Russell (1998) At two with nature. Agency and the development of self-world dualism

What role does agency play in mental development ? Jean Piaget (e. g. , 1970) famously answered that agency is the engine of mental development. However , the past 25 years of cognitive-developmental research have given rise to a widespread dissatisfaction with that answer , mainly because we have unearthed too much innate apparatus for it to be plausible. Yet I will argue that Piaget ' s answer is only incorrect insofar as it is too strong. There is a case to be made , in other words , for the view that without agency there can be no mental development , or at least that adequate agency is necessary for adequate mental development. I will try to give this more modest Piagetian view a run for its money. Like many psychologists of his and the preceding generation (notably James Mark Baldwinl), Piaget regarded mental development as the process of establishing a division between two kinds of reality : an objective reality grasped as independent of ourselves and a subjective reality constituted by our volitions and representational states. I will refer to this with the usual term ' self-world dualism ' , a mode of consciousness that one might regard as the symmetrical opposite of being-in-the-world. Self-world dualism is the basic human situation. For although most of us understand what it means to be at one with Nature , we only do so because our normal state is-as with the Woody Allen character who would stubbornly remain on rural excursions-" at two with Nature. " In presenting and defending a watered-down version of Piaget ' s developmen account of self-world dualism , I will proceed through the following stages. First , I will say why Piaget ' s theory is too strong and sketch the aims of the weaker version. Next , I will present the case for agency being necessary for the development of self-world dualism. My principal claim here will be that it is only by experiencing agency that a subject can experience the world as being resistant to her will , something which is necessary if any distinction is to be drawn between subjective and objective. I argue here that an essential feature of agency is a capacity for