Cover not available
Discussion published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 7:2 (2017) ► pp.253–276
Discussion

Agency

A figment of reality?

| University of Birmingham (UK)
Am I responsible for what I say and how I say it? Or is what I say just a random transformation of what I have heard so far? Is my agency as a discourse participant perhaps borrowed from the agency of discourse? This ties in with another dimension: Is the reality confronting us, a reality that surely includes the notion of agency, a mere discourse construct? For the cognitive and neural sciences, individual agency is only an epiphenomenon of the real world, while it is endorsed by folk psychology and cultural anthropology, having long been a cherished tradition of western discourse. Obviously, selfhood in some form is part of our nature, though we only have discourse to talk about it. Thus it appears as a phenomenon of our contingent culture.
Keywords: agency, free will, reality, discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Setting the scene
  • 2.A brief overview
  • 3.The battle between science and folk psychology
  • 4.Agency in cultural anthropology
  • 5.Inventing the modern western man
  • 6.Does individual agency presuppose language?
  • 7.Agency, a figment of which reality?
  • 8.Coda
  • Acknowledgements
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 27 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.2.06teu
References
Anger, Suzy
2009 “Review: On the hypothesis that animals are automata.” Victorian Review 35(1): 50–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennett, M. R. and P. M. S. Hacker
2003 Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Bognor Regis: Wiley.Google Scholar
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann
1966 The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Blaisdell, Bob
2011 Great Speeches in the 20th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Bruner, Jerome
1990 Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Burckhardt, Jacob
1944 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Phaidon Press.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter
1986 The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Christensen, Scott M. and Dale R. Turner
1993 Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Clifford, James
1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison
2010 Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Davies, Tony
(1997) Humanism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dennett, Daniel C.
(1991) Consciousness Explained. London: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Dennett, Daniel
2007 “Philosophy as naive anthropology.” In Neuroscience and Philosophy ed. by Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, 73–95. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro
2004 “Agency in language.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology ed. by Allesandro Duranti, 451–473. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Emling, Sebastian
2013 Von “In God We Trust” zu “Yes We Can”: Wandel und Neukonzeption des Untersuchungsfeldes Religion und Politik in den USA am Beispiel des Wahlkampfes Barack Obamas. Berlin: Lit Verlag.Google Scholar
Feyerabend, Paul
1975 Against Method. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A.
1983 Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frank, Martin
1977 Das individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und Interpretation nach Schleiermacher. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen
1980 Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Haggard, Patrick
2005 “Conscious intention and motor cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 91: 290–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heidegger, Martin
2010 Time and Being. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Herder, Johann Gottfried
1966  Essay on the Origin of Language . In On the Origin of Language ed. by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Huxley, Thomas
1874 On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History. [URL].
Jager, Eric
1988 “The parrot’s voice: Language and self in Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 211: 316–333. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
James, William
1879 “Are we automata?”. Mind 41: 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1890 The Principles of Psychology. Chapter V: The Automaton Theory. [URL].
Keller, Reiner
2012 “Entering discourses: A new agenda for qualitative research and sociology of knowledge.” Qualitative Sociology Review 81: 46–75.Google Scholar
Kittsteiner, Heinz D.
1991 Die Enstehung des modernen Gewissens. Frankfurt: Insel.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S.
1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno
2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Luhmann, Niklas
1997 Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco Varela
1980 Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCall, Corey
2004 “Autonomy, Religion, & Revolt.” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 21: 7–13.Google Scholar
McKeon, Michael
(2001) “Generic transformation and social change: Rethinking the rise of the novel”. InTheory of the Novel ed. by Michael McKeon, 382-399. Baltimore, OH: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor and Bambi B. Schieffelin
1984 “Language acquisition and socialization.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, Emotion ed. by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, 276–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Oswald, Hans-Peter
(ed.) 2008 Barack Obama: Yes, we can. Hamburg: Books on Demand.Google Scholar
Pablé, Adrian
2015 ”Putting it integrationally: Notes on Teubert and Sealey.” Language and Dialogue 51: 449–470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pablé, Adrian and Christopher Hutton
2015 Signs, Meaning and Experience. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padden, Carol
1992 “Review of A Man without Words, by Susan Schaller.” American Journal of Psychology 1051: 618–653.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rorty, Richard
1982 Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
1966  Essay on the Origin of Languages . In On the Origin of Language ed. by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Schaller, Susan
1991 A Man without Words. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schiller, Friedrich
Of the Sublime: Towards the Further Elaboration of Some Kantian Ideas. [URL]
Schopenhauer, Arthur
1969 The World as Will and Representation. Vol. I1. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Searle, John R.
1998 Mind, Language and Society. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Tattersall, Ian
2016 “Language Origins: An Evolutionary Framework.” Topoi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tesak, Jürgen
1992 “Review of Susan Schaller, A man without words .” Language 681: 664–665. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teubert, Wolfgang
2013a “Was there a cat in the garden? Knowledge between discourse and the monadic self.” Language and Dialogue 31: 273–297. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013b “Die Wirklichkeit des Diskurses.” In Linguistische Diskursanalyse: Neue Perspektiven ed. by Dietrich Busse and Wolfgang Teubert, 55–147. Wiesbaden: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vasari, Giorgio
1991 The Lives of the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vender, David
2006 “Lichtenberg’s flash of insight”. [URL].
Vorster, Nico
2014 “From virtue ethics to rights ethics: Did the Reformation pave the way for secular ethics?” HTS Theological Studies 701: 1–8.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Teubert, Wolfgang
2019. Im Kopf oder im Diskurs: wo ist unsere Welt? Sprache und Denken. tekst i dyskurs - text und diskurs :12 (2019) ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
Teubert, Wolfgang
2021. Embodiment is not the answer to meaning: a discussion of the theory underlying the article by Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in JLS 50(1). Journal of Literary Semantics 50:2 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.