Interpersonal Interactions and the Bounds of Agency

2015

In this paper I respond to Kyselo's (this collection) claim that actionism, and other versions of the enactive embodied approach to mind, fail to accord social relations a constitutive role in making up the human mind. I argue that actionism can meet this challenge—the view makes relations to others central to an account of human experience—but I also question whether the challenge is clear enough. I ask: what exactly does it mean to say that social relations play this sort of constitutive role?

Res Philosophica, 2017

Many conceive of freedom as non-interference or as independence on the assumption that either interference or dependence constitutes an essentially interpersonal threat to agency. I argue (first) that the content of our actions depends on the relationships in which we stand with other agents, and (second) that participation in these relationships necessarily involves dependence on other people’s choices. This means that neither interference nor dependence as such can be a threat to agency, because some pattern of interference or dependence is a precondition of agency. Unfreedom, I contend, consists not in interference or dependence, but in the malformation of one’s relationships, which yields an unjust pattern of interference or dependence.

Adaptive Behavior, 2009

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.

The point of the paper is discussing whether the term 'agency' is useful for the study of interaction practices or whether instead it denotes a set of features which relate to an individualistic perspective from the point of view of a theory or social action, and a voluntaristic perspective from the point of view of a theory of language in action. The argument of the paper is that studying interaction does not require an individualistic and voluntaristic notion of social action. In this regard, Goffman, Garfinkel and conversational analysis offer an alternative approach to the study of interaction practices in natural settings. This reasoning stems from data collected during research conducted on medical emergency call centres in Italy.

Everyday life, under various designations, has been the focus of much sociological theorizing. Its exploration has often been associated with its conceptual separation from the 'long-term' institutional development and transformation of society, and rested on the claim that theoretical prominence be given to the creative character of human action, which is seen as ignored by the turgidity of 'abstract' social theory preoccupied with 'macro-social' phenomena and processes. It is because the theoretical perspectives concerned with everyday life throw into relief the central problems of subjectivity, agency and social relationships that they are examined here. The claim that such perspectives concerned with interaction in everyday life – often designating its routines as a reality par excellence – as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology advance a more or less satisfactory account of action and subjectivity will be challenged. The usual separation of everyday life from long-term processes will also be criticized. What this distinction has meant in actual sociological theorizing, which has often renamed it micro-and macro-sociology, is either an overwhelming emphasis and concern with the trivia of the 'paramount' reality of everyday life, without questioning the triviality of those trivia, or an arrogant preoccupation with great historical events, whose duration proved disappointingly short-lived, to be permeated after the initial exuberance by the depressing spell of everyday life, or with social structural processes whose societal incidence looks so absent and remote. Symbolic interactionism is a far from unified perspective and I shall concentrate on H. Blumer's (1969) outline of its basic premisses. Together with other interpretative perspectives, symbolic interactionism stresses the centrality of meaning. It points out that social action is neither the response to stimuli nor determined by values, statuses and system requirements. It differentiates itself from both those who regard meaning as intrinsic in human activities and those for whom meaning arises out of a coalescence of psychological elements in the person. Instead, it locates the source of meaning in the process of interaction between people. Interaction itself is impossible without the handling and modification of meanings through interpretations. Thus, in order to understand how meanings develop, one has to analyse interaction processes. However, the analysis of symbolic interaction is paradoxically impossible without accounting for how the participants interpret and attribute meanings to gestures. It is in this way that the participant to whom the gesture is directed understands what the other participant plans to do; he decides what he is supposed to do; and he anticipates the joint action arising from the articulation of the acts of both (Blumer, 1969, p. 3). In order to account for this capability of human beings to

Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1988

Free action and microphysical determination are incompatible but this is so only in virtue of a genuine conflict between microphysical determination with any active behavior. I introduce active behavior as the veridicality condition of agentive experiences (of oneself as active) and of perceptual experiences (of others as active) and argue that these veridicality conditions (a) are fulfilled in many everyday cases of human and non-human behavior and that they (b) imply the incompatibility of active behavior with microphysical determination. The main purpose of the paper is to show that the view proposed about active behavior leads to a natural compromise between libertarianism and compatibilism, which avoids the flaws of both positions while preserving their central insights.

ETHICS IN PROGRESS

The reflection on intersubjectivity is a central question in the contemporary philosophical debate. In this field, current practical philosophy faces one of the most difficult challenges. Apparently, the research for a foundation of the intersubjective level seems to lead inevitably towards the abandonment of the logical-foundation theory on which the philosophy had been based up until Hegel. In this report, however, I would like to attempt something different. That is, I would like to explore the possibility of inserting the subject of intersubjectivity right into the heart of Hegelian thinking, with an aim to outline the foundation of a social action theory capable of exhibiting reasons stronger than those deriving from simple dialogic validation. It is possible, as Ho sle believed, that Hegel himself did not take this aspect of the profound dynamics of his thought too seriously, and that he had not prepared the notional categories to be able to think about it in depth. Neverthele...

2011