UCR and FSU

According to the preview of the new Gourmet Report here, the two best departments for studying philosophy of action are UC Riverside and Florida State.  Congrats to those in these departments for this recognition.

Counting Heads

This will be the first of two posts inspired by my recent perusal of Peter van Inwagen’s article “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will” (forthcoming in The Journal of Ethics). The next post will be more substantive. This one is just for kicks. It also resurrects a discussion started by Neil Levy in the post “How many battalions does incompatibilism have?”

Van Inwagen suggests a “sociological point. Before the Consequence Argument was well known…, almost all philosophers who had a view on the matter were compatibilists. It’s probably still true that most philosophers are compatibilists. But it’s also true that the majority of philosophers who have a specialist’s knowledge of the ins and outs of the free-will problem are incompatibilists. And this change is due entirely to the power, the power to convince, the power to move the intellect, of the Consequence Argument” (p. 15 of version posted at van Inwagen’s homepage).

Now, I agree entirely that the Consequence Argument is a powerful argument that compatibilists need to address, and that it isn’t easy to show what, if anything, is wrong with it (my own attempt remains, perhaps deservedly, unpublished; my personal favorite response is John Perry’s “Compatibilist Options,” because it nicely encapsulates options compatibilists have offered over the years, including Lewis’, which van Inwagen, in his article, praises for talking about the problem of free will in the right way).

But I wonder whether van Inwagen’s sociological claim is accurate and whether the Consequence Argument has in fact convinced many people who were or would otherwise be compatibilists to become incompatibilists. The latter question would be very hard to gauge. The former is at least approachable.

Here’s how I have approached it. I considered everyone I could find who has written articles or books on the free will problem since about 1960 and started listing them (in no particular order). Obviously, I have left off people (I apologize to anyone I forgot!) and I ask others to fill in these lacunae (including confirming whether I have situated people below correctly or arguing about whether I am right to put them where I do). I think everyone I include has at least tried to attain and demonstrate a “specialist’s knowledge of the ins and outs of the free-will problem” (though van Inwagen may disagree since he seems to define the problem in a particular way—see post to come). Some, such as the last few compatibilists mentioned, may have published less on the topic than others, but I still take them to have a specialist’s knowledge (I’m sure I’m neglecting others who have a specialist’s knowledge but haven’t published much). If you disagree about anyone having the knowledge to be included on the list, I think it would be better not to make that claim publicly here at the blog (I suppose you might say something like “well, there are 4 compatibilists I think should not be counted but just 1 incompatibilist…”). I also did not list people who (to my knowledge) are untenured faculty or grad students (such as myself, Vargas, Sommers, Werking, etc.), on the assumption that we are still working to attain specialist’s knowledge! I suspect if we added these people, the proportions would remain similar.

(If nothing else, this exercise may help us come up with a near exhaustive list of the people who specialize in free will.)

Compatibilists

David Lewis, John Perry, Bill Lycan, Harry Frankfurt, Daniel Dennett, Michael Bratman, Peter Strawson, Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, Hilary Bok, Michael McKenna, Thomas Scanlon, Bernard Berofsky, Gerald Dworkin, Bruce Waller, Jay Wallace, Dana Nelkin, Joe Campbell, Thomas Kapitan, Keith Lehrer, Paul Russell, David Sanford, Phillip Pettit, Michael Smith, Terry Horgan, David Velleman
I think they count as compatibilists but please confirm: Michael Slote? Kadri Vihvelin? Kai Nielson? David Hunt? Paul Benson? Susan Buss? Ish Haji? David Zimmerman? Gideon Yaffe? Nomy Arpaly? Robert Audi? Mark Ravizza?

John Fischer? Tricky case but I think he should count as a compatibilist.
Al Mele?? (come on, Al, come out of the agnostic camp, though as far as I can tell, if you remain there, you get to be on a list all by yourself!)

Incompatibilists

Peter Van Inwagen, Fritz Warfield, Tim O’Connor, David Widerker, Randy Clarke, Carl Ginet, Robert Kane, Laura Ekstrom, David Wiggins, William Rowe, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Taylor,
and (the incompatibilist skeptics) Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson, Saul Smilansky, Richard Double, Ted Honderich, Thomas Nagel
Is Eleanor Stump an incompatibilist?

Now, if I’m right about those marked with ?, it’s 38 compatibilists (not counting Fischer or Mele) to 19 incompatibilists. This a 66%-33% (or 2 to 1) ratio is just the way I predicted (and hoped) it would turn out for reasons I can share later.  Despite van Inwagen’s claim that among philosophers in general compatibilism is more common than among specialists, I suspect that the ratio is about 2 to 1 compatibilist to incompatibilist among professional philosophers, too (but I’m not about to try to confirm that empirically!).

