"We cannot escape the presupposition of free will"

At least, so says John Searle in a recent interview.  And science just makes it more mysterious.

But at least he doesn't think it's bad that we Gardeners disagree with each other:  "I don't worry too much about the fact that philosophers disagree."

(HT to Matthew Mullins)

Comments

[tnadelhoffer]

Does this mean we are unfree to consider ourselves unfree?

[John Fischer]

In his new book with Columbia U press on these subjects, Searle says:

"Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation taht calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom. Suppose you are given a choice in a restaurant between steak and veal. The waiter asks you "and sir, which would you prefer, the steak or the veal?' You cannot say to the waiter, 'Look, I am a determinist. I will just wait and see what I order because I know that my order is determined.' The refusal, i.e. the conscious, intentional speech act of refusing to place an order, is only intelligible to you if you understand it as an exercise of your own free will."

This is part of his argument that we cannot avoid the presupposition of free will. But various questions spring to mind. Why do we need to presuppose "freedom" or "free will" in the sense that involves genuine metaphysical access to alternative possibilities? Why not presuppose that, whatever we do, we will act freely?

Also: why can't we understand one's decision as an intentional action, even if it is not free? Can't we understand and explain unfree actions, when they are "deliberate and intentional"?

[Eddy Nahmias]

There was some discussion of Searle's views at Brains:
http://philosophyofbrains.com/2007/01/28/free-will-from-neurobiology.aspx#Comment

Also, I posted a reference to Searle's interview at New Scientist in the wrong thread. It was meant to be in the van Inwagen-Fischer thread, because the interview has the header:

"For years, the frustrating lack of progress on the problem of free will has been a scandal in philosophy."

And I pointed out that if that's a scandal, then what should we say about the fact that we can't even agree about what progress would look like!

You need a subscription for the full article but can read the first paragraph here:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19325861.700-tackling-the-pro

[Tamler Sommers]

Isn't this a clear case of confusing determinism and fatalism? Only a fatalist says 'it doesn't matter what I decide, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens.' Determinists recognize that their deliberations form part of the determinstic process that leads to the action. Why can't we see the french fries decision as an unfree determined act that, as John (Fischer) says, is nevertheless intentional and deliberate?

[Alan]

To me, Searle's quote is even worse than John or Tamler characterizes--it not only may make a presumptive mistake about what freedom is or reflect a psychological fatalistic attitude ungrounded in any fact about the situation at hand--it separates the diner into two separate entities, either two multiple personalities, one of whom makes the aforementioned errors in judging the other, or it gives the diner an uber-self that (deterministically) metathinks on its lower functional self. The former is a pathology of selfhood, and the latter an implausible analysis of how ordinary functional thinking works.

[Alan]

Oh--I should have finished with this: putting it in the way he did, Searle sets determinists up as straw *men*, not the Strawson *man* they usually employ.

[Randy Clarke]

OK, a near defense of what Searle says. One doesn't HAVE to believe, when one deliberates about whether to A or not, that one can A and one can refrain from A-ing. But one DOES generally presume such things when one engages in such deliberation. Or so it seems to me. In other words, what John Fischer has aptly described as a view of one's future as a garden of forking paths is a view one commonly takes, especially when engaged in practical deliberation. Whether or not one can, on occasion, deliberate while repudiating that view, I don't think it is so easy to always do so.

Note that I don't claim that what we commonly presume is explicitly about indeterminism--it's explicitly about ability. Whether that ability is compatible with determinism or not is another matter.

[Fritz Warfield]

I think Randy has this mostly right. Searle is expressing his commitment to the "sense of freedom" or "deliberation requires belief-in-ability" thesis that is widely shared, though of course contentious.

Even if one can sometimes deliberate while rejecting that deliberation requires this sense of freedom, there is the ongoing debate over one can *consistently* do this. That debate seems to turn on, among issues, the Taylor/van Inwagen claim that tacit belief in ability is present when one deliberates, even if one explicitly rejects that one is free.

Randy is certainly correct that this issue (in reality and in Searle's view) is about the relation between deliberation and belief in ability: it's prior to any particular compatibilist or incompatibilist analysis of ability.

Searle does say some odd things about free will from time to time, but I don't think that what he says about deliberation and the sense of freedom is one of them.

