Freewill vs Determinism

The free will vs determinism debate revolves around the extent to which our behavior
is the result of forces over which we have no control or whether people are able to
decide for themselves whether to act or behave in a certain way.

Determinism
The determinist approach proposes that all behavior has a cause and is thus
predictable. Free will is an illusion, and our behavior is governed by internal or
external forces over which we have no control.

External Determinism
External (environmental) determinism see the cause of behavior as being outside the
individual, such as parental influence, the media, or school. Approaches which adopt
this position include behaviorism and social learning theory.
For example, Bandura (1961) showed that children become aggressive through
observation and imitation of their violent parents.
Internal Determinism
The other main supporters of determinism are those who adopt a biological
perspective. However for them it is internal, not external, forces that are the
determining factor. According to sociobiology evolution governs the behavior of a
species and genetic inheritance that of each individual within it. For example Bowlby
(1969) states a child has an innate (i.e. inborn) need to attach to one main attachment
figure (i.e. monotropy).
Personality traits like extraversion or neuroticism, and the behavior associated with
them, are triggered by neurological and hormonal processes within the body. There is
no need for the concept of an autonomous human being. Ultimately this view sees us
as no more than biological machines and even consciousness itself is interpreted as a
level of arousal in the nervous system.
Freud also viewed behavior being controlled from inside the individual, in the form
of unconscious motivation or childhood events, known as psychic determinism.
There are different levels of determinism
Hard Determinism

Hard determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action
has a cause.

Behaviorists are strong believers in hard determinism. Their most forthright and
articulate spokesman has been B. F. Skinner. Concepts like “free will” and
“motivation” are dismissed as illusions that disguise the real causes of human
behavior.
In Skinner’s scheme of things the person who commits a crime has no real choice.
(S)he is propelled in this direction by environmental circumstances and a personal
history, which makes breaking the law natural and inevitable.

For the law-abiding, an accumulation of reinforcers has the opposite effect. Having
been rewarded for following rules in the past the individual does so in the future.
There is no moral evaluation or even mental calculation involved. All behavior is
under stimulus control.

Soft Determinism

Soft determinism represents a middle ground, people do have a choice, but that choice
is constrained by external or internal factors.

For example, being poor doesn’t make you steal, but it may make you more likely to
take that route through desperation.

Soft determinism suggests that some behaviors are more constrained than others and
that there is an element of free will in all behavior.

However, a problem with determinism is that it is inconsistent with society's ideas of

responsibility and self control that form the basis of our moral and legal obligations.
An additional limitation concerns the facts that psychologists cannot predict a person's
behavior with 100% accuracy due to the complex interaction of variables which can
influence behavior.

Freewill
Free will is the idea that we are able to have some choice in how we act and assumes
that we are free to choose our behavior, in other words we are self determined.

For example, people can make a free choice as to whether to commit a crime or not
(unless they are a child or they are insane). This does not mean that behavior is
random, but we are free from the causal influences of past events. According to
freewill a person is responsible for their own actions.
One of the main assumptions of the humanistic approach is that humans have free
will; not all behavior is determined. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the
exercise of free will. Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths
we go down and their consequences.
For humanistic psychologists such as Maslow (1943) and Rogers (1951) freedom is
not only possible but also necessary if we are to become fully functional human
beings. Both see self-actualisation as a unique human need and form of motivation
setting us apart from all other species. There is thus a line to be drawn between the
natural and the social sciences.
To take a simple example, when two chemicals react there is no sense in imagining
that they could behave in any other way than the way they do. However when two
people come together they could agree, fall out, come to a compromise, start a fight
and so on. The permutations are endless and in order to understand their behavior we
would need to understand what each party to the relationship chooses to do.
Ranged against the deterministic psychologies of those who believe that what “is” is
inevitable are therefore those who believe that human beings have the ability to
control their own destinies. However there is also an intermediate position that goes
back to the psychoanalytic psychology of Sigmund Freud.
At first sight Freud seems to be a supporter of determinism in that he argued that our
actions and our thoughts are controlled by the unconscious. However the very goal of
therapy was to help the patient overcome that force. Indeed without the belief that
people can change therapy itself makes no sense.
This insight has been taken up by several neo-Freudians. One of the most influential
has been Erich Fromm (1941). In “Fear of Freedom” he argues that all of us have the
potential to control our own lives but that many of us are too afraid to do so.
As a result we give up our freedom and allow our lives to be governed by
circumstance, other people, political ideology or irrational feelings. However
determinism is not inevitable and in the very choice we all have to do good or
evil Fromm sees the essence of human freedom.

