’. ⁶ Oddly though, I, like any other person, can speak of what Ricoeur calls ‘my own body’. This is a body that, unlike any other possession, cannot be detached from the ‘thing’ that ‘possesses’ it.

Ricoeur concludes that the concept of the person is no less primitive, to use Peter Strawson’s terminology, than the concept of the body. But, as he emphasizes, it does not follow that the concept of the person posits ‘a second referent, distinct from the body, such as the Cartesian soul, but in a manner yet to be determined, [it is only to posit] a single referent possessing two series of predicates: physical predicates and mental predicates … Possessing bodies is precisely what persons do, or rather, what they actually are.’ ⁷ Without this notion of the person, ‘we could not engage in the empirical descriptions that we make … in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences’. ⁸

Strictly speaking, the semantic analysis of the concept of the person need not deal with the person’s reflexive capacity, the capacity to designate himself or herself with the first-person pronoun. But to deal adequately with the whole phenomenon of discourse, this analysis must be supplemented with a pragmatic analysis of utterances. Unlike semantics, pragmatics does not provide any empirical description of what it is to engage in the communicative arts. Instead, pragmatics ‘investigates the conditions that govern language use in all those cases in which the reference attached to certain expressions cannot be determined without knowledge of the context of their use, in other words, the situation of interlocution’. ⁹

Let me note here that semantic claims can be verified by appropriate reference to empirical evidence. One can cite dictionaries, grammar books, etc. Pragmatic claims cannot be justified in this way. Evidence for them must be of a different sort. Ricoeur refers to this different sort of evidence by the term ‘attestation’. I will explicate his notion of attestation below.

In the context of pragmatic analysis one can make the elementary distinction between constative utterances, which articulate predications without making any explicit reference to the utterer, and performative utterances. Performative utterances are those marked by the fact that uttering them is part and parcel of bringing about the very thing that they state. The obvious example of a performative utterance is the utterance of a promise. There is no promise unless there is both some definite person who utters it and some definite person to whom it is addressed. That is, fully to understand a performative utterance, one has to know not only what is said about something but also who says it and to whom it is said.

Furthermore, in many cases, performatives show a speaker addressing a listener who can make some utterance in response. In these cases, there is no illocution without allocution. In truth, constative utterances, as utterances, themselves always involve a tacit reference both to the utterer and to some, perhaps unspecified, hearer. To say ‘the cat is on the mat’ amounts to ‘I say to whoever hears me that the cat is on the mat’. Thus all utterances are, in principle, interlocutory. ¹⁰

Every utterance is made by a person who is linguistically indicated by the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’. This use of ‘I’ stands at the core of a cluster of other indexicals such as ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘this’. In the course of actual interlocution, the person indicated by the word ‘I’ shifts. Whoever is the speaker of the moment is the ‘I’ of the moment.

Each speaker can and often does make multiple utterances. Each of these utterances constitutes a different event that takes place in the course of things in the world. Words are said, energy is expended, etc. What should be said about the ‘I’ who speaks these many utterances? Is this ‘I’ itself an event in the world? It is not a semantic constituent of any of its utterances, but there would be no utterance without it.

To deal with this issue Ricoeur introduces the idea of a singular perspective on the world. Each speaking subject, he says, does not have a singular perspective. Each person is a singular perspective. As a singular perspective, the speaking subject is a limit on the world, not one of the world’s contents. And yet, enigmatically, we can and do assign a definite description or proper name to a speaker. Because we can do so, the named speaker obviously does appear in the world. Citing Wittgenstein, Ricoeur concludes: ‘Indeed, it is I, P. R. [Paul Ricoeur] who am and am not the limit of the world.’ ¹¹ Thus there is a conceptual gap between the ‘I’ as world limit or singular perspective and the real person that a proper name or definite description picks out as a worldly thing whose existence is confirmable by such things as public records.

To bridge this gap between the results of these two ‘transcendental’ analyses, Ricoeur turns to a consideration of the array of indexicals and focuses particularly on ‘now’. ‘Now’ can characterize an utterance either as a worldly event or as an instance of a personal performance. For example, one can say: ‘The weather was fair but now is foul.’ And one can also say: ‘I now pledge to you that I will feed your pets.’

