Situated agency
Annemarie Kalis
December 9, 2025 DOI: 10.4324/9781003649359-17 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Wittgenstein's Whewell Court lectures on freedom of the will offer a valuable resource for 4E approaches to agency, which have explained agential capacities naturalistically but still need an account of first-person freedom. Proposes that, for Wittgenstein, understanding oneself as free is a practical stance that human beings can take but need not always take. |
Abstract
Can situated perspectives on mind and cognition also account for individual agency and freedom? During the last 15 years, several notions of situated agency have been developed in 4E approaches as varied as enactivism, ecological psychology, and phenomenology. These approaches convincingly show how agential capacities can be naturalistically explained on the basis of principles of 4E cognition. However, there is still a lot of work to do on the question of how to account for agency as a first-person perspective, or more specifically: what does it mean for human beings to understand themselves as free agents? In this chapter, I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on freedom of the will are a valuable resource for addressing this question. Whereas it is not very common to use Wittgensteinian resources in 4E approaches to agency, this is different in the social sciences. Taking inspiration from the sociological debate on structure versus agency, I analyze Wittgenstein’s ideas on freedom of the will as presented in the Whewell Court lectures, which he taught in Cambridge around 1940. I will show that for Wittgenstein, understanding oneself as free is a practical stance that human beings can, but need not always, take.