Gardeners in Analysis

I'm always glad to see work on free will published in Analysis, partly because it means I'll be able to read the articles fairly soon after they come out, since they are usually bite-sized (though of course even a bite-sized morsel can pack quite a punch!).  So I'm glad to see that the October 2007 issue has a piece by Saul Smilansky entitled, "Determinism and prepunishment: the radical nature of compatibilism".  I haven't received my copy of the journal yet, but I look forward to reading this piece.

You may also be interested to know that Lynne Rudder Baker has an article forthcoming in the January 2008 issue (you can find the preprint here) on the Consequence Argument, in which she references Joe Campbell's excellent Analysis piece we discussed a bit earlier.

And finally, congrats to fellow Gardener Alan White on his forthcoming piece on time (co-authored with Nathan Oaklander), which also appears in the October 2007 issue.

Comments

[Fritz Warfield]

There are many things worth discussing in Lynne's paper. I hope to explore her main line of discussion in more detail later.

But I was a bit surprised to see myself listed as someone who does not accept the McKay/Johnson counterexample to van Inwagen's original Beta (Lynne cites my PPR paper with Tom Crisp). What Crisp and I did was convert McKay/Johnson's indirect argument that there are counterexamples to Beta into a *direct* counterexample to Beta. We then went on to argue that the kind of counterexample involved isn't important to the overall debate because the counterexamples either involve assuming compatibilism's truth or assuming indeterminism. The former is obviously problematic, while the latter can be easily sidestepped given that the Consequence Argument concerns the consequences of *determinism*. So I obviously acknowledge the existence of the counterexamples to original beta but I reject their importance to the debate about incompatibilism.

[Joe Campbell]

Fritz,

It is not possible to formulate a counterexample to Beta that does not presuppose compatibilism -- determinism is true yet someone can do otherwise -- or indeterminism. This is a logical point not a philosophical one!

[Fritz Warfield]

Joe,
1. I hope you agree that sometimes philosophical points can be made by making logical points.
2. As you likely know, there has been discussion in the literature of whether the point in question is substantive or purely logical -- the discussion turns on what suffices for an example's "presupposing" compatibilism.
3. There being counterexamples to original Beta does not by itself decide the question of compatibilism or incompatibilism. No one has shown that incompatibilism is true only if Beta is valid, for example.
Fritz

[Alan]

Thanks for the post Neal!

(Neal's way too kind to say that I sent some of this news to him in part for shameless self-promotion--but Analysis is my favorite journal and the Rudder Baker paper is fascinating!)

[Saul Smilansky]

I highly recommend Analysis. Brevity is its obvious advantage (my paper is a dwarfish 890 words or so - my shortest paper yet which isn't a response. Is it the shortest FW paper ever?). But beyond the size of the papers it is also one of the best journals in terms of response time (even if one is rejected it isn't so bad after a mere month), and time to publication.

Thanks Neal for posting on FW publications. It's hard to follow the literature and very useful to be helped into awareness of new papers, and not to need to worry that one is missing stuff.

[John Fischer]

By the way, our very own Neal Tognazzini's paper on Scanlon on promising is now out in the current Philosophy and Public Affairs. This is a great paper, and it is a significant achievement to publish in PAPA. Congratulations, Neal!!!

[Joe Campbell]

Fritz,

I was kind of ribbing you -- which is not to say that I don't find some sympathy with the view that the point is merely logical. But I'm at least willing to say that the debate about whether it is merely logical is substantive.

Thanks for the post, Neal -- and Alan! And congratulations to you both.

[Fritz Warfield]

Joe,
One other surprising attribution from the article: you were cited as having challenged the fixity of the past premise (in your recent Analysis paper). It seems to me you did no such thing. What you did was point out that the assumptions about the past that van Inwagen builds into his description of the consequence argument are substantive assumptions and that this fact prevents the argument from being a sound argument from "arbitrary instance" to the general conclusion that determinism precludes freedom. That is to say: you reject the claim that incompatibilism follows from the conclusion of the consequence argument. But you haven't rejected the "NP" premise, as I understand you. The main person who most least seriously and sympathetically explored rejecting *that* premise was Terry Horgan back in a mid-80s Phil Studies paper as I recall.

And another claim in this article about the literature that I don't think is correct: the claim that if agglomeration is invalid then so is Beta. The M/J counterexample to agglomeration by itself implies only that the conjunction of the beta rule and the alpha rule is invalid. Crisp and I (and Erik Carlson, working independently) showed how to convert the particular M/J example into a direct counterexample to Beta. But this is not the same as estabilishing that (generally) if Agglomeration is invalid then so is Beta.

But ok, enough about the somewhat odd attributions and descriptions of the literature that appear in this article. The main line of argument in Lynne's paper is well worth some attention. If I say more about the article here, I'll explore the main line of argument.

[Joe Campbell]

Fritz,

I think you're right about the first point. What I said in the Analysis article is consistent with the claim that NPo is true, provided that Po is a description of the entire state of the actual world five minutes after the big bang. What I question is whether the argument can be generalized to all worlds and thus whether it supports the thesis of incompatibilism as we know it.

Note that Baker only says "for a challenge to NPo ..., see Campbell 2007." One could say that I provided a challenge to the generalizability of the premise.

The second point is interesting, too. It is a subtle difference but one worth noting.