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.

Comments

[Kip Werking]

I would have welcomed an attempt to account for the apparent conflict between these numbers and the results from Nichols and Knobe. Their work found evidence that people are natural incompatibilists—but only in response to “more abstract, theoretical questions” which do not “trigger emotions.” The questions from Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner, however, are notably specific and mostly trigger emotions. For example, robbing, stealing, saving a child, and returning a wallet might all trigger emotions. The question about “jogging” would be the only exception (this change, however, did not alter the percent finding free will, as Nichols and Knobe might expect).

The only reference I can find to Nichols and Knobe’s work is this note:

“One might point out that our studies consistently found a minority of participants (usually 20-30%) who offered incompatibilist responses and argue that these subjects “got it” while the majority were unable to recognize the connection between the determinism in the scenario and their own conception of freedom and responsibility. Perhaps some people were motivated not to recognize such a conflict because they are strongly attached to the idea that we are free and responsible and are thus inclined to avoid any cognitive dissonance involved in considering a possible threat to our own freedom. For instance, people’s propensity to blame others for bad outcomes may skew some of their responses. We consider these issues more fully in Nahmias et al. (forthcoming); see also Nichols and Knobe (in prep.).”

For a long time, I’ve suggested that the popularity of uncompromising “free willist” views may be the result of an argument from adverse consequences, and so I would like to see explored the suggestion here, that people “are strongly attached to the idea that we are free and responsible and are thus inclined to avoid any cognitive dissonance involved in consideriding a possible threat to our own freedom.”

I would like to account for the difference between the Nichols and Knobe numbers and these numbers not just because they lend more support to incompatibilism, but also because they lend more support to the “dualist” position that Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner later consider. These positions argue that free will is “un-real” because our intuitions conflict (Richard Double’s view) or that “free will” takes on different definitions in different contexts. Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner take issue with these views:

“However, it seems clear to us that neither the non-cognitivist nor the contextualist approach to the kind of intuitional conflict discussed above will be satisfactory to incompatibilists. For we take it that incompatibilists, when stating their thesis, are making a claim about free will that has cognitive content and that is true in all contexts (or at least all contexts where interest in free will is tied to questions of moral responsibility). Thus, in the face of our data, and assuming empirical research showed people in fact have intuitions supporting (C), the incompatibilist will have to find a way of resolving this conflict of intuitions in a way that helps his or her case.”

But I do not think incompatibilists should be held hostage to “making a claim about free will that has cognitive content and that is true is all contexts (or at least all contexts where interest in free will is tied to questions of moral responsibility)”—especially when incompatibilists such as Robert Kane explicitly reject such a conception of their view. Kane, for example, states that his incompatibilism should only be taken as incompatibilism about a specific type of moral responsibility (other types may be compatible with determinism). Furthermore, if the contextualist position is the claim that:

“… when people use ‘free will’ in contexts and ways intimately tied up with practices of moral responsibility, sometimes it expresses one content, compatible with determinism, and other times—notably, in philosophical discussions when the criteria of applicability become more stringent—it expresses another content, incompatible with determinism.”

Then doesn’t this view presuppose that the relevant sense of “free will” for philosophical discussions is incompatibilist? When philosophers say “We are incompatibilists” do they further commit themselves to being incompatibilists, not just in philosophical discussions, but also outside of them? Should the willingness of such incompatibilists to concede that unexamined or folk intuitions about moral responsibility may well be compatibilist somehow count against their position?

In any case, these are only labels. If the contextualist position cannot satisfy the incompatibilist, then I am not an incompatibilist.

One final nitpick:

Considering how crucial and delicate the choice of words in surveys such as these must be, I have some points to make about the questions:

“Acting of his own free will?” seems, at least to me, less demanding than “Acting of his own Free Will” (capitalizing the term, as Honderich and non-philosophers sometimes do), which seems less demanding than “Does Jeremy have freedom of the will?”

Likewise, considering that many incompatibilists, such as Kane, have placed an emphasis upon “ultimacy” or “origination” (and distinguished this from compatibilist senses of responsibility), it might be helpful to ask questions such as “Was Jeremy Ultimately Responsible for his action?” Would respondents “pick up” on this incompatibilist distinction by finding Jeremy responsible in a conventional, but not an ultimate, sense?

[tnadelhoffer]

Kip,
Surely you can appreciate the fact that our paper was sent to PPR before Nichols and Knobe had run any of their studies--which were, after all, a response to our studies. Hence, in the original version of the PPR paper we had no reason to discuss Nichols and Knobe since their paper had yet to be completed. In the revised version of our paper, on the other hand, we do mention their work in a footnote as you correctly point out. Moreover, as you also correctly point out, at least one of our studies produced data that would not be predicted on Nichols and Knobe's affective explanation of our data.

