Markus Tschögl
University of Gothenburg
In his “”The Province of Human Agency”” (2018), Anton Ford re-negotiates the scope of human agency. He argues against the common view that actions are essentially bodily movements (corporealism) to build a case for his own view (materialism), which holds that actions can extend to “whatever it is—whatever material—one changes intentionally” (Ford 2018: 700).
Ford proceeds by showing that the dualism-charge corporealists levy against the “bad old doctrine” of volitionalism—which limits agency to the will—can, in turn, be used to undermine corporealism vis-á-vis materialism by attacking the sharp line that corporealists draw between our bodily movements and what we happen to change by moving our body. He then tries to strengthen his view by arguing that the same move does not work against materialism, and that any demarcation problems that materialism might suffer from are also present for its competitors.
In this paper, I argue that this last move is unsuccessful. What Ford does is show that the correct description of an action need not be less than the description under which it counts as intentional, but only at the cost of making it harder to say why it cannot also be more than that. He tells us why intentional action does not end at the epidermis, but he has no principled way of telling us where it does end—both with respect to the subsequent and the concurrent. To be more precise, materialism settles a demarcation problem on one front by creating and aggravating demarcation problems on two other fronts: first when delineating intentional actions from consequences; and second, when attributing unintended aspects of what we do intentionally to our agency.
Ford is right that this is not an exclusive problem for his view, but I do want to make the case that it is a bigger one for him than for his competitors. For, unlike materialism, volitionalism and corporealism do provide a clear—albeit questionable—answer as to where human agency ends. Moreover, with a widened scope of agency, there will be more against which intentional actions need to be delineated. This does not make materialism a worse view, but it does increase the pressure to provide a satisfactory answer to demarcation problems on these other fronts. For, without such an answer, materialism ceases to be a solution for the main issue the other views initially set out to solve: how much of what we describe as an intentional action is strictly speaking an agent’s own doing, and how much is, so to speak, up to nature?
Chair: Marianna Leventi
Time: September 12th, 11:20 – 11:50
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 