Yudkowsky on Free Will

Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and a self-taught scholar (I read he scored perfectly on his SAT and ACT before deciding not to attend college), has started a series of posts on control, free will and moral responsibility at the popular blog OvercomingBias.com.

Yudkowsky is very clever, if not spooky smart, and feels strongly pulled (like me) towards one camp of the debate (in this case Dennett/McKenna style compatibilism), while admitting all along that the term "free will" is so poorly defined, and means so many things to so many people, that it might be better to get rid of the term all together.

In the most recent post, called "The Ultimate Source", Eliezer and I exchange a few remarks in the comments section.  I hope some of the Gardeners here find his posts and/or the comments worth reading.

Comments

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

I took the SAT but not ACT. And I think that after the age of 25 you're officially too old to be a child prodigy.

[Joe Campbell]

Why think that 'free will' is so ill-defined that we need to get rid of it? Isn't it part of the responsibility of philosophers to clean up this mess? After all, according to van Inwagen, at least, 'free will' is a term of art. It is our term, our mess. Aren't we obligated to fix it?

Here is my proposal. S has free will iff some of S's actions are up to S. Given this, most philosophers accept that free will is necessary for moral responsibility, thought they disagree about what it means for an action to be up to an individual. Some think that if a is up to S, then S could have done otherwise but some disagree.

[Kip Werking]

Eliezer:

Welcome to the GFP. Sorry about the slight inaccuracy about the ACT (I hope you don't mind too much; I wouldn't).

Joe:

"Why think that 'free will' is so ill-defined that we need to get rid of it? Isn't it part of the responsibility of philosophers to clean up this mess? After all, according to van Inwagen, at least, 'free will' is a term of art. It is our term, our mess. Aren't we obligated to fix it?"

I disagree with this on two different, fundamental levels (both fatal to the sort of project you propose). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think:

1. Even if we wanted to "fix" the meaning of an ambiguous term, we don't have that power. The meanings of terms are determined by common usage, and you are just one data point. Short of starting a widespread campaign (a SuperBowl commercial?) to convince people to start using "free will" in only a compatibilist, or only in an incompatibilist, etc., sense, I don't think we have power to change the meaning of terms, or clarify the meaning of terms whose meaning is unclear.

2. Even if we had that power, we have no good reason to prefer one meaning over another. Suppose people use the term "BLAHBOM", and that the term is vague, but roughly suggests something more alive, with multiple legs, and friendly. But you can find a pesky philosopher or two who will challenge any one of these.

Suppose there are "cattists" and "doggists", who think that "BLAHBOM" should refer to cats, and to dogs, respectively. But the term is silent about which one, if any, it should be. A minority of the folk use BLAHBOM in a cattist way, a minority use it in a doggist way, and most people rarely use the term at all, and when they do it, either use it in ways that are inconsistent with a strictly cattist or doggist interpretation, or in ways that don't commit them to either interpretation.

(By analogy, "free will" roughly conveys ideas of freedom, autonomy, freedom from manipulation, self-control, and control over one's life and fate, without drawing strict metes and bounds as to how much of these it implies.)

Now imagine a passionate doggist, with *nothing* but good intentions, says either:

1. BLAHBOMS are FUDWADS; and/or
2. BLAHBOMS are X, Y and Z, where X, Y, and Z are classic doggist requirements (perhaps X is "canine").

Saying free will means "an act is up to us" is about as helpful as 1, I think, certainly with respect to the question of compatibilism.

And saying we should fix "free will" by giving it a strictly compatibilist or incompatibilist reading (not that you have done this), is as helpful as 2, I think. It's simply arbitrary to pick a side (at least it's unfair to the other camp).

[All of the above is based on the assumption that free will, as used in normal conversation, is so unclear that its silent about whether compatibilism is true. It's not clear to me that this is true; I suspect people have a slight incompatibilist preference. However, I could be wrong about this and don't have data either way.]

What do you think?

[Alan]

In my own FW course--this is 101 BTW--I use Walter Stace's definitive (pun unavoidable) 50s era article in which he employs dictionary common usage as the defense of his classic compatibilist stance. When I teach it I address the fact that Stace at once uses the best available criterion of definition--common usage--but does not at all criticize it. But the most obvious of criticisms of this criterion is that common usage changes. Just consult the primary definitions of terms as they change over time. "Faggot" is my prime example just because of its audacity. 100 years ago its primary use was as a bundle of sticks. 60 years ago it referred primarily to a cigarette. Now it's a defamatory term for homosexuality. Common usage is indexed to time--and the values that control language. And that's my point to my classes--meaning is always in part a function of everything that controls usage--and value shifts that attach to terms can result in shifts to meaning of those terms. My longterm argument about the meaning of the term "free will" is that it is subject to such shifts of valuation--such as the values of retribution versus deterrence, for example.

[Kip Werking]

Alan,

I completely agree. Maybe the truth of compatibilism has been flickering on and off throughout the ages, depending upon how people use the term "free will"?