Critical Evaluation
Psychologists who take the free will view suggest that determinism removes freedom
and dignity, and devalues human behavior. By creating general laws of behavior,
deterministic psychology underestimates the uniqueness of human beings and their
freedom to choose their own destiny.
There are important implications for taking either side in this debate. Deterministic
explanations for behavior reduce individual responsibility. A person arrested for a
violent attack for example might plead that they were not responsible for their
behavior – it was due to their upbringing, a bang on the head they received earlier in
life, recent relationship stresses, or a psychiatric problem. In other words, their
behavior was determined.

Defining Rationalism vs. Empiricism

Rationalism and empiricism are both viewpoints in epistemology. Epistemology is a philosophical
field that focuses on knowledge and can be understood in terms of three central issues. The first is
defining knowledge, trying to understand what exactly knowledge is. The second is questioning where
knowledge comes from, how it is that a person knows some proposition or statement to be true or false.
The third is examining how much people can ever really know, and whether there are certain topics
about which knowledge is impossible.
The issue that generally separates rationalism and empiricism is the second of the three: From where do
people get knowledge? Rationalism is the view that a lot of meaningful and important knowledge about
the world comes purely from the mind itself, from people's ability to use reason. Empiricism is the
view that people's experiences are the only source of knowledge, and that thinking alone does not
provide meaningful knowledge about the world. This lesson examines these two views and their
disagreements.
Rationalism
Rationalism can be understood in terms of three key ideas: deduction, innate ideas, and reason.

 Deduction is a reasoning process that uses logic and is structured such that if each step is
correct, then the final conclusion of the argument has to be true. This can be contrasted
with induction; the conclusion of an inductive argument has good evidence for it but is not
certain. Rationalists often use deductive arguments, beginning from intuitive principles and
deducing claims about how the world must be.
 Innate ideas are ideas that people can understand and think about without ever having to learn
them from the external world. These ideas are simply part of the human mind. Innate ideas are
often the starting point of deductive arguments. For instance, a rationalist might begin with the
ideas of mind and body, which they might say are innate, and then deduce a claim about
whether the mind and body are separate substances.
 Reason is central to rationalism, as it is what allows people to gain important knowledge
without experience. Rationalists often focus on intuition, which is people's ability to know
certain propositions to be true just based on a feeling or sense. For example, the claim ''Five
equals five'' seems obviously true and does not require empirical proof. In the view of many
rationalists, reason and intuition give people important knowledge that they couldn't learn any
other way.

Empiricism
Three key ideas within empiricism are sense experience, the tabula rasa, and induction.

 Sense experience is information about the external world that people get from their senses,
such as sight, hearing, and touch. Empiricists view sense experience as the only path to
knowledge, claiming that people gain knowledge based on the evidence of their senses, rather
than from reason by itself. A person's experiences of their own mind and body are also sources
of knowledge under the empiricist view. Importantly, anything learned through experience is
not innate, so empiricists disagree with the idea of innate concepts.
 The tabula rasa, or blank slate, represents the empiricist claim that people are born without
any innate concepts or knowledge. People start out as a blank slate and only gain ideas and
knowledge over the course of their lives. The tabula rasa, often associated with the
philosopher John Locke, is important to empiricism because it challenges the rationalist claim
that innate ideas or knowledge exist.
 Induction is a form of reasoning that produces conclusions backed by evidence, though not
by certainty, unlike deduction. Since empiricists consider experience to be the only source of
knowledge, they claim that this knowledge comes from induction, based on the evidence that
people have seen so far but not absolutely certain in the way that an argument based on just
reason would be.

