Talking to Our Selves

Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency

By: John M. Doris

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Paperback | 15 June 2017

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Paperback
280 Pages

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23.39 x 15.6 x 1.5

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John M. Doris presents a new account of agency and responsibility, which reconciles our understanding of ourselves as moral agents with psychological research on the unconscious mind. Much philosophical theorizing maintains that the exercise of morally responsible agency consists in judgment and behavior ordered by accurate reflection. On such theories, when human beings are able to direct their lives in the manner philosophers have dignified with the honorific ''agency'', it''s because they know what they''re doing, and why they''re doing it. This understanding is compromised by quantities of psychological research on unconscious processing, which suggests that accurate reflection is distressingly uncommon; very often behavior is ordered by surprisingly inaccurate self-awareness. Thus, if agency requires accurate reflection, people seldom exercise agency, and skepticism about agency threatens. To counter the skeptical threat, John M. Doris proposes an alternative theory that requires neither reflection nor accurate self-awareness: he identifies a dialogic form of agency where self-direction is facilitated by exchange of the rationalizations with which people explain and justify themselves to one another. The result is a stoutly interdisciplinary theory sensitive to both what human beings are likeâ"creatures with opaque and unruly psychologies-and what they need: an account of agency sufficient to support a practice of moral responsibility.

Industry Reviews

`This is an excellent book and would make an excellent text for a course or course segment on the nature of moral responsibility. A psychologically and philosophically informed reader would also find it well worth the effort.' Dr Richard M Gray, PsycCRITIQUES `charming and incisive . . . Doris has done a huge service to the cause of empirical philosophy with this book. It is a model of how to do psychologically-informed work . . . This is empirical philosophy with integrity . . . It reminds us, with striking real-life evidence, just how hidden we often are from ourselves. Whether this evidence is compatible with our being morally responsible agents is the next important conversation agency theorists ought to have, and we should be grateful to Doris for sparking it in such a bold, original, and colorful way.' David Shoemaker, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews `Talking to Our Selves is well-written and well-argued. And the wide-ranging evidence he considers makes for a very interesting and stimulating read. Moreover, its topic, the nature of human agency and moral responsibility, connects directly to the important question of what it means to be human . . . the theory deserves to be taken seriously, to be engaged and further developed, and to become an important part of our ongoing project of understanding ourselves.' Matthew Van Cleave, Metapyschology

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