https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1752/something-everyone-will-be-looking-for-eventually

Look. Look at this crap.

All I wanted to do was correct the error that consists in saying that the idea of a meaning of life is a category error, by pointing out that it makes logical sense in the context of traditional theological ideas of a transcendent creator and bestower of meaning. — John

This is not what you did. What you did instead is the equivalent of passing along class gossip: you pointed out that, allegedly, if you take at face value the good and totally unexamined authority of unnamed sources in the nebulous and ambiguously referenced 'theological tradition', meaning-of-life questions make sense in the context of traditional theological ideas. Whether they actually in fact do, is something you've not at all even addressed. Moreover, the onus here lies with you, not me - it's you who advanced the positive claim that they do so make sense, without so much as providing one iota of argument apart from a grossly fallacious argument from authority.

And note also that, as I clarified in my discussions with Warfer and Fanfer, my position isn't that meaning-of-life questions are inevitably category errors. It's that until demonstrated otherwise, they ought to be taken as such. And to repeat again what I said to Wayfarer, this sceptical stance ought to apply to all philosophical questions. If I singled out meaning of life questions, it's because of it's popularity and the general level of shallowness at which it is approached. I have no doubt that one can - and that people have - attempted to make good sense of it. But this sense will differ per argument, and without paying close attention to the exact, concrete argument at hand - the stakes involved, the articulation between terms - one cannot presuppose that such questions have any 'inherent' sense.

I mean, your whole 'argument' is as if, having asked you about the square root of -1, you were to assure me that, somewhere, out there, there is a textbook - which you will neither name nor cite - demonstrating that such a notion does in fact, make sense and can be answered (and of course, for the longest time, the very question did not make sense - at least, not until the invention of imaginary numbers).

Demonstrate the coherence of those notions! I mean, this was literally the point of the the thread: show your work - among other things. And what do you do? The exact opposite. This is why I was so harsh in my response. You did the very thing the thread was meant to caution against. And in any case even the appeal to 'traditional notions of God' is as straightforward a case of an appeal to authority as there could be. Tradition and theology have said a great many things that are conceptually vacuous (as have many non-theologians of course - I don't discriminate), so it's hardly a philosophical lightning-bolt to say 'well theology has said it makes sense, so it must make sense in the context of theology'. So again, show your work; or, for quite literally the love of God, show someone else's work.

I agree, you backtracked subsequently in order to shore up your initial bluntly hurled assertion that had no argument nor reference to 'traditional notions of God'. I acknowledge that you fixed your glaringly obvious mistake, post hoc.

Oh I get it, but it's more or less irrelevant to my initial point, which was that you failed to provide any sort of sense or context for your statement. Pointing to others who have - and not only vaguely, but subsequently to that post, I may add - is a non-sequitur. It's a pretty simple point, and I'm surprised you seem to be either unable to grasp it, or doggedly unwilling to acknowledge it.

I think your sense-making is much broader than what I've got here (question reformulation and domain redefinition) but this is just the bits I get from Ryle's original idea. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually, it's pretty useful to bring Ryle in here to clarify some things - he was the original proponent of the 'category mistake' after all: for Ryle, one of the things that specified a 'category' was the set of questions which could be asked of it. Thus asking 'where is the university?' while being shown the library, the rectory, etc, was to commit a category mistake by virtue of asking the wrong kind of question. Thus to understand a category would be to understand the set of questions which can sensically asked of it: in the language of our discussion, it would be that the domain of discourse is specified by the kinds of questions that could be put to the subject at hand. A category mistake is what happens when one asks the wrong questions of things.

Wittgenstein, interestingly, approaches this exact issue from the other side: the PI often asks about 'what sort of answer' or 'what kind of answer' one expects from a certain question (§370, §380, §394), with the implication that questions themselves ought to - depending on the language-game - exhort certain kinds of answers in reply. And as with Ryle, a category mistake can be said to have taken place when the wrong kind of answer is given in response to a certain question ("did you leave the window open?" "but the window is round!" - this answer is 'not even wrong').