In any event,you make it sound as if we conveniently ducked the opportunity to address their criticisms. In reality, we decided it would be better to wait until their paper comes out to craft a response that specifically addresses their interesting findings rather than trying to cram such a discussion into what was already a pretty long paper in the first place. Plus, it is unclear whether PPR would have allowed for such a substantial revision anyway. I nevertheless find your comments and suggestions helpful. Hopefully, more philosophers will address these issues in the future--at least that was part of our goal in writing the paper in the first place.

[Kip Werking]

Of course I appreciate that fact, now that I know it! I had only thought otherwise because the Nichols and Knobe paper had been published here at the Garden well before your paper (even if the latter was written earlier). Also, your paper cites the Nichols and Knobe article (but mentions that it is forthcoming, and by implication I suppose, unfinished). This gave me the wrong impression, and in hindsight my assumption was unwarranted!

Anyway, let me congratulate you on a very well written paper. I find empirical philosophy to be exciting, and I think it can be very helpful to this free will and determinism dispute.

[tnadelhoffer]

Kip,
I am glad you liked the paper. I am also pleased to hear that you think that empirical philosophy has something to offer people working on the free will and determinism dispute--if only more people shared your sentiments. Either way, having now reread my earlier post it seems snarkier than I had intended. I only wanted to address what was a genuine (and well-intended) question on your part concerning why we did not address the interesting work being done by Nichols and Knobe in more detail.

In the event that you are interested, there is a special edition of the Journal of Cognition and Culure coming out on the relationship between folk psychology and folk morality that will include a paper by Nichols tenatively entitled " Judgements of Free Will and Moral Responsibility " with a response by Eddy Nahmias tentatively entitled "Do We Believe in Agent Causation: A Response to Shaun Nichols." The issue will also tentatively include papers and commentaries by Joshua Knobe, Bertram Malle, Fred Adams, Gilbert Harman, Al Mele, Adam Morton, and yours truly. Given your interest in the sort of empirically informed work we do in the PPR paper, you might find some of the stuff in the issue of JCC interesting as well.

[Kip Werking]

Well, I am glad you called to my attention which research finished first. As my comments reveal, I am not as familiar with empirical philosophy as I am with other subjects. I did, however, read the Nichols and Knobe paper, as well as your own. They are fascinating reading and make me want to conduct my own surveys! Also, thank you for recommending the Journal of Condition and Culture special issue. I will look for it.

[Ignacio Prado]

As a compatibilist who is convinced of the relevance of bringing scientific questions and methods to bear on the philosophical problems associated with questions about free will, I am intrigued by your approach and results. I worry, however, that the difficulty in constructing these surveys would be that non-philosophers do not have anything that deserves to be called an 'intuition' about the compatibility-or-not of theoretical concepts such as 'free will' and 'determinism.

In ordinary life, 'freedom' and 'responsibility' are thick, contested concepts that get deployed in talking about diverse kinds of personal histories, social encounters, and political arrangements. The result of this ‘pre-theory’ is a mixed bag of commonsensical know-how for living in a society. It would be hard to distill out of this pre-theory anything like an ‘intuition’ about an abstract philosophical problem (a methodological point implicit in Strawson’s classic essay, I think).

Even when you construct cases that are supposed to make the philosophical issues concrete for your survey subjects, they will usually be cases remote from anything that I imagine that these people have thought much about before (such as your Laplacean hypotheticals). The result, I worry, is that the opinions you elicit will reflect spur-of-the-moment, best-guess judgments on an alien issue, rather than a deep reflection of the commitments your survey subjects bring to bear on ordinary life (though if the 70ish % numbers are reproducible in future surveys, they would probably by interesting in their own right). If people ever think about these issues on a cosmological scale at all, my intuition is that they would probably think about them in the context of their religious lives, in response to uncontrollable events like the Asian Tsunami or other political or personal tragedies (in which case, interestingly, the implicit question is usually whether God is responsible. The need to posit an agent responsible for producing events of human significance seems to be ineradicable [even when the locus of responsibility is a quasi-agential Fate]).

For this reason, I think your ‘genes and culture’ questions are a much more fruitful and illuminating line of inquiry (and I would imagine similar work already exists in social psychology?). An interesting avenue of approach might be, to ask, ‘if genes and culture determined, in some way, the result of Fred and Barney’s actions, then why do you think they are responsible for those actions?,’ or more abstractly, ‘what do you think Fred and Barney’s free will consists in, given their genetic endowment and upbringing?’).