[Tamler Sommers]

That's one of way of looking at it, I guess. In my eyes, he's setting up a false dichotomy: 'presupposing 'our own freedom' or 'just waiting to see what I ordered because the choice is determined' (i.e. fatalism).

No one, except maybe Jacques the Fatalist, waits to see what they ordered because the choice is determined. So there must be a third option, something skeptics about free will at least THINK they're doing when they order french fries.

["Q" the Enchanter]

I think Searle's intuition about selfhood and freedom is at most irresistable only as a matter of second-order reflection. The *practice* of choosing doesn't necessarily involve or presuppose the concept "I," certainly not the concept "freedom." Arguably, it's only when I start to try to make sense of what's going on when "I'm making a choice" that I might run into trouble.

Searle's restaurant example (that John Fischer quotes) describes not deliberation but linguistic social interaction. It's a highly contrained example, in which one is specifically asked to provide a second-order report of the results of one's own deliberation. These conditions hardly constitute the general case (i.e., "any situation that calls for voluntary action").

[John Fischer]

By the way, one shouldn't eat veal anyway--for ethical reasons. So the decision is simple.

Hm. So many issues arise; sorry to plug my own work, but I do talk at more length about some of these issues in my paper, "Free Will and Moral Responsibility," which is reprinted in MY WAY: ESSAYS ON MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Here are a few quick further thoughts. What exactly is the experience of "the gap"? Of course, it does not follow from not experiencing one's behavior as causally determined that one experiences it as not causally determined. Additionally, from the mere fact that I have the experience in certain contexts of not having to choose or behave in a specific way--of not being compelled--does not entail that I have the experience of a causal gap or causal indeterminism. Does it?

[Charles Edwards]

What is the difference between "will" and "free will"? What is meant by the phrase "will of my own"? I know the loose arguments that engage ideas like "must", or "implies" along with words like "we" etc. Yet, the fundamental vocabulary is ignored, while huge assumptions and other glosses that rely upon it reign unchecked. Consider the idea that "the universe consists of matter and systems defined as causal relations" expressed in the John Searle's interview. If you define it that way, then it must be that way. The trouble is, "it" is the definition, and it is then used to guide where and how we look. When any of us (whatever that is) perceive (whatever that is) a universe (whatever that is) that is not made of matter (whatever that is), current science makes a foot stomp to prevent further investigation along those paths. It doesn't mean those paths don't exist, or can't be scientifically investigated, it means the current call of science is along a different path, calling for different methods. Their belief and faith in their path informs us of their reasons, we all know that. None the less a technique often employed by science, that implies an important but largely glossed argument, is their failure to define personal pronouns. They use those words ("we", "I", "us" etc.,) even while admitting they don't know what those words mean. In fact, it’s easy to make a scientist angry by pointing this out. They’re saying, "I don't know what I'm talking about, but we have an enormous amount of knowledge." Their failure to know what or who "we" are puts Science in the midst of an identity crisis. Not only do they not know who they are or even that they are, but they think they are caused by something else. Consider the words in this thought experiment: I can imagine a small point of light, I can make it brighter, and I can make it dimmer until it goes out. If a scientists (who is other than me) rigged up a machine that could make this same light (mutatis mutandis) grow brighter and dimmer, by definition, wouldn't it be the scientist doing that and not me?
Some real fun begins with the denial/acceptance that we both have access to the same light.

[Andrei Buckareff]

I wonder if, in making his claim about the inescapability of the presupposition of free will, Searle was thinking along the lines of the phenomenon that Velleman discusses in his too often ignored essay, "Epistemic Freedom"? We feel metaphysically free, and this feeling of freedom is something that we cannot escape in our practical deliberation and deciding, but we must take care not to confuse this epistemic freedom with actually having the kind of freedom we feel like we have. I think that the claim Velleman defends in his essay is close to what Randy was getting at in his comments.

[Tom Clark]

Tamler says: So there must be a third option, something skeptics about free will at least THINK they're doing when they order french fries.

What I think I'm doing is embodying a likely deterministic choice-making process that's triggered by going to a restaurant. In a sense I'm waiting for determinism to happen, in that I don't have to worry about the process starting up. On the other hand, I don't sit back and wait for something outside me to happen, since I'm the process. The openness of the choice situation is simply not knowing how the process will turn out.