The point I guess would be that a category must always be in some way limited: no question can, in principle, accept just any kind of answer least it lose it cogency as a question; similarly, not every kind of question can be put to a specific phenomenon (as per Ryle and the university). This is why there is no 'universal domain of discourse' as it were, and only ever domains of discourse, in the plural.

As far as philosophy goes, this allows for a kind of test for questions: what kind of answer would satisfy that question? And what kind of answer would not? (again, these are Wittgenstein's questions). Importantly this 'test' is not something that can be 'passed' or 'failed' a priori: as I said in a previous post here, it serves as guard-rail in the creative construction of concepts, one which, while not specifying the' right' alleys, helps us avoid the 'wrong' ones (in the same way that a bowling alley guard-rail insures against gutter balls, but does not ensure strikes). It functions critically and negativity, rather than positively.

I'm confused as to where you think my OP was meant to be somehow exclusionary of other approaches to things. To affirm the importance of something is not to devalue the importance any anything else, but then, I have no idea why you need this infantile logical point to be explained to you. Perhaps you have a taste for conflict, I dunno, but you certainly seem tilting at windmills to me.

What may subjectively be "nonsense" to a lot of people or objectively "nonsense" according to the present prevalent orthodoxy in an intellectual tradition or academic discipline may be the "sense" that one person needs to meet his/her intellectual needs. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't know where you're drawing this vocabulary of 'subjective' and 'objective' from. It certainly isn't in my post, and nothing about my post warrants any appeal to orthodoxy or intellectual tradition for the validation of a concept. Indeed what I find so facinating about sense is that it undercuts any simplistic distinction between the subjective and the objective. Sense is always something shifting, mobile, and 'sensitive to conditions', as it were. But there is, for all that, a 'logic of sense' (to borrow the name of Deleuze's book), one internal to sense itself, even as it retains it's own autonomy.

A sensitivity to category mistakes is precisely a 'tool' - perhaps the tool par excellence - that one can use to explore this domain of sense, one that can be used in the service of creatively forging conceptual links between seeming disparate concepts - with the caveat that one 'does the work', as it were, that one does not take for granted that meanings are simply given. So when you say the OP somehow doesnt treat 'grammar and logic' as a tool (notwithstanding the fact that I never even once used the word 'logic'), comes off as utterly bizzare to me. I'm still not convinced that you've read nor understood the point of the OP properly, and it seems you're riding your moralist high-horse a bit too stridently to actually address the OP on its own terms, it seems.

But the idea common to most is that God is the creator (author) of this world and that God created this world for a purpose (gave it an overarching meaning). — John

The point is that this is an 'idea without content', or rather, an idea-awaiting-content: it is, at best, a kind of placeholder; it holds out the promise of saying something substantial, without, in fact, being anything substantive in itself. And look, I'm not saying you can't elaborate on it, I'm not saying that you can't, in principle, 'fill it out' with some good stuff, all I'm saying is that you didn't - at least, not in that post. Worse still, you attempted to draw some sort of conclusion from this empty statement: "So, it really isn't a question of "category error" at all, but rather a matter of being coherent and consistent in relation to your founding presuppositions". I mean, again, maybe this follows, maybe you have a point to make, but you haven't yet made it. And sure, you can gesture vaguely toward other placeholders ("look, tradition! theology!"), but this is, at best, another placeholding manoeuvre.

Perhaps we can meet a compromise here?: I agree that it's possible to make a great deal of hay out of your placeholders, but as yet, the only hay around belongs to other people.

You think 'theology' has an internally undifferentiated, univocal, and consistent articulation between life, meaning and God? Not, of course, that you mentioned anything about the theological tradition in your initial post - you could be a crackpot basement theorist for all I know. In any case I take this as an admission that you didn't at all elaborate on your rather blunt, unargued for assertion, which was exactly my point to begin with.