[Joeschmo]

What about this case:
Say I see someone who looks like Richard Dreyfuss. I point to him and say to my sister, "Richard Dreyfuss!" I'm wrong, but I continue to tell the story and everyone I know is convinced that the man I saw was Richard Dreyfuss. Aren't we all wrong, or has that man become Richard Dreyfuss? Certainly the words we use to denote things are arbitrary, but Richard Dreyfuss is Richard Dreyfuss and a bundle of sticks is still a bundle of sticks. There's a difference between re-naming and analyzing.

[Joe Campbell]

Kip,

1. Is 'free will' a folk term (or expression) or a philosophical term? I think the latter. Certainly it has been handed down to the folk but it isn't as if I have to find out from the folk what it means before I can use it. (Which is different, I think, from what Alan is saying. Maybe when teaching we should define the term in a way that is close to the folk definition.)

If 'free will' is a technical term, not a folk term, then usage doesn't determine its meaning. Perhaps a majority of the folk use the term 'mass' to mean 'weight' but they are wrong. 'Mass' and 'weight' mean different things.

People seem to use the term 'know' to mean 'strong conviction.' That doesn't mean that the skeptic is wrong does it? The proof that I know that I have a hand can't be as easy as showing that I am strongly convinced that I have a hand, can it?

2. I don't think that there is a compatibilist sense of 'free will' and an incompatibilist sense of 'free will.' I think that compatibilists and incompatibilists mean the same thing by the term. Van Inwagen talks about this very issue in his "How to Think about the Problem of Free Will," which is available on his website. In fact, I think you've read it, right?

What do you think of his argument for this claim?

3. Even if 'free will' is a folk concept, it doesn't follow that philosophers as a whole, as opposed to individual philosophers, are powerless to change its meaning. If I convince philosophers as a whole of its meaning and they all start to use it that way, then perhaps the folk will soon follow. It isn't as if changes of meaning are unrelated to the acts of individual people.

[Alan]

Joe and Kip--

I want to agree with much of what you both say. But ultimately I think the question of the meaning of the term "free will" is part and parcel of the whole compatibilism/imcompatibilism issue. So I guess I do part with you Joe on that: I think van Inwagen is wrong in his stance that there are not two separate concepts of FW. There's precedent on that sort of distinction of course. "Gravity" in Newtonian terms is a real force; in Einsteinian terms it is a function of what an inertial object is as following curved spacetime--the idea of force is completely dispensed with. That pushes the question of what gravity really is to a meta-issue of whether Newton or Einstein is more correct (in some sense of "more"--the phi/sci issues here are themselves massive). I see the question of what "free will" means in similar ways--it elevates to a meta-issue of how FW would function in different interpretations of reality. This is how the relevance of the D/I issue comes back in--whether D or I is true feeds back into what we think about the very meaning of the term "free will". There's danger that this kind of feedback, without any sort of arbiter like experimental data as in the gravity case, just results in stalemate of what we should take "free will"" to mean--that's part of the motivation for Gary Watson's excellent Mind survey article in the 80s to be titled "Free Action and Free Will", in which he simply says--pace van Inwagen--that these are two different concepts that align with compatibilism and incompatibilism respectively (and of course his career has been made on the claim that any practical import of freedom aligns with compatibilism and incompatibilism adds nothing of consequence). Without something like the decisive parallel of Mercury's perihelial procession or eclipse results to favor Einstein, we're stymied as to whether a "free action" interpretation of the term "free will" is right or not. I see the recent work of Robert Kane, for example (who I recently met as a presenter at my department's spring meetings--what a terrific person as well as premier philosopher!), as an attempt to duplicate the empirical significance of neurophysiology for incompatibilism as gravitational redshift does for general relativity--there should be some objective significance of evidence to decide not just truth for the FW problem, but the meaning of "free will" itself. There is a dance between meaning and metaphysical reference here--and my remarks about values above shows that that the dance may involve more than the two partners of mind and matter--perhaps it is more of a squaredance than a minuet--but I do not think that "free will" has an easy and delineable referent, except a priori and thus arguably in circular fashion.

[Kip Werking]

Joeschmo:

You raise an interesting point, very similar to the one about "whales and fish", that other philosophers have raised 'round these parts.

To answer your question:

1. The person mistaken about Richard Dreyfuss is mistakenly applying a term to something in the world, even though he agrees with everyone else about what the term means. I agree with everyone else about what apples are. But if I'm drunk, and my vision is bad (or whatever), I might make mistakenly call an apple an orange. In other words, we can imagine how I would make a mistake of fact about "Richard Dreyfuss" or "apple" that has absolutely nothing to do with the definition of Richard Dreyfuss.

2. The free will debate is not like that. If I'm drunk and half-blind, people can correct my mistake about apples pretty fast. But plenty of brilliant, sober philosophers and intellectuals have debated about free will for millennia and still not reached a conclusion. If it was *just* a mistake of fact about a term, the meaning of which everyone agrees on, we would have expected the mistake to be corrected by now. But it's not. Why?

3. First, it's not a rigid designator. Although people can reliable go inspect Richard Dreyfuss (RD), and RD lookalike, and ultimate decide which is which, you can't do that with free will. First of all, nobody agrees about what free will is, not just as to its location in the world, but to what it is conceptionally/abstract---in definition. Second of all, a vocal minority insists that free will doesn't exist at all, so inspect it won't help, even if you could some how. (I suppose there are crazies who deny the existence of RD, and maybe some clever philosophers too, but hopefully free will skeptics are not that bad).

