>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

More on the Consequence Argument

A howler in Harry Potter is an abusive letter that reads itself aloud, embarrassing the recipient. A howler in philosophy is a really bad mistake. If I'm about to commit a howler, don't send me any howlers.

Why don't I think that the Consequence Argument  (in the kind of context in which Fischer is moved by it, ie, a context in which what is in question is alternative possibilities, and not sourcehood) is a problem for compatibilism? One reason is that it seems to be to be over-general: it doesn't tell us anything about determinism and alternative possibilities. Here's one way of getting at the point. Suppose you think the following argument, or some suitable refined version of it, is sound

P

(P ⊃ Q)

Therefore, Q

Then it seems to be that you should also find the following argument sound:

P

(P ⊃ Q v R)

Therefore, Q v R

But the second argument is just a simple version of the Consequence Argument for indeterministic worlds, and therefore allowing for alternative possibilities. In other words, the 'no choice' operator does not depend upon the assumption of determinism for any force it has.

The Essence of Freedom

Manuel’s last post generated a brief exchange about whether free will can be localized. This exchange motivated me to post a quote from John Fischer, which I find puzzling. Here’s the quote (from Four Views on Free Will, but I think John has made the same point elsewhere):

It can be one thing to articulate a meaning or concept, and quite another to specify the nature or “real essence” of something. The meaning of the term, “water,” and the ordinary concept, “water,” presumably do not contain anything about “H2O.” But arguably the nature or real essence of water is H2O. Similarly, the ordinary meaning of the term “can,” and the ordinary concept of “freedom,” may not contain anything about the possibility of extending the actual past, holding the natural laws fixed; but arguably the nature or real essence of our freedom includes these features.
    I have for many years been puzzled at how some philosophers find the Consequence Argument (in some form or another) absolutely and uncontroversially sound, whereas others dismiss it entirely [...] One possible explanation of this puzzling phenomenon is that some philosophers are thoroughly focused on the issues about meaning and concepts, whereas others are attuned to the nature of or real essence of freedom.

Now I understand the distinction between concepts and essences when it comes to natural kinds, like “water”. But I don’t understand it when it comes to something like freedom, which is neither a natural kind like “water” or a historical kind like “species”. How do we go about investigating the essence of “freedom”? We might claim that the concept “freedom” picks out a certain class of actions, and then investigate the nature of those actions. But applying this Kripke-Putnam style move will require us first to settle the extension of the concept “freedom”, and once we have done that the controversy is over. (Or so it seems to me). That is, the philosophical issues will have been resolved, and it will be time to hand the matter on to the scientists.

What am I missing?

More on science and free will

Some empirical evidence that the belief in free will affects behavior:

    Belief in free will can be manipulated with methods developed by Vohs and Schooler (2007). These researchers had some participants read an essay by a well known scientist (Francis Crick, a Nobel laureate) rejecting and indeed mocking the notion of free will. Others read a neutral essay. Another manipulation involved a procedure in which participants read aloud a series of statements emphasizing either freedom of action or lack of freedom and determinism. In those studies, participants who had been induced to disbelieve in free will were later more willing than controls to cheat on a test.
    Likewise, manipulations of belief in free will have been shown by Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall (2006) to affect other social behaviors. Participants who had been led to disbelieve in free will were significantly more aggressive and less helpful toward others.
    We are not suggesting that these studies be taken as proof of the existence of free will. Nevertheless, taken together, these findings indicate that not only is the belief in free will normative, but it is also socially beneficial. Undermining that belief leads to an increase in antisocial actions (cheating and aggression) and a reduction in socially desirable behavior (helping).
    Also, in these studies, manipulations aimed at promoting belief in free will typically yielded results identical to neutral controls, which suggests that encouraging people to believe in free will simply reaffirms their ordinary state. That is, people normally believe in free will, and getting them to disbelieve in it is the departure from normal. This pattern indicates that belief in free will is woven into the fabric of everyday social life and the assumptions according to which people perceive and interact with each other.

[from Baumeister, Sparks, Stillman and Vohs (forthcoming) Free Will in Consumer Behavior: Rational Choice and Self-Control. Journal of Consumer Psychology]

Some necessary caveats: the notion of free will that was manipulated was almost certainly some kind of contracausal notion (it’s hard to be sure; both the studies cited are unpublished). The authors of this paper note that many philosophers are compatibilists, but having noted it they seem immediately to forget it. Second, we need to distinguish the following two situations: shaking belief in free will affects behavior (for the worse) and shaking belief in a cherished notion affects behavior (for the worse). Still, some very interesting results for optimistic disbelievers in free will to mull over.