Those sorts of survey questions would have the disadvantage of not being of a ‘yeah or nay’ variety, which would make them less scientifically tractable. They would, on the other hand, do a significant amount in clarifying what exactly it is that people think makes other people morally appraisable.

Best,
Ignacio

[Rob]

I think incompatibilist claim (L) -- on page 12 -- gets short shrift; accordingly, I wonder whether there wouldn't have been a significant discrepancy among the results of the scenarios had one of the scenarios been rendered in the first person; and against the dismissal of appeals to phenomenology, I would pose Daniel Wegner's research on (as he puts it) "the mind's self-portrait," which, I think, provides pretty robust "relevant research on the phenomenology of non-philosophers."

Some of Wegner's work can be freely accessed here:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/conscwil.htm

[Rob]

Whoops. I meant, above, not that I wonder about how the results would be if one of the scenarios was rendered in the first person, but rather in the second person -- so that the subjects would think about it in the first person instead of in terms of others. My thought is that this might stand a better chance of indicating phenomenological sources of incompatibilism.

[Neil]

I like the paper, just as I liked Eddy's earlier work on the topic. I am surprised all over again by the figures: I would have thought that undergrads are far more incompatibilist than these findings suggest. I have lots of queries and quibbles however. First, and perhaps least importantly, I doubt that you can find pretheoretical intuitions on this topic. Think about the debate over moral relativism. Nichols & Folds-Bennett find that children are moral objectivists, but other tests show that a fairly high proportion of college students are relativists. Why? Theory. I can recall arguments in about 8th grade about freedom and determinism.

Second, you cite G. Strawson as someone who says that the folk are natural incompatibilists. But he also says (1986: 105ff) that the folk are natural compatibilists. It depends on what questions you ask. So some of your targets had already moved to the position you sketch for them, of holding that the folk have incompatible intuitions. For what it’s worth, that what I believe. I think “responsibility”, in both philosophical and everyday use, has several meanings, some of which are compatible with determinism and some of which are not. Recall Watson’s “Two Faces of Responsibility”. Some of our intuitions about responsibility track the degree to which the agent exercised a pretty thoroughgoing control over the sufficient conditions for her actions, whereas some track the extent to which action is merely voluntary and reflective of the agent’s character.

Suppose I’m right. Is this bad news for the incompatibilist? Not necessarily. If the sense of “responsibility” which is incompatibilist is (intuitively!) more important than the sense which is compatibilist, than she can claim intuitive support for her views. Though I’m not an incompatibilist, I think that the control conception of responsibility is ultimately more significant than the character one, and it wouldn’t surprise me if ordinary people are incompatibilists about this conception of responsibility (I would bet that they are, though not a very large amount). More work for you to do!

Finally, I’m not sure that you have shown that incompatibilism is more metaphysically demanding than compatibilism. I would have thought that the best way to show that a theory is more metaphysically demanding than another is to show that the first theory requires that all the theses maintained by the second are true, but also requires that some additional metaphysical claims are true. Is libertarianism more demanding than compatibilism, by that standard? Only if libertarians maintain that in addition to deterministic event-causation, there is also indeterministic. But they need not maintain that: they may (though they usually do not) think that all causation is indeterministic. And hard determinists can have a metaphysics that is exactly the same as that of compatibilists.

[Tamler Sommers]

I want to follow up on Ignaticio's comment, since I have a similar worry. Like everyone else, I'm very excited about this new approach to guaging intuitions, but I find the methodology to be a bit problematic. One thought I had: what if you allowed an experimenter to ask some follow-up questions. I asked Shaun Nichols about this during the Q and A of a talk he gave at UNC, and he replied that we cannot "train" the subjects. I said that it wouldn't be training them, it would be getting them to "think harder" about the issue. This was taken as a joke, but I didn't mean it as one. You can't expect a fully accurate read of someone's intuitions from a one-shot answer. What have we learned from Socrates? That a little back and forth is NECESSARY to find out what we really think about an issue.

So here's my not altogether unserious suggestion. If the subject gives a compatibilist answer, the experimenter is given three follow-up questions to see if they will change their mind. And the same goes for subjects who give incompatibilist answers. My prediction is that this twist will tilt the balance significantly in favor of incompatibilist responses--even in emotionally charged cases.

I do realize, however, that constructing such an experiment would be extremely difficult, but if anyone has any suggestions I welcome them wholeheartedly. I would love to be involved in something like this.

[Tom Clark]

Just a note re research methodology which is relevant here.

