i fully understand that, and actually thought i had basically said it..
My point was that this rules out the notion that at a specific instance in time, any given person could do one thing OR another. Its simply not true, in a given situation (the situation includes your brain state etc) you can and will do one thing. — PeterPants

This is precisely what I think is a bit nonsensical. You yourself are not part of the practical situation where you are called to act. That would only make sense if you would picture yourself floating like a ghost alongside yourself at the time of acting and trying to figure out how to pull the strings that animate your own body. What rather constitutes your practical situation, at the time when you must make a responsible decision, are the opportunities open to you, the set of your practical abilities, and the rational considerations that may tell, by your own lights, what it is that it would make sense for you to do.

According to it, there is no source of action that is not an "external coercion" or "external impediment"; whether it is "felt" or not is really a matter of indifference. — John

Yes, I think most compatibilists, because of the metaphysical picture that comes bundled up with the uncritically accepted doctrine of universal determinism, generally have a hard time distinguishing what it is in the aetiology of human action that constitutes external constraint to our freedom from what it is that is a constitutive part of (internal to) our power of free agency. It is just very hard for them to see how it is that free agency comes to be constituted, what its biological and social/cultural "determinants" (or enabling conditions) really are.

'To say that you could have done otherwise, is simply to say that the universe could have been different at that exact point in time' — PeterPants

This claim seems to rest on a misconception regarding the way human beings, qua responsible agents, relate to "the universe". The universe simply is everything there is, including you. You are a flesh and blood animal; you are not a disembodied Cartesian ego: the mere passive spectator of epiphenomena being generated by your brain. So, of course, if you had done something else than you actually did, then the universe would have been different. That doesn't mean the "rest" of the universe would have made you do it or that you didn't have the opportunity and freedom to do it in the actual case where you didn't.

In my understanding of compatibilism, a compatibilist admits that all our actions are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control but he also claims that we have control and thus free will in the sense that we can do what we want to do or what we intend to do without feeling coerced to do it. Thus a compatibilist denies ultimate free will and ultimate responsibility but accepts free will and responsibility in a limited sense. Yeah, it is a utilitarian and pragmatic approach but it does appeal to an important sense of the idea of freedom - freedom to do what we want. — litewave

Most contemporary compatibilists (I say "most", but I don't actually know of any actual exception) defend a view of compatibilist freedom and responsibility that requires more from an agent than her simply being free from the feeling of coercion when she acts. One of the main points of contention between compatibilists and hard determinists concerns the source or our desires, or of our wanting what we want, when we are indeed "doing what we want". Pretty much everyone agrees that, in cases where we don't have any sort of control over our own desires (or on our desires' effectiveness in making us acting on them) then we aren't free even if we don't feel being coerced.

The classical example concerns the nicotine addict who wishes that she would not desire to smoke but can't help but acting on this desire. If we imagine that she indeed is powerless in getting rid of her addiction (and may be blameless for her having acquired it, let us suppose) then, in a clear sense, her addiction constitutes a restriction on her freedom. And that is the case even if whenever that person lights up a cigarette nobody else is coercing her and she is doing what she most wants to do at that time.

Harry Frankfurt has famously developed a "Second Order Desire" theory of free will in order to deal with cases such as addiction. This theory ran into new problems so Frankfurt later patched it up into his more recent "Deep Self" view. You can looks those up; there is an abundant literature about them. (Many other compatibilists such as John Martin Fisher, Michael Smith, Susan Wolf and Kadri Vihvelin hold roughly similar views). I don't think any one of those compatibilist views is entirely successful, but the main point is that the mere absence of a feeling that one is being coerced by an external agent, or from external circumstances (e.g. from being locked up in a room) isn't sufficient for guaranteeing the sort of freedom that grounds rational and/or moral responsibility. And that this is the case is a point that compatibilist philosopher generally grant to the hard compatibilist.

Let me also mention another related reason why the simple form of compatibilism that would equate freedom of the will with the absence of felt external coercion, or of external impediments, is unsatisfactory: On such a simple account, mature human beings wouldn't be anymore or any less free than dogs and cows are. However, we don't hold dogs and cows morally responsible for what they do (although we may reward or punish then when this is effective). So, there ought to be something more to our own freedom on account of which we can hold ourselves responsible for what we do than merely being uncoerced by external agents or circumstances.

Well, your reasons include the information you have. A person who acts for wrong (detrimental) reasons should be corrected, through advice, education, therapy, blame or punishment, or his freedom to act should be restrained.

I'll come back to this at a later time.

Ultimately, we can't choose anything (because everything we do is ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control). If we have more time or opportunities to do something then there may be a greater probability that we will do it, but ultimately we can't choose it. — litewave

This sounds more like a hard determinist line than a compatibilist line. The sort of thing that a compatibilist might say -- someone like Daniel Dennett, for instance -- is that people can chose to perform specific actions, and avoid performing other actions, even though whenever they make such choices there wasn't any possibility for them to have done anything else. It is rather hard determinists who claim that the lack or an ability "to have done otherwise" precludes the ability to chose at all. (Although some compatibilists also assert that possession of the general ability to have done otherwise is consistent with the impossibility of its being exercised in the specific situation).

Hard determinists such as Galen Strawson or Derk Pereboom deny that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism (and also with indeterminism!) but they maintain that praise and blame, reward and punishment, can nevertheless be justified on utilitarian grounds, which seems to be your position. Your position therefore seems to be identical with the position that philosophers who defend it qualify as hard determinism (or hard incompatibilism) but you would rather call it "compatibilism" for some reason.