Best papers?

Over at Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, Brian Weatherson suggests that some blog take up the slack left by the (apparent) death of the Philosopher's Annual. I don't think this is the right place to take up the task in its entirety. But I'm a big fan of distributed cognition: we can take on the part where we have expertise. So I hereby call for nominations: what are the best papers in philosophy of action, moral responsibility and free will, published since 2003 (the last year for which PA produced a volume)?

New Work

A couple of things to draw to the attention of gardeners:

A study conducted at my (Australian) university found that subjects gave much shorter sentences to (real) criminals if they had detailed knowledge about the offender. This seems to be in line with the intuitions pumped by Watson's paper on Robert Harris. It's good to have empirical confirmation (for once) that our intuitions are shared. One caveat: though the average sentence members of the public wish to impose is very much shortened by knowledge of the offender, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. Media report here (the study itself is as yet unpublished).

Despite what you might think from JFP, free will is flourishing in the journals, with recent and forthcoming papers in many of the best. I won't bother pointing out isolated papers. But the latest issue of the Journal of Ethics definitely rates a mention. It's entirely devoted to John Fischer's work.

Conference

The following conference will be of interest to many Gardeners.

Call for papers
SELFHOOD, NORMATIVITY, AND CONTROL
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
May 10-11, 2007
Keynote speakers: David Velleman and Susan Hurley
It is a basic folk intuition that genuine agency can be distinguished from mere bodily movement in virtue of an agent's capacity to be in control of their behaviour. This intuition is also central to many traditional philosophical accounts of human agency, no matter how diverse they may be in other respects. Central features such as agential authority, or selfhood, and acting for a reason, or normativity, are often thought to imply some important kind of control. An agent's actions are considered to be hers in virtue of the agent's being in control of her actions. And an action is done for a reason in virtue of the agent's capacity to bring her behaviour under normative constraints.
Recent developments in experimental psychology, however, raise questions about this intuition. Experimental work suggests that for at least some types of behaviour, our trusted notion of conscious control does not do any explanatory work. These new results force philosophers and psychologists alike to rethink the traditional picture of human agency with its key notions of selfhood, normativity, and (indeed) control. In particular, do we need the concept of control to make sense of selfhood and normativity, or can we do without? If we can't do without it, which revisions of the traditional idea of control do we need?
We invite those who would wish to contribute to the conference to send us an abstract of their paper before October 1, 2006. Decisions about the conference programme will be made by November 1, 2006. We will be able to offer those invited to present a paper accommodation in Nijmegen for three nights and we are trying to get additional funds for covering travel reimbursement.

Abstracts to Jan Bransen:

Professor of Philosophy
Behavioural Science Institute
Radboud University Nijmegen
P.O. Box 9104
6500 HE Nijmegen
Netherlands
Phone: + 31 24 - 361 18 17
Fax: + 31 24 - 361 62 11

Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.ru.nl/pwo/bransen/

(Hat tip: David Hunter).

Talbert on Carlos Moya (no, not that Carlos Moya)

More free will related goodness here. Matt Talbert reviews Carlos Moya's Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism.

History

Alright, enough meta-blogging. Here's a controversial claim to get the argumentative juices flowing. In a recent Times Literary Supplement (not online, unfortunately), Saul Smilansky reviews Kane's Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. The free will debate, Saul writes, belies the widespread view that philosophy never progresses: in fact with regard to free will recent progress has been so great that it's not worth reading anything on the topic published earlier than 'about 1960' (I quote from memory).

I want Saul to be right. I want a justification for my own practice of rarely going to the library, and almost never reading anything published more than a few years ago. Of course I know that many of the positions defended today have historical precedents, in the work of Hume, Reid, and Kant. But the compatibilism, agent-causation and Kantianism defended by contemporary thinkers is much more careful and plausible than these original views (as I understand them). These greats deserve recognition but do I really need to read them?

More on My Way

I’m reviewing My Way for the Philosophical Quarterly. It will probably be a short review, so I won’t have time to do much more than express admiration. Nevertheless, I’m reading the book carefully. I wanted to try out some (rather inchoate) thoughts on fellow gardeners.

My Way

Papers from the INPC symposium on John Fischer's My Way are now available in the latest issue of Philosophical Books (subscription required). I forebear commenting on David Zimmerman's last footnote!