As a result of these developments, professional psychologists and coaches have had to take a hard, critical look at their tacitly held deterministic assumptions. I wish to offer a roadmap regarding how this critical review might be engaged. Specifically, I offer four viewpoints on the issue of determinism and free will: (1) acceptance of a deterministic system, (2) acceptance of a system in which our behavior is a product of our own free will, (3) acceptance of a system in which at times our behavior is determined and at times free or in which we are determined or free depending upon the way our behavior is viewed, and ( 4) recognition of the essentially semantic nature of the argument.
Position One: Deterministic
This first stance forces us to think critically about our own thinking. We are required to explore that actual way in which we deliberate and make decisions. The deterministic participant in Williams (1980, p. 19) hypothetical dialogue puts it this way:
It is certainly true that when we deliberate in daily life we think we can choose differently from the way we actually choose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t deliberate. But thinking we can choose differently doesn’t show that we can actually choose differently. What make you think is the latter and not just the former that deliberation involves?
Psychologists enter the dialogue when this challenge is posed regarding how we actually think. Furthermore, the outcome of this challenge holds major implications for those engaged in professional coaching. After all, professional coaches are involved in providing assistance to their clients when making important life and work-related decisions. Is this assistance actually nothing more than a sham? Have decisions already been made prior to (or at least independent of) the coach’s intervention? We turn, therefore, at this point to perspectives offered by psychologists.
Helmholtz, Pavlov and Thorndike
While his work preceded the independent emergence of psychology as a “science,” Hermann von Helmholtz typified the nineteenth century movement of the exact sciences away from a mind-body dualism and towards a deterministic monism. Helmholtz felt that mind must be accessible to empirical observation if psychology and the other fields dealing with humankind’s behavior are to leave the orbit of speculative philosophy and be placed “squarely within the orbit of ordinary natural — that is, physical law, and of mind within the scope of the law of life.” (Murphy, 1949, p. 252)
The two prominent figures in the early years of psychology were, quite significantly, both strong determinists. Pavlov was a consist dialectic-materialist utilizing the principal of determinism. (Shustin, 1951) Adopting a somewhat different stance, Thorndike noted that:
. . . man makes the world a better home for man and himself a more successful dweller in it by discovering its regular unchangeable modes of action. He can determine the fate of the world and his own best not by prayers or threats, but by treating it and himself by the method of science as phenomena, determined, as far as he can see, by their past history. . . . Every regularity or law that science can discover in the consequences of events will be a step toward the only freedom that is of the slightest use to man and an aid in the good life. (Thorndike, 1949, pp. 347-348)
The scientist’s major task, according to Thorndike, is to discover “causal” sequences and postulate laws concerning these sequences.
Both Pavlov and Thorndike felt that by studying the behavior of animals in highly controlled laboratory situations they might be able to formulate basic behavior laws which apply to all animals, including humans. Pavlov did so, at least partially, in an attempt to justify a particular ideological stance, Thorndike did so in a pragmatic effort to gain control and prediction.