Another option is to maintain that free will and responsibility don't require "ultimate responsibility". In order to defend such an option, you still need to contend with Strawson's Basic Argument, it seems to me. It would seem especially important that you would do so on account of the fact that your own regress argument is similar to Strawson's.

I say that the regress of intentions must be blocked at some point. If the first intention is caused by values, so be it.

Sure, this "blocks" the regress. (Rather: it terminates the regress at some point in the past where the agent wasn't responsible). But it block the regress in favor of the hard determinist, and not in favor of the the compatibilist. The compatibilist wishes to block the regress in such a manner that the agent's responsibility for her own actions isn't removed!

But reasons are causal factors too. Acting for a reason means being influenced by the reason

For sure. Whenever an agent acts intentionally in a context where she might be held (or hold herself) to be responsible for what she did, then her behavior is a manifestation of her being sensitive to some rational consideration or other. When the reason was bad, we may blame her and when the reason was good we may sometimes praise her (if there is some point in doing so). We blame her (or she feels remorse or expresses regrets) when her having had a bad reason for acting reflects badly on her character.

However, reasons thus construed as abstract features of the agent's practical situation that she might rightly or wrongly take to be justifying her behavior aren't antecedent causes of her action in the same way mental states such as beliefs and desires might be. It makes sense to say, retrospectively, that wrong beliefs or questionable motivations might have "caused" you to act badly and that they might, in some circumstances, absolve you in part of your responsibility. (You were not free to do the right thing on account of a lack of knowledge that you couldn't have had, or because of an addiction that clouds your judgement, say). But in the case where you are well informed and don't suffer (through no fault of your own) from some addiction, say, then to say that you had no choice in doing what you did because you were "influenced" by you reason for doing so doesn't seem to make sense. Freedom from rationality isn't freedom at all. It's just being unmoored.

I agree that the fact that the agent has been repeatedly engaged in an action says something about her character (her relatively stable properties) but it still doesn't give her ultimate control or responsibility for the action. We engage in the activity of breathing all the time and it doesn't give us ultimate control of our breaths even after many years of breathing. But it says something about our nature (namely that we are breathing creatures), which we cannot freely choose. — litewave

We can't choose not to breathe but we can chose not to lie or steal, for instance; at any rate, we can chose not to do those things unless we have some good overriding reasons not to refrain in specific instances. But although it might be begging the question against the ultimate-responsibility skeptic to say so, my only intent here was to dislodge the picture of responsible action according to which the responsibility of the agent only attaches to her momentary choice -- in the instant when she deliberates and act -- to behave badly and to yield to her bad impulse. We also typically are blaming her for having acquired the bad character that accounts for her having such bad impulses, and that also accounts for her lack of control over them. And this means that we also hold that she was free to choose a different path in the past and not indulge in the behaviors that molded her character in this fashion. That she was thus free to choose a better path in the past must also be argued for separately, of course. But it is important not to assume without argument that acting freely just means being able to make choices regardless of one's present character and motivations.

Of course we have different kinds of desires - for carnal pleasures, for compassionate love, for duty, etc. - but they are all motivators for the formation of our intentions and the performing of our actions, and all of those desires (and consequently intentions and actions) are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control.

Yes, but I would argue that what normally terminates the chain of "why?" explanations of rational behavior need not be construed as a mental state that one had prior to deciding what to do, but rather one's ultimate reason for doing so. Hence, imagine that the house is burning and, as you escape, you have the opportunity to grab your sleeping child in her bed. If you are doing so it's because you are valuing her life, say. That would be a reasonable explanation of your action. Your intentional life-saving action is grounded on the value that you ascribe to your child's life. In order to start a regress argument, you would have to argue that you were only thus sensitive to this rational consideration because you are a person who values your children's lives. And you would also have to argue that your being such a person isn't something that you have any "ultimate" controls over.

It may be true that you don't have any such "ultimate" control over this in the sense that you were indeed lucky enough not to be raised in circumstances that would have turned you into some sort of a sociopath. A sociopath might be someone who suffers from some form of moral blindness. But it wouldn't make you any freer if you could have, in the past "freely" chosen evenhandedly between becoming a normal compassionate person or a sociopath. Hence, in order to block the regress, it is sufficient to point to the values that motivate you in acting and challenge the proponent of the regress argument to show you why your endorsing such values isn't a rational act.

If the skeptic about ultimate responsibility would rather argue that you weren't free to become such as to be motivated by those values, you can simply reply that you now are free to endorse them, or revise them, on the condition that good reasons might be offered for your doing so. And it is this ability to reassess your own values at each moment of your life (from the time when you became morally and rationally mature) that makes you free and ultimately responsible for your actions.

Sure, the questioner obviously assumes that the neighbor's action is intentional, so he is not interested to hear that the neighbor intended to perform the action. He is interested to hear what were the factors that caused/influenced the formation of the intention and consequently the performance of the action.

I was arguing that she wanted to hear the reasons why her neighbor was trimming her hedge. The question of the causal factors that were implicated in her becoming aware of those reasons is a different question. It may relate to the explanation of her having the ability to act intentionally, but not to the explanation why she exercised this ability in the present circumstances. When you ask someone why she is doing something, you don't normally mean to inquire why she had an ability to behave rationally. (That's just because she is a normal human being). You rather are assuming that she is rational and are inquiring about the specific reasons she may have in the present circumstances.