The problem is in contemporary culture is that we can't assume which, if any, of such 'domains of discourse' provide a normative background for the discussion; so what the participants mean by very general terms, such as 'will', or 'intention' or 'meaning' (or life!) can't be simply assumed, as each participant may bring a very different perspective to bear on the question. So I think that's what you're driving at with 'category mistakes', and I think it's basically correct; but it's also a reflection of the times, and the medium (namely, the Internet). — Wayfarer

Hmm, I'm 50/50 on this. On the one hand, I think there is never not a 'universe-of-discourse', as you put it - and this is the case irrespective of the times or the medium or what-have-you. On the other hand, I think this has become more obvious in recent times, where one can no longer take for granted that someone else shares the same universe of discourse as you (and this especially so in philosophy - and as Deleuze says somewhere, there are no real discussions in philosophy - just people talking past each other...).

It is either simple-minded or prejudicially disingenuous to say that such an idea is incoherent... — John

I didn't say it was incoherent outright, I said it would be incoherent if left standing as-is, without elaboration into the relation between life, meaning and authorship. My only point is that your initial post was exactly exemplary of this lack of elaboration, without which, it is incoherent. This is not prejudice, unless the criteria for prejudice is a demand that a statement be afforded some or any kind of sense, in which case I'm prejudiced beyond all measure.

What prejudices? All I said - in a few more words - is that you provided no reason to accept your assertion one way or another, rendering it more or less unintelligible. Was I wrong? It is prejudice that I literally cannot see what you did not write?

What are you even talking about?

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise. — John

Why?

--

I mean, this kind of response/post is, unfortunately, the kind of thing the OP is trying to correct against. You can't just make this kind of blunt assertion - 'the question about the meaning of life is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning' - without explaining what the relationship between life, authorship, and meaning is. To be as harsh as possible, this is pretty much - to a tee - the exact kind of statement which is 'not even wrong'. There is simply no way to proceed here - other than to ask you to elaborate. It is literally impossible - at this point - to assess your assertion because you've provided no reason for (or against) it; at this point it remains a seemingly grammatically correct sentence lacking any and all substance. I know this will come off harsh, but you've provided a nice object lesson into exactly - exactly - the kind of thing out of which utter confusion blooms, the idling engine of language which the entirety of Wittgenstein is pitched against.

For a moment there I thought you might have actually been responding to the OP, only to realize that the only way you could have reached this conclusion:

Arguments like yours above make it sound like logic, grammar, etc. are the work, not tools for doing the work. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

...is to literally not have read a word of the OP (charitably assuming you are not simply grossly incompetant at reading). Nice off-topic rant though.

The challenge here (at least if you are a Wittgenstenian) is to avoid this sort of theorizing, and still have a method of providing a philosophically illuminating analysis of meaning or uses of language. — Fafner

I agree, and moreover I think this art, this ability to create or mobilize concepts that are immanent to whatever problematic they attempt to tackle, is one particular to the philosopher. Deleuze refers to this as a philosophical taste which must be cultivated: "what appears as philosophical taste in every case is love of the well-made concept..." - recalling here that taste is the mode of aesthetic judgement par excellence, a type of judgement that is both - in Kant's formulation - subjective and universal (and thus not merely particular); a kind of judgement that expressly charts a middle path between "semantical or metaphysical theories".

An aspect of this 'taste', I want to argue, is having what I called in the OP a sensitivity to category errors, where this sensitivity acts as a kind of conceptual guard-rail, keeping us from crossing wires and running 'incommensurate' senses of concepts together (and to emphasize again, this requires no commitment to pre-established meanings!). Remembering as well the sensate is an aesthetic category too!


---

This is a very interesting, unique take on the topic, and I have a response to it, but sleep calls at the moment, so bear with me : )

But what price?