In the meantime, please correct my list—perhaps it will move closer to 50-50—I’m open to empirical disconfirmation.)

Let me add, just in case someone misconstrues me, I am not arguing that this head count offers evidence for any philosophical position. Rather, it is (potentially) interesting information. I can imagine some interesting claims one might make with reference to this information, but I won’t make any (yet)—except that, so far, it looks as though van Inwagen’s “sociological point” does not seem to be accurate.

Back with another one of those blog-rocking posts

Now that the magnificent Mele melee has subsided a bit, we can announce #3 in the ongoing Garden of Forking Paths Unstoppable Online Reading Group of Excellence!

For your reading pleasure and conversating delight, next month we will discuss a paper by Shaun Nichols that dares to ask that forbidden question:

"How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate?"

Through the arcane power of the internets, the delight that can only be found in Nichols' paper is available here:

http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/mrvargas/GFP/gfprg.html

As initial commentator, John M. Doris — the world-famous sensei of psychology and philosophy— will show us The Way of The Lurking Tiger.

The opening bell will sound around November 13th.
Your comments will follow soon after.
While you are at it, go grab a psychologist and make him or her comment, too.
Just do it.

Philosophical Topics

And speaking of new work, a new double-issue of Philosophical Topics (Vol. 32) is now out, edited by John Fischer.  Check out the table of contents -- there's enough there to keep you reading for quite a while.  Enjoy!

New Work

A couple of things to draw to the attention of gardeners:

A study conducted at my (Australian) university found that subjects gave much shorter sentences to (real) criminals if they had detailed knowledge about the offender. This seems to be in line with the intuitions pumped by Watson's paper on Robert Harris. It's good to have empirical confirmation (for once) that our intuitions are shared. One caveat: though the average sentence members of the public wish to impose is very much shortened by knowledge of the offender, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. Media report here (the study itself is as yet unpublished).

Despite what you might think from JFP, free will is flourishing in the journals, with recent and forthcoming papers in many of the best. I won't bother pointing out isolated papers. But the latest issue of the Journal of Ethics definitely rates a mention. It's entirely devoted to John Fischer's work.

Breaking News: Free Will more Important than Skepticism in M/E

Brian Leiter has recently posted a preview of some of the new Philosophical Gourmet report.  One interesting part of this data is the overall rankings he gives across 'metaphysics and epistemology' as a whole.

Brian Weatherson takes issue with this way of ranking departments here and here.  One of his worries about the stats Leiter posts is this:

[T]here is a striking bias here in favour of people who work across categories. If someone writes a great book on the metaphysics of free will, and how this relates to the problem of evil, that will improve their department’s ranking (perhaps considerably) on three of the seven rankings that go into this stat. But if someone writes a great book on scepticism, that only impacts the epistemology ranking, or one-seventh of the stat. But it is absurd that work on the metaphysics of free will should be three times [emphasis in original] as important to metaphysics and epistemology as work on scepticism.

If I could be certain that people would note that I was being facetious, I'd say that this isn't absurd at all, and that this is exactly what once should expect.  But I won't (since I obviously don't mean it).

A Philosopher's Turn

A philosopher sounds off in the MyTurn section of the most recent issue of Newsweek.  Check it out!

JFP and Agency

As you are probably already aware, the new Jobs for Philosophers is now online at the APA website.  A completely amateurish and unoffical search of the document (conducted by yours truly) brings out the following information:

Number of instances of the phrase 'free will' = 0
Number of instances of the phrase 'freedom' = 11 (but none use it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'free' = 2(but none use it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral responsibility' = 0
Number of instances of the phrase 'responsibility' = 2 (but neither uses it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'agency' = 3 (one uses it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'action' = 108 (all prefaced by the word 'affirmative')

Okay now for more interesting results:

Number of instances of the phrase 'ethics' = 267 (almost all in a sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'metaphysics' = 33
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral' = 16
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral psychology' = 0

For those of you on the market, happy hunting!

Comment Spam

In an ongoing effort to fight the weeds that occasionally pop up here in the Garden (that's Garden-speak for comment spam), I have closed comments on all archived posts.  The posts that appear on the main page will all still be open for comments, though.  If for some reason you find yourself wanting to comment on an archived thread, just drop me an email and I'll open the comments again for you so you can contribute. 

Happy Friday the 13th!