["Q" the Enchanter]

I agree with Tom. I think of "making a choice" as in a sense being witness to my own willing while a "participant attitude" is sort of papered over it.

And Tamler, given the topic, shouldn't we call them *Freedom* Fries?

[Joe]

In relation to Fritz's comments, check out "The Sense of Freedom" by Dana Nelkin, in Campbell et. al. (eds.) Freedom and Determinism (MIT Press, 2004). Nelkin argues that deliberation requires a sense that the agent is free but does not require a belief in indeterminism, as Searle suggests. (The paper is also available on Honderich's website -- though likely I shouldn't be telling you this!)

Following Andrei’s remarks, I would say that deliberation clearly requires ignorance about one's future actions. You cannot KNOW that you are going to eat freedom fries while you are still deliberating about whether or not to do so. Since determinism does not entail predictability, though, this fact has little to do with determinism.

Yet I think that there is more to it: a positive attitude not just mere ignorance. Perhaps a belief in abilities of some kind or ‘a garden of forking paths,’ as Randy suggests. I’m not at all saying that this feeling can establish that we have free will but it does indicate that, at least when we’re deliberating, we believe that we have it.

[Randy Clarke]

Joe,

There are several good examples apparently showing that one CAN deliberate while having a justified belief about what one will do. I describe some such examples in an old paper in PPQ, and there I cite some other papers with other such examples. I think they're convincing.

Andre,

It's been awhile since I read the Velleman paper, but I think his "epistemic openness" is different from the ability to act. He takes (or did take, when he wrote that paper) intentions to be beliefs of a certain sort, and the idea is (I think) that sometimes one may permissibly form such a belief even though prior to doing so one lacks adequate evidence for its truth, so long as one reasonably expects that the belief, if formed, will be self-fulfilling. Then, while deliberating, one may have plural (epistemic) permissibility concerning which belief one forms about what one is going to do. But this kind of openness, I think he says, isn't an ability to act. In fact, I think he says it is this epistemic openness that is routinely mistaken by us for an ability to act. (I could be misremembering some of this.)

John,

I thoroughly agree about veal.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Well, while we're all plugging papers (and I agree Velleman's, Clarke's, and Nelkin's papers are really helpful), I'll plug my own (with Thomas Nadelhoffer, Stephen Morris, and Jason Turner) on "The Phenomenology of Free Will." We discuss how philosophers use claims about the phenomenology of deliberation and decision-making to support their theories, and then we discuss what sort of empirical evidence would be needed and could be marshalled to support these phenomenological claims (which the philosophers support only with their own experiences or anecdotal evidence from others). We discuss the (little) relevant work in psychology and an attempt we made at getting some evidence.

A penultimate draft of the paper is at my website here:
http://www2.gsu.edu/%7Ewwwphl/philosophy/faculty/nahmias/papers/Phenomenology_of_Free_Will.pdf

[Eddy Nahmias]

Nothing worse than a failed self-plug. The blog gets messed up with long web addresses, so if you are so inclined, go to:
http://www2.gsu.edu/%7Ewwwphl/philosophy/faculty/nahmias
and the Phenomenology of Free Will Paper is one of the first papers linked in the text.

[Joe]

Randy,

Here is a situation I can imagine. I'm headed for McDonald's and, knowing my weakness for their fries, I formulate the justified belief that I'm going to eat freedom fries when I get there. Once there I wonder whether or not it is a good thing for me to do so, deliberate about the matter, and eventually succumb to the temptation. But I don't see how the process of deliberation wouldn't create defeaters for my belief that I'm going to eat freedom fries. My belief that I am deliberating about the matter, for instance, might not be enough to make me deny that I'm going to eat the fries but it would seem to give rise to some significant level of doubt. I can’t see how I wouldn’t, while genuinely deliberating about the matter, come to believe that I might not eat them.

Admittedly, this is very abstract. I'll have a look at your examples and see what I think. Thanks for the reference!

[Andrei Buckareff]

Randy,

I think you are mostly right about Velleman. I don't recall his doxastic theory of intention playing much if any role in what he says about epistemic freedom (of course I have only read the PPQ version of the paper, perhaps his account of intentions plays a role in his theory of epistemic freedom in the chapter in Practical Reflection). Otherwise, I think you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that the feeling of metaphysical freedom which is just (a proper) part of epistemic freedom is mistaken by agents as an actual ability to do either A or ~A. Hence my belief that what Velleman was up to in his paper approximates what you were describing.

