From Shotter, J.
(1975) Images of Man in Psychological Research. Methuen, pp.105-107
'Inside'
and 'outside' us
We have taken it
to be a fundamental fact that people can, without being caused by 'external'
events, be themselves responsible for at least some of their own movements. We
can say that it is 'within' their agency to control themselves so. For this to
be possible the world must be talked about as a very different place from that
pictured by Descartes as consisting of elementary particles in blind but lawful
motion ‑ the 'picture' to which behavioural scientists think all our
motions must be reduced. Within this classical, deterministic, billiard ball
universe, there is no way in which any processes could go on within a
particular segment independently of any external influences upon it. In other
words, a self‑acting billiard ball would not just be surprising, it would
be inconceivable in principle: activity
intrinsic to an organized and self‑organizing system, activity formed
from within by a 'mentality', can be no different within such a perspective
from an external, mechanical motion.
However, for us in everyday life, we do want to talk
in terms of their being a real distinction between what goes on 'inside' us and
'outside' us. Evidently, there are events happening in the world 'outside' our
agency to control. But a part of what it is to say that a man is an agent is to
say that as such, 'within' the particular region of physical reality he
occupies as an agent, he can make at least some events occur independently of
those which occur 'outside' that segment. In other words, if there are to be
agents in the world, then we must talk of it as more of a 'loose jointed' place
than the deterministic scheme allows. And the segments of reality agents occupy
are not to be specified geographically, as particular locations in space, but
by a quality of 'connectedness' between the events 'within; the segment not
possessed by those 'outside' it. This has been discussed by William James
(1890: 237): there is to our personal consciousness, he suggests, a 'sensible
continuity'; that is, there is a sense of all the parts of our actions
belonging together and being inwardly connected as parts of a common whole ‑
the natural name for that common whole being, James states, 'myself, I, or me'.
To say all this, though, about what is 'inside' and
what is 'outside' us, is only to restate the fundamental distinction between
actions and events, doings and heppenings, introduced in the last chapter: without knowing how it is that we can do it,
we can sense the difference between that for which we are responsible and that
which merely happens, 'outside' our agency. And it is this that is fundamental
for us.
The terms inside and outside are being used, then, with special meaning here ‑ to make not a spatial but a mental distinction. We cannot talk of agents as being located like objects simply in space, for they manifest their character not just in space but also through time: hence, although 'within' us in the sense of belonging to us, our mentality is not necessarily something spatially confined within our bodies; agents may express their mentalities out in the world in what, through time, they do there. Talk of an agency as having events 'within' its control implies, then, not only a world of events much more loosely connected than those in the Cartesian/Laplacean world, in which all that happens in one moment is connected by an iron chain of causal necessity to what happens in the next, but also a world in which, through time, there is a continual passage from trying to doing, from possibilities to their realization. In other words, it must be a world in which at any one moment there are really alternative futures, so that what actually happens there depends upon what agents do.
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