Fellowships and Scholarships of $15,000 for Georgia State Masters Program

Dear Gardeners, please share this information with any students who may be interested.  Thanks, Eddy!

The Masters program in the Philosophy Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia is accepting applications from qualified students for its two Neurophilosophy Fellowships, a Legal/Political Philosophy Scholarship, and a German Philosophy Scholarship.  Fellowships and Scholarships cover tuition, provide $15,000/year for living expenses and up to $500/year for travel to conferences. Fellowships have no teaching duties for two years. Scholarships have no duties in the first year but require teaching in the second year.  A flier with more information is here.  The deadline for applications is March 15.

More information on the departments areas of strength in these three areas is here.  In addition to Andrea Scarantino and I, the department's strength in neurophilosophy and empirically informed philosophy of mind will improve with the addition of George Graham next year.  Students on the Neurophilosophy Track also have the opportunity to participate in GSU's interdisciplinary Brains & Behavior Program.

The Masters program in the Philosophy Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia is accepting applications from qualified students for its two Neurophilosophy Fellowships, a Legal/Political Philosophy Scholarship, and a German Philosophy Scholarship.  Fellowships and Scholarships cover tuition, provide $15,000/year for living expenses and up to $500/year for travel to conferences. Fellowships have no teaching duties for two years. Scholarships have no duties in the first year but require teaching in the second year.  A flier with more information is here.  The deadline for applications is March 15.

More information on the departments areas of strength in these three areas is here.  In addition to Andrea Scarantino and I, the department's strength in neurophilosophy and empirically informed philosophy of mind will improve with the addition of George Graham next year.  Students on the Neurophilosophy Track also have the opportunity to participate in GSU's interdisciplinary Brains & Behavior Program.

SPP Workshop on Experimental Philosophy

The deadline for submissions to the next meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) is February 1. It’s always a great conference.  It is in Philadelphia (U Penn) June 26-29. And there is a bonus this year, a pre-conference workshop on experimental philosophy that has an impressive line-up of presenters from various disciplines (see below). The workshop starts in the afternoon of June 25 and continues the morning of June 26. Everyone is invited to the workshop for one or both days (there will probably be a $10 registration fee set up at the SPP website).

In the workshop we will present and discuss a variety of methodologies and approaches to doing experimental philosophy, as well as some new results, and debate the goals and methods of this emerging field. It should be informative and fun!

Pre-SPP Workshop on Experimental Philosophy (tentative schedule)

Wed., June 25, 1:30-6:30pm

Chair: Thomas Nadelhoffer
1:30-2:00  Shaun Nichols, Title TBA
2:00-2:30  Bertram Malle, Title TBA
2:30-3:00  John Mikhail, Intuitions of Negligence
3:00-3:30  Jonathan Baron, Moral Intuitions vs. Law and Economics
3:30-4:00  Liane Young, The Guilty Mind: A cognitive neuroscience approach to theory of mind and moral judgment
4:00-4:30  Catch up and Coffee
4:30-5:00  Eric Schwitzgebel, Introspection and Experiment
5:00-5:30  Brian Scholl, Two Kinds of Experimental Philosophy, and their Methodological Dangers
5:30-6:00  Ron Mallon, Title TBA
6:00-6:30  Tania Lombrozo, Title TBA

Thursday, June 26, 9:00-12:00am

Chair: Eddy Nahmias
9:00-9:15  Eddy Nahmias, A Brief Introduction to Experimental Philosophy
9:15-9:55  Joshua Knobe and Edouard Machery, Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness
9:55-10:40  Ernest Sosa, Some critiques of experimental philosophy
10:40-11:10  Jonathan Weinberg, Defending experimental philosophy
11:10-12:00 Panel Discussion Q&A with Sosa, Weinberg, Knobe, Machery, Nichols, and Nadelhoffer

Surveying Strawson

Dear Gardeners,

Tamler Sommers and I are embarking on a perilous pilot study in experimental philosophy, and we need your help to make it less fruitless than it might otherwise be!  Unlike previous studies on folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility that have focused on scenarios describing determinism, we would like to systematically explore how non-philosophers react to a philosophical argument about FW and MR, how they explain their responses to it, and how they try to resolve and explain any inconsistent responses they offer.  In the pilot study we just hope to learn whether refinements of such studies could lead to valuable information and, if so, how to refine them, and we suspect in any case that we’ll get some interesting responses (as we all have experienced when we do such “studies” the normal way, by listening to our intro students).

 

We want to present our participants with something like Strawson’s Basic argument.  This has turned out to be a painfully difficult task, mainly because the regress idea is hard to get across.  But we seek your feedback about how any of what follows might be improved.  We are fine with people telling us that we are being silly to even go down this path, but since we already know that, it won’t have much effect (though perhaps you will have some reasons why we are being silly that we haven’t thought of already).  Suggestions about best to go down the silly path (which we are determined to go down—no forking here) will be more helpful.

Thanks,

Eddy and Tamler

Directions for taking the online survey, followed by this open-ended question:

1.      When someone says, “She’s morally responsible for doing that” what does that mean?

People understand the idea of moral responsibility in several ways and you likely mentioned one of them just now.  Sometimes people use the idea of moral responsibility to mean something like “moral obligation” (for example, we have a moral responsibility to help our friends).  But for the rest of this survey, we want you to keep in mind this idea of moral responsibility:  When people are morally responsible for doing something bad, they deserve blame (and perhaps punishment) for their action, and when people are morally responsible for doing something good, they deserve praise (and perhaps reward) for their action. 

Another way to describe this sense of moral responsibility is this:  When people are morally responsible for doing something bad, it is fair to blame them, or we should blame (or punish) them even if there would be no future benefit of doing so. 

GARDENERS: ANY

MORE EFFECTIVE WAYS

TO DESCRIBE THE SENSE OF MORAL RESPONSIBILTY AT ISSUE?

[7-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree]

2. Most people are morally responsible for some of their decisions and actions.

3.  I am morally responsible for some of my decisions and actions.

Now consider each of these statements carefully and indicate whether you agree or disagree with them [Responses available are: ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘This statement does not make sense to me.’  If participants answers anything other than ‘yes’ we will ask them to explain why they answered that way.]

1.      Your decisions are entirely the result of the situation you are in and the way you are at the time (your character, thoughts, desires, skills, etc.).

