Determinism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Any doctrine positing that one kind or order of phenomena is the necessary and sufficient condition of another kind or order of phenomena is a strongly deterministic doctrine. On the other hand, if a doctrine posits that some order of phenomena is only a necessary or a sufficient condition of another, it is considered to be only weakly deterministic. Since their inception, the social sciences have been home to many such doctrines.

From Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) in the nineteenth century to J. Philippe Rushton’s work in the 1990s, racist accounts of variations in character or intelligence are among the least credible and most enduring of deterministic doctrines. Psychobiological accounts of the roots of war and violence have had nearly as long a hearing. Somewhat more credibly, contemporary evolutionary psychologists of diverse disciplinary provenance are reviving the pursuit of accounts of humanly universal behavior, as well as of racially marked or ethnically distinctive behavior, as positive adaptations to or resolutions of existential or situational problems (Buss 1999).

The environmental determinism of Johannes Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who treated variations of climate and physical environment as the chief source of variations of human character, was popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Herder’s latter-day successors are more circumspect, typically treating particular conditions of climate and geography as imposing on the human populations who live with and under them a cap on the upward bounds of politico-economic complexity. A noteworthy case in point is the historian Fernand Braudel’s 1949 thesis that the preindustrial societies occupying the borders of the Mediterranean Sea were effectively ecologically precluded from sustaining political organization beyond the level of the city-state.

Technology, however, changes everything, or such at least has been the opinion of a long line of determinists since the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1930s Braudel’s elder colleague Marc Bloch traced the pivotal source of the social organization of French agriculture to the invention of the double-bladed plow. A half-century before, the cultural materialist Henry Louis Morgan had appealed more generally to technological innovation as the essential index of broader civilizational progress. The Victorian biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) saw in technological development—first military, then economic—the lynchpin of the advance of utilitarian happiness. Though not quite a utilitarian, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) is among Spencer’s recognizable evolutionist heirs. Less sanguine is the anthropologist Leslie White (1900–1975), who made the post–Hiroshima assessment that the increasing efficiency of the technologies of harvesting energy is the causal underpinning of collective evolution—for better and for worse. White’s ambivalence grew darker in such seminal assessments of the harmful environmental consequences of industrial and atomic technologies as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Mark Harwell’s Nuclear Winter (1984). In The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), David Harvey argues that the far-flung reach and unprecedented speed of communicative technologies is effecting a global compression of space and time that tends to unmoor human experience from its typically local bearings. Harvey articulates (with a dark ambivalence) a specifically digital determinism.

Cultural determinism of a less material and materialist sort has two prominent installments, both traceable to the early students of Franz Boas. Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978) were the early champions of the cultural determination of personality. Encouraging now-discredited distillations of “national character,” their work also gave rise to sustained research into child rearing and other practices that remain the focus of the anthropology and sociology of childhood and education (Whiting and Child 1953; Christie 1999; Jones 1995). Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) were the eponymous champions of the speculative thesis—erroneously deemed a “hypothesis”—of the linguistic determination of what is presumed to be reality itself. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may have had its roots in the thought of such Romantic philosophers as Wilhelm von Humboldt. As an assertion of linguistic relativism or linguistic mediationism, it has many counterparts in semiotics and semiotically grounded theories of knowledge, past and present.

Émile Durkheim began The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) with the bold claim that social structure and organization determine the structure and organization of the basic categories of thought. His influence remains most obvious in the work of Mary Douglas. Institutionally more specific, and by far the most influential social determinist, was Karl Marx, especially when writing in collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels’s transference of the presumptive human primacy of a finite set of material needs to that of the institution best disposed to satisfy them—the economy—was the initial step in their theorization of the means and mode of economic production as determinative of the form and content of every other institutional order. Marx’s Capital (1867) and his and Engels’s German Ideology (1932) were the benchmarks of leftist social and political thought from the turn of the twentieth century until the 1970s. The analysis of the commodity (and its fetishization) in the former treatise stimulated Georg Lukács’s inquiries in the 1920s into the broader capitalist habit of “reification,” the process of construing the related parts of systemic wholes as independent entities in their own right. It would later inspire Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of the mass-produced debasement of what they called “the culture industry.” The problem of the relation between class interest and truth inherent in The German Ideology (1932) gave rise to a Marxist sociology of knowledge from Lenin through Antonio Gramsci and Karl Mannheim to Jürgen Habermas. Especially in its stronger expressions, Marxist determinism brings to an account of human action the same logical assets and liabilities as any other determinism. It is an attractively powerful device of intellectual focus and direction, but it runs two risks: (1) circularity, or taking for granted the very hypotheses that it is obliged to prove; and (2) a drift into the metaphysical, leaving behind any possibility of putting its hypotheses to the test at all.