4. To rework your analogy: suppose that you meet someone who doesn't believe a RD lookalike is Richard Dreyfuss, but instead believes that Brad Pitt is called "Richard Dreyfuss". It would futile to say "Oh no, look, your 'Richard Dreyfuss' is married to Angelina Jolie, that can't be RD!" The man would reply "Of course it means he's Richard Dreyfuss! What do you think Richard Dreyfuss even means? The brash star of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Mr. Holland's Opus?"

At first you just think this man is crazy. But then you ask other people. And you find out:

A. many people hardly ever refer to Richard Dreyfuss, but when they do they have an amazing ability to (over)confidently assert exactly and precisely what Richard Dreyfuss is
B. some people talk about RD as if he's the star of Jaws
C. other people talk about RD as if he's the star of Fight Club
D. some people talk about RD as if he's the star of Jaws and then talk about RD as if he's star of Fight Club *in the same* paragraph, and don't seem to have any clear memory of who RD is or what movies he specifically starred in (although they have vague leanings and inclinations: Carmen Electra is definitely not Richard Dreyfuss. But Tom Hanks, it's not so clear.)

This, I think, is a much better analogy. Or am I mistaken?

[Kip Werking]

Joe:

1. I think folk term / term of art is a false dichotomy. There are simply terms, the people who use them, and their usage determines the meaning. Some terms might be "terms of art" because only philosophers use them, therefore the common usage of philosophers determines the meaning. But the same principle applies in each case.

2. You write:

"If 'free will' is a technical term, not a folk term, then usage doesn't determine its meaning. Perhaps a majority of the folk use the term 'mass' to mean 'weight' but they are wrong. 'Mass' and 'weight' mean different things."

Well, the folk (meaning: non-philosopher professors like yourself) use the term. Even though any given non-philosopher rarely uses the term, there are so many more of them than philosophers, that you can't properly claim a monopoly.

But even if you could claim a monopoly, that would be hardly do you any good, because philosophers are just as divided about the definition of free will as the "folk" are. 2/3 of philosophers are compatibilists, at best, which is hardly strong enough to prove that your definition is the ONE TRUE DEFINITION.

3. About Van InWagen, I have read his paper and I think it is a step in the wrong direction. This should not be surprising, since he recommend basically the opposite of the view I've defended more and more in the last year.

For example, you say:

"I think that compatibilists and incompatibilists mean the same thing by the term."

But, if this is true, you should be able to present a picture of the world, in arbitrary detail, and have people agree about whether free will exists in that world. Compatibilists and libertarians won't do that. You could paint a perfectly detailed deterministic picture, and only compatibilists would say free will exists. And you could paint a perfectly detailed libertarian picture of the world (the libertarianism of your choice), and only libertarians would say that free will exists. And of course a few gadflies like Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson would probably say free will exists in neither world.

So how can they possibly mean the same thing? It can't be a mistake of fact (e.g. I mistakenly think a lookalike is Richard Dreyfuss), because we're talking about pictures of the world in arbitrary detail. The philosophers judging having all of the facts right. Yet they still disagree.

4. You wrote:

"Even if 'free will' is a folk concept, it doesn't follow that philosophers as a whole, as opposed to individual philosophers, are powerless to change its meaning. If I convince philosophers as a whole of its meaning and they all start to use it that way, then perhaps the folk will soon follow. It isn't as if changes of meaning are unrelated to the acts of individual people."

A. Good luck.
B. Changes of meaning are due to the acts of people, you're absolutely right. But this generally happens through a diffuse and non-deliberate process of lingual evolution, not through concerted campaigns to change a term's meaning (although Dan Dennett and others tried to change "bright" to mean atheist; they didn't have much success).
C. On that note, I am going to start a small campaign to change the meaning of "free will" to one mostly the same as Galen Strawson and Derk Pereboom prefer. That's the meaning I started out with, and I was kind of surprised so many people disagreed with me, but now I see that there is hope, and after all of this arguing I have to change the meaning to that, if only to spite you and the compatibilists.

[Paul Torek]

B. I think Kip must have slept through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions ;)

C. Pass the ammunition, and may the best idea win!

C, part deux: No, really. Alan is right to point out "There is a dance between meaning and metaphysical reference here--and my remarks about values above shows that that the dance may involve more than the two partners of mind and matter" -- probably more right than he realizes. Values are the senior partner in this dance, I dare say. The most straightforward way to further the debate on those values is by unleashing those persuasion campaigns. (Hopefully, with a bit more honesty than the above mentioned political movements.)

[Alan]

Paul-

I agree, even if I can't parse "remarks" with "shows" correctly in my fervor on this topic. Axiology has a lot to do with the meaning of many terms, and the FW debate would do well to recognize that values cannot be divorced from it. Much of the compatibilism/incompatibilism argument has been conducted in ignorance of how values underlie the ouija movements of argument. And these values are not necessarily subconscious and subliminal as in a ouija jerk of reactive answer--in many cases they are of world-view order and consciously driven in the course of response. But I agree--what is valued, and usually at the world-view level--drives what drops out at the levels of FW debate. We need to talk about that sort of world-view level a bit more.

