The Plausibility of Irreducible Agency

philosophy of neuroscience, experimental philosophy, philosophy of action, free will, libertarianism, agent-causation, wild coincidence objection, statistical laws, probabilistic models, stochastic models, plasticity It has been argued that our scientific discoveries support at least one of two distinct forms of causal reduction thereby making the notion that we irreducible agents obsolete. One is the reduction of the manifestation of causal dispositions to stimulated responses. The other is the reduction of kinds of causes of physical change to those studied in the hard sciences. In this chapter, I argue that neither have any scientific support. Rather, whether either form of reduction is viable won’t ultimately be resolved by scientific advancement but by analytic progress. Furthermore, I argue that attempts at the first are misguided as attempts at reducing what is a process (i.e., the manifestation of a causal disposition) to what can be a result of various processes (i.e., a stimulated response); while attempts at the second ultimately involve not fully taking into account how the specificity of any domain of science limits the generalizability of what can be discovered through it.