SEE ALSO Benedict, Ruth; Boas, Franz; Freud, Sigmund; Gobineau, Comte de; Gramsci, Antonio; Marx, Karl; Mead, Margaret; Parsons, Talcott; Racism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bloch, Marc. 1966. French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics. Trans. Janet Sondheimer. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1949. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Trans. Siân Reynolds. London: Collins, 1972.

Buss, David M. 1999. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1923–1929. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–1957.

Christie, Frances, ed. 1999. Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes. London: Cassell.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Douglas, Mary. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon.

Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Durkheim, Émile. 1912. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.

Gobineau, Arthur, Comte de. 1853. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the Human Races). Présentation de Hubert Juin. Paris: P. Belfond, 1967.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1929–1935. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.

Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Harwell, Mark, et al. 1984. Nuclear Winter: The Human Consequences of Nuclear War. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Herder, Johann G. 1784–1791. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Trans. T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 1947. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edward Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Humboldt, Wilhelm, Frieherr von. 1836. On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, ed. Michael Losonsky; trans. Peter Heath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Jones, Raya A. 1995. The Child-school Interface: Environment and Behavior. New York: Cassell.

Lenin, Vladimir I. 1902. What Is To Be Done? Ed. Robert Service; trans. Joe Feinberg and George Hanna. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Lorenz, Konrad. 1966. On Aggression. Trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Lucy, John A. 1992. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lukács, Georg. 1923. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971.

Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1932. The German Ideology, Parts I and III, ed. R. Pascal. New York: International Publishers, 1947.

Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow.

Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea. New York: New American Library.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877. Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998.

Parsons, Talcott. 1960. Structure and Process in Modern Societies. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Penn, Julia. 1972. Linguistic Relativity Versus Innate Ideas: The Origins of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in German Thought. The Hague: Mouton.

Rushton, J. Philippe. 1995. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Spencer, Herbert. 1876–1896. The Principles of Sociology, abridged ed., ed. Stanislav Andreski. London: Macmillan, 1969.

White, Leslie. 1949. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Farrar, Strauss.

Whiting, John Wesley, and Irvin I. Child. 1953. Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New York: Yale University Press.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

James D. Faubion

DETERMINISM

DETERMINISM. Determinism is a doctrine about causes and effects, some version of which has been in contention at almost every period in Western philosophy. In logic, a thing is said to be "determined" or "determinate" (from Latin determinatus ) in its properties if, for each generic property, it has a fully specified property of that sort. A cat cannot simply be feline; it must be Siamese, slender, long-legged, raucous, and so forth. Nor can it be simply colored; it must be black, or white, or ginger, or teal. Most philosophers have held that actual concrete individuals are completely determined.

An efficient cause is said to be determined in its effects by prior causes if its action, and therefore its effects, are entirely determined by those causes. The most important case for early modern philosophers was the human will. The will in choosing can be inclined toward this or that choice by passion, sentiment, or reason: on that, almost all early modern philosophers agreed. According to some it is always determined by the totality of causes acting upon it. Others held that no combination of prior causes ever suffices: however "inclined" the will may be toward one alternative, it is never necessary that it should act thus, even given all the causes acting upon it.

Determinism, then, is the conjunction of two claims: that given the totality of causes that have combined to produce a certain effect, that effect cannot but occur (causes "necessitate" their effects), and that the action of a cause is fully determined by the prior causes that have set it in motion. The action of one billiard ball on another when colliding with it is not merely to make it move somehow, but to make it move in a precise direction with a precise speed (René Descartes [1596–1650] called the direction of a motion its "determination"). The word determinism was seldom used by early modern philosophers. David Hume (1711–1776) referred to the "doctrine of necessity" in his discussion of free will; Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), objecting to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's (1646–1716) version of determinism, said that it imposed a "more than fatal necessity" on human action. We may distinguish in early modern thought a theological and a physical determinism.

THEOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

According to theological deteminism, everything that occurs in the world has been entirely determined by the creative act of God, the "first cause." Being omniscient, God knows timelessly all there is to know about his creation. Since (in the predominant view) God not only creates the world but continues to cooperate with every "second" cause, God knows timelessly not only what he does but also what every created thing will do. In particular the acts of the human will are, if not determined by God (here opinions differed), known to him eternally insofar as they are determined by causes acting upon the will. Since causes (including God) necessitate their effects, even what we regard as "free" choices are extrinsically determined.

Theological determinism was by no means a new doctrine. Medieval philosophers had dealt with it at length. During the Reformation it received new impetus from debates on predestination, debates renewed in the seventeenth century by the Jansenist controversy. Among early modern philosophers, some tried to limit divine knowledge, holding that before the fact God does not know what a free will chooses (Luis de Molina [1535–1600]). Others, including Descartes, denied that the determination implied by divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with freedom (Sixth Response). Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Leibniz, on the other hand, held that although the will does not have the "freedom of election," which consists in being able to choose otherwise than it actually chooses, it does have the "freedom of autonomy," which consists in an agent's acts being determined by that agent's own nature rather than by extrinsic causes.

Leibniz, whose God is the traditional omniscient creator of the world, agreed that all acts, including acts of will, are determined (Leibniz uses the term "certain"). But he denied that those acts are "necessary": God could have created a different possible world, and his will in creating the actual world was only inclined, not necessitated, by the aim that it should be the best of all possible worlds. Moreover, the human mind, like every individual substance, is utterly autonomous in its acts, since no substance ever genuinely affects another.

Spinoza, who identified God with the entirety of the world, held that all things occur of necessity. In particular the will has no freedom of election: what I do I must do. The human mind may, however, aspire to freedom of autonomy by virtue of acting according to reason, which is to say, out of what belongs most properly to its nature.

PHYSICAL DETERMINISM

Although some ancient philosophers had entertained notions of physical determinism, the predominantly Aristotelian philosophy of the sixteenth century did not seriously raise the question. Natural causes—the active powers of nature—act, in the usual phrase, "always or for the most part": generally speaking, it was thought that there was a certain indeterminacy in their action; indeed, for some philosophers that indeterminacy provided an argument on behalf of divine concurrence or cooperation with natural causes, determining the precise nature of their effects.

With Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Descartes, natural philosophy began to take as fundamental the notion of a "law of nature." A law of nature admits no exceptions; causes acting according to laws of nature not only necessitate but wholly determine their effects. Physical determinism received its definitive statement in the Théorie analytique des probabilités (Analytical theory of probabilities) of Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827):

An intelligence which, for a given instant, knew all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that compose it, and if it were, moreover, vast enough to submit all these data to Analysis, would embrace in one formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. (pp. vi–ix)

A world in which all causal interactions are governed by immutable, universal laws is a world from which, it would seem, not only freedom of election but even freedom of autonomy is excluded. If physics is in principle sufficient to explain the motions and qualities of material things, and if all my acts have—eventually as one traces back the chain of causes leading up to them—causes extrinsic to me, then the will is not only determined in its acts but determined extrinsically.

Freedom of election is an artifact of our ignorance of the springs of human action. Spinoza and Hume agreed in this diagnosis. But Spinoza, as we have seen, held that we can aspire, as reasonless beings cannot, to freedom of autonomy insofar as knowledge of causes and effects and of our own nature renders our will independent of the usual causes acting on it—the passions, for example. Hume, writing after the enormous success of Newtonian physics, deterministic through and through, offered a different sort of freedom or "liberty," which he regarded as sufficient to the purposes of moral judgment—in particular, the attribution of responsibility for our actions. An agent is "at liberty" if not physically or mentally constrained: not, that is, in chains or drunk or hypnotized. The prior determination of the will by whatever unknown, and perhaps unknowable, causes typically act on it does not constitute constraint.

Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) view of physical nature, or the "world of phenomena," much resembled that of Laplace. Like Hume, he did not seek theological backing for the necessity pertaining to the laws of nature; unlike Hume (but in certain respects in agreement with Hume's analysis of causal reasoning), Kant regarded the universality and necessity of the laws of nature as a prerequisite for understanding natural phenomena. Merely probable laws are not laws at all. The human being is, with respect to its existence in the natural world, subject to the same lawful necessity that governs all things. It is therefore determined in its motions. Whether that entails the determination of its volitions is another matter. A rational will is a will governed not by the laws of nature but by the moral law, a law which the will freely legislates for itself in accordance with reason. The result is that in considering ourselves as capable of moral action, and therefore as having freedom of autonomy (because the moral law, if it governs our will, does so according to our nature as rational agents), we must somehow think of ourselves as if we were not also things in the natural world (pp. 124–125). Kant admitted that it is not easy to see how the two "standpoints" can be maintained simultaneously. What keeps the standpoint of freedom from collapsing into the natural standpoint is the distinction between "subjectivity," the self experienced as part of nature and governed by its laws, and moral "objectivity," the self considered according to its own nature, capable of choosing on the basis of reasons, independently of the natural causes that would influence it.