2.      The way you are at any time is entirely the result of earlier factors that led you to be that way.

3.      At some point (when you were a young child), all of these factors were entirely beyond your control (you had no control over your genes, your early upbringing, random things that happened to you, etc.).

4.      You cannot be morally responsible for factors that are entirely beyond your control.

5.      Since you were not morally responsible for these factors that made you the way you are, you are not morally responsible for the decisions that result from your being that way.

6.      So, you are not morally responsible for any of the decisions you make.

If they agree with 1-5 but not 6 we ask them to resolve the apparent contradiction…

GARDENERS: ANY

MORE EFFECTIVE WAYS

TO DESCRIBE THE BASIC ARGUMENT SO THAT IT BOTH GETS ACROSS THE PROBLEM AND CAN BE UNDERSTOOD?

This argument is probably not formally valid as written and it may need another premise to get from 6 to 7, but every way we try to make it sharper makes it too technical or unclear.  Needless to say, one of us believes this argument (as presented and in its more precise Strawsonian form) is unsound, while the other believes it is sound.  But we hope to see what people who don’t have deep philosophical commitments or theories think about it, whether they will see any tension between accepting the premises of the argument and rejecting the conclusion, or whether they say anything interesting as they explain themselves.  Thanks for your thoughts!

New Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Hi Gardeners,
Check out the new Midwest Studies in Philosophy volume on "Philosophy and the Empirical."  You may be able to access the articles here or here.  There are a lot of interesting articles, and several articles on free will and moral responsibility, including ones by Shaun Nichols, Dana Nelkin, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Adam Feltz, and yours truly (with co-authors Justin Coates and Trevor Kvaran).  Our article (which I link below in case you don't have access) includes the largest survey yet of intuitions about FW and MR (over 1000 subjects, 8 scenarios, 20 experimental questions), the results of which seem to support my claim that determinism per se is not intuitively threatening to FW and MR unless it is presented in a way that suggests reductive mechanism (but there are some other intruiguing results summarized in the Table and briefly canvassed in the appendix).  At some point we hope to set up a webpage with more info on the studies and a link to the surveys so we can collect data from philosophers. 
All the best, Eddy

Download nahmias_coates_kvaran_final.pdf

Freegulls, Unfree 16-year-olds, Free Robots?

First, you must all take note that one of our own, Tamler (one-m) Sommers, is now one of the "world's leading thinkers" (along with 39 others who argue for The Myth of Free Will).  Tom Clark is there too!  Unlike humans, but like fruit flies, I think the seagulls on the cover are supposed to have free will.

Second, here's the the Allstate ad I mentioned:  "Even bright, mature teenagers sometimes do things that are “stupid.” But when that happens, it’s not really their fault. It’s because their brain hasn’t finished developing. The underdeveloped area is called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. It plays a critical role in decision making, problem solving and understanding future consequences of today’s actions. Problem is, it won’t be fully mature until they’re into their 20s."  I am currently trying to use this quote to illustrate everything that is both right and wrong about discussions of free will and responsibility.

Third, I'm looking for help finding a good reading (preferably a short story) about a robot being put on trial for a crime (does it have free will?).  I use trials in my intro class (e.g., Trial of God for suffering, Trial of rich American, using Singer's arguments), and this semester I want to add a Trial of the Robot (is it responsible or his creator or both for a murder or something, etc.).  Any suggestions?

Free Will, Science, and the Media

Hi Gardeners,
There has been, as the intell people put it, a lot of "chatter" recently about the relationship between free will and the neurosciences, here at the Garden with posts about the Financial Times review (which I found problematic, to put it mildly) to Searle's book to the NYTimes article "The Brain on the Stand," not to mention several recent NYT articles on morality and neuroscience, Time's recent issue on the Brain, and this recent article printed in my local rag, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which discusses the experiment described in the previous post here. 

Those of you who know me and my Neurotic Compatibilist (TM by Manuel) position know that I think neuroscience (and the other sciences of the mind) have the potential to threaten free will and responsibility in ways that are more significant than any potential threat posed by the thesis of determinism.  But I do not think it poses a threat in the way most of the scientists suggest, or the way the media presents their research.

I hope to get a book done on this before, say, the end of the decade, but since we all know how that is, I thought some people might be interested in looking at this powerpoint (link below) of a talk I recently presented to the Neurophilosophy reading group here at Georgia State.  (I was trying to explain to the neuroscientists here what I take the problems to be).  It also includes some recent survey results--the actual survey scenarios and questions are the last three slides of the powerpoint, because my audience had already taken a written version.  (It would be interesting to consider my results in light of Luke's.)

Keep in mind that I had to jam a lot into 30 minutes and simplify certain extremely complex issues, but let me know if you have any comments.  Thanks, Eddy

Download free_will_for_neurophilosophy_version_3.ppt

OPC 2: The Sequel

As some of you may already know, last May we held the first Online Philosophy Conference (OPC)--which included over thirty papers and sixty invited participants and received 40,000 visits from the global philosophical community.  Well, we are now pleased to announce the sequel--OPC2--which will be hosted on this new blog.  This year's tentative program is as follows:

Week One--May 14th through 20th (2007):   

1. Juan Comesaña (University of Wisconsin--Madison), "Knowledge and Subjunctive Conditionals," w/ commentary by John Greco (St. Louis University).

2. John Martin Fischer (University of California--Riverside), "The Direct Argument," w/ commentary by Randolph Clarke (Florida State University) and David Widerker (Bar-Ilan Univesity).

3. Caspar Hare (MIT),"Morphing and Aggregation," w/ commentary by Peter Graham (UMass--Amherst).
   
4. Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona) “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy," w/ commentary by Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California--Riverside), and Kelby Mason (Rutgers University--New Brunswick).
   
5. **Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University--New Brunswick) "Epistemic Normativity" w/ commentary by Ram Neta (University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill), and Duncan Pritchard (University of Stirling).   

6. Meredith Williams (Johns Hopkins University), "Wittgenstein and the Paradox of Thought," w/ commentary by Hans-Johann Glock (University of Zurich), and David Stern (University of Iowa).

Week Two--May 21st through 27th (2007):   

1. Jonathan Dancy (University of Texas--Austin), "Practical Reasoning and Inference," w/ commentary by Joseph Raz (Columbia/Oxford), and Candace Vogler (University of Chicago).
   
2. Delia Graff Fara (Princeton). TBA.
   
3. **Jeff McMahan (Rutgers University--New Brunswick), "The Pacifist Challenge."