What’s typically done in research on beliefs and attitudes is a two stage process. First, conduct extensive focus groups and interviews with open-ended questions (e.g., about free will and MR) in which people get to ramble on at length about the issues in question, without much if any guidance from the moderator or interviewer. The resulting material is then subjected to a rigorous content analysis which extracts the salient features of the belief and attitude concepts, their dimensions, and their variability. Of course it’s important to involve people from different walks of life in order not to get a biased slice of the conceptual variation. And it’s equally important to get more than one person’s take on the content analysis. What this stage does, ideally, is get a relatively unbiased empirical assessment of the landscape of belief and attitudes.

Then, on the basis of the content analysis, questionnaires are constructed using yes/no, multiple choice, and Likert scale type questions (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly disagree) which can efficiently test for variation on the concepts that have been elicited in the focus groups and interviews. The data are then analyzed to see if the questions capture consistent patterns of variation that indicate real dimensions of belief, and if so, what these are best interpreted as being (e.g. belief in contra-causal freedom vs. a desire that people be held accountable). When someone asks you to justify your close-ended (as opposed to open-ended) questionnaire items, you can point to the earlier stage of research and give empirical justifications for phrasing the questions the way you did. But of course there’s always going to be room for interpretive disagreement at all stages of this sort of research.

It’s great that Eddy and others are delving into the empirical question of what people really think about this stuff. But I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s beliefs re fw and mr are a mess of contradictory intuitions that will take some pretty cagey research to untangle.

[Eddy Nahmias]

I can't answer everyone's interesting comments and questions right now (about to go to SSPP conference), but some relevant methdological points:
1) Rob, we have another paper on the phenomenology of freedom (Journal of Consciousness Studies special issue on Trusting the Subject vol. 2). The methodological issues there are even more problematic than intuition testing, but we did not find any evidence to support the libertarian phenomenology suggested by many incompatibilists that would support what we call L (that libertarianism is intuitive because of our phenomenology of decision-making). In any case, we suggest that the issue should be addressed empirically, not from philosophers' theory-influenced phenomenology (and yes, the folk have theory-influenced intuitions and phenomenology too, but all the more reason to see what their intuitions and phenomenology are).
2) Ignacio and Tamler, we would love to see more studies using follow up questions (some grad students here are doing that with the intentional action surveys). We did, however, allow students to explain their answers on the back of the survey, and some gave responses that suggested compatibilist views (and some gave responses that suggested incompatibilist views). This supports several people's points above that the folk have conflicting intuitions about free will. That is likely (our own results suggest it to the extent that we consistent got results in the 3-to-1 range). If so, then both sides need to explain how that fact influences their position (and we suggest some reasons it may be more problematic for incompatibilists--e.g., their view is not as amenable to revisionism, at least in my opinion). And, if so, then incompatibilists need to give up their claim that their view is the natural view as supported by commonsense intuitions (whereas compatibilism is a quagmire of evasion, etc.).
3) Tom, your methodological approach is indeed the right way to go. We did not carry it out to the extent you suggest, but we did do quite a few preliminary surveys with some open-ended questions and surveys like ours with various versions of the questions. (In the phenomenology study, we also did some "protocal analysis" where people offered concurrent introspective reports while they made decisions--didn't work too well). In any case, we make no claim that we have discovered what the folk's intuitions about free will and moral responsiblity are. We tried to make a start. We hope others (including psychologists with more experimental experience than us but perhaps in conjunction with philosophers who understand the conceptual issues) will do more work using various methodologies. And we hope others, like Nichols and Knobe have done in their paper, will offer cognitive hypotheses for why people have the intuitions they do (that's the focus of my talk with Zac Ernst for SSPP--better go think about that!).

Thanks for all the helpful feedback. Keep it coming.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Not having read either of the papers under discussion, I am trying to understanding their purpose. Let's assume that the folk do have significant predisposition toward one position or the other. What would it matter? Couldn't tomorrow's folk take the other position?

In my mind "folk" philosophy is just watered down philosophy -- philosophy past from parent to child, educator to student, having been several times removed from the source. Beliefs produced by this process qualify as pre-theoretical only in the sense that the folk who hold them have not rigorously scrutinized them. Their parents or their teachers (or some other person they took to be an authority while growing up) told them so-and-so and so they believed it.

Somewhere up the chain those beliefs were produced by being exposed to or doing actual philosophy. In this way, folk beliefs are historical in nature. They are what they are because of historical factors -- with no necessary connection to truth.

If that is the case, what is the point of studying folk philosophy? Is it any different from a kind of historical science or social psychology? These are just ways of phrasing the more basic question: can the study of folk philosophy generate normative content? I believe the answer is no.

