The Social Re-Construction of Agency

One of the deep roots of opposition to social constructionism is the belief that the very idea of a social construction of physical concepts is highly suspect. In this paper, I want to call attention to the fact that such “constructions” can occur in the opposite direction as well. According to responsibilism, attributions of actions are to be understood in terms of ascriptions of responsibility. Responsibilists thus take the notion of action to be a social concept. I point out how, from the responsibilist point of view, the concept of action is misconstrued as mental by the predominant intentionalist approach in philosophy of action. One of the deep roots of opposition to social constructionism is the belief that the very idea of a social construction of physical concepts is highly suspect. In this paper, I want to call attention to the fact that such “constructions” can occur in the other direction, as it were, as well. There are concepts that really are social and yet we have a tendency to construe them as mental or psychological concepts. 1 In this connection, I want to call attention to a responsibilist theory of agency. According to responsibilism (of which H.L.A. Hart’s ascriptivism is an example), actions do not exist as events in the world. Rather, we should understand the attributions of actions in terms of our holding one another responsible for certain events in the world. One of the advantages of responsibilism is that it can capture rather easily a wide class of forms of agency such as omissions (including unintentional omissions), spontaneous, arational, habitual, automatic actions, as well as slips and mistakes. By contrast, the intentionalist approach to agency, according to which an action is paradigmatically a bodily movement caused in the right way by (or otherwise appropriately related, e.g. by means of teleological relations, to) an appropriate rationalizing mental state (belief-desire, intention, intention-in-action, volition), has to either discount such performances as nonagentive or else has to stretch mental concepts so as to encompass the performances. It is this concept stretching that underlies the “mental construction” 1 In calling attention to such mental constructions of what is at roots a social phenomenon, I am not siding with social constructionism. In fact, the debate between social constructionism and realism frequently is really a debate between conceptualism (or antirealism) and realism (see also Hacking 2000), where the modifier ‘social’ does not play a great role.