4. Derk Pereboom (Cornell), "A Compatibilist Account of the Beliefs Required for Deliberation," w/ commentary by Joseph Campbell (Washington State University), and Dana Nelkin (University of California--San Diego).
   
5. Adina Roskies (Dartmouth). TBA.
   
6. Gillian Russell (Washington University - St. Louis), "One True Logic?" w/ commentary by JC Beall (University of Connecticut), and Jonathan McKeown-Green (University of Auckland)

**=keynote address

OPC 2 will officially last two weeks this year--although you are obviously welcome to continue commenting in the threads so long as others are willing! Some of the threads last year were very active--hopefully, even more people will take part this year.  After all, that is one of the primary benefits of the online format.  It enables the participants to get a lot of constructive feedback on their work in a short amount of time, while also allowing the online audience a chance to engage in interesting philosophical discussion.  Please do your part and play along.  As for us, we have tried to do our part to ensure that this year's OPC is as interesting and engaging as possible.  For instance, we have included far fewer papers--so that each paper gets the attention it deserves--but we have also invited more philosophers to comment on each one.

Another new development is that Blackwell Publishing has kindly offered to sponsor this year's OPC.  With their assistance, we are going to be able to include two keynote addresses this year--one to kick off each week of the conference.  The first will be given by Ernest Sosa at Georgia State University.  The second will be given by Jeff McMahan at Dickinson College.  Both talks (along with the ensuing discussions) will be recorded, video-taped, and posted for people to view on the OPC 2 blog!  We are particularly excited about this new feature and we thank Blackwell for making it possible.

Finally, we are very pleased to announce that Professors McMahan and Sosa have generously offered to donate their keynote honorariums to charity.  This year the charities selected by the OPC keynote speakers are Amnesty International, Oxfam, and The American Philosophical Association.  Please follow their generous lead and donate what you can.   Perhaps treat it as an inexpensive conference registration fee!  We have provided links in the sidebar to this year's official charities.  We hope that with your assistance we can start a charitable tradition here at the OPC, and we thank both Professors McMahan and Sosa for laying the groundwork!

For now, we just want to invite you once again to participate in this year's OPC.  We hope to "see" you in the comment threads come May!  Keep in mind that the more everyone in the broader philosophical community puts into the conference, the more everyone gets out of it. So, we hope you will watch and listen to a couple of interesting philosophy talks, download and read some engaging papers, peruse the invited commentary, and contribute to the unfolding philosophical dialogue that this conference is designed to facilitate.   

As always, if you have any suggestions with respect to how to improve OPC 2 (as well as future installments of OPC), please don't hesitate to let us know.  In the meantime, if you could help us spread the word about the upcoming conference we would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias

As some of you may already know, last May we held the first Online Philosophy Conference (OPC)--which included over thirty papers and sixty invited participants and received 40,000 visits from the global philosophical community.  Well, we are now pleased to announce the sequel--OPC2--which will be hosted on this new blog.  This year's tentative program is as follows:

Week One--May 14th through 20th (2007):   

1. Juan Comesaña (University of Wisconsin--Madison), "Knowledge and Subjunctive Conditionals," w/ commentary by John Greco (St. Louis University).

2. John Martin Fischer (University of California--Riverside), "The Direct Argument," w/ commentary by Randolph Clarke (Florida State University) and David Widerker (Bar-Ilan Univesity).

3. Caspar Hare (MIT),"Morphing and Aggregation," w/ commentary by Peter Graham (UMass--Amherst).
   
4. Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona) “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy," w/ commentary by Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California--Riverside), and Kelby Mason (Rutgers University--New Brunswick).
   
5. **Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University--New Brunswick) "Epistemic Normativity" w/ commentary by Ram Neta (University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill), and Duncan Pritchard (University of Stirling).   

6. Meredith Williams (Johns Hopkins University), "Wittgenstein and the Paradox of Thought," w/ commentary by Hans-Johann Glock (University of Zurich), and David Stern (University of Iowa).

Week Two--May 21st through 27th (2007):   

1. Jonathan Dancy (University of Texas--Austin), "Practical Reasoning and Inference," w/ commentary by Joseph Raz (Columbia/Oxford), and Candace Vogler (University of Chicago).
   
2. Delia Graff Fara (Princeton). TBA.
   
3. **Jeff McMahan (Rutgers University--New Brunswick), "The Pacifist Challenge."

4. Derk Pereboom (Cornell), "A Compatibilist Account of the Beliefs Required for Deliberation," w/ commentary by Joseph Campbell (Washington State University), and Dana Nelkin (University of California--San Diego).
   
5. Adina Roskies (Dartmouth). TBA.
   
6. Gillian Russell (Washington University - St. Louis), "One True Logic?" w/ commentary by JC Beall (University of Connecticut), and Jonathan McKeown-Green (University of Auckland)

**=keynote address

OPC 2 will officially last two weeks this year--although you are obviously welcome to continue commenting in the threads so long as others are willing! Some of the threads last year were very active--hopefully, even more people will take part this year.  After all, that is one of the primary benefits of the online format.  It enables the participants to get a lot of constructive feedback on their work in a short amount of time, while also allowing the online audience a chance to engage in interesting philosophical discussion.  Please do your part and play along.  As for us, we have tried to do our part to ensure that this year's OPC is as interesting and engaging as possible.  For instance, we have included far fewer papers--so that each paper gets the attention it deserves--but we have also invited more philosophers to comment on each one.

Another new development is that Blackwell Publishing has kindly offered to sponsor this year's OPC.  With their assistance, we are going to be able to include two keynote addresses this year--one to kick off each week of the conference.  The first will be given by Ernest Sosa at Georgia State University.  The second will be given by Jeff McMahan at Dickinson College.  Both talks (along with the ensuing discussions) will be recorded, video-taped, and posted for people to view on the OPC 2 blog!  We are particularly excited about this new feature and we thank Blackwell for making it possible.

Finally, we are very pleased to announce that Professors McMahan and Sosa have generously offered to donate their keynote honorariums to charity.  This year the charities selected by the OPC keynote speakers are Amnesty International, Oxfam, and The American Philosophical Association.  Please follow their generous lead and donate what you can.   Perhaps treat it as an inexpensive conference registration fee!  We have provided links in the sidebar to this year's official charities.  We hope that with your assistance we can start a charitable tradition here at the OPC, and we thank both Professors McMahan and Sosa for laying the groundwork!

