John Austin on Quantum Physics: Agency and the Non-Existent Present

• In Event: 3151 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Advancing Sociological Foundations – B

Abstract

Starting with the assumption that social life is built upon a material foundation, this paper makes an initial attempt to understand human agency. Despite the law-like sentences of Newtonian physics, Quantum physics has established that the "present" does not exist and, hence, that sentences purporting to relate a material cause to effect are meaningless. But, if this be so in the material world, how can such sentences be meaningful in the social world?
After a review of the relevant elements of Newtonian and Quantum physics, the standard visualization of material interactions as light cones is used to establish a functional analysis of human interactions. This is accomplished by repurposing Arendt's vita activa and vita contemplativa. Instead of distinguishing between a life of action or of silence, the two now distinguish life "before" and "after" an human interaction. Next, the human functions located in the "before" vita activa and the "after" vita contemplativa are fleshed out by noting that homo agens and homo patiens function in the former, while homo percipiens and homo concipiens function in the latter. This four part rubric now constitutes a functional matrix to analyze human agency in an uncertain quantum world in which sentences relating cause to effect are meaningless.
But, if such sentences are meaningless, then what sentences are meaningful? Not by chance, John Austin in his 1964 Sense and Sensibilia, answers the question. He does this by calling to account the "idealist" tradition that stretches from Heraclitus to Plato, from Descartes to Kant, from Hume and Berkeley to Dewey and Pierce, from Marx and Engels to Webber, Parsons, and Bourdieu, and to many, many others along the way. As such, the tradition speaks to the vita contemplativa, as Hannah Arendt and the Greeks maintained, but not to the vita activa, as Austin insists.

Author

• Brien Hallett, University of Hawaii