Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

There May Be No “Free Will,” But That Doesn’t Mean There Ain’t Agency Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. In 2012, two prominent scientists announced the death of free will. In a short book titled Free Will , Sam Harris argued that our thoughts and intentions come from background causes we neither see nor control, so the feeling that we author our own actions is an illusion. A few months earlier, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne had made the same case in USA Today . His argument was simple. We are collections of molecules, molecules obey the laws of physics, and so our “choices” are settled by those laws before we ever deliberate. On this view, we are not characters rewriting our parts as the play goes on. We are puppets reading a script that physics has already written. I do not want to defend free will in the sense Harris and Coyne attack. Coyne defined it clearly: you have free will if, at the moment of decision, you could have chosen otherwise . That is a metaphysical claim about...

A World in the Making : Symbolic Interactionism in the Twentieth Century (Professor Ken Plummer used to teach at the University of Essex.  When I arrived at UC-Santa Barbara in the mid 1980s, Ken ( with his partner Everard) used to arrive each summer to teach a class on the Sociology of Sexuality.  Ken pioneered interactionist approaches to intimacy, sexual identity and gay and lesbian studies, and thus could be easily regarded as one of the founders of Crtical Interactionism. The following article appeared in: Bryan Turner (ed.)  A Companion to Social Theory , Blackwell;  revised version for second edition, p. 193-222. Ken Plummer [We live in] a universe which is not all closed and settled, which is still in some respects indeterminate and in the making... an open universe in which uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties, and possibilities are naturalized... Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it ...