[Joe Campbell]

Alan and Kip:

It simply can't be the case that incompatibilists and compatibilists mean different things by the term 'free will.' Otherwise there is no debate, or no interesting one at any rate. Everyone would agree that compatibilist-free-will (whatever it is) is compatible with determinism and that incompatibilist-free-will (whatever that is) is incompatible with determinism and that no one has skeptic-free-will (whatever that is). There must be some kind of content that is shared between all parties or else it would be impossible to state their disagreements.

Kip:

Your theory of language is false. My example is a counterexample to it. If usage determined meaning in the case of technical terms, then 'weight' and 'mass' would be synonymous but they are not. Sometimes the folk -- most of them, at least -- misuse terminology. But how is that possible if your view is correct?

And whatever it is that you want, you don't want 'free will' to MEAN 'skeptic-free-will' (whatever that is). You want the claim that no one has free will to be substantive, not analytic. You think you've learned something when you learned that no one has free will (if indeed it is true). But if your views on language and the meaning of 'free will' are correct, you didn't and you can't.

I agree that Alan's post makes some interesting points, and I agree that it is not easy to distinguish the meaning of a term from some its demonstrable features (say, incompatibilism from 'free will' if the Consequence Argument is correct). But your view, Kip, seems to be saying something much stronger. If it were true -- or if I believed it at any rate -- I certainly wouldn't do philosophy because there is not much to be done.

Lastly, there is absolutely nothing about the meaning of 'free will' that I endorsed above that is essentially compatibilist. There are compatibilist accounts of up-to-usness (Fischer) and incompatibilist accounts (Kane) and skeptical accounts (Pereboom, Strawson).

[Alan]

Thanks for the great comments Joe--you always do a terrific job of keeping me on my toes!

You are quite right that if compatibilists and incompatibilists meant entirely different things by "free will" then debate would be pretty darn difficult. But there is a lot of discernible overlap between the discussants here. I argued in a presentation to the UW Madison department three years ago that there is good reason to believe that most everyone except the most diehard skeptics (like Double--whose work--like yours--I admire greatly) agree on a higher-level model of FW as involving some kind of abilities along with some opportunities. (I argued in fact that FW must be a relational property of abilitx and opportunitx, where x is potentially singular or plural in either case as an accommodation of Frankfurt-style arguments.) It's this very abstract conceptual model that keeps (nearly) everyone involved in what constitutes essentially the same debate, although compatibilists and incompatibilists fill in these broad categories in ways that yield their particular definitions. If I could just get some real time to sharpen my ideas into submissible form (and not get sidetracked into issues like "real time"!), I'd very much like to see what my FW colleagues think of this approach.

[Kip Werking]

Joe:

"It simply can't be the case that incompatibilists and compatibilists mean different things by the term 'free will.' Otherwise there is no debate, or no interesting one at any rate. Everyone would agree that compatibilist-free-will (whatever it is) is compatible with determinism and that incompatibilist-free-will (whatever that is) is incompatible with determinism and that no one has skeptic-free-will (whatever that is)."

The argument seems to be:

1. If the free will debate were characterized as X, that would be bad/boring/not-fun/not-worth-doing.
2. Implied premise: the free will debate cannot be bad/boring/not-fun/not-worth-doing
3. Therefore the free will debate cannot be characterized as X.

The crucial premise is 2. And I don't see why it's obviously true. Most people I know think the free will debate is horribly bad, stupid, obnoxious, and boring.

"There must be some kind of content that is shared between all parties or else it would be impossible to state their disagreements."

First, I don't think that the parties don't agree about anything. I think everyone, libertarian/compatibilist/skeptic alike, thinks that free will conveys ideas of greater freedom, choice, autonomy, and freedom from manipulation, and control over one's self and destiny.

Second, even if there was no shared agreement, you can still "state their disagreements": they disagree about the definition of free will. If I call apples "oranges" and you call apples "apples", we can say easy enough what the disagreement is. Maybe it's boring to you. Maybe you wish the disagreement was more interesting, compelling, fascinating, challenging (whatever). But it is what it is.

You also:

"And whatever it is that you want, you don't want 'free will' to MEAN 'skeptic-free-will' (whatever that is). You want the claim that no one has free will to be substantive, not analytic. You think you've learned something when you learned that no one has free will (if indeed it is true). But if your views on language and the meaning of 'free will' are correct, you didn't and you can't."

So many things to say:

1. I don't really *want* free will to mean anything. That was a joke. It's silly to want vague/undefined words to mean one thing instead of another. Do I care if WHOMBABO means a dog or cat? No.
2. Just because a truth is analytic doesn't mean you can't learn it. 8*8=64. But I didn't always know that. Maybe that is boring to you. But it seems to me that your view would throw away all of mathematics as being "analytic" (in the sense relevant here).

"Lastly, there is absolutely nothing about the meaning of 'free will' that I endorsed above that is essentially compatibilist. There are compatibilist accounts of up-to-usness (Fischer) and incompatibilist accounts (Kane) and skeptical accounts (Pereboom, Strawson)."

