Psychological Determinism
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Psychological Determinism Robert King1 and Marcus Appleby2 1 School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland 2 Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, School of Physics, Department of Physics, Queen Mary, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia
Synonyms Bayes theorem; Causation; Evolution; Free will; Information theory; Probability; Reductionism; Thermodynamics
Definitions Psychological, in this context, refers to patterns of thought and behavior across both individual and species-typical levels of description. Determinism refers to the necessary and sufficient conditions of prior ascriptions of such patterns to the extent that they can provide causal indicators. The precise nature of what this means will be explored in more detail below.
Introduction “Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the
slightest notion what it means,” so said Bertrand Russell, in 1929 (cited in Bell 1945). Chance and necessity, or, to put it differently, probability and determinism, lie at the heart of science. However, thinking about determinism is harder than it might initially appear, because thinking about probability is harder than is commonly supposed. Because scientists, naturally enough, draw on the most foundational science – namely, physics – for clarity and inspiration, it is very important to be clear about what is, and is not, implied by this, our most basic and predictively powerful science, if one wishes to understand what determinism could possibly mean at the levels that the behavioral sciences operate. What is it to say that x caused y, or, perhaps, that the measurement of event y, was fully determined by the occurrence of cause x? Wilfred Sellars (1963) made a famous, and useful, distinction between the manifest and scientific images of the world. The manifest image is, essentially, the conception of things as it developed in human evolution, supplemented and clarified in various ways so as to bring it into line with modern knowledge. It thus contains such things as colors, living beings, and human relationships, together with more recent discoveries such as parliamentary democracy and fiat money. The scientific image is the modern scientific conception of the world. It thus contains such things as atoms, quarks, and the four fundamental forces. In which of these two images – scientific or manifest – do determinism, and the attendant
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concept of free will, belong? Can the separate pictures be reconciled? The issue is pressing for psychologists, because elements of the scientific image – particularly those driven by particular understandings of physics – keep bleeding through from the scientific into the manifest image, allegedly rendering some concepts obsolete. There are many technical ways in which this can occur, but, broadly, these intrusions come in two
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