For now, we just want to invite you once again to participate in this year's OPC.  We hope to "see" you in the comment threads come May!  Keep in mind that the more everyone in the broader philosophical community puts into the conference, the more everyone gets out of it. So, we hope you will watch and listen to a couple of interesting philosophy talks, download and read some engaging papers, peruse the invited commentary, and contribute to the unfolding philosophical dialogue that this conference is designed to facilitate.   

As always, if you have any suggestions with respect to how to improve OPC 2 (as well as future installments of OPC), please don't hesitate to let us know.  In the meantime, if you could help us spread the word about the upcoming conference we would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias

Neurophilosophy Fellowships

Please share with any students who may be interested.  Thanks, Eddy!

The Philosophy Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia is accepting applications from qualified undergraduates for its two $15,000 Neurophilosophy Fellowships, to be awarded by the Brains & Behavior program. The Brains & Behavior program at GSU aims to take the neurosciences at Georgia State to a position of international prominence by promoting interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students from partnering departments. B&B Fellows in the Philosophy Department complete a Masters degree and receive a stipend of $15,000 plus tuition (they do not have to serve as graduate assistants or instructors).  More information on the requirements for the fellowship can be found here.

Andrea Scarantino and I are the primary faculty who are involved in the B&B program and who mentor students interested in "neurophilosophy" (and such), but we are currently hiring for a senior position and the person who ends up filling it may be active in the program.

Surveying the Sounds of Freedom

Well, now Kip’s gone and done it!  In his attempt to make my free-will-comes-in-degrees view sound silly (well, counterintuitive at least), he’s used the folk against me, claiming that “the average Joe on the street” would think it sounded awkward to ask, “How much free will do you have?”

I agree that question sounds awkward, certainly more awkward than the question, “Do you have free will?” (which sounds a bit strange too, I suppose).  I’d say it’s because the question is phrased wrong or perhaps needs to be asked in context.  (“How much intelligence do you have?” sounds a little funny too.)  But maybe it's because the folk think free will doesn't come in degrees.

But what about these questions—do they sound awkward?

--Do adults have more free will than children?

--Does God have more free will than we do?

--Do we have more free will than dogs have?

--Do children attain more free will as they get older?

--Can you lose some of your free will if you get certain mental disorders?  For instance, does a person with schizophrenia have less free will than a normal adult?

--Do you have less free will if you are overcome by emotion?

--Could an incredibly complex robot (like Data on Star Trek) have any free will?

--Do intelligent animals, like chimpanzees, have at least some free will?

--If you have more free will, are you more responsible for your actions?

--Do people become more responsible for their actions as they get older and have more free will?

What if we replace the “free will” talk with “act freely” talk? E.g., Do children act more freely as they get older?

What if we replace it with “up to” talk (the phrase that, in our surveys, seems to track “free will” most closely)?  E.g., Are adults decisions more up to them than children’s?

What if we replace it with “morally responsible” talk?

I’m not sure.  I guess I’ll try running a study, using the techniques linguists use to test grammatically (also one of the methods Knobe and Prinz use to test intuitions about consciousness):  present people with sentences and ask them if they sound right or not (e.g., do they “sound natural” or “sound weird”).

I predict (from my armless armchair) that most folk would think most of the questions about free will sound OK (and would offer some interesting answers to them), though they may think the other formulations (e.g., act freely talk) sound more natural.  But it's a prediction that would require testing.

But, now for a survey of gardeners:

--Do you think the answers to such questions would have any bearing on the philosophical debates? 

--If so, what?  If it came out as I predict, would it help support the claim that free will can be understood as something we possess to varying degrees rather than all or none?

--If not, why not?  (Was van Inwagen right when he suggested that outside of philosophical discussions, no one uses the term “free will” except in expressions of the form “act of one’s own free will?)

--Do you have any predictions about what people would say about questions of the form above (or statements with similar form)?

--And most of all, do you have any statements you think would be helpful to test on the folk?

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.

Free Will, Cross-Cultural Style

I started writing this post before Joe’s and Neil’s recent comments because I could no longer stand the deafening silence each day when I clicked on my gfp bookmark. Anyway, here’s a thought experiment that I hope will get a few comments going to warm us up for our discussion of the Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk piece.

Imagine we discover a culture (of humans somehow previously hidden here on Earth or of intelligent aliens on a distant planet, I don’t think it matters) that resembles modern, Western cultures in many ways. Most notably, after hanging out with the people in this culture for a while, we recognize that they have basically the same practices regarding moral responsibility (i.e., praise and blame, punishment and reward) as ours, they express and seem to experience the same reactive attitudes (pride and shame, indignation and gratitude, etc.) as we do, and they talk about choice, freedom,  responsibility, and so on in basically the same ways we do (e.g., we have no problem translating the relevant aspects of their language).

However, perhaps in part because of their advanced science, these people also believe causal determinism is true. They believe that there is only one possible future given the actual past and laws of nature. They believe that every event has a set of sufficient prior causes. They believe that this is true of all of their choices and actions as well as everything else in the universe. [You may substitute here whatever conception of determinism incompatibilists take to preclude free will and moral responsibility.]

Now, it’s not just the scientists and philosophers who believe determinism is true. It’s everyone. It’s a belief that’s become understandable to the folk and seeped into the culture as fully as the belief that the earth is round and moves around the sun has seeped into ours (I wish I could say “as fully as the belief in evolution has seeped into ours”!). Hence, the ordinary folk in this culture appear to believe in free will and moral responsibility as much as the ordinary folk in our culture do but also to believe explicitly that determinism is true. [I’m not sure whether to say that the philosophers just don’t recognize the compatibility question to be a philosophical problem or that they take themselves to have “solved” it a long time ago by adopting some compatibilist strategy, such as rejecting transfer of non-responsibility principles.]

My question is what we should say about this thought experiment and this culture. Here are some of my thoughts, but I’d really like to hear from others (especially incompatibilists):

1) Compatibilists should presumably say this culture has discovered what is true.

2) Incompatibilists might say that, despite the surface similarities, these people mean different things than we do when they use the language of responsibility and freedom (especially, desert and retribution).  How might we show that they really mean different things than us?  Do they also feel something different when they feel and express the reactive attitudes?

3) Incompatibilists might say that these people (especially their philosophers!) are simply missing an important truth (e.g., some principle, such as transfer of non-responsibility, or some conceptual connection, such as the necessity of ultimate sourcehood for desert). If they thought about it enough, they’d recognize it (or maybe they wouldn’t, but either way, it’s still true). Skeptics about free will might say that, in this way, these people are just like most ordinary folk here.  Is so, what sort of truths are these (a priori, conceptual, necessary, what?)?