I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

[Joe Campbell]

The problem of free will is a perennial problem, Kip. It doesn't matter much whether you and most of your friends think "the free will debate is horribly bad, stupid, obnoxious, and boring." A lot of other people think it is important, think whether or not we have free will is a substantive question, and that would be hard to explain if your views were correct. (I'll skip the obvious question of why it is that you spend as much time as you do posting on a topic that you find "stupid, obnoxious, and boring.")

For instance, if the debate was just about what the term "free will" meant that wouldn't explain the concern. Again, it isn't very controversial that no one has skeptic-free-will, nor that incompatibilist-free-will is incompatible with determinism.

Lastly, 8*8=64 is not analytic. As Kant noted, it is not as if "8*8" means "64." Otherwise, each number would have an infinite number of definitions: "65-1," "640/10," etc.

[Kip Werking]

Joe:

I don't think the fw debate is bad or obnoxious or any of those things. As you can tell, I'm quite fascinated by it.

My point is just that a debate/controversy isn't more interesting/substantive/challenging just because we want it to be. The debate is what it is, and our wishes have little do with that.

Isn't it telling that you say: "I certainly wouldn't do philosophy because there is not much to be done." That sounds like you have a lot invested in avoiding my characterization of the debate. We can imagine how philosophers would avoid characterizing philosophy problems in ways that made them easy/obvious or even solvable. The medical field is rampant with perverse incentives too.

"Or instance, if the debate was just about what the term "free will" meant that wouldn't explain the concern. Again, it isn't very controversial that no one has skeptic-free-will, nor that incompatibilist-free-will is incompatible with determinism."

We might agree more than the surface debate suggests. I agree with you 100% that it's not controversial whether nobody has skeptic fw, for example. That doesn't "explain the debate", so to speak:

But this explains the debate (in large part, I think): nobody agrees about which one of these varieties of free will is the one, true definition of free will. Once you have this premise, then it becomes much easier to understand the debate.

The controversy hasn't been "does skeptic free will exist?" or "does compatibilist free will exist?" For millennia, the question has been "does *free will* exist?" As Van Inwagen says, "free will, full stop, free will period", etc.

But to solve that controversy, you have to decide which of the free wills is the one true free will. And that's what people have been arguing about, indirectly for millennia. I'm not saying this explain 100% of the free will debate (I think cognitive biases have a lot to do with it too), but it goes far.

Although I enjoy the friendly debate, I should add that I really admire your work, and I look forward to meeting you again at a future conference on free will (whenever I get around to going to one).

[Joe Campbell]

Kip,

I just want to characterize the problem in a way that is consistent with the data, e.g., the fact that a lot of intelligent people have been interested in it for a few thousand years now. I don't think that your view -- our disagreements are primarily disagreements about meaning -- supports this datum. In fact, I don't even think that this theory is consistent with much of what you say above.

[Joeschmo]

Agreed that free will isn't a medium-sized dry good, but that doesn't make it's existence as ephemeral or transitory as some might suggest.
There are lots of strange and complex things in the world like the synaptic plasticity of the pre-frontal cortex, or Plank's constant that it took many years to discover and understand.

[Joe Campbell]

Right, Joeschmo. But the benefit of compatibilism in this regard is that it may provide a naturalistic theory of free will. I understand that there is a fear that once you go compatibilist you're talking about something else -- which is really Kip's criticism, as I see it. But I truly believe that any kind of metaphysical freedom that is both possible and worth having one can have if determinism is true. I don't claim to be able to explain the impossible ones.

Perhaps I'm overstating my case. I'm not suggesting that the shared content of 'free will' -- what we all mean by the term -- is complete and without debate or variation. Nor do I disagree with Alan that the concept could use a radical overhaul. But even here key elements remain: control, responsibility, up-to-usness, etc.

I see it as my job to try to uncover these essential features. I'm mindful that I will no doubt fail to uncover them -- "Greater minds have failed." But I already knew that in the beginning, so it is hardly a reason to stop now!

[Cihan Baran]

Joe,

You write that "Nor do I disagree with Alan that the concept could use a radical overhaul. But even here key elements remain: control, responsibility, up-to-usness, etc."

Granted the definition of free will isn't as arbitrary as Kip claims it is, then how can we know that we have the *correct* definition of free will? How do you revise a concept in philosophy? I understand how physicists may revise weight, mass, etcetera (to a first order approximation, they choose whichever has the greatest utility in explaining experimental data) but what is the parallel practice in philosophy?

Note that this discussion doesn't only apply to free will debate. It also applies to, for instance, personal identity, which seems even worse than free will in terms of appealing to intuitions.

In my darkest hours, I am liable to think that all problems of philosophy are merely problems of language.

[Alan]

Cihan has provided me the opening--so let me show my hand a bit more on this.

