...so they won't explain anything sudden, like. — unenlightened

Indeed, the variable Milankovitch forcing explains the slow and regular Holocene cooling trend that has occurred since the Holocene Climatic Optimum, roughly 7,000 years ago. It doesn't explain why this cooling trend suddenly reversed a little more than a century ago, and why the climate has warmed as much, over the last few decades, as it had previously cooled, over seven millennia. The human caused increase of atmospheric CO2 (and also methane,CFCs, N2O, etc.) concentration explains this unnatural warming.



Source: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/

I agree with your comments. However it wouldn't matter if the prediction did take into account that I would be informed about its content (assuming it didn't include a reward or threat). I would still be free to either accept or reject that prediction (i.e., to drink either tea or coffee) and there would be no inconsistency in either outcome. — Andrew M

While I agree that the occurrence of the prediction, and the presentation of its putative content to the agent, take away nothing from the agent's freedom of choice, it must be noted that this setup may make it impossible for the prediction to be successful. That's because if the agent has set up her mind to do the opposite from whatever she is told that she had been predicted to do, then, conditionally on her being presented with the prediction that she would drink tea, say, the predictor will predict that she will drink coffee, and vice versa. So, under those conditions, the prediction, as written down and shown to the agent, can't succeed.

I think this is part of what I wanted to get at.

If I don't behave normally, I'm not entitled to be considered normal. But it need not be a pejorative thing. I think the healthy thing for a nonconformist to do is to accept that they aren't normal, rather than campaign to redefine normal. My sense is that this is a big part of what's going on. — Roke

The trouble is that people don't usually go around qualifying other people's behaviors as "normal" or "abnormal" in a totally dispassionate and/or merely descriptive or statistical way. If this were the case, we could say of an American citizen who speaks both Chinese and Russian that she is highly abnormal.

Also, if someone is gay or transgender, say, and demands not be treated as an abnormal person, it would be very disingenuous to interpret her as saying, foolishly, that her specific case represents a statistical norm: that a large majority of women are gay, or that a large majority of people born with XY chromosomes are females, and hence that she is normal in that sense. Rather, what she is saying is: to hell with norms. Merely statistical of biological norms aren't normative in any kind of moral sense.

It implies that even if you have a completely deterministic description of the universe which predicts I will drink tea, I am not bound by that description. Instead the correctness (or incorrectness) of the description depends on my choice to drink tea (or not). — Andrew M

This is tricky. What you mean to say, possibly, is that the description of what it is that you are determined to do (actually, given "the past" and the deterministic laws that govern the evolution of the material universe) would not bind you if it were (counterfactually) supplied to you. That's because, of course, in the counterfactual scenario where you would be told what it is that you actually are predicted to do, the physical system that you are a part of would be (counterfactually) perturbed away from its actual evolution. Hence, in the counterfactual scenario, you may choose to deliberately do the opposite of what it is that was "predicted". That's because the "prediction" was effected under the assumption that you would not be informed about its content.

What is most deeply true about compatibilism, I think, is the intuition that what can be concluded from a passive theoretical (predictive) stance does not conflict with that it is that can be decided on the basis of a practical (deliberative) stance. And that's because no agent can adopt both stances about herself at once. Deciding what one rationally ought to do is an activity that is inconsistent with passively predicting what it is that one is determined to do conditionally on one's own antecedent psychology and character. Mainstream compatibilist theories spoil this insight when they attempt to theorize the question of agency (and its internal conceptual link with practical deliberation) from within the theoretical stance and hence reify desires, wants and dispositions as some sorts of psychological forces that determine action.

