9 - Envoi: actor and context

Summary

Plastic Man started the book strongly placed. Nature and nurture were simple ideas but capable of the subtlest refinement. They could be filled out not only technically with models from cybernetics, statistics, economics and other realms of sophistication but also philosophically, in support of many divisions of labour between nature and nurture. Free action could be distinguished from unfree in ways congenial to some philosophers of mind, with familiar results in ethics and politics. The axis of strength was that all processes of action were seen as causally connected and so explicable with the best accounts of this relation to be had from the natural sciences and their philosophy. The one clear doubt was that Plastic Man, being but the intersection of a complex of laws, was not much of an individual. But perhaps the demand for a holier uniqueness was born of an unreflecting or socially generated individualism. At any rate the contrary thesis – that action has determinants unique to the agent-an-sich – was too cryptic to be cogent. In this epilogue I want to ask how he stands now and to end with a query about the notion of context.

Autonomous Man was ushered in with the thought that social action occurs on a stage built of shared meanings and norms. That might be awkward for behaviourists and for very mechanical accounts of how nature and nurture operate but it posed no general threat to Plastic Man. Indeed, by cashing the metaphor of the stage in terms of normative expectations attached to social positions and by letting homo psychologicus act within constraints on homo sociologicus, a passive conception did very nicely. An active conception started to emerge only when the thesis that motives were causes of action was contrasted with the claim that reasons were the explanation but not the cause of rational action. Fully rational action was its own explanation, given the context and the actor's identity. Context enabled and constrained, setting him problems because he was who he was. Rational action was a skill, not a pleonasm in the logic-of-the-situation-as-he-saw-it, and shortcomings were for causal explanation.