On the other hand, I think it may be of (philosophical?) value to investigate isolated cultures to determine how large of an impact mainstream philosophy has had on mainstream culture. This would, at least, help us separate so-called “natural” beliefs from the artificial ones, but, of course, there are senses in which “natural” is equally meaningless (e.g. cases where the “natural” is of no intrinsic value).

[Kip Werking]

Two small points:

1. Mark, the value of empirical philosophy is less clear when philosophers make claims that don't involve folk intuitions. But when philosophers make explicit claims about what folk intuitions we do have, then one of the best ways to address such claims is to just ask people! This is especially so when philosophers, while speculating from armchairs, make controversial claims about folk intuitions. I'm glad that philosophers challenge the claim, made by some incompatibilists, that incompatibilism is the intuitive or natural view. As the new Nahmias et al paper shows, things are not so simple. As someone who sympathizes with skeptics, I would like to see further research because I think compatibilists, and not just incompatibilists, make controversial claims about intutions that I doubt the folk would share.

2. One of the most interesting things about the Nahmias et al paper is that, while it does not support (but rather challenges) the incompatibilist claim that incompatibilism is intuitive, neither does it support compatibilism. Compatibilism consistently only received support from about 75% of the survey-takers. 75% is not 90% or even 98%. This suggests to me that our natural intuitions are conflicting. But it also suggests to me that one of the most important things future work on this subject can do is explain why the 75% who go compatibilist go compatibilist, and why the 25% who don't, don't.

Nichols and Knobe suggest that emotion may trigger the compatibilist response (by impairing rationality). Perhaps the 25% are just less resistant to this fallacy, or simply less emotional. But this is just one explanation and others may favor compatibilism. It would be fascinating to search for a correlation between the 75% compatibilist responses and, for example, IQ, sex, age, political orientation, personality type, and so on. Another example: Gary Watson suggested, in Responsibility and the Limits of Evil, that free skeptics such as Einstein were also loners (and felt less committed to the reactive attitudes). Watson's suggestion would certainly also be true for Russell (at least in his youth). Are loners more inclined to be fw-skeptics? Empirical philosophy explaining why people choose compatibilist or incompatibilist answers would help test hypotheses such as Watson's.

[Tamler Sommers]

Kip, that's a great point, one that I've thinking a lot about lately. Spinoza was a loner too, and Darwin was never really comfortable in public eye either. You see this trend in literature too. The greatest fictional free will skeptic of them all--Jacques the fatalist (from Diderot's novel)--was a wanderer, never settling anywhere or becoming part of a fixed society.

But there are at least two ways of looking at this.

(1) Loners and wanderers are more likely to be RIGHT about the fact that we are not free and morally responsible in the way that most think we are. Or...

(2) Loners and wanderers are more likely to have incompatibilist intuitions, which leads them to skepticism once they become naturalists or determinists. But the the ground level compatibilist intuition about moral desert is really out there among the (non-wandering) folk.

By the way, I just received what I've been looking for: a long study about our intuitions about moral responsibility with interviews and follow-ups etc. I'll post it as soon as I get permission from the other--it's in press right now. The title: "Explaining Away Responsibility." Life is good.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Kip,

"This suggests to me that our natural intuitions are conflicting."

As I alluded in my first post, I don't think anyone's been able to establish that there are any "natural" intuitions regarding these issues, in what sense they can be considered "natural", or more importantly why it matters.

I do recognize that the purpose of the Nahmias et al paper was to refute the claim that incompatiblism is more intuitive, but I still totally unclear what is at stake. As I said in my first post, there doesn't seem to be anything fixed about folk intuitions, given their historical nature, so even if incompatibilist is more intuitive to the folk what would it matter? What is at stake here?

[Jason Turner]

A hodgepodge of comments re some above posts. (Sorry, I blog seldom, but I figured I might want to get in on this one.)

First, to Mark: there is a strong tendancy among philosophers to think that one's theory had better (a) preserve as many "pre-theoretical" intuitions as possible and (b) tell a good story as to why we should jettison those intuitions that it fails to preserve. Now, if I understand you aright, you think this tendancy is mistaken: who cares what the folk "intuitions" are, since those intuitions are just poorly done philosophy and liable to change with the next quazi-philosophical movie anyway.

This would be a really nice response to all sorts of arguments from intuitions: I'd like to make use of it, but I can't see how to make it work. If you're going to endorse it, you have to answer some other pretty tough questions: for instance, if we're not beholden to "folk" intuitions, are we beholden to any intuitions at all? (Could a JTB-er plausibly respond to the Gettier cases by saying, "Oh, those are just your intuitions -- who cares about intuitions? Jones still knows that Smith has a Ford (or whatever).") If not, what are the data points which a philosophical theory must fit? And if so, which intuitions are the "important" ones, and why are they *better* than folk intuitions? (They are influenced by theory and liable to change also, after all.)