The article is behind a paywall, but honestly I don't see how the so-called agent causation can save libertarian free will. — litewave

That's unfortunate. However, if you google the four separate words: "Galen Strawson basic argument "(without quotes), then the top two results are (1) a link to The Information Philosopher's page on Galen Strawson, where his "Basic Argument" is summarized, and (2) a link to Strawson's own paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility where one version of his argument is developed. The reason why I am pointing you to Strawson's argument is because it seems to express the same worry that you are trying to express (in the form of a regress argument) but it doesn't suffer from the same flaw. It doesn't misconstrue an intentional action as a sort of action that must be controlled by a prior intention in order for it to be intentional. And also, as I mentioned already, if you accept Strawson's argument, then it threatens compatibilist free will just as much as it threatens libertarian free will, which is instructive and may motivate you in trying to figure out what's wrong with it.

(...) Incidentally I did participate in a debate on the topic of Free Will on the Dharmawheel forum not long back, and I maintained the view that Buddhism basically supports the idea of free will - it has to, because it defines 'karma' in terms of 'intentional action', so I can't see how it could possibly not. But, interestingly, there was quite a bit of dissent from other contributors. — Wayfarer

Thanks for those useful explanations. So, Harris's Buddhism really amounts to Pop Buddhism sprinkled with a fair amount of Cartesian prejudice.

Incase you haven't missed it, it can't be claimed to be who you are because YOU have no OWNERSHIP over it. I mean, sure you can influence it's decisions but you can influence your girlfriend/boyfriends decisions too, does that mean that they are part of who you are? I think not, just a part of your life.

And so by definition, anything that you are unaware of and can not control is therefore not you. Like your heart, or your cells, they form part of your body but they are not you. All YOU are is an awareness, an observer riding around in a body that you so naively and arrogantly call your own. The driver of the car is not the car, remember that. — intrapersona

I'm not sure why it should be regarded as arrogance to claim your body as your own. (Who else would more rightfully claim ownership over it?) In any case, the body and the brain that you allegedly are "riding in" are causally involved in the exercise of your capacities to perceive the world, to gain knowledge about it, and to act. The proper way to characterize those involvements, in my view, is as enabling conditions for the possession of your mental powers and their exercises. Likewise, your eyes enable you to see but they are not doing the seeing for you, your legs enable you to walk but aren't doing the walking for you, and your brain enables you to think but isn't doing the thinking for you.

P.S. Meditation is perhaps the clearest sense of attaining insight on the matter is it is primary. You can't claim physical activity anymore valuable in determining free will over self-observation. Self-observation is primary and comes before decision making. In anycase, it has already been observed by neurological studies that the unconscious mind makes the decisions.

I think you alluded to Libet's experiment earlier. The interpretation of this experiment has been widely criticized, and even Libet himself later came to temper his own conclusions. I commented on it just a few days ago.

Thanks, so has anyone ever asked him how something can be epiphenomenal and yet cause him to still generate an entire philosophy based around it? I'm sure he must have considered it at least once. — JupiterJess

Harris simply bites the bullet and acknowledges that he can't claim any responsibility for his own intellectual achievements. He is even handed about that. If people can't be held morally responsible for their bad deeds -- since they're mere puppets being moved around by the impersonal forces of the universe -- then they can't either be given any real credit for their positive accomplishments.

Of course, Harris's philosophy of powerlessness and irresponsibility is unstable and he attempts to patch it up with the caveat that although people are powerless to make choice among real alternatives, and although they can't be given any real credit for their actions, it still is useful to pretend that they are responsible, and praise and reward them accordingly, in order to manipulate them. People are powerless puppets but you can still use praise and blame (and rewards and punishment) as mere psychological tools for pulling on their strings. Harris is quick to add, though, that blaming or punishing someone who has intentionally done a very bad deed (a murderer, say) is terribly unfair to the criminal since he isn't responsible at all. Blaming or punishing the criminal can justifiably be done only if that's the only means for controlling him, but it would be much better, if possible, to tie him up and hack into his brain in order to remove the source of the criminal impulse.

Yep. But wouldn't this require a person/self to suffer to be correct? — JupiterJess

That's right, but Harris isn't arguing that the self is an illusion. It's rather the self's sense of her own freedom that is an illusion according to Harris. He believes that the mental phenomena that are being experienced by the self (including the sense of one's own power of free agency) are epiphenomena. They are not unreal but they don't have any causal efficacy according to him.

So, Harris's ethics (as expounded in The Moral Landscape) boils down to the affirmation of the intuition -- which he believes to be a self-evident a priori truth -- that it would be ethically good if all of the epiphenomenal "selves" being generated by biological brains in the universe were somehow being caused to have happy thoughts and pleasurable feelings. This is quite sophomoric, really.

EDIT: Free will and choice making ability are not connected in any real sense. — TheMadFool

You seem to be connecting, or equating, the very idea of "free will" with libertarian (incompatibilist) free will. This is the ability for agents to settle between various options that are metaphysically open, in a sense, prior to the time of action or decision. Also, what you are calling "choice making" seems to be an instance of the sort of ability that compatibilists deem to be sufficient for free will (or merely for moral responsibility). But you are not very explicit about that.

Hence, your thesis seems to boil down to the claim that compatibilist free will is possible even if libertarian free will isn't. This is rather common place, though not unworthy of discussion.

