Determinism, indeterminism, and explanatory bias.

Abstract

Actions are a subclass of human behaviours which are distinguished, on a modest view, by certain antecedent mental and neural processes and events, including desires and beliefs. Libertarian philosophies have taken a less modest view, according to which some actions come under the influence of individual persons in a way distinct from being the necessary effect of a sequence of psychoneural events. Determinism claims necessary connections between sequences of events and conditions, including those sequences that involve desires and beliefs and subsequent actions. Even if a certain interpretation of modern physics shows determinism to be false, the sense of personal influence over action which libertarians have remains obscure. It is not enlightened by the physicist's idea of inexplicable fluctuations between courses of events with greater or lesser probabilities. If libertarianism remains obscure, so do the grounds for an approach to explaining behaviour which might be called "explanatory individualism". According to the latter stance, the local outcomes of actions and larger social tendencies are only properly explained in terms of the choices of individuals, rather than, for example, their neural or environmental antecedents. Again, bare indeterminism will not help to supply the required grounds. A more justifiable stance is "explanatory pluralism", a doctrine which denies the intrinsic priority of individualistic modes of explanation over those which focus on psychoneural, environmental, social or genetic conditions. It is stressed that on a sensible pluralism, any determinism which correctly describes the history of actions would be no more "genetic", than indeterminism could be "individualistic".