Abstract

Pollio and Henley and Rychlak support the author's efforts to provide empirical evidence from different methodological perspectives for a role of agency in the science of human behavior. The hypothesized agent initates behaviors independently of heredity and environment, but it also is responsive to those causal factors. In addition to certain labelling problems, a major difference between our views is that the commentors attempt to use a monistic voluntaristic mode of thinking to conceptualize the causal mechanisms, whereas the author advocates in addition, on utilitarian grounds, a second incompatible, mechanistic mode of thinking. The microprocesses in the metaphysical views of voluntarism versus determinism are not empirically falsifiable, but hypotheses which propose different predictive values of the resultant theories under different conditions can be falsified. Neither theory is intrinsically more scientific, nor are methods associated with either theory intrinsically superior in the absence of context