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."
(Attributed to George Berkeley)

Ok cool thanks for breaking down that analogy further. So, what does Dennett have to say about unconscious choices dominating our free-will? Harris' has come from a background in buddhist meditation where it is observed through meditative practices that your sense of identity is basically an illusion. Tie this in with the neurological findings of unconscious decision making and it looks pretty solid, so how is Dennet refuting these findings with compatibilism?

Well, from my perspective it seems that the only way would be to say that you ARE your unconscious mind which makes decisions. Which, correct me if I am wrong, Dennett does. Well if you ARE your unconscious mind then why can't you account for why you chose one decision over another? Or why can't you just fall asleep at anytime in one second as you wish? This does not mean to say that people's actions shouldn't go unpunished or that they are not to blame, just that the observer is not to blame. Because the observer and the actor are somewhat segregated. — intrapersona

Your unconscious mind is a part of who you are, for sure. This includes most of your cognitive habits and abilities as well as the source of most of your "raw" motivations. Harris indeed has been, as you note, influenced by his Buddhist meditation practice in viewing the "self" from the stance of a passive observer who introspects her own states of mind and ponders over the origins of her random "thoughts". This is just about the worst possible stance for inquiring about free agency (or about knowledge, for that matter), which involves active involvement of an agent in the world (including the social world) and not a voluntary retreat from it.

Freedom is not to be found in the passive contemplation of one's own navel. The observer and the actor aren't two different entities. They are two different stances taken up alternatively (and oftentimes simultaneously within the normal flow of life) by the very same embodied human being. Also, the observer no more than the actor can be absolved from responsibility for what she comes to believe since she can reflect critically about the deliveries of her senses and memory. Harris often seems to think that the role of the epistemic "observer" (which he equates with the "self") is limited to her passively witnessing random thoughts popping up in her conscious mind as a result of automatic "free" association.

The main thing most would agree on is that humans have the right of self-determination to a degree we don't let that right detract upon that same right we grant others. — Gooseone

According to Harris the very foundation of this right -- the possibility of self-determination -- is illusory. This is why he also is pushing an utilitarian theory that has as its sole foundation the imperative to increase human "well being" regardless of the values people may endorse.

Incidentally, we had a discussion 10 months ago about this topic and Harris's view also was brought up.

Also worth noting, a couple years after Harris replied to Dennett's review of his book, Harris and Dennett had another conversation about free will in a podcast. This the the most recent episode of their dispute that I know of.

Yeah, of which Harris' has replied and showed how Dennett has misunderstood and misconstrued his statements. This is a great one: — intrapersona

Harris is painting himself into a corner here. In his analogy, Atlantis stands for the crudest from of "contra-causal" libertarianism, which very few philosophers endorse; while Sicily stands for compatibilism, which a majority of philosophers endorse in one form of another. Harris then complains that it's as if Dennett were accusing him of denying the existence of Sicily. But arguing that compatibilism is incoherent and not worthy of any serious consideration also is something that Harris attempts to do in his book. So, in the analogy, it's as if Harris was arguing that there really isn't any such place as Sicily and that it is a mythical place as well. Dennett complaint therefore is on target.

In his review of Harris's book, Dennett also argues convincingly that a view akin to compatibilist free will can ground our reactive attitudes (praise and blame) just as well as the crude form of libertarianism that Harris ascribes to ordinary people. There is a debate regarding whether ordinary people's intuitions about free will are more in line with libertarian or compatibilist theories. There is inconclusive evidence in the "experimental philosophy" literature on this topic. But Dennett also argues successfully, in my view, that it is of little significance how ordinary people *theorize* about the source of free will when pressed to do so. So long as they ascribe to each other abilities to freely chose among ranges of options in a manner that reflects well or badly on their characters there is no reason to charge them with irrationality just because they may have a tendency to come up with bad theories regarding the way human beings make choices. In fact, Harris himself is guiltier than most in producing flawed theories about the source of our sense of freedom and responsibility.

But how could we falsify "Free will is an illusion"? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Short from showing that free will isn't an illusion, you can show that Harris's argument are unsound, inconsistent, and also that his conception of free will is some sort of a strawman. Daniel Dennett has written a devastating review of Harris's Free Will. (And Harris has replied here.) Although I don't endorse fully Dennett's own brand of compatibilism, myself, I think his view is much more sensible and sophisticated than Harris's. And also, he is fairly successful in pointing out the most glaring flaws in Harris's arguments.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Confucius (or maybe Buddha or Groucho Marx)

“When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

By the way, I just finished reading a nice short paper by Chris Tucker: Agent Causation and the Alleged Impossibility of Rational Free Action. It's just 11 pages long and quite on topic for this thread.

The account of agent-causation that Tucker develops is a little thin on my view, but, to be fair, it's only presented in order to highlight some shortcomings of Galen Strawon's "Basic Argument" against free will and responsibility. Strawson is of course a hard-compatibilist while you yourself are a compatibilist. But Strawson's argument is similar to your own regress argument. It is useful to see how Strawson wields his argument against both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of free will. If you attempt to expose flaws in this argument such that compatibilist free will can emerge unscathed, then you may find out that you also open the door to some forms of libertarian free will. And if, on the other hand, you attempts to strenghten the regress argument just enough to rule out agent-causal accounts of free will, you may find out that compatibilists accounts don't escape unscathed either.