Examples of Rationalism vs. Empiricism

There are many philosophical debates throughout history that have been viewed as disagreements
between the rationalist and empiricist positions. This classification is somewhat flawed because it can
oversimplify philosophers and their positions; many philosophers who are frequently viewed as falling
under one label or the other actually mix elements of both rationalism and empiricism in their work.
However, those classified as rationalist philosophers generally include Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes,
and Baruch Spinoza. Those classified as empiricist philosophers generally include John Locke, David
Hume, George Berkeley, and John Stuart Mill.
In early modern Europe, many debates between rationalism and empiricism focused on metaphysics,
the field of philosophy that considers fundamental questions such as what it means to exist or how the
mind is related to the body. An example of such a debate would be the issue of causality. Spinoza
operated from an intuitive understanding of the concept of causality and used this idea of cause to infer
all sorts of claims about the universe. This is a rationalist view because it uses reason to move from
purportedly innate ideas to meaningful claims about external reality. On the other hand, Hume argued
that the idea of cause is based on experience, and therefore suspect. Since people infer causal links
based on their observations, it is not immediately clear whether causes actually exist or whether people
just assume they do. This is an empiricist view because it credits experience and induction as the origin
of people's concepts.
Another example has to do with the idea of substance, which refers to the material existence of objects
in the external world. Descartes treats substance as an innate idea and claims that we intuitively
understand mind and body as two separate types of substances. Spinoza similarly views substance as an
innate idea but thinks that the idea of substance leads to the claim that there is only one substance in the
universe, so the body and mind are not separate. These are both rationalist positions because they use
innate ideas and reason to make conclusions about the world. On the other hand, Berkeley claims that
substance is an idea that people develop to try to explain the world they observe; in fact, Berkeley
argues that there is not really evidence that material objects exist. This is an empiricist view because it
views observation as the source of knowledge.

Empiricism and Rationalism

Aristotle was the philosopher to start empiricism. Empiricism means that everything you experience in
life causes you to create conclusions and gain knowledge about different parts of life. When you’re
looking out the window of your house or apartment ready for your walk to school or work, you see a
large group of people walking down the street shivering and wearing many layers of clothing. Through
reasonable and logical thought, you can conclude that they are experiencing cold weather and you
should follow their lead in wearing your winter coat.
Empiricism can be lost for certain people though. When you were a kid, some parents would talk
about how if you put a tooth under the pillow and fell asleep the tooth fairy would replace the tooth
with change. As children, we believed in the story because it was a reward for a natural part of life.
After learning the truth, you realize the foolish notions that were believed even though there was no
evidence of a real tooth fairy. Our experience was positive for blindly believing in the tooth fairy, so
the evidence was not disputed in any way.
In this day and age, the internet has a ridiculous amount of information that can be processed in the
shortest amount of time. Through some artistic talent, any information on the internet can be polished
to look real and legitimate. Many people look at this information as true evidence without the citations
or references to establish fact. These people look at strings of information and draw their own
conclusions on false information. These conspiracy theorists are extremely passionate with their
thought process and beliefs due to the supposed facts from the internet and the obvious related
experiences. This relates to illusory correlation in which people draw their own conclusion on random
events even though there is no relation to it. The people truly believe in the correlation between so
many of the events because they don’t dispute the evidence before them and they believe in what they
want to believe. Empiricism is completely confused by the people with rationalism. Rationalism is the
thought process that puts reason as the primary source of information needed to attain knowledge.
Rationalizations are mainly used to justify a certain thought process without the use of empirical
evidence.

Difference Between Rationalism and Empiricism

Definition
Rationalism: Rationalism is a theory based on the claim that reason is the source of knowledge.

Empiricism: Empiricism is a theory based on the claim that experience is the source of knowledge.

Intuition
Rationalism: Rationalists believe in intuition.

Empiricism: Empiricists do not believe in intuition.

At Birth
Rationalism: Rationalists believe that individuals have innate knowledge or concepts.
Empiricism: Empiricists believe that individuals have no innate knowledge.