None of this is to say philosophy can't be done properly while ignoring folk intuitions. But it's unclear how it ought to be done in this case, and easy to see why philosophers have thought they need to consider the intuitions after all. And once we're in the frame of mind where we think folk intuitions put at least some sort of constraint on theorizing, it's easy to see why we should care what those intuitions are.

Second: Neil, on metaphysical demandingness. It's true that there's a sense of "metaphysically demanding" on which a theory T1 is more demanding than a theory T2 iff T1 entails (perhaps counterpossibly) more metaphysical theses than T2 does, and on that criterion, it's not clear that incompatibilism is by itself any more demanding than compatibilism. (But I still would have thought libertarianism more demanding: after all, libertarianism entails indeterminism, whereas compatibilism entails neither determinism nor indeterminism.)

Our thought, though, was slightly different. It was that, for any target concept C, each metaphysical thesis proposed as a necessary condition for C must be *motivated*. Incompatibilism (whether libetarian or skeptic) clearly has more metaphysical theses as necessary conditions for free will than compatibilism does; as such, these conditions need motivation. And our contention is that incompatibilists often do appeal to intuitions to provide this motivation. But if you don't want to call this feature of incompatibilism "metaphysical demandingness," we probably won't complain.

Finally, Kip on contextualism, from way back on the first post. We probably spoke too quickly; it does seem that libertarians could also be contextualists. But, as I understand it, libertarians do need to say that there is some particular kind of moral responsibility, K, (the kind that grounds the whole package of goodies that e.g. Kane wants out of free will), such that there is no context where an agent S can be determined, K be the kind of moral responsibility at stake, and yet "S acted freely" be true.

So I'm wondering if a weaker version of our point could still do the work we wanted it to. The objection we were considering was one that said "when you think about free will, you get compatibilist intuitions, but when you think about 'has a choice about' type locutions, you get incompatibilist intuitions." Then our point would be that the most natural contextualist move here would vary along the wrong axis: you would get shifts in the semantic value of "free" when you stopped thinking about free will on a global level (so to speak) and started thinking about whether someone had a choice about something. But there's no reason to think that you couldn't focus either on "having a choice about" or on a more global type of freedom while kind K is still the kind of responsibility at stake. So it doesn't seem like the contextualist maneuver will help the libertarian out here, since it doesn't look like it will ensure that you can't get "S acted freely" to come out true even if you're worried about K and S was determined.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Thanks (again) for the interesting comments!

[Mark Smeltzer]

Jason,

Good points. I believe you are correct regarding the important role that intuitions play in philosophy, but only insofar as our intuitions are generally truth-seeking*. I'm just not convinced that there are any natural, truth-seeking intuitions that entail incompatibilism. If that is the case, it is hard for me to see what is at stake regarding folk intuitions in this area.

Having said that, I do believe there are legitimate truth-seeking intuitions behind folk philosophy, but that they are buried beneath layers of (typically contradictory) quazi-philosophy (to borrow your term) and diluted philosophy. If that were not the case, then (as you said) it would be pointless to try to reason with anyone. In doing philosophy the goal is, in one sense, to point out to people cases where their intuitions do not support or entail the views they hold as function of epistemic duty. Good philosophical positions capture the essence of these natural truth-seeking intuitions; the difficulty is in exposing them.

(* Generally speaking, my view is that intuitions that are so vulnerable as to be swung back and forth by pop culture [e.g. quazi-philophical movies], are not in the running to be considered truth-seeking.)

[Keith Snyder]

From the Department of Fools Rushing In...

I found this discussion as the result of a Google search on "free will problem" while doing research for a novel that deals with the question. As I intend it to be a good novel, any philosophical question is subservient (by a long shot) to the story, but I still need a better understanding than I started with. (And in novel-writing, "research" often means "plausibly deniable procrastination.")

If I follow the conversation--and I wouldn't put money on it--the only thing I see that would prevent free will and determinism from coexisting in anyone's intuition is an overly dualistic outlook: an outlook illustrated by the very dichotomy of "compatabilist" vs. "incompatabilist." Must I be one or the other? The people I know are rarely that purely committed to any exclusive absolute. And must it be one or the other? Most of life seems to be "sometimes it's mostly one; sometimes it's mostly the other; other times it's even less clearly defined." Why would this necessarily be any different?