4) Incompatibilists might say that these people just think determinism is true but they are wrong. They have libertarian freedom and that’s what allows them to develop the practices and beliefs and attitudes about freedom and responsibility that they do.

5) Incompatibilists might say that the thought experiment is incoherent.

I can’t see why 5 would be right. Regarding 4, I can’t imagine an incompatibilist (certainly not a skeptic!) would want to argue that we can know we have libertarian freedom based on our practices and beliefs about freedom. I’d like to hear more about 3 or 2 (both of which I find problematic for reasons I can explain more fully later) or any other response anyone has.

[The post's title is a reference to Machery, Mallon, Stich and Nichols' "Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style" which suggests that Kripkean intuitions about reference vary across cultures.]

Free Will in the World Cup

Since I am having withdrawl symptoms now that there are no World Cup games to watch, I figured I would write something about it.  In case you missed the final yesterday, Italy beat France in penalty kicks--and if you did miss it, I will try to suppress my reactive attitudes towards you since I realize it is irrational for me to care so much about other people's lack of interest in soccer (sidenote for another post--doesn't it seem like most of our second-order desires are really about other people's first-order desires?). 

Anyway, here are two events from the game that raise some relevant questions (which people may or may not feel like addressing, but this blog has been too quiet all summer!):

1) Compare French star Zidane's made free kick, which hit the crossbar and bounced in a foot over the line with Trezeguet's missed free kick in the shootout, which hit the crossbar and bounced on the line (losing the game for the French).  A micro-difference in initial conditions that had a huge effect on the game and hence (most of) the world.  When people say, as millions surely did in one form or another, "He [Zidane] got lucky--he could have missed that" or "He [Trezeguet] could have (or should have) made that", do many (any) of these people have beliefs about that statement (or event) that commit them to the claim that determinism is false?  If they believe indeterminism is required for these events to have happened otherwise, is it indeterminism in the agent or outside the agent or either, or is it anything like agent-causation?  Do they think that these events are different in some important way from, say, a dog jumping and just missing a frisbee ("She could have caught that") or, say, a lottery turning out a certain way?  If engaged in Socratic dialogue, would they be willing to use "backtracking counterfactuals" on the dog and lottery case in a way that they would not with the human case (e.g., the dog would have caught it only if certain conditions had been different and those conditions would have been different only if...)? 

2) Now compare Zidane's header in overtime that was barely saved by the Italian keeper Buffon with the Zidane's "header" into the chest of Materazzi a few minutes later--the latter has become the story of the game, driving people (like me) to compulsively wonder what could possibly have led Zidane to trash his legacy and perhaps the game (he got thrown out of his last international performance)--what could Materazzi have said to set him off?  When we perform actions we control partially but far from perfectly (and without much conscious consideration) like the header during the course of the game, do people think of those actions in terms of free will and if so, in the same terms as actions people perform that at least seem to allow for some foresight, like his deliberate attack (see the film to see what you think about how much control he had)?  Why do people think (want to think) the header is controlled less than the attack on another person?  While the missed header is at least as important to fans (it would have likely won the game) than the attack, why is he not blamed for the former as much as the latter (I suspect even by people who think he had as much or as little control over both)?  It's amazing how much we want to apply a principle of charity in this case--people want to know what Materazzi said because they can't believe Zidane would do such a foolish thing without sufficient provocation (reports are that perhaps he called him a terrorist, though I suspect it had something to do with his momma).  For that matter, why is it that in the case of other foolish and seemingly irrational acts, like suicide terrorism, people are so much less interested in applying their theory of mind modules to figure out what drives the behavior and so much less to just say it's evil (is there a boundary past which we give up trying to explain or simply cannot explain certain actions)? 

Anyway, my own suspicion for most of these questions is that people don't have any theory or implicit beliefs or intuitions that would commit them to particular views about these philosophical questions, and as such few philosophical theories would conflict with their views (or seem counter-intuitive or revisionary).  But I have mainly been thinking about the questions, not the answers.

Well, thanks for indulging my attempt to transition back from soccer to philosophy.

Physics and Free Will

Check out this article in the London Times by Brian Appleyard (thanks for visiting, Brian!). 

I think the article illustrates a point I like to press:  that what the physicists ultimately say about whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic simply will not impact people's view of themselves as free and responsible, even if the philosophers chime in with a consensus view (like that's gonna happen!).  My prediction is that if the physicists said the universe is deterministic and the philosophers said incompatibilism is true, not much would change about the way people think or act. 

If the physicists and philosophers agreed about, say, the physical nature of consciousness (and that was reported in the press), well that might have more of an impact (but it wouldn't matter whether the physicists said the physical laws were indeterministic).  But the relevant sciences to most people are psychology and neurobiology (and maybe genetics)--these are the ones whose findings the press reports (and misreports) and people read to suggest that we have less free will and responsibility than we thought.  Whether the science is right (or the way it's reported is misleading) or whether any conclusions about free will and responsibility are the right ones to draw, well, there's some good philosophy to be done there.

OPC is On

The first On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC) is here now.  There are seven papers with commentary posted for this week, to be followed by 8-9 papers per week the next three weeks.  I hope the philosophical blogging community will help make this event a success by participating a spreading the word, especially to grad students and undergrads who may learn a lot by reading some of these papers and comments.  Thanks!

On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)

The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC).  I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy.  (Thomas Nadelhoffer has done an outstanding job putting this together.)  We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room. 

We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience.  Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event.  Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate.  So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website:  http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week.  "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length).  The authors, including several GFP regulars, will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment. 

So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action.  We hope you will be part of it.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Week One:
Sunday April 30th:

1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).

Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:

1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin  (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).

Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:

1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin),  “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest &  Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).

Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:

1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning:  The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).

The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC).  I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy.  (Thomas Nadelhoffer has done an outstanding job putting this together.)  We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room. 

We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience.  Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event.  Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate.  So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website:  http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week.  "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length).  The authors, including several GFP regulars, will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment. 

So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action.  We hope you will be part of it.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Week One:
Sunday April 30th:

1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).

Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:

1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin  (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).

Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:

1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin),  “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest &  Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).

Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:

1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning:  The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).