See also Arnauld Family ; Descartes, René ; Enlightenment ; Galileo Galilei ; Hume, David ; Jansenism ; Kant, Immanuel ; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm ; Logic ; Moral Philosophy and Ethics ; Natural Law ; Spinoza, Baruch .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. New York, 1964. Translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785).

Laplace, Pierre Simon. Théorie analytique des probabilités. 3rd ed. Paris, 1820.

Molina, Luis de. Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione, et Reprobatione Concordia. Lisbon, 1588.

Secondary Sources

Clatterbaugh, Kenneth C. The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637–1739. New York, 1999.

Nadler, Steven M., ed. Causation in Early Modern Philosophy: Cartesianism, Occasionalism, and Preestablished Harmony. University Park, Pa., 1993.

Dennis Des Chene

Determinism

The concept of determinism conveys the idea that everything that happens could not have happened in a different way than it actually did. Or alternatively, everything that happens, happens by necessity. However, as simple as this may sound, the concept of determinism is one of the most difficult and controversial concepts in Western philosophy.

Philosophers often distinguish different kinds of determinism. First, there is scientific determinism, which was inspired by classical physics. One interpretation entails that everything in the universe is governed by universal laws. Universal in this context means that the laws are the same everywhere in the universe and at all times, and that they apply to all events and objects. A second interpretation of scientific determinism holds that every event has a sufficient cause. These two interpretations of scientific determinism combined can yield an argument for Laplacian determinism : If every event has a sufficient cause, and if every event is governed by universal laws, then one could in principle predict exactly the subsequent evolution of the universe if one had knowledge of all the initial conditions of all objects in the universe combined with knowledge of all the laws of nature.

Note first that this interpretation denies the existence of chance or probabilistic laws. Since the second half of the twentieth century, however, more and more scientists argue that not all natural laws are deterministic, but that some of these laws may be inherently statistical in nature. This line of argument could constitute an argument for indeterminism, and is explored further by Karl Popper (1902–1994). Note furthermore that, though Laplacian determinism is an ontological view, it is mostly formulated in epistemic terms, relating to knowledge and predictive capabilities. Hence, as John Earman argues, one must keep in mind that scientific determinism is first of all a claim about how the world is constituted. As such one must distinguish this ontological claim from the epistemological claim to predictability, even though both often go together. That determinism does not always entail predictability is testified by chaotic systems, which display deterministic though unpredictable behavior.

If scientific determinism is taken seriously, it can result in a worldview that affirms the concept of metaphysical determinism. Metaphysical determinism conveys the idea that if everything in the universe is governed by universal laws, and if every event has a sufficient cause, then there is only one history possible. One can clarify this idea by using possible-world semantics. If a possible world starts off with exactly the same initial conditions as the actual world and with exactly the same universal laws, its evolution would look the same in every detail. As such, metaphysical determinism entails scientific determinism, but not necessarily vice versa, even though scientific determinism could be used to defend metaphysical determinism.

Both metaphysical and scientific determinism are threatened by the indeterminism of quantum mechanics, when interpreted as an ontological feature of the world. If at the quantum level there is genuine indeterminism, then, it might be argued, not everything has a sufficient cause, so that the histories of two possible worlds with exactly the same initial conditions, but with quantum indeterminism, might develop in completely different ways. However, scientists like David Bohm (1917–1992) have tried to restore determinism at the quantum level by invoking hidden variables, though this proposal is not uncontroversial. Furthermore, it must be kept in mind that quantum theory might not be the final theory, but might in the future be replaced by an alternative theory that forces its philosophical interpretation to affirm either determinism or indeterminism.