John and Randy,

I'm with you about veal. But, being a vegan, I feel that way about eating any animal :-)

-A.

[Andrei Buckareff]

Randy,

I peaked at the paper just now. It looks like Velleman's views on intention are playing some role in his account of epistemic freedom. Also, in the intro to The Possibility of Practical Reason he makes the connection more explicit.

-A.

[Andrei Buckareff]

I meant 'peeked' not 'peaked'.

[Tamler Sommers]

Imagine that there are only two choices for the entre: veal and a vegatable pasta dish. The waiter comes to you and asks for your order. You know that you would never order veal (for ethical reasons) and so you order the pasta. Here it seems like your character makes it such that you aren't free to order the veal. But you certainly aren't 'waiting to see' yourself order the pasta. You're ordering it. And it seems like you're in no way presupposing your freedom to do otherwise.

Is this such a fundamentally different experience from one where you have to deliberate about the order? As Tom said, perhaps the experiences are only different in that in the latter case you don't know what you're going to order. But you're still fully aware that your deliberations are going to determine your order, whatever it turns out to be.

[John K. Alexander]

This has been a very interesting thread, but I am left wondering what the real issue is. Why do we think that we possess something called a ‘will?’ Why won’t the linguistic practices regarding intentionality, praise, and blame that we have developed over time function to answer relevant questions regarding why someone acted as she did without having to reference some mysterious ontological entity?

Let us use an example from this thread, someone deciding to order beef or veal. Let us presume that she orders veal. Why is this even related to questions of whether the will is free, or not, or whatever? How does this question of the will and its status naturally arise? We might be surprised that she orders veal especially if we know that she loves beef, has always order beef in the past when we are out with her, and that she has never had veal. But surprise does not lead to the ontological issue of whether she is utilizing some mysterious thing called her ‘will.’ It does lead us naturally to ask her why she made such a surprising choice. We ask her for a supporting reason that explains why she chose as she did. If she provides us with a reason, “I have wanted to try veal because others like it and I want to see what it is that they like and anyway I had beef last night so I want something different,” provides us with what we are looking for, a supporting reason that explains and justifies her action. In practice, we do not naturally leap to questions of whether a ‘will’ is involved only whether reason is involved. To ask whether a reason is free, or determined, or something else, does not seem to me to make much sense. A reason is either warranted or not, questions associated with freedom of will to not pertain.

If our linguistic practices enable us to understand decision-making, which they seem to do fairly well, why do we need to assert that there is something beyond these practices that is needed to ‘fully’ understand why a person decided as she did? I have been puzzled by this question for a few decades now, what would change in our linguistic practices of assigning intentionality, praise, and/or blame, if we thought that the ontological entities that we thought made up our world are not as we thought they were? What does the ‘will’ add to the practices we have that seem to work reasonably well without reference to a ‘will?’

[Randy Clarke]

Joe,

You might be right. But consider: believing that I'll A isn't itself intending to A. There's more to do to get to intending. And I can believe that I'll A without yet believing that I have best, or ever good, reason to A. So why couldn't I still deliberate? Maybe the idea is that if I'm still considering whether to NOT A, I can't believe I'll A. But why not?

[Andrei Buckareff]

Tamler,

I think you are right about the 'veal-vegetable' scenario. I agree my action is in fact no less under my control if I form the intention to get the vegetable dish, knowing full well that I cannot do otherwise. However, if we suppose that I am out for Indian food and deliberating about whether to have a dosa or chana masala, while my deliberative activity may be determined, it seems that I still deliberate under the idea (illusion) of being free to decide to get either dish. My epistemic situation is not such that I have any reason to believe that I will form an intention to get either dish. The phenomenology of my mental activity in the Indian food scenario seems quite different than in the scenario where I have no genuine options. While my behavior is still intentional when I order the vegetables, I expect I will feel somehow less in control when options have been so reduced. (But insofar as I have a sense of being in control to the extent that I can form the intention to eat the vegetables, I feel freer than if I were coerced.)

