Can there be instanteous actions?

This post is a followup to my recent thinking about Frankfurt-style counterexamples and their implications. In a prior post, I suggested that the only way to avoid such counterexamples is through what I termed "divergences", which are supposed to be instantaneous actions.

I wonder if such is possible. First, the negative path. They can't be deliberative actions, involving a prior intention or decision to perform them. Such deliberative actions will have to be diachronic in temporal import. Further, they couldn't be physical actions. One might try trickery of the following sort: think of the action of beginning to move my arm. But no such action is performed unless my arm moves, and thus this action implies that something happens beyond moment at which my arm begins to move. Moreover, many things happen in the small duration from when I first try to move my arm to the moment at which my arm begins to move. Think of playing "slap" as a kid and experiencing the frustration of finding your hands moving too late, even though you saw the slap coming and began the process that resulted in your hands moving.

You might be unmoved, thinking that I'm ignoring the obvious point that there is a very first instant at which motion of the arm or hands begins. Yes, there is, but it is not clear that there is an action here. There is, of course, the event in question, but not every instantaneous event involved in action is itself an action.

So, it appears we should look at mental acts such as tryings if we are to find instanteous actions. But here there are worries about vagueness that creep in. Suppose you are deliberating about what to do, and the end result of your deliberation is the action of moving your arm, which includes the action of trying to move your arm and trying to begin to move your arm (only the latter has any hope of being an instantaneous action).

Even if the beginning of the movement of your arm is an instantaneous event, it is not obvious that your trying to bring about this instantaneous event is itself instantaneous. We might gerrymander here, however: talk instead of the trying which is contemporaneous with the beginning of the motion of the arm. (One gerrymandering we should resist, that

Even here, though, I think there is a problem. It strikes me as obvious that it is vague when your arm begins to move, and hence vague when the trying begins that is contemporaneous with this beginning.

If all this is right, then to maintain that this particular trying to begin to move your arm can be an instantaneous action requires adopting an epistemicist view of vagueness. Let me speak with the vulgar about this, in the way discussions of vagueness usually proceed. Suppose vagueness is really "in the world," so that there are moments of time at which you've clearly begun to move your arm, and moments of time prior to the moments in the penumbral region where it is not clear whether you've begun to move your arm. In order for the action to be instantaneous, on the assumption that vagueness is in the world, every acceptable precisification of the action in question would have to assign just one moment of time to the action in question. But I can see no reason for thinking that this would be a requirement on an acceptable precisification, and besides that issue, the usual demands on precisification identify the thing in question with what would be true about it on every acceptable precisification. Yet, if every precisification made the action instantaneous, nothing would be true about the action in question regarding its temporality on every precisification.

OK, this was much too fast and loose, but I hope you see my concern, which is simply this: am I right that if you want to avoid FSC's, you'll have to be an epistemicist?

free will and necessitation

Since I also blog (I'm participating here in the verbing of America) on Prosblogion, the philosophy of religion blog, and since the entry there that has drawn the largest response there is one on free will and necessitation, I thought I'd blog the topic here and see what the real experts think...

I'm not as up to speed on the Frankfurt literature as I wish to be, so maybe I can learn something by provoking responses. Here's what I see so far. There are Franfurt-style counterexamples to PAP, and the most common way of defending the Kantian claim that responsibility requires being able to do otherwise is to talk about internal actions such as trying or intending. My uninformed response to this maneuver is that it doesn't help. If the internal factors are themselves actions, and if they have temporal duration, then Frankfurt-style counterexamples are still easy to construct: just have a demon watch, and interfere when the first segments of the internal action appear to prevent the person from trying or intending.

So, the only hope, as I see it, for defenders of the Kantian view is to talk about instantaneous internal factors which have no causally sufficient priors that could be used by the demon to anticipate the control exerted by the agent over that factor. Here things get murky for me. Could there be such instantaneous factors? It is hard to see how they could be actions, though I can see how they could be the beginning of an action; but I see no argument why there couldn't be instantaneous actions. I think the more natural route, however, is to think in terms of events such as the beginnings of an internal action--"beginnings" for short. Could the Kantian view be saved by insisting that beginnings must be such that we could have initiated a different beginning instead?

'Beginnings' is the wrong concept, however, since there could be an action A and its absence, ~A, that share the same beginning. At some moment, however, they will have to diverge. So maybe the instantaneous factors in question should be called "divergences". Let us formulate the Kantian view, then, as the claim that, regarding divergences, we must be able to proceed via either of the two divergences, and these divergences will themselves not have causally sufficient priors.

This is where my reflection ends. It looks to me that the rescue of the Kantian view requires talk of instantaneous divergences which are under the control of the agent in question, and it seems to me that Frankfurt-style counterexamples cannot be constructed against a "control over divergences" position. I'm uncomfortable with the position, however, in part because of the required instantaneous character of divergences.

So, finally, the point of the post: can the Kantian intuition be save from Frankfurt counterexamples by appeal to divergences? Or, perhaps, is there some other option I'm missing?

new epistemology blog

I noticed in the last post on libertarian agency that the comments fast turned toward epistemology. Views will differ on the value of such a direction, but I liked it! Anyway, it gives me an opportunity to plug our new epistemology blog Certain Doubts, run at the University of Missouri by myself with the help of Peter Markie and Matt McGrath. We already have an impressive list of contributors, and I invite you to check it out!