My dissertation aims at throwing new light on the problem of agency, by pursuing a reductionist project about agent causation. In Chapter 1, I provide a rationale for this project. The central problem of agency is to reconcile agent causation with the naturalistic view of the world. I argue that reducing agent causation to event causation, if successful, provides the best way of reconciling them. Chapter 2 considers whether agent causation can be conceptually reduced to event causation. I examine various reasons for conceptual irreducibility, and suggest that the real reason is that agent causation and event causation belong to different “conceptual schemes” or “perspectives.” In Chapter 3, I turn to the idea that agent causation is ontologically reducible to event causation. I first make the idea of ontological reduction clear, and claim that reduction of agent causation to event causation should conform to the so-called “functional model of reduction.” I maintain that functional reduction of agent causation is promising, but also identify some problems that need to be addressed. Chapter 4 discusses an idea that emerges from the discussion in Chapters 2 and 3. It is that agent causation is something visible only from our internal perspective, while event causation can be seen from the external point of view. I seek to explain what these different perspectives amount to. I claim that they lie in two different practices of explaining actions, and that the concept of agent causation is tightly connected to one particular kind of explanation of actions, which I call “normative explanation.” The discussion in Chapter 4 provides materials to solve the problems that Chapter 3 leaves unsolved. In Chapter 5, I submit that the role of agents in producing actions needs to be found in the context of normative explanations. I also make a rough suggestion about what agent causation is reduced to.
Rhee, Sun Hyung,
"Agent Causation and Reduction"
(2014).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0X928PK
