Agency Reductionism
Yesterday, I discussed some of the content of chapter 1 of Angus Menuge’s book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. The attempted reductions of agency, according to Menuge is one of the primary concerns of this book. Agency is therein defined as applying to any individual which has…
… representations of its own goals, such as desires, and the means to achieve those goals, such as beliefs, and whose behavior is rendered intelligible in light of those representations.
Menuge further states that an individual is an agent if his representations exhibit intentionality (they are about something beyond themselves), they serve as reasons for actions, and they involve self-representation. In the biological sciences, Darwinistic reductionism as explained away any evidence of agency in the natural world. Complex life only appears to be designed (design, of course, is an activity of agents), but in actuality is the result of blind processes of physical laws and chance.
Menuge distinguishes between two forms of attempted reductions of agency: Strong Agent Reductionism (SAR, which he examines more closely in chapter 2) and Weak Agent Reductionism (WAR, which he scrutinizes later in the book). Menuge states:
According to SAR, what Darwin only started now needs to be finished. Darwin provided the means for eliminating agency in our natural environment: the blind automatic mechanism of natural selection. Now it is time to apply the same strategy to ourselves, replacement of the occult talk of human agency with the blind automatic mechanisms of neurophysiology.
Menuge accurately describes, I think, the implications for human agency once the remnants of divine agency is removed from nature. Biology and psychology both target the notion of agency in their reductionist efforts.