A third kind of determinism, closely related to scientific determinism, is mathematical determinism. Mathematical determinism is the "logical" complement of scientific determinism, and has become increasingly important in chaos theory. In mathematical determinism the initial conditions are numerical inputs, and a mathematical function takes the place of the universal law. Mathematical determinism now entails that, given an arbitrary value of the initial conditions, calculating the mathematical function will yield one and only one outcome. In other words, given an arbitrary value of the initial conditions and a mathematical function, there is only one outcome possible. In the case of mathematical chaotic systems, problems arise with specifying the initial value. Because knowledge of the initial conditions is limited, the outcome of a chaotic evolution cannot be predicted, yet as a mathematical system it is deterministic, which means that the outcome of the calculation, given the initial conditions, could not be other than it actually is.

A fourth kind of determinism is logical determinism. Logical determinism is about propositions, and entails that any proposition about the past, present, or future of the world is either true or false. As such, logical determinism is grounded in Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, which holds that a proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time. Developments in so-called "fuzzy logic" have challenged this kind of determinism.

Theological determinism constitutes a fifth kind of determinism. There are two types of theological determinism, both compatible with scientific and metaphysical determinism. In the first, God determines everything that happens, either in one all-determining single act at the initial creation of the universe or through continuous divine interactions with the world. Either way, the consequence is that everything that happens becomes God's action, and determinism is closely linked to divine action and God's omnipotence. According to the second type of theological determinism, God has perfect knowledge of everything in the universe because God is omniscient. And, as some say, because God is outside of time, God has the capacity of knowing past, present, and future in one instance. This means that God knows what will happen in the future. And because God's omniscience is perfect, what God knows about the future will inevitably happen, which means, consequently, that the future is already fixed.

All forms of determinism (except perhaps mathematical determinism) challenge the idea of free will. Or rather, they render the experience of free will an illusion. Theological determinism moreover raises big problems for the idea that God is perfectly good. For, if everything is God's action, the evil and suffering that happens is also due to God's actions. Or, alternatively, if God already knows what evil will happen, why does God not prevent it from happening? Some theologians have argued for divine self-limitation (kenosis ) of God's omniscience and omnipotence to warrant human freedom.

See also Causality, Primary and Secondary; Chance; Chaos theory; Clockwork Universe; Contingency; Divine Action; Freedom; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; Indeterminism; Kenosis; Omnipotence; Open Universe; Physics, Classical; Physics, Quantum

Bibliography

berofsky, bernard. determinism. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press 1971.

earman, john. a primer on determinism. dordrecht, netherlands: d. reidel, 1986.

laplace, pierre simon marquis de. a philosophical essay on probabilities, trans. from the 6th edition by frederick wilson truscott and frederick lincoln emory. new york: dover, 1952.

polkinghorne, john, ed. the work of love: creation as kenosis. grand rapids, mich.: eerdmans; london: spck, 2001.

popper, karl. the open universe: an argument for indeterminism. london: routledge 1982.

weatherford, roy. the implications of determinism. london and new york: routledge 1991.

taede a. smedes

DETERMINISM

The most general meaning of "determinism," one applicable in most contexts, is the condition of being determined. If we understand determinateness to be a qualification of an object, determinism sees this determinateness initially as identification of the object (by several processes) and then as a causal response to a request for an explanation of why. All scientific or theoretical research thus necessarily presupposes determinism, but not in the sense of merely naming or the other operations of contemporary language, since the conditions for the initial application of language are not determinant. The meaning customarily given to determinism is determination, through the principle of causality, of the objective conditions for a phenomenon to occur.

Initially, the concept of determinism (Determinismus ) arose within German theological and moral thinking, where it served narrow requirements related to predestination and was used to provide dogmatic answers; it did not have an objective theoretical meaning as such. Then in nineteenth-century scientific positivism, the "condition of determination" became associated with an empirical or descriptive principle of causality based on the primacy of observation, and not on explanation in the strict sense. Subsequently, for experimental science, determinism came to be considered a condition for the conduct of science itself, that is, as the epistemological principle of scientific knowledge. In this way determinism became normative. For example, physiological determinism claims to decide between the normal and the pathological in medicine, as shown by Georges Canguilhem.