The conclusion I've drawn from my limited experience is that most apparent logical deadlocks are the result of an inaccurate initial assumption that leads to unrealistically polarized, apparently mutually exclusive terms.

I also doubt that wording is as "crucial and delicate" as a questioner might prefer, since no matter how concisely you put something, a significant number of people won't get it.

As I said--Department of Fools Rushing In. I'm a novelist; what do I know? Thanks for the useful conversation and for tolerating an interested outsider. I intuited that you wouldn't mind.

[Neil]

Keith,

I'm no logician, but it seems to me that this is a case in which the options are exclusive. If you think there is ever (not necessarily always, or usually, but ever) free will in a deterministic universe, then you're a compatibilist. If you think there is never free will in a determinstic universe, then you're an incompatibilist. I (for what it's worth) think that there are many threats to free will, but determinism is not one of them. So I'm a compatibilist. But that doesn't mean I think that we're all free all or even most of the time. Actually, I think there's less freedom than most people think. And what freedom there is comes in all kinds of degrees. So I think that the compatibilist view, there is room for all kinds of shades of grey.

Hope this helps the procrastination. I wanted to write fiction once. But everything I wrote sounded like it was written by an academic.

[Keith]

Neil,

Thanks for the response. The procrastination's coming along nicely.

I suppose that if I thought this were a deterministic universe, I couldn't, by definition, believe that free will was compatible with it. And if I believed in free will, I couldn't, by definition, believe this to be a deterministic universe.

It seems to me that some things are, to a great extent, deterministic. Most of them involve inanimate objects.

It also seems to me that some things are deterministic to a lesser extent. Most of them involve self-aware objects.

Does this make me a compatabilist?

[John Fischer]

I highly recommend John Perry's piece on procrastination. It is available at the link in our humor section to "John Perry's light essays". Don't delay--have a look at it.

Welcome to the Garden, Keith!

[Tamler Sommers]

Keith,

It makes you an incompatibilist since you think that determinism and free will are incompatible. Incompatibilists are then traditinally broken up into two categories: libertarians and hard determinists (or free will deniers.) You're a libertarian since you think that there is some indeterminism in the universe and it's there that our free will lies. The hard determinists or free will deniers believe that we never have free will (of the type that could make us deserving of blame/praise for our actions). And not necessarily because they think that determinism is true--some believe that free will is impossible whether or not we live in a deterministic universe

Note to the rest of the Garden: Keith seems like an intuitive incompatibilist if there ever was one.

[Rob]

Keith,

You might find Galen Strawson's Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy article "Free Will" of use in obtaining some clarity on the matter:

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014

And, your reaction to "the no-freedom theorists' argument" might be of particular interest to Garden denizens:

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT3

[Kip Werking]

Keith,

I agree with the thrust of Neil's post (compatibilism and incompatibilism *should* be mutually exclusive). But there are actually several scholars who have maintained middle-ground positions. I think these scholars were motivated by the same suspicion of false dichotomies that you mention. These are all positions with which I strongly sympathize.

Consider: the "metacompatibilism" suggested by Richard Double and Bruce Waller, the "Fundamental Dualism" suggested by Saul Smilansky, and also the work of Ted Honderich, who regards both compatibilism and incompatibilism as mistaken.

You can find a paper by Waller here:
http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5114405&PDF=1
You can find a paper by Double here:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9973.00288/abs/
You can find a paper by Saul Smilansky, which I highly recommend, here at the Garden:
http://gfp.typepad.com/online_papers/saul_smilansky/index.html
And finally you can find papers by Honderich, as well as papers by Double, Smilanky, and many other prominent scholars at Honderich's excellent Freedom and Determinism website:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm

If you are looking for introductory books, Bob Kane just published a new book. The first half of his The Significance of Free Will is also an excellent (and slightly more technical) introduction, which has served me well. Honderich also has an short introductory book entitled "How Free Are You?", which is its second edition.

[Keith]

Man, it takes a lot of homework to hang with you guys!

Thanks for the welcome. With the caveat that I haven't done the homework yet (but do intend to) and may not even be using the words correctly:

I do think determinism and free will are incompatible theories. In practice, I think they mix all the time, and there's no other way it can work. How? I don't know--but I don't believe the words can be defined unambiguously enough that an unassailable logical proof can be assumed to imply the possibility of truth.

As the cliché goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

I'm sure anyone here could out-argue me quite easily, but I still think I'm catching a whiff of eau d'false dichotomy. Maybe it springs not from "incompatabilist" vs. "compatabilist,' but from "determinism" vs. "free will."

One of the nice things about being a novelist is you can just decide how the universe works, and that's how it works. At least until the next book.