And the acquisition of the habit was completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen, whether those factors were intentions or whatever else. — litewave

I would rather say that the relevant factors -- in this case: the fact that the agent isn't engaging in the bad habit for the first time in her life but rather has a history of doing so -- is a manifestation of her free agency that is spread over time.

My main point was to question the picture according to which acts of the human will are decisions that occur in an instant or, at any rate, over a very short period of time when the agent was deliberating. Consider the case of a criminal who plots her crime over a period of months. It is not a good defense for her to say that after having gone to such great lengths to prepare her crime she wasn't emotionally free anymore to refrain from pulling the trigger when the time came. She is not just being blamed for not having changed her mind at the last moment but also for the whole sequence of events -- the premeditation -- that shows what the orientation of her will has been during the protracted period when she was in charge of laying down her own path, as it were, and mustering up the resolve to eventually perform the deed. The very idea that the agent's own character works behind her back, as it were, from moment to moment, to compel her into performing all of her habit forming actions precisely relies on the dubious picture of instantaneous decisions that is shared by many compatibilists and libertarians alike. The picture is dubious because it is separates the agent from the very features of her mind (i.e. her character and habits) that are constitutive of her power of agency. And to operate this separation is incoherent.

One does not always act merely on the strength of one's "strongest" antecedent desire, whatever that might mean.
— Pierre-Normand

Why else would he act then?

As I explained, she acts on the basis of reasons. That doesn't mean that she acts apathetically, as it were, as Mr. Spock maybe would. Rather, the specific desire she choses to act on, among many competing desires, need not be the desire that is the "strongest" when considered in isolation, but rather the desire that she judges to be the one that it is reasonable to be acting upon in the circumstances. And such a choice is a act of practical reason. This is why when you ask someone why they did something, they seldom simply respond trough mentioning a desire except in the case where nothing more than the satisfaction of subjective personal preference hinges in the balance (e.g. why did you choose this particular flavor of ice-cream?) It is not unusual to hear as a response: "I would have much preferred doing ..., but...". What figures in the place of the first ellipse might be what the agent desired most at the time of acting (because it is an intrinsically appealing act to her) and what figures in the place of the second ellipse is something that the agent "desires" to do because she *judges* it to be best to act in this way in the light of her duties, values, commitments, etc.

Rather, one acts on desires, values or considerations that one takes to highlight specific features of one's practical situation that are salient on rational and/or moral grounds.
— Pierre-Normand

Why would he do that? If he does it intentionally then he does it because of an intention to do so and that intention controls that action.

It is no *because* of an intention that an agent acts. The reason why someone acts often is, precisely, the reason. An action shows up as intentional when it is done for some reason or another. This is why when you ask someone why it is that she is doing something, she doesn't usually answer that she intended to do it. This is an example provided by Bede Rundle in Mind in Action, if I remember: Someone asks her neighbor why she is trimming some part of her hedge. The neighbor replies "because I intended to do so". The reason why the answer isn't satisfactory is because the fact that she was doing it intentionally was assumed by the questioner. What the questioner wants to know isn't what sort of thing (e.g. and intention or neural event or something else) causes the action but rather what is the reason the agent has to do what she did. It's only though the disclosure of this reason that the actions will show up intelligibly as the intentional action that it is.

Fafner had usefully explained in an earlier post why actions and the intentions that they manifest are internally (conceptually) connected rather than them being externally (causally) connected through contingent laws of nature that we don't control.

And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist. — Fafner

Well, you had suggested rather more strongly that barn facades are "particularly problematic" for disjunctivist accounts of the fallibility of knowledge. And I agree that it might look, at first blush, that they are. On my view, disjunctivism recommends itself quite appart from the way it deals with Gettier cases since it is an account that jettisons the old empiricist conception of beliefs and justifications qua internal representational items the epistemic subject can be fully acquainted with irrespective of the "external" world doing her any favor. It just so happens that, on my view, disjunctivism *also* deals rather elegantly with barn facades through distinguishing much better than empiricism does between (1) the conditions where epistemic powers can be ascribed to subjects from (2) the conditions when those powers are successfully exercised.

I can grant you for the sake of argument that epistemic contextualism could also be made use of by an epistemologist who doesn't endorse disjunctivism in order to deal with Gettier examples. But I am unsure how successfully such an epistemologist would deal with the barn facade case. I haven't done a literature search for this and I have rather produced my own account from scratch in order to bring disjunctivism to bear on issues that were puzzling me. And I have found out that it throws light on the contextualism/invariantism debate regarding knowledge attributions. I also don't think this account produces explanations any more complicated than is warranted by the contrivance of the cases it is brought to bear on. But since this discussion about epistemological disjunctivism is veering off from the topic of this thread (my fault), I may start a new one regarding contextualism and barn facades.

So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist will also have to admit as well that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge. — Fafner

Thanks for bringing that up. This is a problem that I have thought long and hard about. I have imagined lots of puzzling scenarios where commandos are being unknowingly parachuted in Barn Facade County in the vicinity of a real barn, in an area within Barn Facade County where most barns are real, etc.

I think most of the problems that arise in such cases stem from presuppositions that are intimately connected with "highest common factor" theories. And those are presuppositions that epistemic powers of human beings aren't merely supervenient on their "internal" constitutions *and* actual favorable epistemic circumstances, but are independent of the range of counterfactual circumstances where those powers might be expected to be realized. What is peculiar about those ranges, properly defined, is that they always must be relativized to a specific practical context. This is in line with contextualist theories of knowledge according to which what counts as possession of knowledge by an agent whose epistemic powers are fallible is the practical considerations on which the possibility of failure are practically significant (and not merely probable in a statistical sense). Hence, for instance, you may count as knowing that your wife is home while you don't count as knowing that the lottery ticket that you bought is a losing one even though the probability of the former belief being mistaken is much higher than the probability of the latter being mistaken.

