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 (53)
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 (2)

Cited by two 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 5 july 2024. 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.