On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)

If you are a graduate student or junior faculty (i.e., without tenure), please consider submitting a paper to the first annual On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC).  Thomas Nadelhoffer has put together an outstanding program of "speakers" whose papers will be posted in April along with commentary and then people can post comments and questions, some of which the speakers will address.  The line-up of speakers includes:   Stephen Stich, Jonathan Kvanvig, Julia Driver, Terence Horgan, Graham Priest, R.A. Duff, Thomas Hurka, Susanna Siegel, Brian Weatherson, Uriah Kriegel,  Kit Wellman, Joshua Gert, Joshua Knobe, Brie Gertler, Jessica Wilson, Benj Hellie, Amie Thomasson, Elizabeth Harman, Noa Latham, Andy Egan, and our own Manuel Vargas, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele and Neil Levy. 

The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 31.  If you are interested in being a commentator, please let Thomas or I know.  In any case, I hope you will "attend" the conference.  This is a new experiment in philosophy that I think has a lot of potential.

Scientists and such talk about free will and such

Check out The Edge where well-known academics, mostly scientists, were asked what their most dangerous idea is.  Many talk about the "amazing hypothesis" (Crick) that we have no immaterial soul (= we are just a bunch of neurons??), that there is no ultimate purpose to the universe, that we are not consciously aware of why we do what we do, etc.  In such entries as well as others, many talk about free will and responsibility, and it is interesting to see what they get right and what they get wrong.  Here's the names of the people who talk about free will, roughly in order from those I found most to least interesting (though not necessarily right):
Shirky, Metzinger, Clark, Kandel, Dawkins, Smith, Bloom, Horgan, Hauser, Ramachandran, Buss

Several social psychologists (Nisbett, Banaji, Zimbardo) talk about our limited understanding of the reasons we choose and act as we do, which I obviously think is very relevant to issues of free will.

I'd be interested to hear what our participants and readers think about some of these entries, what is right and wrong about them, etc.?  (I'll add more substantive thoughts later.)

1st Annual On-line Philosophy Conference

I wanted to let everyone know that for the past few weeks Thomas Nadelhoffer (with some help from Adam Feltz and I) has been organizing the 1st Annual On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)--which will tentatively run from April 14th to 27th (2006) and which will be hosted on the newly created OPC blog.  Thomas has received incredibly positive feedback from the people he invited and put together a remarkable list of invited speakers, including a few from our ranks (Fischer, Mele, Vargas, Levy) plus 18 other well-known philosophers from a wide-range of fields. 

While the first installment of OPC is a mostly invited affair (since so many people accepted), we are nevertheless issuing a call for papers for both junior philosophers (PhD in the past five years) and graduate students (the call for papers and directions for submissions can be found on the OPC blog).  Hopefully, some of you will be interested in (a) submitting a paper for the conference, (b) offering to give commentary on some of the invited papers, or (c) both (a) and (b). Minimally, I hope all of you will participate in the comment threads once the conference begins. Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions concerning the format of the conference, etc. Hopefully, others are as excited as I am about the line-up and the tentative format. Tomorrow will be the first day that the blog and the call for papers become publicly available, but I figured it would be OK for me to give the readers of this blog a head's up.

Pope Plagiarizes Wolf?

Well, I doubt it, but I thought we needed a new post with a catchy title to get things going.  Pope Benedict at the World Youth Day said:  "Freedom is not simply about enjoying life in total autonomy, but rather about living by the measure of truth and goodness so that we ourselves can become true and good."  The language is remarkably similar to Susan Wolf's language in her wonderful Freedom Within Reason, where she suggests that free will (of the sort associated with moral responsibility) does not require what she calls "autonomy"--the ability to do otherwise--but rather requires the ability to act in accord with the True and the Good (roughly, so that we ourselves can become true and good).  Just thought I'd point out the coincidence (I'm assuming the Pope has not read Wolf)...but if anyone wants to say what they think is wrong with Wolf's view, if anything, that may start a good discussion.

Society for Philosophy and Psychology

Just a reminder that the 2005 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology is June 9-12 at Wake Forest and the program is complete.  Most relevant to this blog, there is an invited session on The Psychology of Free Will with talks by psychologists Jonathan Schooler, Kathleen Vohs, & Azim Shariff (UBC) and Jordan Peterson (Toronto) and by philosophers Shaun Nichols (who is also giving an invited lecture) & Joshua Knobe.  Bob Kane is the session's commentator. 

Also of interest (I hope), I've put together a panel discussion on Mind and Brain in the Media to discuss the role the media plays in presenting research that influences people's conception of human nature, free will, etc. and hence affects important ethical and legal debates.  What role do (and should) academic philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists play in shaping the folk's conception of themselves?  Panel members include Owen Flanagan, Paul Bloom, Daniel Povinelli, and Dan Lloyd.  I'm still looking for a science journalist to join us--any ideas?

Hope to see you at the conference.

Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?

A paper by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner, "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" should appear soon in the Recent Papers Posted section of this site.  The paper has been accepted to PPR, but comments are still welcomed.  We hope it generates discussion not only about whether incompatibilism is intuitive to ordinary people but also about whether the answer to that question should matter to the philosophical debate (and if not, why not), about how to determine whether it is intuitive, and more generally, about what intuitions are and what their role should be in philosophy.  Here's the abstract:

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.

Bullshit on Daily Show

If you missed the Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight, make sure to catch the repeat tonight (Tuesday 3/15) at 7 PM.  John Stewart's guest is Harry Frankfurt talking about his book "On Bullshit."  A convergence of two of my favorite (though very different) minds.

Meanwhile, I've decided I will title my next (i.e. first) book "On Assholes."

A Verse on Free Will

At Dave Chalmer's Site, Fragments of Consciousness, there is a great post going on explaining philosophy in one syllable.  I though I would post my entry here as well:

A Verse on Free Will

If all is caused can we be free?
Some say no it can not be.
Some of these folk say we are free,
so all's not caused, some acts are free.
And some of these folk say all is caused,
so we are not free (it's in the laws).

But some say we can too be free
though all is caused--it's up to me. 
It must be caused the right way of course,
by my mind, though not as the first source.

(I'd love a new word for "first" in the last line! Help!)

Or...
If all our acts must be, can we be free?
...