Determinism, without being explicitly referred to, has been the ideal of mechanics since the seventeenth century. Projected onto objects made to satisfy the demand for causality, determinism ended up requiring that all phenomena satisfy the principle of ontological objectivity assumed in nature. Quantum physics, however, led to a retrenchment of this principle of establishing the conditions of determination, at least on the microphysical scale. Chaos theory has accentuated this point of view. In the sphere of the psyche, when Sigmund Freud attempted to explain dreams by psychoanalysis, he assumed a notion of psychic determinism in his theory of intentionality. He thus shifted the doctrine of causality in the direction of a theory of intentionality that assumed the existence of a subjective causality beyond or alongside objective causality, as shown by Pierre-Henri Castel in his introduction to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

Determinism essentially informs all theoretical or scientific research. So how can we explain the fact that modern philosophical thought, at least since Kant and Fichte, is so strongly opposed to it? Natural determinism, after serving as the principle of Spinoza's immanent metaphysics, has come to dominate science. This domination reveals that the term has undergone both a confinement and an unwarranted extension in twentieth-century thinking. The confinement of the term to natural science constrains philosophers of freedom from examining the conditions that determine what they say. In the nonclassical sciences, confinement of the term to well-behaved natural sciences subjects intellectuals to indeterminacy complexes that seriously inhibit their theoretical inventiveness and subjects them to denigration. Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, is denigrated by positivist psychology and the various forms of psychological, organicist, and physicalist reductionism. As a result, Freudian psychoanalysis continues to search for an epistemological legitimacy based on theoretical models of the natural sciences, as was shown by Paul-Laurent Assoun. In physics, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg created a quantum physics that was indeterminate from the point of view of classical determinism (as formulated by Pierre Simon Laplace). Because they were under the ideological spell of the old determinism, they could not completely accept their own discoveries as good science. There were two reasons for this situation: first, the concept of determinism arose not in the minimalist causal sense given above but in a theological sense, and second, ever since classical mechanics, the degree of determination that scientific objectivism has achieved has delimited the meaning and norm of determinism. Because they exclude identity and assume the differential nature of the symbolic, the status of the psyche and, even more so, the structuralist approach to the subject as taken by Jacques Lacan show that objective legality and causality could not serve as paradigms for everything we talk about. This is especially so for the unconscious, which, although "structured like a language," is not structured as a determining cause.

A robust determinism must renounce naturalist metaphysics, which has continued to control its principles. A new philosophy of "determined" freedom can be developed without indeterminism. Freud's determined freedom led Jean-Paul Sartre, probably wrongly, to reject the Freudian unconscious and to confront a "natural determinism". All of Freud's efforts, contrary to Jung's, clearly attempted to establish a paradoxical materialism that went beyond philosophical idealism and the old materialisms, dialectic or otherwise.

Dominique Auffret

See also: Instinct; Neurosis, choice of the; Psychic causality; Psychogenesis/organogenesis; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The ; Complementary series.

Bibliography

Assoun, Paul-Laurent. (1981). Introduction à l'épistémologie freudienne. Paris: Payot.

Castel, Pierre-Henri. (1998). Introductionà "L'interprétation du rêve" de Freud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Canguilhem, Georges. (1989). The normal and the pathological (Carolyn R. Fawcett, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.

Kojève, Alexandre. (1990). L'idée du déterminisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne. Paris: Hachette. (Original work published 1932.)

Koyré, Alexandre. (1957). From the closed world to the infinite universe. New York: Harper.

Lacan, Jacques. (1966).Écrits. Paris: Seuil.

Determinism

A scientific perspective which specifies that events occur in completely predictable ways as a result of natural and physical laws.

Since ancient times, the origins of human behavior have been attributed to hidden or mystical forces. The Greek philosopher Democritus speculated, for example, that objects in our world consist of atoms; included among these "objects" was the soul, which was made of finer, smoother, and more spherical atoms than other physical objects. He rejected the concept of free will and claimed that all human behavior results from prior events. Some philosophers have advanced the argument that human behavior is deterministic, although most have resisted the idea that human beings merely react to external events and do not voluntarily select behaviors.

There is a clear dilemma in explaining human behavior through psychological principles. On the one hand, if psychology is a science of behavior, then there should be laws allowing the prediction of behavior, just as there are gravitational laws to predict the behavior of a falling object. On the other hand, objections have been raised by individuals who believe that humans control their own behaviors and possess free will. Part of the controversy relates to the concept of the mind and body as separate entities. In this view, the mind may not be subject to the same laws as the body. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) attempted to make the distinction between determinism and indeterminism by suggesting that psychological processes could be creative and free, whereas the physiological processes in the brain were deterministic. This argument does not solve the problem for psychology, however, because psychologists consider mental processes appropriate for study within a scientific framework, thus subject to scientific laws.