And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here anything like the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.

When the ineliminable contextualist constraints on ascriptions of epistemic powers to individuals are taken into account, then, it seems to me that disjunctivism deals correctly with barn facades. That's Because what is "taken in" as evidence isn't merely the actual object of cognition (a real barn, say) but also relies for its status as good warrant on one's epistemic powers not being suppressed by a contextually relevant range of possible (countrafactual) errors. Since those context can vary according to the perspectives of agents that are differently positioned, this means that the belief expressed by an agent as "there is a (real) barn in front of me" may count as a case of knowledge relativized to one practical context and not to another.

Here is an example. Suppose you are traveling with a friend to Barn Facade County (where most "barns" are actually mere decoy facades) and she knows this to be the case whereas you don't. Suppose then, that you stop by a real barn. The barn thus appear to both of you to be a real barn but only your friend knows that she doesn't know it to be a real barn (since she knows the probability for this to be quite low). According to the standard accounts of such situations, you don't know either that this is a barn since your "justified" true belief that this is a real barn isn't actually justified. And this is because you are mistaken about the objective probability of your experience being an experience of a real barn.

The problem faced by disjunctivim, it would seem, it that it wrongly would conclude in your having knowledge on the ground that circumstances are favorable, in this particular case, for your epistemic abilities being exercized. All that would be required (seemingly) is that this particular barn is real.

However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn counts as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.

Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two formulations of justified true belief that can't reasonably be considered knowledge? — Michael

Disjunctivism isn't merely a theory about perception. Disjunctive theories of perception and epistemological disjunctivism are two separate topics, though they are very intimately related since they have the same general structure and are animated by the same motivation to root out some of the resilient Cartesian presuppositions that infect both theories of perception and traditional theories of knowledge.

And, of course, disjunctivists agree with Gettier that the JTB account of knowledge can't be correct. It goes further in pointing out how many attempts to buttress the JTB analysis with the addition of supplementary conditions are doomed to fail.

Forget what I say, now on second thought I don't think that disjunctivism can actually solve the Gettier problem. Never mind. — Fafner

I think it does actually, since it provides a conception of indefeasible warrant that can be substituted to the misguided notion of merely "internal" justification that makes the construction of Gettier examples possible. And it achieves this consistently with the correct intuition that our epistemic powers are fallible. Although, rather than saying that it solves the Gettier problem, it might be better to say that it makes the problem go away since it undercuts the motivation for providing analyses of knowledge in terms of capacities or concepts that don't presuppose it.

Take it both easy, then, and everything's gonna be fine ;-)

One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both. — creativesoul

That's not what "disjunctivism" means in the context of epistemology or philosophical accounts perceptual experience.

In the second case, being a disjunctivist means that for one have a visual experience of a red apple (or its seeming to one that the apple is red) ought not to be construed as one being acquainted with a mere impression: a "common factor" between a veridical experience and a mere illusion, say. It rather must be construed as the disjunctive claim that *either* one is perceiving that the apple is red *or* it merely seems to one (albeit mistakenly) that one is perceiving that the apple is red. The central commitment of the disjunctivist is that in cases where the first disjunct holds -- i.e. when one isn't under any illusion -- then one's perceptual experience puts one into direct contact with the world, and not with a sense datum or some such "internal" experience.

Extended to the case of epistemology, disjunctivism means that when one's warrant to believe that P is good enough to secure one's knowledge that P, and there might be cases where one mistakenly believes that P on (what appears to be) the very same rational grounds, then that doesn't mean that one's warrant is defeasible and hence insufficient on its own to secure knowledge. It rather means that *either* one's warrant is good and sufficient to ground knowledge *or* one mistakenly takes oneself to have a good warrant. As applied to the aforementioned example, this would mean that in the case where there seems to one that there is a red apple in from of one, and one isn't under any illusion (and also, one doesn't have any good ground for believing that the circumstances of observation are abnormal, or that one is being tricked, etc.) then that one experiences the apple to be red is sufficient to secure knowledge since it is (in that case!) an undefeasible warrant for it.

In short, disjunctivism strikes at the ordinary conflations between defeasibility (of "internal" justifications) and fallibility (of epistemic powers). Our epistemic or perceptual abilities are fallible, but their fallibility isn't such as to make the successful exercise of them impossible.

Please do translate for us. — Nils Loc

Frankly, although I had to read the OP three times before it was clear to me, I am usure if I could much improve on the formulation without producing a much longer post. It seems to strike a just balance between concision and readability (although, as I said, I'd like to see it broken down into separate paragraphs). The topic is difficult, for sure, but maybe it will become clearer in the context of discussion.

It's every choice a moral choice? Is deciding whether to eat fruits or vegetables a moral dilemma? I believe that when one frames Choice as an intention of action in a direction, then it is possible to see that it can be without moral connection. — Rich

The OP's point seems to be, not that every choice is a moral choice, but rather that the issue of the freedom of choice doesn't arise for choices that boil down to mere personal preference. We don't generally inquire whether a dog can freely choose to eat a piece of raw meat over a raw turnip. So, the issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism arises in the context of human choice, but not in the context of (non-rational) animal choice because human actions involve something more than the blind pursuit of "self-interest". (I'll explain elsewhere why I am using scare quotes here).