Thanks again for the affable welcome. Academics speaking their opinions of fiction among gatherings of fiction writers don't always fare so well.

[Kevin Timpe]

Keith,

If you say that 'free' vs. 'determined is a false dichotomy, then you now sound like a compatibilist. Just as 'red or fast' is a false dichotomy for cars because one could be both, compatibilists think we could be free and determined.

So maybe what you have is conflicting intuitions (I'm not saying that as a bad thing--it's not a normative cliam, just a possible descriptive claim). And there are plenty on this blog that would have lots to say about such cases of conflicting intuitions.

[John Fischer]

I would also recommend Robert Kane' new introductory book on free will with Oxford University Press. It is excellent.

[Keith]

I've been thinking about this idea of "conflicting intuitions," and I don't think it's accurate. My understanding of intuition is that it's not logical; it's empirical and inductive--it doesn't reach its conclusions through rigorous application of principles, but rather through pattern recognition. (Which is why the older you get and the more you see and think, the better your intuition becomes.)

So there's no contradiction--no conflict--if it sometimes tests one way and sometimes tests another. The test makes fatal assumptions, i.e., that either "compatabilist" or "incompatabilist" is a meaningful description of intuition.

Put another way, logical deadlocks, paradoxes, and mutual exclusions only exist in intellect. They can't happen in intuition because intuition doesn't use deductive reasoning.

[Neil]

Keith,

For discussion of intuitions and how they work see here:

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2005/04/intuitive_to_wh.html

and Gladwell's *Blink* is a nice popular discussion. Intuition, it seems, can reflect all sorts of consicous training, in such a manner that it improves as we get older (as you say). But it can also be very wrong, and no less powerful for that. So we need to distinguish different kinds of intuitions (Jonathan Weinberg makes such distinctions in the comments in the link above).

There is good evidence that *some* intuitions are relatively stable, and not easily shaken. Others alter according to the way evidence is presented, others are educable. It's still far from clear into which class intuitions about free will fall.

[Kip Werking]

As a complete amateur trying to get into this empirical philosophy stuff, I've posted a first draft of a survey on my website, to test intuitions about free will and determinism. You can find it here (any and all criticisms and advice are much appreciated):

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~werking/survey.htm

So far I've had five people take the survey. That number is terribly small, but the results are still fascinating (if anybody knows a good way to get more numbers, or to post the survey is an interactive online form, please let me know). There is not much consensus at all. I will also say that so far I've found at least one non-specialist who says that "Free Will", "free will", "freedom of choice", "responsibility", and "moral responsibility" can exist in a deterministic world, but that "freedom of the will" and "ultimate moral responsibility" cannot (I suggested, in a comment to this thread on March 19th, that people might find the requirements for "freedom of the will" more demanding).

[Stuart Rennie]

Just a couple of comments concerning your paper.

I wrote a bit of a cranky comment on the idea of experimental philosophy on the American Journal of Bioethics Editors Blog, which questioned whether this constituted a new kind of philosophy or 'old wine in new bottles', etc. I'm less cranky now, but still have some methodological questions about this paper.

First: why is there no mention of the number of persons interviewed? Without knowledge of sample size, how is the reader supposed to know whether the percentages stated are statistically significant?

Second: why were college students sampled when your research question concerns 'what people think' about determinism and free will? This way of sampling leads to lack of representivity. It does not matter that the students did not take a college course before. There is no reason to think that the thoughts of college students represent 'what people think' about free will.

Third: are the 'people' whose intuitions about free will etc. are being investigated by these surveys the same 'people' that philosophers talk about? Empirical surveys generally are not about generic people or minds in general: they are about people in a certain geographic area with certain demographic characteristics. The survey does not seem to control or take into account possible confounding due to the differences between respondents (socio-economic class, etc.)

Third: why are the methods shunted off to a reference in footnote 15 when your whole article depends on the results of a study based on those methods? That move would not pass muster in a scientific journal. It strikes me as strange: on the one hand, the empirical data is supposed to be what is driving the paper, on the other hand it is neglected in favor of philosophizing about the implications of the data.

I won't go into the problems raised by the language of the survey, as others here have already done. I would just say that the language is pitched at a level higher than anything I have seen in a survey (most surveys are pitched around 9th grade level), which speaks again to the representativeness problem. Such surveys should really try to get off college campuses.

From my point of view, the conclusion -- i.e. that the data gives 'convincing evidence' that people lean intuitively more toward compatibilism than is usually believed in philosophy -- is premature and unsupported. At least based on what is to At best, it is a start in a line of study that might in the future contribute usefully to the free will/determinism debate.