Experimental Philosophy on Free Will and Determinism

<p>In the debate over whether free will is compatible with determinism most philosophers on both sides think that folk intuitions are a constraint on philosophical theorising. Most also think that the same criteria are required for free will in all cases. But recent attempts to empirically study folk intuitions about free will appear to show that these two positions cannot be jointly maintained. That is because folk intuitions about free will appear to represent compatibilist and incompatibilist criteria for free will in different cases. In response to this some philosophers have run new studies to demonstrate problems with older ones and undermine their results. One such study has been claimed to show that some participants mistakenly inferred that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions given determinism. In this thesis I argue that the questions about causation that were used in this study were too ambiguous to show this. My central point is that when considering the causal history of an action we tend to privilege the earlier causes over later ones. When participants responded that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions they may have meant that there were earlier conditions that caused the agent‘s mental states which then caused their actions. This would show that the participants had made the correct inference that given determinism the causal histories of an agent‘s actions extend back in time to events outside of the agent‘s mind. Thus the problem of the apparent mismatch between folk intuitions and philosophical theories of free will remains. I also suggest that the results of these studies also appear to demonstrate a greater level of disagreement among folk intuitions about the same cases than philosophers seem to expect. This raises questions about whether the same theory of free will has to apply to everyone, and if so, whether folk intuitions support any such theory. In chapter one I begin by briefly describing the free will debate and the role that folk intuitions usually play within it. I describe some debate over the usefulness of folk intuitions in philosophy, and make some small contributions on behalf of their usefulness. I describe and defend the recent movement towards attempting to empirically study folk intuitions on philosophical issues. In chapter two I describe the empirical studies that seem to show that folk intuitions about free will represent compatibilist criteria in some cases and incompatibilist criteria in others. I suggest that they also seem to show that when considering the same case some folk have compatibilist intuitions and some have incompatibilist intuitions. I raise some questions about the implications of rejecting the assumption, which most philosophers seem to make, that people generally have the same intuitions about the same cases. In chapter three I present the study that is claimed to show that participants in the earlier studies were confused, and thus that they did not really have incompatibilist intuitions. I present my arguments against it and conclude that for now the original interpretation of those studies stands, along with the problems it raises.</p>

Experimental Philosophy on Free Will and Determinism

<p>In the debate over whether free will is compatible with determinism most philosophers on both sides think that folk intuitions are a constraint on philosophical theorising. Most also think that the same criteria are required for free will in all cases. But recent attempts to empirically study folk intuitions about free will appear to show that these two positions cannot be jointly maintained. That is because folk intuitions about free will appear to represent compatibilist and incompatibilist criteria for free will in different cases. In response to this some philosophers have run new studies to demonstrate problems with older ones and undermine their results. One such study has been claimed to show that some participants mistakenly inferred that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions given determinism. In this thesis I argue that the questions about causation that were used in this study were too ambiguous to show this. My central point is that when considering the causal history of an action we tend to privilege the earlier causes over later ones. When participants responded that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions they may have meant that there were earlier conditions that caused the agent‘s mental states which then caused their actions. This would show that the participants had made the correct inference that given determinism the causal histories of an agent‘s actions extend back in time to events outside of the agent‘s mind. Thus the problem of the apparent mismatch between folk intuitions and philosophical theories of free will remains. I also suggest that the results of these studies also appear to demonstrate a greater level of disagreement among folk intuitions about the same cases than philosophers seem to expect. This raises questions about whether the same theory of free will has to apply to everyone, and if so, whether folk intuitions support any such theory. In chapter one I begin by briefly describing the free will debate and the role that folk intuitions usually play within it. I describe some debate over the usefulness of folk intuitions in philosophy, and make some small contributions on behalf of their usefulness. I describe and defend the recent movement towards attempting to empirically study folk intuitions on philosophical issues. In chapter two I describe the empirical studies that seem to show that folk intuitions about free will represent compatibilist criteria in some cases and incompatibilist criteria in others. I suggest that they also seem to show that when considering the same case some folk have compatibilist intuitions and some have incompatibilist intuitions. I raise some questions about the implications of rejecting the assumption, which most philosophers seem to make, that people generally have the same intuitions about the same cases. In chapter three I present the study that is claimed to show that participants in the earlier studies were confused, and thus that they did not really have incompatibilist intuitions. I present my arguments against it and conclude that for now the original interpretation of those studies stands, along with the problems it raises.</p>