Furthermore, the term ‘now’ is applicable both to the undifferentiated sequence of moments of cosmological time, the sequence denominated by t1, t2, t3, etc., and to the weighted moments of phenomenological time, the lived time of moments differentiated by their relative importance in someone’s life. We unite these two uses of ‘now’ when we produce calendars. By inscribing phenomenological time onto cosmological time we produce calendar time, the time of ‘dated nows’. Undated, what occurs now is any event contemporaneous with some particular utterance of ‘now’. By giving a date to a moment of phenomenological time, we anchor it to the world and its events. Thus ‘the dated now is the complete sense of the deictic “now”’ ¹² . Given the operation of tying a person’s linguistic performances to the world of events and locations, one can propose the hypothesis that the underlying reality that both the person named in an identifying reference and the ‘I’ of that same person as one who utters something is that person’s ‘own lived body’, the body that the I calls ‘mine’.

This body is at once a fact belonging to the world and the organ of a subject that does not belong to the objects of which it speaks. This strange constitution of the lived body extends from the subject of utterance to the very fact of utterance: as a voice proffered outside by breath and articulated by phonetics and gesticulation, the utterance shares the fate of all material bodies. As the expression of a sense intended by the speaking subject, the voice is the vehicle of the set of utterances insofar as it refers to an ‘I,’ the irreplaceable center of perspective on the world. ¹³

In pursuit of such an ontology, Ricoeur focuses attention on the relation between an action and its agent. Actions are both attributable and ascribable to their agents. Every predicate is ultimately attributable either to bodies or events or to persons, but certain predicates attributable to persons, as I have said above, cannot be translated into terms attributable to bodies or events. For example, the predicates ‘penitent’ or ‘arrogant’ cannot rightly be attributed to bodies or events.

Persons are peculiar inasmuch as we can attribute both psychological or mental predicates and physical predicates to one and the same person. Thus the difference between mental and physical predicates does not warrant the positing of any ontological dualism in the person. But at least some mental predicates – for example, intentions or motives – are directly attributable both to oneself and to someone else. In both instances such predicates have the same sense. Thus Jack and Jill can engage in joint actions if they have the same intentions or are motivated by the same considerations. For example, they can play mixed doubles tennis together, aiming to win. ¹⁵

Among these attributions is the predicate ‘making a decision’. When an agent makes a decision he or she cuts off his or her deliberation by adopting one of the options under consideration. We then ascribe the decision to the agent. ‘Ascription consists precisely in the re-appropriation by the agent of his or her own deliberation.’ ¹⁶

The pertinence of the distinction between attribution and ascription shows up when one asks why some action A took place. If we are looking for the person who did it, then the search is terminable. We can find that Jill, and no one else, did it and ascribe it to her. But if we are looking for a full account of the antecedent causes or motives why Jill did it, then the search cannot arrive at a definitive beginning. The string of external and internal influences that Jill, in her bodyliness, was subject to and to which the action is somehow attributable, is, in principle, interminable. We can always inquire further back into the past whence she and her action have come.

Even if all actions are ascribable to some agent, if one is to make an ascription to a specific agent, that agent ‘must be able to designate himself or herself in such a way that there is a genuine other to whom the same ascription is made in a relevant manner’. ¹⁷ For example: ‘I, not you, did x and you, not I, did y.’

In truth, the act of ascribing resembles the act of prescribing more than it does the act of describing. Prescriptions simultaneously apply both to agents and to actions. They tell us who ought to do or refrain from doing what. They specify what actions are commanded or forbidden or permitted. And they determine who is praiseworthy or blameworthy for what is done. The act of imputing an action to its agent is the act of holding him or her responsible for the actions he or she performs, which actions are, by the same act of imputation, said to be either permissible or impermissible.

Thus, for Ricoeur, the agent’s power to act is a ‘primitive datum’, but it is not self-evident. It comes to light only through argumentation. This power to act is called initiative. Exercising initiative is a kind of causality peculiar to persons, but it is always yoked to other forms of causation that are operative in the agent’s bodiliness. ¹⁸

Just how the agent as cause comes to be in the course of biological evolution a primitive datum fundamentally different from other worldly bodies is an ontological enigma, an enigma I do not claim to resolve. But the evidence in favor of agent causation is not only intelligible. It is, as Nagel says, very hard to resist.

