The Question for Contemporary Psychologists and Professional Coaches

All of the themes found within the discussions of Classical philosophers on the question of determinism and free will are evident to a greater or lesser extent in modern psychology and professional coaching. One might even conclude that many present-day themes in psychology and coaching are but slightly modified re­statements of Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, etc. ideas. Furthermore, the issues evolving from the question of determinism versus free-will are still unresolved to the satisfaction of most critical psychologists and coaches. Even prominent philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, seems to find this question to be elusive. Nagel (1986, p. 112) offers the following candid appraisal:

I change my mind about the problem of free will every time I think about it, and therefore cannot offer any view with even moderate confidence; but my present opinion is that nothing that might be a solution has yet been described.. . . . It is a case where nothing believable has (to my knowledge) been proposed by anyone in the extensive public discussion of the subject.

It is therefore not surprising that overt concern about the question is not apparent today among many professional psychologist, coaches and other human service providers. Why devote time and energy to a question that has not been “solved” by even the great philosophers.

A majority of the professional psychologists of the twentieth and twenty first century are a great deal more interested in problems of a practical nature than with those which are philosophically oriented. A similar conclusion can be reached regarding twenty first century coaches. As Gordon Allport indicated many years ago, most psychologists “skirt” the problem of determinism, for this issue serves only as consternation to these psychologists. Allport, 1955, pp. 82-83) This seems to still be the case with both professional psychologists and coaches. They both customarily proceeds within the framework of gentle determinism—focusing on ways they can help to “determine” (influence) the behavior of their clients. While most professional coaches don’t consider themselves to be strict determinists (and behaviorists)—the assumptions they make and strategies they engage tend to be aligned with this perspective.

Most professional psychologists and coaches agree with Russell. They believe that effective practice necessitates determinism — at least an operational determinism. Thus, a discussion of the determinism/free-will argument would be viewed by some psychologists and coaches as threatening, by others as irrelevant. The question of determinism and free-will has become more difficult to avoid, however, within the last few years, numerous recent occurrences have converged to make the reentry of the question imperative:

With the introduction of quantum physics into the mainstream of the physical sciences comes the startling recognition that, at the present time, there is a lack of causality in the subatomic realm. Subatomic particles seem to be moving in a random fashion (e.g. Willims, 1980).

Psychologists and coaches have taken new interest in values and the dynamics of choice—often encouraged by the work being done in the field of behavior economics (e.g. Kahneman, 2011).

With its focus on free-will, existentialism pervaded psychology as well as philosophy and literature during the last decades of the 20th Century and continues to have a lingering influence (especially in Europe) among both psychologists and coaches during the 21st Century—especially as related to the role of narrative in therapy (and coaching (e.g. Drake, 2008).

There is a widening appreciation of and application of the tools of critical philosophy (and philosophically oriented cognitive sciences), hence challenging philosophically naive notions such as are held by many deterministic psychologists (e.g., Hofstadter, 2008).

Gestalt psychologists and cognitive theorists aided by the neuroscientists have postulated internal and “conscious” processes of determination and reason (e.g.g Dennett,1991; Damasio, 2021) and

Many highly respected, psychologists of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Century (e.g. George Kelly, Gordon Allport, Jerome Bruner, Chris Argyris, Donald Schon) constructed philosophically­ oriented theories and stressed analysis and clarification of psychological terminology, assumptions, and hypotheses.