Degrees of Freedom

In my dissertation I advanced an idea I want to return to now, so I'm soliciting input. I won't go into too much detail here, but the rough idea is that free will should be seen as a degree concept, not an all-or-nothing concept. Both an agent's possession of free will and an agent's opportunity to exercise free will on a particular occassion come in various degrees, which correspond to numerous factors, especially the degree to which the agent possesses and has the opportunity to exercise certain cognitive capacities. This way of seeing things has numerous advantages, including (1) allowing free will and threats to free will to be examined empirically, (2) reducing the impetus to look for strict necessary and sufficient accounts of free will, and (3) tying ascriptions of free will more naturally to ascriptions of responsibility, which clearly come in degrees.

For instance, see "Too Immature for the Death Penalty?" which includes this passage:
"In other words, teenagers cannot be held fully responsible for their actions because all the wiring to allow adult decision making isn't completed yet. As Stephen K. Harper, a professor of juvenile justice at the University of Miami School of Law, puts it, ''Adolescents are far less culpable than we knew.''
The briefs in the Simmons case are based on research that shows that the human brain, once thought to be fully wired by about age 12, continues to grow and mature into the early or mid-20's. And the last part to mature is the frontal lobes, or prefrontal cortex, responsible for all the hallmarks of adult behavior -- impulse control, the regulation of emotions and moral reasoning."

The three cognitive capacities discussed at the end seem to be clearly tied to ascriptions of culpability, they seem to be capacities that should be tied to the concept of free will, and they seem to be possessed and exercised to varying degrees.

Obviously, these ideas are compatibilist in spirit, though of course the cognitive capacities in question will be relevant to libertarian accounts to the extent that such accounts require such capacities in addition to indeterminism or agent causation.

He Coulda Caught That Ball!

I suspect the following is confused in some way, so please let me know how.

Take some non-morally-loaded action, such as a boy dropping a baseball tossed to him or a dog missing a ball tossed to him. (Presumably) because the boy and the dog have made similar catches lots of times, we might say, "He coulda caught that ball." Now, we may be making some claim about the general abilities (or capacities) of the boy or dog. But it seems we might certainly be making a claim about the exercise of those capacities on this particular occasion. If so, do people (or quite different--should people) have the unconditional sense of 'could have done otherwise' (CDO) in mind here? That is, do they (should they) mean that the boy or dog could have caught the ball with (at some relevant point just prior) all conditions, internal and external, being as they were? That is, are they committed to believing indeterminism must be true when they say "He coulda caught that ball"?

Of course, ordinary people don't have a clear conception of determinism (or indeterminism), but perhaps we could, with the proper Socratic probing, discover what they think about such cases. My suspicion is that people do not have an unconditional sense of CDO in mind here, nor would they be inclined to give up their talk of CDO in such cases if they were convinced determinism were true. (My suspicion is backed up by a couple modest empirical surveys, since I don't think armchair speculation on folk intuitions or putting our well-honed philosophical "intuitions" into the mouths of ordinary people will be sufficient here).

Perhaps with simple mechanisms people would explicitly recognize that for it to have done otherwise (e.g. for the mouse trap in Mouse Trap to have fallen) some prior condition would have had to have been different, thus explicitly accepting a conditional analysis of CDO. And perhaps with complex systems like boys and dogs they would not recognize this explicitly (or be befuddled by which conditions might have had to be different).

What's the point? Well, if the above is accurate, I want to know exactly what it is that should lead us to believe that the CDO involved in moral actions should be interpreted differently.

Here's another way to put it. I suggest that if a Consequence-style argument has the conclusion, "If determinism is true, then the boy (or dog) could not have caught that ball", people would be (should be!) more inclined to reject some element of the argument (perhaps Beta principle) than to conclude that determinism must be false (or that we are always speaking falsely when we make such CDO claims). So, why shouldn't such a move apply to the Consequence argument, or more generally, to unconditional readings of CDO in the free will debate? I suspect the 'ought implies can' principle may come into play here (in a way it doesn't with non-moral actions). But I'd like to hear where exactly incompatibilists (or compatibilists) think this line of thought goes wrong.

New Names in the Free Will Debate?

In response to the debate in "Deny or Deflate" about naming the G.Strawson (and Tamler) position, the Random House Dictionary definition of 'skeptic' is 'a person who questions the validity, authenticity, or truth of something purported to be factual.' So a 'free will (or moral responsibility) skeptic' would be 'a person who questions the validity ... of free will (or MR).' Sounds like a perfect description of the view. All we need to remember is that we are using this conception of 'skeptic' that has penetrated ordinary language, not the philosophical conception which is specific to epistemology (though I think there are in fact deep connections between skeptical arguments in epistemology and 'skeptical' arguments about free will, but that's a topic for another day--and it's no reason to give them the same name).

OK, while we're talking about names, let me float a suggestion I've been toying with. Past threads have noted some problems with the labels for the main positions in the free will debate. I think these labels certainly need to be updated. An important distinction to me needs to be drawn between those philosophers who think the issue of determinism is the central concern in questions about freedom and determinism and those who do not. I propose we call those who do 'Traditionalists' (it is the way the traditional debate has been framed). Traditionalists would then include those who think determinism poses a specific and important threat to free will--and present arguments for this claim--and then react to it in opposing ways--libertarians and hard determinists (and perhaps 'mysterians' like van Inwagen?). Then there is the camp of philosophers who are Traditionalist Compatibilists in that they agree that the question of determinism lies at the heart of the debate so they mount responses against incompatibilist arguments and/or develop positions that free will requires determinism (i.e. the old Soft Determinists).

But most Compatibilists and many (what I'll call) 'Skeptics @FW' believe that determinism (or indeterminism) is simply not central to questions about freedom and responsibility. I propose we call these philosophers Progressives (though I'd be happy if someone could find a more neutrally valenced term that contrasts with Traditionalists). Again, many so-called compatibilists fall into this camp--they may spend some time arguing for compatibilism (e.g. with Frankfurt style cases), but they spend more time developing positive conceptions of freedom for which the question of determinism is simply not an issue (i.e. these accounts work given deterministic causation but also with probabilistic causation). Other issues may then be threats to these positions (e.g. reductionism, mechanism, epiphenomenalism, etc.--NO MUDDLING TOGETHER DETERMINISM WITH THESE THESES!--or scientific claims about human nature--what I've called 'flank attacks', which again have no logical connections with determinism), so one might be a Progressive (compatibilist) who thinks we might not have free will--or we might be less free and responsible than we ordinarily believe ourselves to be (perhaps call these Worried Progressives (or something). Such philosophers might then spend their efforts examining the flank attacks and considering whether they are legitimate--for instance, developing accounts of reasons-responsiveness that explain why, contra the neuroscientist Singer described in 'I'm not guilty-but my brain is'--not all criminals are brain damaged in a way that exculpates them.