I should note that I am not sure this directly addresses Searle's point (I hope it does). Moreover, I for one do not want to move from how it feels to act to a claim about the metaphysics of free agency.

[Cihan Baran]

How nice our garden is blossoming with comments! I know this thread has been mostly about the phenomenology of free will, but I just want to point out that the freedom to choose between veal and pasta may not be the most worthy freedom!

Serendipitously, Thomas Nagel also touched on the subject of choosing a meal:

With respect to decision and action, the strategy of objective tolerance is appropriate in areas where I do not aspire to the highest degree of self-command. When I choose from a menu I am interested only in opening myself to the play of inclinations and appetites, in order to see what I most feel like having (providing it’s a cheap restaurant and I’m not on a diet). I am content here to be guided by my strongest appetite, without fear that from a more detached perspective it might appear that one of the weaker ones should really be preferred.

In fact I don’t know what it would mean to wonder whether, sub specie aeternitatis, wanting a chicken salad sandwich was perhaps really preferable as a ground for action to wanting a salami sandwich. Nothing happens when I put myself outside of these desires and contemplate the choice: it can be made only from an internal perspective, for the preferences are neither undermined nor endorsed from an external one. Perhaps there could be some objective endorsement of the satisfaction of the preferences without endorsement of the preferences themselves. But even this principle of prima facie hedonism seems superfluous until I am faced with the problem of weighing these preferences against other motives and values.

[John Fischer]

So, Eddy, you didn't find MY (self-plugged) article helpful??

Ha! Just kidding (sort of). This reminds me of that great Jewish mother joke. A Jewish mother gives her son two neckties for his birthday. Next time he visits her, he wears one of them. Disappointed, she asks: "So, you don't like the other tie??"

Well, it kind of fits (sort of).

I'm giving a free will talk at Davidson College Thursday--any Gardeners around?

["Q" the Enchanter]

Strange in a discussion about the relation between free will and responsibility that though there's been much talk about ordering dinner, not a word has been said about dessert.

[Charles Edwards]

There's not much discussion about dessert because it's commonly believed dessert isn't a choice, you have to order it; whereas main courses are easily skipped entirely.

[Joe]

Randy,

You write: "I can believe that I'll A without yet believing that I have best, or ever good, reason to A. So why couldn't I still deliberate? Maybe the idea is that if I'm still considering whether to NOT A, I can't believe I'll A. But why not?"

I admit that I might be able to believe that I'll A while deliberating about whether or not to A. What I deny is that I can know that I'll A while I'm deliberating. If I'm deliberating, then I presumably believe that I might not A; this seems to raise some doubt about whether or not I'll A. Maybe not enough doubt to undermine the belief that I'll A but enough to defeat my knowledge that I'll A.

[Tamler Sommers]

Cihan's right, it's funny to think that only months ago most of the posts and comments were about how no one was posting or commenting.

Andrei,

I pretty much agree with you. That illusion (if it is one) is often present for me too. When there's a tough choice in front of me, especially a moral one, I often believe that there are two genuine alternatives and that I am free in a pretty radical sense to choose either one. What I object to in Searle's description is (a) the idea that I HAVE to presuppose this (because I often don't, especially when the choice is not morally charged), and (b) the notion that not presupposing our freedom means that we 'wait for the choice to happen,' as if we're not aware that conscious deliberation plays a part in determining the choice.

And I certainly agree that even if this is a part of our subjective experience (some, most, or all of the time) it doesn't entail any metaphysical truths about whether we have 'contra-causal' free will.

I showed that passage to my students with some interesting results. A few of them said that when they had a long time to make a decision, they did not presuppose their freedom. When they had all the time they needed, they felt that the could engage in the deliberation knowing full well that only one alternative is 'truly' available (although you don't know which option that is). It's only in those quick decisions that they tended to suppose that there were two genuine alternatives and that they ('they'?) were free to choose either one.

[John K. Alexander]

Tamler

I am not clear on what you are claiming here.

You wrote regarding your students: It's only in those quick decisions that they tended to suppose that there were two genuine alternatives and that they ('they'?) were free to choose either one.

Are you suggesting that the alternatives have equal outcomes so that there is no relevant difference between choosing one over the other, or are you suggesting that because of the shorten time wherein a decision must be made that 'Free-will" somehow substitutes for deliberation by providing short-cuts for making decisions that more often then not result in the correct decision being made?