I realize, of course, that Ricoeur’s account of a person’s ‘own body’ as a primitive datum and its capacity to exercise initiative that is not subject to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation runs counter to forms of ontological materialism or physicalism that many scientists and philosophers are committed to. Taken together, the modern natural and social sciences have succeeded in showing the numerous effects of physical, psychological and social factors at play in human life. Some of these factors are necessary conditions for human conduct of all sorts. Other factors are constraints on this conduct. The factors of both sorts are sufficiently pervasive that it can seem not only plausible but indeed likely that the sciences will ultimately reveal that these factors are not only necessary but also sufficient to bring about all human conduct.

In response, let me say again that I recognize that some form of materialism or physicalism is a necessary methodological presupposition that any modern scientist has to adopt in order to engage in any empirical scientific research. Scientifically to address any question within the domain of any science requires such a presupposition. Neither Ricoeur nor I deny this fact. But one can sensibly doubt whether all reasonable questions are, as some scientists claim, empirical scientific questions. To advance the case for the claims that there are some such questions and that there are good reasons to acknowledge the existence of agent causation, let me direct attention to the discourse involved in scientific practice.

III Scientific discourse

One striking feature of the discourse in which scientific theories, hypotheses, experimental results, etc., are reported or discussed is its ‘impersonality’. In contrast to the discourse prevalent in ordinary life, there is, strictly speaking, no place in scientific discourse for resort to indexicals or for using literary tropes. Ideally, its terms are univocal in meaning. And to understand what is said there is no reason to care who says or writes it. The ‘impersonality’ of this discourse reflects the objectivity and universality to which scientific practice aspires. The semantics of this ‘impersonal’ discourse lends no support to the idea that agent causation may exist. Nonetheless, it is important to consider just how this scientific discourse is related to ordinary discourse.

The neuroscientist Changeux, for example, argues for a radical autonomy of the sciences and their discourse. In his view, the sciences come about through a process in which scientists detach the objects of their inquiry from the realm of pre-scientific experience. They detach the objects not only from the context of unanalysed sensory perception but also from the imaginary world of ‘myths and the social structures in which they are embedded’. ¹⁹ On this view, scientific thought can and ought to account not only for its own occurrence but also for the occurrence of non-scientific thought, thought that lacks objectivity or universality. Ultimately, he says, our frame of reference will ‘deliberately evolve from the highly emotional, selfish, and ethnocentric ways of thinking that so far have been dominant in human history to a universalist conception of humankind’. ²⁰ Though he does not say so explicitly, Changeux seems to imply that the discourses of the sciences are ultimately destined to make non-scientific discourse epistemically redundant at best.

Ricoeur, by contrast, proposes a very different account of the relationship between scientific and extra-scientific discourse. Like Changeux, he recognizes the distinctiveness and strength of scientific discourse, but he sees no credible evidence either that extra-scientific discourse is reducible without remainder to scientific discourse or that there might be some third discourse that would wholly subsume these two discourses. Either ‘I speak of neurons and so forth, and confine myself to a certain language, or else I talk about thoughts, actions and feelings, and I tie them to my body, with which I am in a relation of possession, of belonging’. ²¹

Ricoeur recognizes, of course, that scientific knowledge transforms and deepens the knowledge we gain from our ongoing experience of living in the world with other people. But he finds good reasons to hold that scientific knowledge and the research that produces it are inextricably tied to the lived experience of scientists and their audience. All scientific objects are the outcome of the process of objectivization that some person or group of persons performs. That is, all objectivizations are ascribable to some person or persons who inhabit our lifeworld. ²² Every scientific object and every scientific project is something that some specific person or persons, our fellow lifeworld inhabitants with family members, colleagues, rivals, etc., make or undertake. The apparent ‘impersonality’ of scientific discourse notwithstanding, its very occurrence depends upon specific, identifiable scientists.