If the intention is not freely chosen then all of the agent's actions are completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen. This is something that I think libertarians would have a problem with because the idea of libertarian free will seems to require a freedom that can override any determining factors. — litewave

I agree that this a problem that afflicts many traditional libertarian accounts of free will. But I think the main assumption that generates this problem is a mistaken assumption that is generally shared by (most) libertarians and (most) compatibilists. And this is the assumption that the antecedent features of the agent's ability for practical deliberation (including her antecedent beliefs and motivations) -- which she had prior to the time when she deliberated and/or chose what to do -- constitute antecedent constraints on her power of deliberation that she has no power over. Where the traditional libertarians and the traditional compatibilists disagree is whether this lack of present control does constitute a threat on the very idea of freedom of choice.

I am actually agreeing with compatibilists that "present control" on (or ability to override, as it were) the causal efficacy of one's own antecedent beliefs and motivations isn't a requirement for freedom and responsibility. One's own antecedent character indeed isn't something that is external to one's own power of agency. It is rather constitutive of it. I am however disagreeing with compatibilists that the manner in which an agent's antecedent beliefs and desires make intelligible the actions that she chooses to do can be construed in a deterministic fashion.

There are two reasons for that. First, just because one's antecedent beliefs and motivations contribute to explaining what one does doesn't generally absolve one from responsibility. And that's because one's responsibility for those features of one's character often extend to the past. If one acts badly because one has acquired a bad habit, one often is responsible for having acquired the bad habit in the first place.

Secondly, and more importantly, in order to explain what someone does on the basis of the beliefs and motivations that she has, it isn't generally sufficient to merely mention those beliefs and motivations as brute facts about her and her antecedent "dispositions". It is also generally necessary, in order to so much as *make sense* of what it is that she is doing (and hence construe her behavior as genuine intentional actions as opposed to mere conditioned responses to present stimuli, say) to get a handle on the reasons why she takes some of her motivations and some of her beliefs to be relevant to her present decision. One does not always act merely on the strength of one's "strongest" antecedent desire, whatever that might mean. Rather, one acts on desires, values or considerations that one takes to highlight specific features of one's practical situation that are salient on rational and/or moral grounds. And this can't generally be explained in terms of "antecedent" states of mind.

This new topic of yours is excellent, as is your introductory post. I'll post a comment later today when I have more time on my hands since it merits thoughtful consideration. Did you really mean to make it into just one paragraph? Maybe if you could manage merely break it into two or three paragraphs it would make for a less intimidating block of text!

Okay but how can we know for certain that CO2 increase (which is undeniable) will cause warming? We notice a correlation so far between CO2 and temperature, in the long term. How do we know that this correlation indicates causation at the level of the entire earth? — Agustino

We know that because the radiative-convective mechanism underlying this effect is well understood and, indeed, measurable. We can measure the change in the infrared spectra of the radiation emitted to space, and the radiation downwelling back to the surface, and how those spectra have changed over the last few decades. Furthermore, quite independently from our understanding of the mechanism, the warming that has occurred in recent decades in response to the enhanced greenhouse effect hasn't been enough to keep up with this increased forcing. We know that because the oceans still are accumulating heat at a fast rate and this proves that there remains a large positive imbalance between the energy entering the system and the energy leaving it. This is sufficient to show that the cause of the warming can't be some internal circulation cycle since such a cause would lead to an imbalance in the opposite direction and would thus have caused the oceans to lose rather than gain heat.

And if it does how do we know that the earth does not have some mechanisms to counter-act the warming effects? It seems to me that we're being quite arrogant to think we fully understand what the earth is capable to do.

The most plausible such effect would be a negative cloud feedback. But there might equally be a positive cloud feedback. We don't know for sure, and this is precisely why the IPCC estimates that the climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing likely belongs somewhere in the range between 1.5°C and 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. It is, on the contrary, the skeptics who seem quite certain that the high values for climate sensitivity can be discounted. Since they don't offer good arguments for thus narrowing down the IPCC uncertainty range, we are well advised to question their certainties.

You can read for example this counter article from awhile back: — Agustino

This paper from WUWT is fairly bad. It simply ignores two fairly well understood and uncontested principles of climate science.

First, it fails to mention that in the past, before mankind started to release vast amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmospheric CO2 concentration could act as a positive feedback to global surface warming or cooling. If orbital variations (e.g. Milankovitch cycles) would cause some amount of warming, for instance, then consequent warming of the oceans would trigger the release of even more CO2. But that is not what is mainly causing the CO2 increase now.

Secondly, it asserts that climate sensitivity must be low because the positive feedback due to water vapor is "hypothetical". But this positive feedback is just about the least contested part of climates science and atmospheric physics. Even the very few climate scientists (e.g. Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen or Roy Spencer) who believe that climate sensitivity likely is lower than the central estimate reported by the IPCC believe this because they think the cloud feedback might be negative. Those who question the value of the water vapor feedback don't understand the science at all. They don't even represent the views of the 3% of AGW-skeptical scientists.