[Tamler Sommers]

John,

I'm not all that sure either. I think it's something like this. When we have all the time in the world, it's easier to deliberate and at the same time believe that there is only one genuine option available (although we don't know what it is), and that our deliberations will eventually lead us to it. We don't need to imagine that there's anything over and above our deliberation. When the pressure's on, we 'feel' the two options more, if that makes any sense, and we're no longer certain that deliberation is sufficient to determine which option we take. So maybe in this situation (as you suggest) we imagine a 'self' to cut the deliberation short and make the choice. Not that the deliberation doesn't matter, it does, but we feel like something else has take all those reasons inclining us to act, and make one set of them effective. Of course, this is all off the top of my head (which must be pretty obvious...)

[Joe]

Tamler and Andrei,

There was something about your above exchange that has been bugging me for a few days now. Likely, I should just let it pass but here goes anyway.

For instance, Tamler writes (2/7): "Imagine that there are only two choices for the entree: veal and a vegetable pasta dish. The waiter comes to you and asks for your order. You know that you would never order veal (for ethical reasons) and so you order the pasta. Here it seems like your character makes it such that you aren't free to order the veal."

It is the last line that bugs me but Andrei seems to agree with it (2/7, 12:30).

Andrei’s ordering pasta instead of veal strikes me as a paradigm of free action. After all, he has a spectrum of deeply held reasons for not eating veal, and these reasons were built over years of research and reflective contemplation. It is not as if his actions are similar, in this respect, to those of a man with compulsive hand washing disorder. For those who think that Andrei's actions are not free, I'd like to know what would constitute a free action.

Of course, I know how Tamler is likely to respond to this last challenge and it gets back to his argument for free will denialism, offered on another thread -- which I have yet to respond to! (I hope to do so later today!) I just wanted to go on record as saying that if one thinks that Andrei's ordering pasta over veal is not a free action than it is not surprising that one would also think that free actions are impossible, or extremely rare at the very least.

[John K. Alexander]

Tamler
Thanks for you comments.
Question: what do you mean by "genuine option"? If you mean that there is only one reasonable option available(that reason will explain and justify only one outcome) that will become clear if we have the time to do a complete dilerative analysis, then the idea of freedom does not seem to arise. If you mean that there are more then one option and that each option can be supported by reasons and that when we diliberate we reason whioh reasons make the most sense to us, then the idea of freesom might make some sense.

However, I am still confused as to what all this has to do with us having a metaphysical property called a "will" and how the question of our having some 'freedom of will' even arises. If reason is to be our guide what to these concepts add to our analysis? This is what I am not clear on. Can you (or anyone) help me to understand what I am missing, if I am in fact missing something of importance?

As to the idea of 'shortcuts' I have in mind the idea of JJC Smart who argued that we use rules (rules of thumb) as guides when we do not have the time to do a complete (utilitarian) analysis. Again, I do not see how this relates to questions of having a will or having free-will, but only to how we use reason within the time frames alloted us to make a decision.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Well, Joe's post demands that I shamelessly self-promote my own work (it's so obviously the course of action I have most reason to choose that it's not really open to me to choose otherwise, though of course, my action here is paradigmatically one that I perform of my own free will).

My recently published "Close Calls and the Confident Agent" (Dec. issue of Phil Studies, published a mere four years after submission!), offers a thought experiment about an agent who, *after* deliberating about her alternatives for choice, is confident about what decision to make, for *all* the decisions she makes. I suggest she would both feel free and really be free, but she would neither feel she needs nor really need metaphysically open alternatives. I suggest we experience open alternatives most saliently in "close call" decisions (where, *at* the moment of decision, you still feel you have nearly equally strong desires and/or reasons for more than one course of action). These are the decisions some libertarians (restrictivists) identify as the only ones in which we exercise free will. These are the decisions that seem, to me, to represent failures of deliberation. But sometimes I wonder if my phenomenology and my intuitions are just very different than someone like, say, Searle's.

I also wanted to say that I gladly wear every philosophical necktie John Fischer has given us and I like to wear them all at once. Neglecting to mention the value of his article on these issues is almost as bad as self-promoting two of your articles in the very same thread.