And also notice that in the examples that I described we do not come up with a new meaning, but rely on the 'old meaning' which is extended to new cases that no one thought about before. — Fafner

The 'price paid' obviously depends on the change of context in question. There's no a prioricy to this, you said it yourself. And really, I'm not sure how this is such a contentious point. The meanings of words are not simply cumulative: at some point, they change to an extent that they are no longer, as it were, commensurate with their old use. Off the top of my head, the words 'subject' and 'object', for example, used to have almost the exact opposite meaning of what they are commonly understood to mean today. If one starts to mix n' match both meanings at will, one will not be speaking much sense. This is not so wild a point.

Sometimes, of course, the mixing of incommensurate senses it not as obvious. To take an example out of my recent receding, one can distinguish between (at least) eight different senses of the word 'freedom' (all of which are 'internally consistent', as it were), and demonstrate that when some of these are run together, one ends up with some pretty rough conceptual difficulties (which is what Raymond Geuss does in his essay "Freedom As an Ideal", Outside Ethics - the book in fact in full of studies of this kind, on 'well known' ethical and political concepts, which he makes it his mission to distinguish the different senses of). This 'running together' is not simply nonsense, but is in fact a result of an unwarranted mixing together of 'kinds' of (concepts of) freedom, not all of which can be spoken about in the same breath without causing issues with conceptual inconsistency. And it is awfully interesting work.

I feel this is all very obvious and trivial and it's confusing to me why this ought to be spelled out at all.

But my point is that you cannot know this just by looking at the sentence which he utters (that is, only from the particular words from which it is composed and their combination). There's nothing intrinsically erroneous in this or that combination of words so that you could have an easy or quick philosophical method for identifying 'category mistakes'. — Fafner

Sure, and I did not claim, or I do not intend to claim, that there is anything 'intrinsically erroneous' about any particular use of words. But to say it once more, one does not need to in order to affirm that category mistakes exist.

I think we agree far more than we disagree. For instance, I don't think that category mistakes are the results of either (1) the combination of things that 'necessarily' cannot be combined, nor (2) because of the pre-existing meanings of words. Neither an appeal to the 'nature of things' nor to 'pre-existing meanings' is necessary for category mistakes to exist. Moreover, as I elaborated in my reply to Wayfarer, category mistakes are never, as it were, categorical; what may seem to be a categorical mistake, may become, after some tinkering, not one. As you said, at some point people began to speak of musical notes as dark and bright, importing, as it were, a specular vocabulary into a musical one. But one could no longer ask - without further tinkering - how many lumens this or that melody is. Or, one could ask how many lumens a particular melody is, if one rejigs a little bit (or perhaps alot), exactly what a lumen refers to in the latter context.

But this new, musical lumen, if we can call it that, which now has an 'autonomous' meaning of it's own, as it were, could not be treated in the same manner - or used in the exact same manner, the same language-game - as it's specular 'parent'. If one were to start asking how many musical lumens it would take to light up the room for the sake of reading, somewhere, someone has messed up. Of course you could add further dimensions and context to make the latter question meaningful, but this would entail a further transformation in semantic resonance and so on. Part of the point here is that philosophy can be a minefield of questions about the number of musical lumens it takes to light up a room.

Which is all a roundabout, very boring way of saying: of course there are category mistakes! One can of course 'come up' with a new, novel meanings for every apparently mismatched pair of words, but not without paying a certain semantic price. Category mistakes happen when this price is not paid. So one does not need to at all hold to any kind of notion about the fixity of meanings or the 'naturalness' of kinds in order to accept that category mistakes exist; I certainly don't believe in any such thing. So there's no need to throw out the baby of category mistakes with the dirty bathwater of natural meanings of kinds. Language may be plastic, but it is also viscous. In any case, Witty's constant admonishments about the illusions of grammar or the idling engine of certain manners of langauge-(un?)use are nothing if not warnings about just this kind of uncritial use of transformed words.