I think the announced death of naturalized epistemology is a bit Twainian-premature, even as regards pretty abstract concepts like FW. (So Joe, I think I am pretty much on board with your general point of view at least.) My approach is grounded in empiricism. I think there are thought-experiment arguments that show that some concepts of freedom--I call them externalist concepts--meet conditions of analysis that reveal components of ability and opportunity (I will exclude questions of whether these are singular or plural for the purpose of this note). By externalist concepts I mean--physical freedom, social freedom, political freedom and so on (there are more types that exist but these are sufficiently familiar to make my points). I believe that it can be shown--not proved but amply supported--that such forms of freedom exist, and in the same ways that any relational freedom does--in part by the existence of the relata, but also that the relata are correctly related (I suppress details here--but think of siblings who may incorrectly think that they are biologically related). To emphasize my claim to my classes I often say that I think that the existence of such freedom is demonstrably real as rocks (as biological sibling relationships are, e.g.). But since the relata change for particular types of freedom (people for social; governments for political, e.g.), what drops out of this empirical argument is that freedom is in general a model concept: there are in general identifiable ability relata and opportunity relata in the externalist cases.

Problem? Mind-body. When these findings are applied to mental freedom (which I would note classical compatibilism ignores by definition--see Stace) you (might) transit to different metaphysical categories of ability and opportunity. This (might) also result in (mind-body) divergences in the more specific--and definitional--accounts of what FW is.

Overall, my account generally has two results of metaphysical significance. One is that, depending on what is axiologically the most basic form of freedom (think incompatibilist FW versus classic compatibilism which is equivalent to physical freedom ala Stace), all freedom expands outward from the most basic form. There are hierarchical levels of freedom ordered by metaphysical dependence on lower forms. Another is that diminution or destruction of the relata at any given level of freedom proportionally affects the degree (however measured) of freedom available (at least counterfactually). But totally destroy either ability or opportunity (-ies? van Inwagen vs. Frankfurt)--and freedom is metaphysically destroyed.

I panicked a bit when I first saw and read Pettit's Theory of Freedom some years ago, thinking I'd been aced. But while his analysis is pretty compatible with mine--it does not have the same empirical/metaphysical emphasis.

[Cihan Baran]

Alan,

Care to simplify that for us mere mortals?

Thanks.

[Joe Campbell]

Cihan,

That is a great question. I don't know the answer. But clearly philosophical terms do change meaning. Think of 'knowledge.' I don't think that contemporary epistemologists mean the same thing as folks in Descartes's era did. Most contemporary epistemologists are fallibilists whereas Descartes, etc. were infallibilists. Thus, I think that philosophical terms do undergo changes in meaning but I'm not sure how. I imagine it is similar to the case of science: we choose whichever has the greatest utility in understanding philosophical problems. Notice that one thing that is clear from Alan's post is that (like Pettit) he is trying to give a general theory of freedom, one which will explain the relation between free will and political freedom, etc. as well as help us to understand existing debates (compatibilism vs. incompatibilism) and problems.

[Alan]

Sorry Cihan! I was aiming more for some semblance of completeness of view than out-and-out clarity. I re-read my post and it is overall accurate in the line of reasoning I follow--and some of the fallout from it.

But, here's another briefer try:

Freedom is metaphysically layered asymetrically from some basic form (which might be some form of mind-based FW) to more external forms;

The general nature of all freedom is some form of ability in relation to appropriate opportunity;

Value issues may well be partly determinative of the precise nature of some kinds of freedom such as political freedom or FW.

I apologize for the compression of my position above (though it is pretty accurate, once again)--full expression of the whole line of argument will take a pretty lengthy monograph, only part of which is on paper (about 50 pages). Some of my argument is presented somewhat crudely here:

http://gfp.typepad.com/online_papers/v_alan_white/index.html

[Alan]

Thanks Joe--you are right on about what my point of view is--YOU should write my stuff up!! :-)

[Cihan Baran]

Joe,

As much as I want to agree with you, I definitely feel a skeptical pull.

For instance, your (rough) suggestion that "we choose whichever has the greatest utility in understanding philosophical problems" seems problematic to me. The reason is that our understanding of free will depends on what free will is or how we define it after all. But then, if what free will is or how it is defined also depends on our understanding of it, these two dependencies seem like they are "question begging".

I am much less confident that free will is a substantive philosophical problem than I was about a year ago.

[Kip Werking]

Joe,

When you write:

"I just want to characterize the problem in a way that is consistent with the data, e.g., the fact that a lot of intelligent people have been interested in it for a few thousand years now."

You're stealing my own move! (See my point 2 in my June 19, 2008 at 04:38 PM comment).

Let's call the fact that smart people have debated free will for millennia: SFACT. On my side, SFACT is consistent with my view because:

1. If smart people were talking past each other, we wouldn't expect much progress; but if they were talking about the same term, then we would expect them to eventually decide whether that term refers to something real.

On your side:

2. If smart people have been arguing about free will for so long, they would have figured out that they were referring to different things.

I admit that I can see how SFACT is somewhat consistent with your view, in accordance with 2. I still feel pulled towards 1 (I guess you could say that I feel these smart people are only so smart), but I recognize it's not nearly as strong an argument as I thought.

2. I think you're arguing against:

STRAWMAN: The free will debate is *only* a result of semantic ambiguity.

And, I entirely agree, STRAWMAN (as its name might imply) is not necessarily true. In fact, I think it's false.

The view I defend (as I've mentioned a few times) is a semantic ambiguity + cognitive biases view. Semantic ambiguity alone usually isn't sufficient to generate heated and ancient philosophy problems. I'm not *that* cynical.