[Joe]

John,

A few quick points about the expression 'free will.'

Descartes thought that the will was a faculty, "a collection of interrelated powers." Locke noted that, since freedom was a power, to say that one had a free will would be to say that one of his powers had a power, which is problematic if not absurd.

Thus, few contemporary philosophers using the expression 'free will' think that there is a faculty 'the will' which has the property of being 'free,' even if they think that some persons have free will. Rather, they use the expression out of respect for tradition (cf. van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford, 1983), 8). They accept, along with Locke, that "the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free" (Essay, Book II, Ch. 21). (And many think that the real question is whether a man's action be free!)

Most contemporary philosophers use the term 'free will' to designate some freedom-relevant condition that is presumed to be necessary for moral responsibility (cf. Fischer and Ravizza, "Introduction," Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Cornell, 1993)). Some (Fischer) use it explicitely to designate the ability to do otherwise and others use it in a more general way, e.g., as designating the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility, whatever it may be. When folks writing on this blog say that 'S has free will' they mean 'S is able to do otherwise' or 'S is the source of his actions' or 'S's actions are up to him' or something like that.

Lastly, note that Tamler does not think that anyone has free will -- in any of the above senses. Likely he would agree with you and Smart.

Best, Joe

[John K. Alexander]

Thanks Joe for your comments. That clarifies a few things and gives me something to reflect on.

[Tamler Sommers]

Right, just to add one more thing to Joe's remarks, the focus here (my focus anyway) is on the FEELING of free will, the phenomenology, the subjective experience--not the question of whether we actually have free will in any of the above senses.

[John K. Alexander]

Tamaler
Can I intrepret this feeling of being free as similar to felling well? One can hardly be mistaken in the one's feeling of wellness (even if one has a serious condition ie cancer, one can still feel well relative to other feeling one might also experience re the cancer).

If this is the case, is it possible to feel that one is not free?

If I understand you, if this is so then feeling free relates to the timing issues we have been discussing, such that if one has time to deliberate that this timing frame will result in one feeling unfree. Similary one feels free if the time frame requires us to use shortcuts (whatever they might be)? Am I understanding you correctly?

[Paul Torek]

Eddy,

Once, in high school, I deliberated about my class schedule and found a way to take a class I liked which was also being taken by a girl I had a serious crush on. This was far and away the best option available to me, and it was one of the times I felt most free. So you are not alone in your phenomenology of decision-making; there are at least two of us.

[Fritz Warfield]

This isn't a new point but it does seem applicable to some of the discussion involving Searle and others on deliberation. We should do what we can to avoid confusing (a) disagreement about the phenomenology of action with (b) apparent disagreements brought on by equivocation on the apparently slippery term "deliberation".

Some seem to use "deliberation" as a synonym for something like "thinking about" or "considering the reasons for and against". Others use it to mean something different (perhaps "trying to decide") and still others use it for a restricted sort of "trying to decide": a sort that occurs after the agent has considered the reasons for and against and found that they did not settle the matter.
I'm not advocating any of these as preferred. I do think we see all of these notions in play in discussions of whether "deliberation" presupposes 'belief-in-ability' type theses. Sometimes the equivocation is mistaken for disagreement.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Fritz (and others), I've always been intrigued by the third type of deliberation you mention, "a sort that occurs after the agent has considered the reasons for and against and found that they did not settle the matter." This seems to be the sort that features most prominently in your interesting article with EJ Coffman, "Deliberation and Metaphysical Freedom," and the kind that Searle and van Inwagen emphasize when they advance theses like BAT--belief in ability thesis.

I'd like to hear more about what this sort of deliberation is like. For my part, if I feel like considering my reasons for various courses of action does not settle the issue (i.e., make clear what I should decide), I feel as though I either postpone the decision to search for more reasons (or reasons to adjust the "weight" of my considered reasons) or I "flip a coin in my head" and just choose because I have to without really knowing what I think would be the better course of action. But the former option (searching for more reasons) does not fit this third definition of deliberation and the latter option (which I might describe as guessing what to do rather than deciding what to do) does not seem like deliberation either.

What am I missing?