In sum, Ricoeur argues that, though the work of understanding ourselves would be drastically stunted were we to be deprived of the benefits of scientific knowledge, that understanding must also take into account the human performances that bring about that knowledge. Properly to do so, we must relate scientific practice and its results to the distinctive capabilities and vulnerabilities constitutive of us as persons, as selves. ²³ Not the least of these capabilities is our capacity to reflect upon both our own and other persons’ performances and to impute to us the kind of agent causation that makes us, worldly beings though we are, responsible for some of the things that we bring about through the exercise of our own initiative.

Ricoeur names the kind of evidence that supports this conception of agent causation ‘attestation’. This evidence is different from empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is the kind of evidence researchers can gain about worldly things in their worldliness. Questions about inorganic chemistry or geology are examples of things amenable to empirical investigation. So are human beings insofar as they are worldly things. But as perspectives on the world, they do not fall within the scope of empirical investigation. When the question concerns their assessment of their own capabilities and vulnerabilities they must resort to reflection and discourse with other people. The evidence thus gained Ricoeur calls attestation. ²⁴ Such inquiries in which the investigators and their capabilities and vulnerabilities are intrinsic to the subject matter of the investigations are not foreign to the consideration of any human practice, scientific or otherwise.

The evidence called attestation is not reducible to any form of introspection. Though there would be no such evidence unless people reflected on their own performances, their reflection is subject to confirmation by discussing it with other people. For Ricoeur, the term ‘attestation’ means

… the sort of assurance or confidence … that each person has of existing in the mode of selfhood [i.e. as a unique agent]. In saying assurance, I do not say certitude. In saying confidence, I do not say verification. I repeat: assurance is, if one wishes, a belief; but it is a non-doxic belief, if one means by doxic belief that which is expressed by the ‘I believe that …’ I would prefer to speak of credence, as opposed to belief–opinion. The grammar of credence would be expressed in terms of ‘believing something’ or ‘believing in something or someone.’ The witness believes what he or she says and one believes in the witness’s sincerity [even if one doubts the accuracy of what the witness says]. One believes in his or her word … Assurance is linked with confidence in the sense in which one’s word is believable or not. ²⁵

IV Offering and receiving recommendations

Consider the structure of recommendations. As instances of discourse, all recommendations have the form ‘A says p about x to B’. More specifically, recommendations have the form ‘A recommends to B some particular way to deal with some issue or set of issues’.

Unlike commands, which presume that A has authority of some sort that enables her or him to impose upon B some requirement to act in a certain way, recommendations presume a more nuanced relationship between A and B. B either explicitly seeks advice from A or, at a minimum, recognizes the potential benefit of receiving a recommendation that some A may offer. It makes no sense for A to offer a recommendation to B unless A has some reason to believe that B is or will become receptive to it. But being receptive to a recommendation does not entail any diminution of the recipient’s capacity to reject it. And genuinely to offer a recommendation A has to acknowledge that B may have good reasons to reject it. There is of course some presumption that A is capable of making a recommendation that would be beneficial to B to accept. But there is no presumption that any particular recommendation that A offers is indeed one that it would benefit B to accept.

More fundamentally, recommendations apparently presume that both the A who offers them and the B who either accepts or rejects them exercise some causal power. A fashions his or her advice to fit either the B who faces the issue or the issue that B faces or both. Both A and B take it that both of them can and do exercise initiative. Neither of them takes it that impersonal factors completely determine the contents of the recommendation or the response the recipient makes to it. The evidence of their causal capability is the confidence they experience in the course of their interaction. This confidence attests to their causal powers.

As I mentioned above, people offer and receive recommendations about all sorts of things, but to press my case let me consider two intellectually sophisticated recommendations. One is the recommendation to scientists and philosophers that William Wimsatt makes in his Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings. ²⁶ The other is the recommendation that A. C. Grayling attributes to Ronald Dworkin concerning how we ought to think about what it means to say that we are responsible for our actions. ²⁷

Wimsatt argues that idealized conceptions of science as systems of knowledge built upon axioms and developed through deductive reasoning that yield certainty are misleading. They distort scientific practice and lead people to misrepresent both what the scientific enterprise can accomplish and how it does so. Instead of the excessively rationalistic accounts of science that are so prevalent, Wimsatt calls for a philosophy of science that gives full recognition to the place of heuristics in scientific thought and practice. Such a philosophy of science focuses on ‘how real scientists, real engineers, historians or sociologists of real science and engineering, and real philosophers interested in how any of the preceding people work, think about their practice, think about the natural world we all inhabit, and think about what follows reflectively and reflexively from these facts’. ²⁸ The heuristic principles and devices in evidence in the work of these people show that scientific processes are ‘teleological activities’ and that the specific heuristic devices a particular scientist adopts are ‘purpose relative’. ²⁹