To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that meaning-of-life questions are, well, categorically category mistakes - although I agree, my phrasing came off that way. Rather it's that meaning-of-life questions - like any other 'philosophical' question' - are themselves meaningful only to the extent that sense is made of them. These questions are not 'eternal' questions, handed down from on high; they have their sense only to the extent that the very terms in which they are posed already circumscribe the kind of answers to which they correspond. One 'answers' a meaning-of-life question not by laying out, as it were, a series of ready-made answers, each of which is assessed as to it's 'validity' or 'correctness' with only one remaining at the end.

Rather, one proceeds by asking about the articulation between meaning and life, forging - creatively - a conceptual consistency between both that would avoid any kind of category mistake. To borrow a juridical phrase, questions in philosophy ought to be considered nonsensical until proven otherwise. If I picked 'what is the meaning of life?' as exemplary of a question prone to being treated as a category mistake, it is because more often than not, the question is treated precisely as self-evident in it's extension. That is, more often than not, it is nonsense. The free will question - which happens to be littering the forum recently - is another I think is mostly nonsense, where people mostly literally have no idea what they are talking about, and are mostly cobbling together pieces of word salad which are 'not even wrong'.

So there's a kind of mutability I'm more than willing to admit here: what is a category mistake in one approach might not be in another: witness Gooseone's mention of synaesthesia with respect to coloured ideas. But there is nothing self-evident about the meaningfullness of such - or any - question whatsoever, and moreover, the attempt to work out the question is itself the very practice of philosophy. If there's any kind of 'moral' to my thread it's simply: be sceptical about sense; the fact that certain questions look grammatically correct ('what is the meaning of life?') shouldn't deceive us into thinking that there is any sense whatsoever to these kinds of questions (this is Wittgenstein's lesson). But sense is not something that can be specified a priori; only ever in it's working-through.

Ha, that's even more critical than I am. But yeah, that makes sense.

Maybe this tension begins to ease, and Deleuze's philosophy just goes one step further, once we take into account that Deleuze's production of concepts (and their overall treatment) is firmly related to specific circumstances and practices. — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah exactly! I think Deleuze shows how one can take on board Witty style criticism, and basically turn it inside out: yes, all language use must take place in a concrete language-game, etc: but this is just what philosophy has been doing since time immemorial - and with productive results! And I think you're right that Witty wouldn't necessarily endorse this kind of 'extension', as it were, but at my most critical, I feel that his uncharitableness was simply a function of his unfamiliarity with philosophy.

And please, I could talk about this stuff all day, and it's not entirely off topic! I mean, part of what's at stake here is what philosophy 'is'; the notion of conceptual consistency as the core of philosophical practice, for example, which follows if one understands category errors as a kind of philosophical diagnostic tool, directly bears on what it means to do philosophy as a whole - and this is something Deleuze brings out when he speaks of the "endo-" and "exo-" consistency of concepts in his What Is Philosophy?. And interestingly, he employs this property of concepts to demonstrate how logical analysis literally cannot deal with concepts, and thus is totally inadequate to philosophy - which again might link back to his abhorrence of the logical positivists and by extension, Wittgenstein. Anyway, I'm missing a few steps in this story, but it's a nice little link, if you can make the leaps.

Not to someone with synaesthesia. — Gooseone

Hah, I was waiting for the synaesthesia response. But then, one has provided a context by which one could make sense of such a question. And part of my point was that is just what is needed: sense-making can be understood as simply another way of saying 'context-providing': of showing how a difference makes a difference, of elaborating the stakes behind any one question.

For some, asking the question: "What is the meaning of life?" is a coarse grained way of asking a question which is relevant to them on a practical level where the underlying axioms are taken to be self evident. — Gooseone

And I think this is fine, as far as it goes, but I wouldn't confuse this with the work of philosophy.

In writing at least, the one reference Deleuze ever made to Wittgenstein was in fact to "the disciples of Wittgenstein" (who "spread their misty confusion, their sufficiency and their terror"), rather than directly to Witty himself. And in the taped abecedaire interview - the only other place I know where he mentions Wittgenstein - it's again to 'Wittgensteinians' in the plural (who are, incidentally, 'assassins of philosophy'). I've always wondered if, given the continual use of the plural, it was to the Vienna circle and the logical positivists to which Deleuze's ire is directed at, moreso than Witty himself - or at least a Witty amalgamated to such views. Which I think kind of makes sense given that at this time, this was the predominant reception of Witty's work.