Other psychologists like William James , who was interested in religion and believed in free will, recognized this conflict but was reluctant to abandon the concept that behaviors were not free. At one point, he suggested that mind and body operated in tandem, whereas on another occasion he concluded that they interacted. Clearly, James struggled with the issue and, like others, was unable to resolve it. The behaviorists were the most obvious proponents of determinism, dating back to John B. Watson , who claimed that environment was the single cause of behavior, and who made one of the most famous deterministic assertions ever: "Give me a dozen healthy infants … and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and, yes, even beggar man and thief."

The psychologist with the greatest influence in this area, however, was B. F. Skinner . He adopted a stance called radical behaviorism , which disregarded free will and the internal causes of behavior. All behavior, Skinner maintained, was determined through reinforcement contingencies, that is, the pattern of reinforcements and punishments in an individual's life. Although critics have claimed that Skinner's concept of determinism denied people of their humanity, he maintained that his approach could actually lead to more humane societies. For example, if people were not responsible for negative behaviors, they should not be punished, for they had no control over their behaviors. Instead, the environment that reinforced the unwanted behaviors should be changed so that desirable behaviors receive reinforcement and increase in frequency.

Sigmund Freud defined determinism in terms of the unconscious and contended that behavior is caused by internal, mental mechanisms. In some ways, Freud was more extreme than Skinner, who acknowledged that some behaviors are not predictable. The main difference between Freud and Skinner involved the origin of causation; Freud believed in underlying physiological processes while Skinner opted to focus on external causes. Thus, even though Freudians and Skinnerians differ on almost every conceivable dimension, they have at least one commonality in their reliance on determinism.

Those scientists who believe that behaviors are determined have recognized the difficulty in making explicit predictions. Thus, they have developed the concept of statistical determinism. This means that, even though behaviors are determined by fixed laws, predictions will never be perfect because so many different factors, most of them unknown, affect actions, which result in generally accurate predictions. The recently developed theory of chaos relates to making predictions about complex events such as behaviors. This theory suggests that in a cause-effect situation, small differences in initial conditions may lead to very different outcomes. This theory supports the notion that behaviors may not be completely predictable even though they may be dictated by fixed natural laws.

Further Reading

Doob, Leonard William. Inevitability: Determinism, Fatalism, and Destiny. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

determinism philosophical thesis that every event is the inevitable result of antecedent causes. Applied to ethics and psychology, determinism usually involves a denial of free will , although many philosophers have attempted to reconcile the two concepts. Thomas Hobbes, identifying the will with appetites and defining freedom as the absence of impediments, concluded that free will exists where nothing prevents a person from satisfying his prevailing appetite. David Hume argued that a person's willful conduct counts as freely chosen even though his will has itself been determined by his motives. William James called such attempts to fit notions of free will into determinist systems "soft" determinism; "hard" determinism excludes the possibility of free will altogether. The doctrine of determinism is opposed by the principle of emergence, which states that truly novel and unpredictable events may occur out of the composite forces of nature.

de·ter·min·ism / diˈtərməˌnizəm/ • n. Philos. the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. DERIVATIVES: de·ter·min·ist n. & adj. de·ter·min·is·tic / -ˌtərməˈnistik/ adj. de·ter·min·is·ti·cal·ly / -ˌtərməˈnistik(ə)lē/ adv.

determinism (philos.) doctrine that human action is necessarily determined. XIX. — F. déterminisme or its source G. determinismus (Kant, 1793), which may have been extracted from prädeterm inismus, if not directly f. determinieren — L. dētermināre (see prec.) + -ismus -ISM.

Determinism. The view that events and behaviours are determined before they occur, by the laws of the universe or by God. In religions, determinism takes different forms: in Christianity, see Augustine and Calvin; in Islam, qadar and kasb, Allāh; in Hinduism et al., karma. See also PREDESTINATION.

determinism Philosophical thesis that every event is the necessary result of its causes. Nothing is accidental. It usually involves the denial of free will, though Thomas Hobbes and David Hume struggled to reconcile the two ideas. Calvin's concept of predestination is a form of determinism.

determinism See BIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM; CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; ECONOMIC DETERMINISM; HISTORICISM; LABELLING; SOCIAL AREA ANALYSIS; SOCIOBIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM.

Determinism. The view that all events (including human actions) are somehow inevitable or necessitated. See also PREDESTINATION.