The CO2 emission targets recommended by the IPCC, and aimed at by the Paris Agreement, aren't unrealistic. Reasonable policy efforts (aided by technological progress), versus little of no efforts, can mean the difference between a stable 550ppm concentration of CO2 by 2100 or 800ppm and growing. This might translate into either a 2°C global average warming, or 4°C and growing, respectively. This is a huge difference in terms of impacts on human populations and ecosystems. It may also translate into a difference of several meters in sea-level rise. Whatever we do from now on, the Greenland ice-sheet likely is doomed over the long run, but the fate of the much larger Antarctic ice-sheet still depends on us. And there also is the issue of ocean acidification which is a very grave concern.

But all of this can be explained by ordinary temporal causation. Factors like the feeling of hunger, food desires/preferences, belief about what ingredients are available in the kitchen, knowledge of how to make an omelet etc. cause the agent's intention to make an omelet. Then this intention, along with other factors like the knowledge of how to make an omelet, causes the agent to perform actions like heating up the frying pan, breaking eggs, chopping up mushrooms. Logical and physical operations can also be performed by a machine - no libertarian/incompatibilist free will is necessary. — litewave

Let me grant you, for the sake of argument, that libertarian free will isn't required. You are still agreeing with my main point in that case. If the obtaining of all of those causal relations between the agent's prior states of mind (beliefs, desires) and her intentional actions is all that is required for those intentional actions to count as being free, then there is no need for the agent to "control" her intentions for the future and there is no regress looming. This was the main argument that I was making here. The conditions for intentional actions to count as being free don't include a requirement that the intentions themselves be controlled by the agent. It is sufficient that the mental states of the agent that are manifested in the pattern of her intentional actions reflect her sensitivity to whatever features of her practical situation she takes to constitute good reasons for them. So, this is something that I am in broad agreement with many compatibilists about.

But then the act of forming the intention is not freely willed (since it is not controlled by an intention to do the act) and thus the act that is controlled by the formed intention is controlled by something, an intention, that is not freely willed. For a compatibilist it is not a problem, but the fact that the final act is ultimately controlled by something that is not freely willed would clash with the libertarian concept of free will. — litewave

On my view, the action is indeed controlled by the intention of the agent (and therefore, by the agent). What makes it the case that an action is controlled by an agent precisely is the obtaining of the conditions under which the action is intentional. Granted, there arises a problem for some libertarians who believe that acts of the will only are free if the agent could have acted differently in the exact same circumstances, where those circumstances include all of the agent's states of mind and the dispositions of her character. But that's not my account.

But what does "being sensitive" mean? It seems we can again explain it causally - being sensitive to something means being able to be influenced by something, for example by the agent's needs, habits, desires, beliefs, knowledge, intentions... These factors influence the agent's actions. — litewave

Sure, but the relevant factor that I am identifying as the ground of the agent's intentional actions are the features of her practical situation that she can adduce as the reasons why she is doing what she is doing.

If you ask me why I am doing something, you can then challenge my reasons, or try to convince me that I am not acting in a way that furthers my own self-interest, or that my choice has been made on the ground of some false beliefs, etc. But if you tell me that I am not free since my action is being "influenced" by my awareness of the reason that I just gave you, then I can shrug this off. Who would want to be acting "freely" on no rational ground whatsoever?

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that my action isn't free since my being aware of the particular reason why I act depends on my having the beliefs and motivations that I in fact had immediately prior to making my choice, then it seems that I can also shrug this off. This is only relevant if you can show me that some of those beliefs and motivations are states of mind that are interfering with my awareness of better reasons that I might have for acting differently right now. But then, what you really should be offering me are those better reasons. My having prior beliefs only constitutes a limitation (of sorts) on my freedom if the beliefs are false and therefore interfere with my ability to achieve my goals. And likewise regarding misguided motivations or bad character traits that may cloud my judgement regarding what it is that I should set as my goals.

Of course in real life the process of "critically assessing" our beliefs and their sources may be complicated, but in principle these seem to be logical operations that also a machine could perform, reducible to causal processes. — litewave

To the extent that a robot would perform those rational tasks just as well as a mature human being, then it would also be free. But the mere fact that the computer controlling the robot might run a deterministic algorithm would be irrelevant, on my view. If the robot's emergent behavior is such that it manifests sensitivity to good reasons for acting, and the robot is able to revise its beliefs, and steer and adjust its own motivational states accordingly, then its emergent behavior will not be deterministic even though the mechanism that produces its bodily movements might be. Some emergent properties of complex systems can be indeterministic even if the laws that govern the evolution of its constituent parts aren't. The behaviors of animals or robots characterized in high level intentional terms are such emergent features that are distinctive from the 'raw' bodily motions and the antecedent neural/computational states that generate them.

Indeed. Not only is it very likely that human activity has been responsible for more than 50% of the warming that occurred since 1950, the central estimate for the human contribution is actually around 110% percent of the observed warming. That figure is higher than 100% because the net effect from the natural contributions to global warming over that period likely has been a cooling effect. So, were it not for the natural contributors to climate change, the warming that we have experienced up until now would be even larger. Here is a good post by Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate that explains how we know that.

How would one define directional coordinates in such a universe? — Arkady

Mirrors reverse chirality. Here is Groucho Marx negotiating a common understanding of chirality with his own mirror image. (They're starting to reach an agreement at the 1:55 time mark.)

This experiment has been done before. You could try using a rubber band and a hat.

"Phenomenon" - simply an occurrence, something that obtains. "Phenomena" is the plural. — Terrapin Station

So, in summary, you account of free will is that it's real freedom accompanied with things that obtain. Have you thought about submitting it to a philosophical journal?