And I should say that I don't think that the OP would quite stand for Witty's conception of philosophy. I think Witty understood philosophy as such to be an archive of category mistakes from beginning to end, without really finding it in a positive, autonomous enterprise unto itself. On this, I think Witty was wrong. Or, he was right about everything save the 'application' of his critique to philosophy as a whole.

Hans Jonas - The Phenomenon of Life
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception
Anthony Wilden - System and Structure
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Slavoj Zizek - The Ticklish Subject
Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech
William Connolly - Identity\Difference
Francois Zourabichvili - Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event
Manuel DeLanda - Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

11 because everyone else is cheating too :P

So, if we define free will as the ability to make choices and choice as the ability to imagine different scenarios, entertain their outcomes and pursue them, then the kind of subjects who have free will are those who have a sense of self, possess imagination, desires and are able to act on them. Then clearly you and I have free will, while your teapot doesn't. — Πετροκότσυφας

Well, this is certainly a better definition than any that has been given in this thread so far. It only took four pages for someone to actually say anything remotely substantial. And even if I were to lay aside the gaping problem with that definition (which would entail that if I am not able to act on a desire, by dint of having no money, say, I no longer have free will - a rather bizarre upshot of that definition), it still remains a half-finished thought for the purposes of answering whether or not 'we' have free will.

The next step, if you're going to consider whether or not we have this kind of 'free will', lies in explaining what it would mean to not have it. It's about this point that I imagine people start to talk about 'determinism' or, as Wayfarer has, things like 'conscious control'. But then, what is the relation between the two? What theory of causality is at work here? Where would 'we', apparently free agents, figure into such a theory? Or what theory of consciousness is at work here, if one is going to bring 'consciousness' into it?

Note, by the way, this is the only way in which one can make any progress about this question over 'free will'. This is how philosophy proceeds, by clarifying questions. 'Answers' are the detritus, the leftover scraps, of philosophical questioning, they fall out, like dead leaves, from live questions. Anyone who has an issue with this shouldn't be doing philosophy. Deleuze put it nicely: "Philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and nothing else; by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration, to the very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question." Or Zizek: "Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of it's presuppositions." The answer to the question of whether or not we have free will, will fall out from the sense that can be made of the question itself. Any attempt to 'skip straight to the answer' is vacuity.

If your question does not require new information in order to be answered, that's all we're going to get. — Πετροκότσυφας

What, exactly, is your point?

Free will is predicated on consciousness. — Noble Dust

Why?

You appear to employ an approach that doesn't allow for anything to actually be established. At some point, you have to allow yourself to take something at face value, just so you have somewhere to begin. The most obvious place to begin is experience. Consciousness is where we experience. — Noble Dust

No, I'm literally asking what it is you are talking about about, and you're dancing around this point. What I'm asking for is quite simple: establish a distinction, and explain why it matters. This is the ground zero for any argument, let alone philosophy.

OK, if you want to proceed with a discussion based on a tautology, don't let me stop you.

Because it's philosophically useless.

Because it's a tautology.

Which is relevant how exactly, in the context of free will?

*And should you really be trying to define one ambiguous idea by another, entirely ambiguous idea?

Presumably my teapot does not have free will, and I do. What is the relevant difference between me and my teapot, as far as free will is concerned? And note that a tautologous answer is not acceptable: one can't say, oh, you have the ability to make choices where your teapot doesn't. Because that just *is* free will (if you define free will by choice).