Rather, I think a number of cognitive biases create "mental illusions", just like visual illusions, when people think about free will. The most prominent of these are:

1. the fundamental attribution error
2. positive outcome bias (e.g. wishful thinking)
3. the illusion of control
4. the just world phenomenon
5. the mind projection fallacy
6. the illusion of evil (the inability to understand the motives of evildoers; I don't know a name for this bias, but it's an important one).

That list keeps growing the more and more I think about the free will problem.

But, to help us reach some mutual ground, just recently I'm starting to think that there must be a bias at the intersection of semantic ambiguity and cognitive bias: a "bridging bias", so to speak, about semantic ambiguity itself, that makes people less able to recognize semantic ambiguity when it exists.

For example, are people biased to assume that their definition of free will is the ONE, TRUE DEFINITION? Suppose you're raised your whole life to think that free will is something incompatible with a God designing your entire life---the very essence of free will is to make it the case that that can't happen, that you write your own destiny and not some cosmic being. (This is very similar to how I've always thought of free will.) Then suppose you meet hard compatibilists and they all tell you: "Oh no, that's not free will. You can still have free will even if God designs your entire life and you're just like a character in his story."

Your first reaction would probably be, like mine, a strong gut reaction of "no, that's wrong, you're making a mockery of free will" (not unlike very liberal theologians who redefine God almost out of existence). However, the more you try to prove these people wrong, the more you realize you can't. You look at the dictionary for the definition, and it's horribly vague. You ask friends and family members and most people have no idea what you're talking about. And it starts to dawn on you that your definition of free will was not the ONE, TRUE DEFINITION, it was just your pet definition.

Biases like the mind projection fallacy and confirmation bias would only aggravate this problem, and perhaps there are even more that I haven't considered. But, if there is any bias that would work this way, it helps explain SFACT, as discussed above. That is, I'm not trying to say that brilliant people have argued for millennia about whether free will exists without realizing they are talking about different things. But I'm suggesting that brilliant people, with flawed, bias-prone, human brains, may have done so.

[Joe Campbell]

Kip,

So far I haven't said much about your (actual) view: semantic ambiguity + cognitive biases view. I've just been commenting on some of the statements you make above, which don't go much further than STRAWMAN. So at least we are both in agreement that STRAWMAN is a bad theory.

As for your (actual) view, I don't think it is much better. For one thing, it doesn't explain my disagreement with van Inwagen since I accept all the definitions he endorses -- indeed, he has provided me with the framework with which I think about these issues -- yet I still think that he is ultimately wrong about some things, e.g., that free will is incompatible with determinism. Van Inwagen and I both accept the "ONE, TRUE DEFINITION" of "free will" -- or the very same definition, at any rate -- yet disagreements remain.

Of course, I could just be suffering from any of "a number of cognitive biases," or "mental illusions," such as the ones that you note above. Indeed, I have my share of psychological debilitations -- I have an irrational fear of flying, for instance. It is not that I think that it is impossible it is just that I don't seem to fit any of the profiles that you have described so far.

For one thing, I'm not so sure that I or anyone else has free will. I have never said that I know that the free will thesis is true or even that I have good reason for thinking that it is true. I think that even if the free will thesis is true, it is likely that no one is blameworthy for their actions but not because they fail to satisfy the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility. Rather it is because they fail to satisfy epistemic conditions about moral responsibility (in other words I am tempted by Socrates's view that all wrong actions are done out of ignorance).

Nor do I think that determinism is true. Nor are there any theological commitments that I have which compel me to endorse compatibilism -- I'm a theist but I'm a skeptic about God's nature and I'm often prone to pantheism. There is no theistic belief that compels me to think that the free will thesis is true, or that compatibilism is true.

The only firm belief that I have is a compatibilism of this form: any kind of freedom that is both possible and worth having is compatible with determinism. Note that this does not entail the free will thesis, nor does it specify any particular definition of free will. Thus, your (actual) view is not much better than STRAWMAN.

In fact, I don't even think that you believe your (actual) view. I don't think that you believe that your comments about free will are relative to your own definition of "free will," nor that your views on free will are the product of your "mental illusions." If you did believe either or both of these claims, how on earth can you argue for a "medicalized society," as you have done in the past?

Lastly, it is worth noting that there are competing explanations of SFACT. Peter Unger, Thomas Nagel, and PF Strawson have all provided explanations that I find more compelling than yours (Unger's is a variation of STRAWMAN, in fact). I like Strawson's the best but note that it is consistent with the kind of compatibilism that I endorse.

[Kip Werking]

Joe:

"As for your (actual) view, I don't think it is much better. For one thing, it doesn't explain my disagreement with van Inwagen since I accept all the definitions he endorses -- indeed, he has provided me with the framework with which I think about these issues -- yet I still think that he is ultimately wrong about some things, e.g., that free will is incompatible with determinism."

If you don't agree that free will exists in a deterministic world of arbitrary detail, how can you agree about what free will is? Clearly, you are using a different definition of free will, or regard free will as different things, if you disagree about whether it exists in any particular world you know in arbitrary detail.