Attention to actual scientific practice shows that there is no way to eliminate all biases or distortions. ‘We can’t idealize deviations and errors out of existence in our normative theories because they are central to our methodology. We are error-prone and error-tolerant – errors are unavoidable in the fabric of our lives, so we are well adapted to living with and learning from them’. ³⁰

For present purposes I need not comment on the soundness of Wimsatt’s recommendations. In truth, I lack the competence to do so. Instead, I want to emphasize that, in presenting his case, Wimsatt is not merely reporting his own mental states. Even if the semantic content of such a report were the same as that of his recommendations, Wimsatt displays both a confidence in his ability to offer a practical proposal to his competent readers as well as a confidence that they have the ability to adopt them in place of the views to which they have hitherto given their credence. In so doing, he effectively attests to both his own and their ability to exercise agent causation.

The second recommendation I want to consider is somewhat easier to state. According to Grayling, Dworkin argues that whether or when we are responsible for what we do is an ethical, not a scientific, matter. We have to decide whether determinism, if true, would rule out personal responsibility. Dworkin recommends that we deal with this issue in two stages. First, he would have us distinguish between two, contradictory, principles for establishing responsibility. One principle says that we are responsible for what we do only if our choices are not entirely determined by natural events beyond our control. The second principle says that, whether or not our choices are so determined, we are responsible provided that we have two specific capacities at the time that we act, namely the capacity to form true beliefs and the capacity to make decisions that reflect our own personality and our purposes.

Dworkin then recommends that we adopt the second of these principles because what he calls the ‘unfolding drama of self-conscious life’ requires that we take responsibility for the major, life-shaping decisions that no accurate account of a person’s character or biography could rightly ignore. The first principle, by contrast, does not help anyone make any decisions about anything. ³¹

Here again I need not comment on the substance of Dworkin’s recommendations. What matters for present purposes is that Dworkin displays confidence both that he himself can author a new proposal for dealing with the problem of responsibility and that at least a part of his audience can decide to adopt his recommendation in place of what it has hitherto thought. Thus again we find at least implicit attestation to agent causation.

As these examples illustrate, the practice of offering and receiving recommendations lends considerable support to the case for agent causation. Similar support can be found in discursive practices such as negotiations and legal contests. Given these considerations, to deny the existence of agent causation is to make it hard to see how these practices and their outcomes could be taken to have any genuine significance.

V Further considerations

Before I conclude, let me address two likely objections to the case I propose and then offer some clarifications concerning the implications of my case. One likely objection is that many people are mistaken about many things, including their own capabilities and vulnerabilities. Could it not be that, despite the widespread confidence and beliefs of so many people in so many eras, there is no agent causation? I do not deny that it is logically possible that all these people are mistaken. But I do maintain that there are compelling reasons not to accept this position.

It is one thing for large groups of people to be mistaken about matters they encounter in the world. There are unsupportable beliefs, unfounded fears, etc. But it is another thing to propose that the widespread confidence that people have in their ability to initiate changes in the world is always misplaced and that at least some of them, e.g. some scientists, can come to know that it is misplaced. Who could show that he or she has hitherto been deluded about his or her own causal abilities? Perhaps A might find reason to conclude that B is always deluded in this respect, that B is ‘demented’. But how would any A show to any other B that both A and B have been so deluded or ‘demented’? Even if in the eyes of some god all people up to the present era of scientific research have been deluded about their causal abilities, how could any of them come to find reliable evidence that such is the case? One would have to claim something like ‘I have learned that whatever I do or say is the outcome of impersonal causes’. To make such a claim is akin to propounding a Habermasian ‘performative contradiction’.

A second objection is more fundamental. On the account that I have given, among the worldly things are dolphins, porpoises, bees and many other species whose members communicate with one another and respond to one another. All of their performances are in principle fully explicable by the natural sciences. Why should one not acknowledge that human beings and all their various performances are also explicable in these terms?