Why would we need to start by figuring out the "kind" of thing we are in order to address a question like "Do we have free will? — Noble Dust

Because it is basic philosophical practice. Figuring out 'if we have free will' is a noble goal, but not before asking if the question itself makes any sense. What kind of thing is 'free will' such that 'we' might or might not have it to begin with? And correlatively, what kinds of things are 'we' such that we might or might not possess 'free will', as distinct from something that does not posses it? Perhaps the very idea of 'free will' is a simple grammatical error, a thesis which might be 'not even wrong'. It's simple philosophical hygiene, of getting your starting point in order.

One could, of course, say that it's unfair to fools to call them all men.

Why? — Noble Dust

Because the kind of thing that you or I 'am' is not at all clear. And without knowing that, you might as well have said anything at all. Moreover, the kind of subject that is claimed to have freedom is among the most contentious topics in this debate, historically. Kant's subject is not Rousseau's subject is not Augustine's subject is not Locke's subject; and the kind of subject involved in each countours the kind of freedom is each is said to have. And this is before we can even consider, let alone intelligibly discuss, questions of falsifiability.

My point is simply that if one wants to talk about the falsifiability of free will, one really ought to specify, from a wide field of contenders, which notion of free will is in play.

As far as I can tell, it's that you were asking about "levels of freedom", but I was asking for a "definition". But now you seem to be saying otherwise? Maybe I misread? — Noble Dust

I think so. I don't believe I've once used the word 'levels' in our discussion, nor have I intended to discuss anything like it - not that I would know what it means to talk about levels of freedom in the first place.

No I don't; I want to say "You and I". Is it unclear to you what I mean when I say "You and I"? — Noble Dust

Incredibly unclear.

I was not the one imagining these states, that was you. I was, rather, asking for a definition (provisional is fine) of "freedom", or of "free will". — Noble Dust

I guess I'm not sure what we disgree about. This is just the question I've been asking all along.

You'd need to explain why you think that. — Noble Dust

But the onus is on you here: if you say 'you and I' are the subjects of free will, presumably you want to say something like 'you and I, and not this other kind of thing'. But what is the difference that this difference makes? What is 'special' about You and I?

I tend to come to the realization that, rather than different kinds of actual freedoms existing, it's rather that I'm able to imagine different kinds of freedoms existing, but this doesn't mean that they actually exist. — Noble Dust

I agree! One can imagine a range of freedoms: the question is why one, rather than another, ought to be of any relavence at all. This is why it's important to specify the kind of thing, person, or subject that would have this freedom. One cannot intelligibly talk about free will without at the same time considering the kind of subject that would excercise it.

Ok, fair enough, as I'm not educated enough to have a good response to this. So are you saying free will was a concept that didn't include the idea of "choice" until recently? — Noble Dust

Consider, to keep this short, that the ancient Greeks had no concept of 'will' or it's equivalent - let alone free will. Incidentally, I think was an excellent state of affairs. Note also, as Wosert has, that freedom was traditionally contrasted with slavery, and not 'determinism' - it was a political, practical issue, and not a 'metaphysical' one. Another excellent state of affairs, sadly neglected in much discussion about it today.

Free will is apparently the freedom to choose between alternatives — WISDOMfromPO-MO

By what kind of subject? Organized by what field of constraints? (And constraint must figure into it; after all, that I cannot turn into a unicorn at will would presumably not be an argument against free will; so what makes an alternative 'count', and why?).

Clearly you and I. — Noble Dust

This means nothing though. Or at least, one cannot draw anything philosophically useful from this answer.

Yes, this is definitely the crux of the problem; or rather, not what kind of freedom (kinds of freedom seems fallacious), but instead, the question of how to define freedom. This question seems ultimately unanswerable, just given the multiplicity of nuances of answers. — Noble Dust

But there certainly are different kinds of freedoms; or rather, freedoms understood in various, not-necessarily-compatible ways.

I'm not sure what you mean, since Augustine pre-dates all the other people you mention. — Noble Dust

True, and my list is comprised of modern representatives of that tradition. Which has no bearing on the fact that free will qua choice is a relatively recent invention in the history of philosophy.