[Randy Clarke]

Making a practical decision is, arguably, actively forming an intention to act (or not). Sometimes we do this even though we don't see reasons settling the question of what it would be better to do. (There's a good discussion of this point in Gary Watson's "The Work of the Will.")

It does strike me as an odd use of 'deliberation' to say that it is something that comes only after one has considered reasons and made any judgment one is going to make about how the reasons weigh. But whatever one calls it, there certainly is a phenomenon of, having concluded one's assessment of practical reasons and found them inconclusive, making an effort to make up one's mind what to do. And the effort often succeeds. When it does, you've make a practical decision.

[Neil]

On deliberation - and only slightly off topic - let me take the opportunity to plug my own work (everyone else has!) My 'Determinist Deliberations', which responds to Fritz's paper with Coffman, appears in the latest issue of Dialectica . This paper began life as a post right here on GFP.

[Mark Smeltzer]

We've touched on the relevance of deliberation to here a bit freedom in the past. When I consider the ideal agent, who is maximally free, I deem that this agent would have such thorough going self-knowledge that this agent would not deliberate in the same fashion that we are used to. Rather, this agent would have the advantage of being able to simply act in response to each situation that comes along.

Thinking about what ideal agency looks like makes me suspicious of building a strong link between free will and deliberation.

[Mark Smeltzer]

I wish there was an edit comment feature ;)

The first sentence in my previous comment should have read, "We've touched on the relevance of deliberation to freedom here a bit in the past." I normally try not to post corrections, but the accidental transposition in the original made it nearly unintelligible.

[Rob]

What philosophical sense, I wonder, should be made of this:

"The researchers were able to recognize the subjects intentions with 70% accuracy based alone on their brain activity - even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070208131728.htm

[Peter Brian Barry]

Rob--

This is interesting stuff and probably deserves its own thread. Since an intention is plausibly regarded as the termination of deliberation, the mere fact that we could determine what another agent intended doesn't really suggest that she must have thought she was free to do or deliberate otherwise, etc.

Most gardeners are probably familiar with Libet's work that suggests our conscious awareness of our own intentions follows their onset, and Libet's work has been ably discussed my Mele in his most recent book. Haynes' work mentioned in the link is interesting if only because it seems to suggest that the propositional content of an intention can be determined and not just its onset. But I'm not sure that is what the research supports, even by the author's own lights. There is an awful lot in the way of scare quotes in the linked article: researchers could "read" the participants intentions, a computer was "trained" to predict decisions, and so forth. It would be interesting if any of the garden's experimental philosophers were already familiar with Haynes' work.

[Neil]

For what it's worth, I know this stuff, and discuss it my forthcoming book. Arithmetical operations seem have a dedicated module, so there is no inference from ability to detect correlates of arithmetical intentions to ability to detect the content of propositions concerning ordinary matters of fact.

[Fritz Warfield]

Eddy writes:

"if I feel like considering my reasons for various courses of action does not settle the issue (i.e., make clear what I should decide), I feel as though I either postpone the decision to search for more reasons (or reasons to adjust the "weight" of my considered reasons) or I "flip a coin in my head" and just choose because I have to without really knowing what I think would be the better course of action. But the former option (searching for more reasons) does not fit this third definition of deliberation and the latter option (which I might describe as guessing what to do rather than deciding what to do) does not seem like deliberation either."

I agree with those who have suggested that the use of the word "deliberation" to describe the Taylor / van Inwagen situation seems a bit odd. In discussing it in written work I simply use it as a technical notion introduced by Taylor and van Inwagen and make no claim that it fits well with ordinary use of that term.

But about the phenomenology of this "deliberation", I think what Eddy describes is in the neighborhood of what Taylor and van Inwagen are talking about. You describe yourself sometimes doing a mental coin flip -- presumably that's a metaphor for "just deciding". The Taylor / van Inwagen claim is that in doing this you take the options to be open to you. It's like a mental coin flip in at least this way-- it seems that like the coin could go heads or tails, [it seems that] your decision could go either way. You have a sense of open possibilities.

As many have indicated, these claims of Taylor and others are claims about the phenomenology of "deliberation", not claims about how deliberation does or does not imply anything about freedom itself. So far as I know, though they are sometimes accused of arguing from this phenomenology to a particular view on the metaphysics of freedom, neither Taylor nor van Inwagen has ever claimed anything to the contrary.