Pluralistic Attitude-Explanation and the Mechanisms of Intentional Action

According to the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), genuine actions are individuated by their causal history. Actions are bodily movements that are causally explained by citing the agent’s reasons. Reasons are then explained as some combination of propositional attitudes—beliefs, desires, and/or intentions. The CTA is thus committed to realism about the attitudes. This chapter explores current models of decision-making from the mind sciences, and argues that it is far from obvious how to locate the propositional attitudes in the causal processes they describe. The outcome of the analysis is a proposal for pluralism: there are several ways one could attempt to map states like ‘intention’ onto decision-making processes, but none will fulfill all of the roles attributed to the attitudes by the CTA.

Who went fishing? Inferences from social evaluations

Humans have a remarkable ability to go beyond the observable. From seeing the current state of our shared kitchen, we can infer what happened and who did it. Prior work has shown how the physical state of the world licenses inferences about the causal history of events, and the agents that participated in these events. Here, we investigate a previously unstudied source of evidence about what happened: social evaluations. In our experiment, we present situations in which a group failed to optimally coordinate their actions. Participants learn how much each agent was blamed for the outcome, and their task is to make inferences about the situation, the agents' actions, as well as the agents' capabilities. We develop a computational model that accurately captures participants' inferences. The model assumes that people blame others by considering what they should have done, and what causal role their action played. By inverting this generative model of blame, people can figure out what happened.

False Consciousness for Liberals, Part I: Consent, Autonomy, and Adaptive Preferences

The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw (they are typically formed for reasons of the wrong kind) but that it's not clear that this flaw matters morally or politically. What matters is whether they suffer from an autonomy flaw. To answer this question, the author develops an account of autonomy failure, according to which a preference is nonautonomous if an injustice played an appropriate role in its causal history. The author then discusses the moral implications—and in an initial way, the political ones as well—of proclaiming a preference, or consent based on it, nonautonomous in this way.

Delusion

In a clinical context, delusions are symptoms of a number of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and dementia, manifesting as beliefs that are implausible and resistant to counter-evidence. In the philosophical literature, the nature of delusions (what they are) and their formation (what causes them) have been examined with increasing interest. Different arguments for and against delusions being regarded as beliefs have been put forward, and both the doxastic and the anti-doxastic camp capture some distinctive and puzzling features of delusions. The one-factor theory, the two-factor theory, and the prediction-error theory constitute distinct attempts to describe the causal mechanisms responsible for the formation of delusions and have implications for the management and treatment of delusions in clinical practice. The lively debates surrounding the nature and the causal history of delusions have also shed some light on standard issues in the philosophy of mind, such as what conditions a report needs to satisfy to be regarded as a belief report, and how experience and reasoning interact in generating of hypotheses that can then be accepted as beliefs.

Free Will and Open Alternatives

In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom (and moral responsibility) are motivated by a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her (rather complex) view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

This article looks at the philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at “intermediate” cosmic scales, which has rarely aroused philosophical interest so far. Being confronted with the attribution of antirealism by Ian Hacking because of its observational nature, astrophysics is equipped with a characteristic methodology that can cope with the missing possibility of direct interaction with most objects of research. In its attempt to understand the causal history of singular phenomena, it resembles the historical sciences, while the search for general causal relations with respect to classes of processes or objects can rely on the “cosmic laboratory”: the multitude of different phenomena and environments naturally provided by the universe. Furthermore, the epistemology of astrophysics is strongly based on the use of models and simulations and a complex treatment of large amounts of data.