Finally, there are those 'Skeptics @ FW/MR' who think determinism is not the central issue because indeterminism is equally threatening and/or because it makes more sense to see the threat in some other way (e.g. Strawson's impossibility of self-determination, the argument for which does not make use of determinism). We might divide this camp into 'Necessary Skeptics @FW' (like Strawson) who think FW of the sort required for RMR is simply impossible and 'Contingent Skeptics @FW' (like Pereboom) who think FW is impossible given contingent theses that happen to apply to us (e.g. lack of agent-causal powers). Of course, hard determinists and those 'Worried Progressives 'who think one of the worrying theses is true of us would fall into the Contingent Skeptic category, so things get a bit muddled. Suggestions for unmuddying any of this are welcome.

But we need something to replace the old labels and illustrate how many people, for whatever reason, think it is not 'the problem of freedom and determinism' but some other problem(s). Personally I'm tired of having to label myself with a position (Compatibilism) that is defined in terms of an issue I think is--how shall I put it--distracting?

Against Retribution

Another NYTimes article relevant to freedom and responsibility, this one discussing the abolition of prisons as punishment. Here's the most relevant passage:

"Even if the deterrent effect of imprisonment is overrated, there are those who feel that lawbreakers should nevertheless get stiff sentences because they deserve it. The idea of making an offender suffer for his crime can be traced to the ''blood vengeance'' practices of primitive societies. Today, it goes under the more dignified name of retribution, which literally means ''paying back.'' How the suffering inflicted on an offender compensates for his crime has never been clear, unless it is through the vindictive satisfaction it might bring to his victims and society. But is this justice? There is increasing evidence that the most violent criminals are often driven by forces beyond their control. Because of damage to the frontal lobes of their brains caused by birth complications, accidents or brutal childhood beatings, they simply can't contain their aggressive impulses; compared with the rest of us, they live life on a neurological hair trigger. Clearly, society needs to protect itself from these people. But does it need to punish them?"

To add a philosophical question, I wonder what people think is the significant difference, if any, between some compatibilists (e.g. JJC Smart) and some skeptics (e.g. Pereboom), both of which may think some robust notion of responsibility (e.g. the G.Strawson sort) is clearly impossible and tend to focus on the forward-looking aspects of freedom and punishment, suggesting that (most) retributive practices are not justified (at least not because we have robust freedom)? How might we show that the debate between these two parties, both of whom tend to reject the viability of libertarian freedom, is not just semantic (if it's not)?

Enhancing Free Will?

Here's another interesting article relevant to free will, "Courting Casanova". The author uses the recent findings of "monogamy genes" in prairie voles to discuss whether we would want to inject such a gene into ourselves to control our temptations to promiscuously spread our own genes (see his closing paragraph for mention of choice and free decisions).

One interesting point is the hierarchical compatibilism suggested in the discussion. Whereas most compulsives and addicts would take an injection to suppress the relevant first-order desires, it's less clear who would want to take a drug to control their promiscuity. (It might depend how it worked, eh? Does it reduce your sex drive or just your attraction to possible mates other than your significant other or make the others look less attractive or what?) Might this suggest a thought experiment to test for the Frankfurtian notion of identification ("a state of satisfaction with one's will"): if an agent (in a suitably clear state of mind and ignoring any associated negative aspects with taking a drug) would not take a drug that would suppress the influence of some desire's influence on her actions, then she identifies with that desire (is satisfied with its influence on her). Or something like that--I'm not in a state to try to develop an analysis right now, but I hope you get the idea.

I also think this article hints at a sort of argument like the one Neil mentions in the "Subverting Free Will" thread: (1) We think we have free will in regards to X-type behaviors or character trait, but (2) scientists have found a gene that correlates with X-type behaviors or traits (at least in voles or monkeys--so surely they will find one in humans), so (3) we are not free (or responsible) for such behaviors or traits. Like Neil I present this "argument" in the invalid form suggested by many media and pop sci presentations of good research in genetics, with all the suppressed premises left suppressed. As Fritz suggests, we need philosophers to pay attention to these 'flank attacks' to freedom and responsibility and help suppress such poor arguments (and the misleading term 'genetic determinism'!), if only because they have such a powerful influence on popular thinking (and may increase 'twinkie defenses' and the such in legal settings).

Subverting Free Will

Following John Fischer’s lead of pointing out a reference to responsibility from a “real world” source (reality TV!), here’s a reference to free will. A recent article in Newsweek (July 5) about “Mindreading” offers a summary of some interesting research on cooperative (and selfish) decision-making and the effect of the reactive attitudes on such decisions (the upshot: indignation at an unfair offer from another person will make us reject that offer even if it means we get nothing). The article also mentions some neuroscientists who are working for advertisers to try to figure out how consumers make decisions. One of these researchers, who is “well aware of the Orwellian implications of this work,” hastens to add that “there’s no ‘buy button’ out there to be found. We’re not going to subvert free will. This isn’t about screwing the customer.” Yeah right.

But there are some more serious points I’d like to raise about this quotation and others like it that I’ve been collecting over the years (mostly from scientists or science writers discussing research in psychology, neuroscience, other cognitive sciences, genetics and evolutionary psychology but also from legal discussions or just ordinary folk). First, there is the point that people out in the real world do in fact use the term ‘free will’—contra van Inwagen who claims that “the term ‘free will’ is a philosophical term of art…. If someone uses the words ‘free will’ and does not use them within [the phrase ‘of his own free will’], he is almost certainly a participant in a philosophical discussion” (“When is the Will Free?”). Indeed, we philosophers embroiled in our debates sometimes seem to treat ‘free will’ as a technical philosophical concept without paying close enough attention to its ordinary uses (don’t worry, I’m not about to launch into an argument in the tradition of the ordinary language philosophers here). For instance, people often talk about free will in contexts that do not involve questions of moral responsibility and often treat it as a set of capacities people (or other creatures) either possess or don’t.

Furthermore, when people talk about threats to free will, especially in the context of discussions about new research in the mind sciences, they are generally referring to our capacities to know what we are doing, to act on our reasons, to have conscious control of our actions, etc., and the research is usually presented as threats to these abilities. All I want to suggest for now is that these sorts of threats are quite distinct from the alleged threat