So far as we know, only human beings have the reflective capacity to ask about and assess the likenesses and differences between themselves and other worldly things. Only they, so far as we presently have reason to believe, reflect upon their own worldly involvements, evaluate them, consciously work to alter some of them, and discuss these performances with other people, people who themselves engage in performances of this sort. Particularly worthy of note is that only people, so far as we know, dispute with one another about their conduct as well as that of all sorts of other people, predecessors as well as contemporaries. Only people display the traits of being, in Ricoeur’s terms, ‘own bodies’, worldly beings enmeshed in the world’s processes but also unique perspectives on the world.

It is as such perspectives that some people engage in scientific work. They gather and assess evidence. They test initial results. They offer competing explanations. Sometimes they arrive at a generally accepted consensus, but sometimes they do not. To say that this array of performances is exhaustively nothing other than the outcome of impersonal worldly forces stretches credulity to the breaking point. Natural forces would have to explain why scientist A says p about x while scientist B says q about the same x. Assuming, as is not unlikely, that some scientific disagreements will regularly be features of any scientific discourse, if what A says conflicts with what B says about x and if both sayings are the outcome of impersonal forces, then there is no basis for preferring one of these sayings to the other. Indeed, whether scientist C, or anyone else, accepts p rather than q would itself be the outcome of impersonal forces. All of this would make the issue of competence in the gathering and testing of evidence pointless.

In sum, to maintain that all human performances are worldly things and nothing more is tantamount to construing the world as some sort of cosmic, impersonal Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist that controls the utterances of a myriad of Charlie McCarthys. Far less implausible is Ricoeur’s contention that some human performances, both scientific and otherwise, are deliberate achievements brought about by specific persons, without whose initiatives these achievements would not have come into being.

Let me now offer two clarifications about the implications of this argument for agent causation. First, the human species, with all its capabilities and vulnerabilities, is of course the outcome of the natural processes that determine biological evolution. Like every living species, it is apparently destined at some point to become extinct. Even if its members can and do exercise agent causation, they cannot forestall the species’ eventual extinction, which of course would bring human agent causality to an end.

Second, one distinctive feature of recorded human experience has been the persistence with which a number of questions have been raised, questions that remain contested. Among these questions are those concerning how people ought to treat one another and how people are related to other living species. These are among the main perennial philosophical questions. In passing, let me note the oddity of their persistence if all human performances are the outcome of impersonal processes.

The case that I have made for human agent causation does not entail any well-developed ethical or political doctrine. Inasmuch as the putative attested evidence for agent causation requires confirmation and authentication by other people, then there is a prima facie reason for a person to have both respect and solicitude for the capabilities and vulnerabilities of his or her discursive partners. ³² Exactly what this respect and solicitude amounts to remains heavily contested. Nonetheless, one does find some support for the recognition of this respect in the repugnance that some scientific investigations, e.g. eugenic experiments, have provoked and, on the other hand, the acclaim that some scientists have won for the way they have pursued their work, even if their work is deemed unsuccessful. ³³

Consider now the question of how human beings ought to treat non-human living beings. One large part of this issue concerns the question of whether the members of any other living species are capable of agent causation. So far as I can see, there is no definitive argument that could prove this to be impossible. But also so far as I can see, we presently have no strong evidence that any members of any non-human species have the reflexive capacity to impute conduct to themselves or to one another as their own and as deserving either praise or blame. ³⁴ If such evidence should come to light, then nothing about my argument would give grounds for denying that they are capable of agent causation.

VI Conclusion

The Ricoeurian conception of agent causation meshes well with the array of discursive practices that people engage in as well as with some of the important parts of their conduct that are related to these practices, e.g. negotiations, agreements, disagreements, commitments, censures, etc. Furthermore, this conception of agent causation is underpinned by Ricoeur’s account of a person’s ‘own body’ as both one worldly thing among others and yet as also a unique perspective on the world. This account gives full weight to the two distinctive phenomena manifest in human life and to the two distinct sorts of relevant evidence, namely empirical evidence and attested evidence. Admittedly this case for agent causation is not definitive. Nor does it sit easily with any standard form of ontology. But it is too strong to be dismissed just because it is ontologically ‘inconvenient’.