You might say "we both think free will is that power that makes things up to us." But this vague definition leaves open other questions about what exactly free will is. An analogy: a person who believes that GOGOMUFFS are triangles could say of someone who believes GOGOMUFFS are squares: "I agree with this person about the definition of GOGOMUFFS: GOGOMUFFS are shapes. Yet, somehow, mysteriously, for reasons I don't quite understand, we end up disagreeing about whether GOGOMUFFS exist in a world of arbitrary detail."

You also write:

"For one thing, I'm not so sure that I or anyone else has free will. I have never said that I know that the free will thesis is true or even that I have good reason for thinking that it is true. I think that even if the free will thesis is true, it is likely that no one is blameworthy for their actions but not because they fail to satisfy the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility. Rather it is because they fail to satisfy epistemic conditions about moral responsibility (in other words I am tempted by Socrates's view that all wrong actions are done out of ignorance)."

Ah, I had no idea your view was so interesting (even if, as I've tried to say, I'm not asserting that you're a compatibilist or free will realist or any other thing). When I first read Socrates' view about ignorance, I felt an immediate attraction to it.

"In fact, I don't even think that you believe your (actual) view. I don't think that you believe that your comments about free will are relative to your own definition of "free will," nor that your views on free will are the product of your "mental illusions." If you did believe either or both of these claims, how on earth can you argue for a "medicalized society," as you have done in the past?"

I don't know how to quite respond to your last two paragraphs here. You seem to suggest that I don't really believe what I say I believe, and I tend to think I'm the better judge of that (but, who knows, maybe you're right).

To answer your specific points:

1. I don't think my view, after reflection, is the result of cognitive biases, although I'm sure I've been tricked by them throughout my life over and over again. Cognitive biases are real, but can be overcome through reflection---especially if you know about them, and guard against them. What interests me is that virtually every cognitive bias I've learned about relevant to the free will problem favors belief in free will.
2. My endorsement of a medicalized society has little to do with what "free will" is. So my views about semantic ambiguity are irrelevant. It might be the case that everyone on the planet except for me believes "free will" means the bare-minimum-compatibilist requirements of your choice. In that case, my usage was incorrect, and most people have free will most of the time. But in that case, I would still want to medicalize society, and the reasons have everything to do with ethics and nothing to do with semantics/linguistics. That people have free will is just a descriptive claim (and not limited to the context of "moral responsibility"); the endorsement of medicalizing society is a prescriptive claim, and the two don't have much or any logical connection to each other, even if they often show up together in the same discussions and blogs.

Lastly, I don't pretend to know, for certain, that my explanation for SFACT is the best. I'm not familiar with the other explanations you mention, although they sound fascinating and perhaps I would grow to like one of them more. I try to be modest about explaining SFACT, the explanation will be an empirical claim and I have a poverty of data at the moment.

[Cihan Baran]

Kip,

In "Four Views on Free Will", Manuel Vargas gives the examples of marriage, magician and water as concept changes. He talks about how water was considered one of the four basic substances of the unverse and then how we eventually figured out water is H_2O, how marriage used to be mean a transaction of property and how magician used to mean someone who caused miracles and now only means someone who creates illusions.

Couldn't the concept of free will undergo a same change?

I agree that free will is an ambiguous concept but can't there be some disambiguations that are better than other disambiguations? (Here I'd be curious to know what really is a better disambiguation.) Mathematicians do this all the time, i.e. when a particular function is defined only on a certain domain and they want to define that function over a more extensive domain, there are some ways of extending the function that are more useful/helpful than others. (Think of extending the factorial function to negative integers or extending Riemann integration to Lebesque integration.)

[Kip Werking]

Joe:

I was reading Hume's "Of Liberty and Necessity" in the Enquiry (to catch up for the Hume's Slip thread), and noted that Hume seems to agree with me about the explanation for SFACT (see my June 24, 2008 at 07:54 PM comment):

"IT might reasonably be expected in questions which have been canvassed and disputed with great eagerness, since the first origin of science, and philosophy, that the meaning of all the terms, at least, should have been agreed upon among the disputants; and our enquiries, in the course of two thousand years, been able to pass from words to the true and real subject of the controversy. For how easy may it seem to give exact definitions of the terms employed in reasoning, and make these definitions, not the mere sound of words, the object of future scrutiny and examination? But if we consider the matter more narrowly, we shall be apt to draw a quite opposite conclusion. From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot, and remains still undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy. For as the faculties of the mind are supposed to be naturally alike in every individual; otherwise nothing could be more fruitless than to reason or dispute together; it were impossible, if men affix the same ideas to their terms, that they could so long form different opinions of the same subject; especially when they communicate their views, and each party turn themselves on all sides, in search of arguments which may give them the victory over their antagonists. It is true, if men attempt the discussion of questions which lie entirely beyond the reach of human capacity, such as those concerning the origin of worlds, or the economy of the intellectual system or region of spirits, they may long beat the air in their fruitless contests, and never arrive at any determinate conclusion. But if the question regard any subject of common life and experience, nothing, one would think, could preserve the dispute so long undecided but some ambiguous expressions, which keep the antagonists still at a distance, and hinder them from grappling with each other."