Yet, apparently their supposedly highly intelligent, highly rational opponents easily fall for the narrative that says that there is a significant anti-science movement made up of nutcases. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is true, as some have mentioned already, that the AGW-skeptical movement (that is, people skeptical of the anthropogenic contribution to recent and foreseen global warming) has been fueled by fossil fuel interests, and also by economic libertarian ideology. However, it seems also to be a drawback from the crude scientism that has been for a long time pushed by the scientific community. From my experience debating climate science in internet fora, most AGW-skeptics view themselves as advocates and defenders of sound science. The same is true, by the way, of anti-vaxers, in general. Just like the mainstream advocates of "official" scienfic positions, they tend to have a fetish for an idealized version of the scientific method that is broadly Popperian and falsificationist. The problem that skeptics face in grasping the rationale behind some mainstream scientific conclusions isn't methodological. It is rather, to put it crudely, that they don't have a clue what it is they are talking about. That's simply because they lack a sufficient formal training in the relavant fields.

The main thing that prevents mainstream scientists who advocates the crude "scientific method" to go off the rails and fall into pseudoscience, as the skeptics often do, is their actual expertise and active participation in a well developed scientific research tradition. It isn't reliance on any kind of mythical universal method that accounts for the success of science. Hence, when the skeptics charge the mainstream scientists with failures to actually be practicing science in the only way their own endorsed method advocates that they should do, they are correct. In order to correctly assuage the worries of the skeptics, the mainstream scientists would need to highlight the substantial flaws in their arguments, and also criticize the ideologies that bias the skeptics' evaluations of the practical aims and other social aspects of the research, rather than advocate for them to accept mythical methodological principles that nobody actually obeys.

These days, most seem pretty confused about it. I'm confused about it. There seems to be some demand to change how it works, but I honestly don't understand what's being demanded. — Roke

Yes, I think there is some degree of confusion, left and right. Left because people who are socially progressive aren't always philosophically literate and right because people who are socially conservative sometimes don't want to be.

I think the insistence to distinguish sex and gender doesn't amount to something being demanded as much as an insistence that fewer demands be made on the basis of sex. If you are a biological determinist, or biological essentialist, about sex and gender, for instance, you are likely to judge that someone who doesn't comply with a demand regarding how people of a given sex ought to behave isn't entitled to be considered normal. This socially prevalent demand for normal behavior, construed with reference to the alleged link between biological sex and gender-appropriate behavior, seems grounded into a form of the naturalistic fallacy (or, sometimes, divine command).

fdrake commented to me (privately):

I've been reading this 'generalised probability' paper. The 'Heisenberg' uncertainty principle doesn't necessarily need a new form of probability axioms to demonstrate it. The result was actually known before Heisenberg and is a result of the theory of Fourier transforms. The position and momentum operators have an uncertainty principle because one is a Fourier transform of the other. This gives an example in terms of Gaussian distributions.

The intuition behind this result is something like: say you have a function that is highly localised in space (it looks like an upside down U), then its Fourier transform has to have lots and lots of different types of frequencies to 'cancel out the tails' in frequency space to produce U. This means the Fourier transform is very dispersed in frequency space but (and thusly) less dispersed in the original space.

A concrete and extreme example is given by a pure tone. Say someone plays a pure note A with frequency 28Hz. This pure tone, mathematically, wiggles all the way out from −∞ to ∞ - it is infinitely not-localised in position space. What about in frequency space? Well, it consists of a single frequency, 28Hz, so the function in frequency space consists of an infinite spike at 28Hz and is 0 everywhere else - infinitely localised. — fdrake

Agreed, however this characterizes mathematically the duality of conjugate variables in quantum mechanics without supplying an interpretation (either realist or otherwise) of the wave function or of the measurement process. Hence, Heisenberg initially developed the mathematical apparatus of his "matrix mechanics" while being guided by the idea that the measurement process introduces an unavoidable perturbation of the measured system, and proceeded to quantify the resulting uncertainties. It was Bohr who convinced him to endorse a more radically instrumentalist interpretation of quantum states, which justified the characterization of Heisenberg's principle as a principle of (ontological) indetermimination rather than a principle (merely epistemic) uncertainty.

Bitbol's own interpretation has been characterized by him, recently, as a radicalization of Rovelli's relational interpretation. That's because, like Rovelli, Bitbol views the nature of the relation between a quantum system and the agent who actively sets it up, and actively interacts with it, to be constitutive of (rather than merely informative about) what it is that is being measured. However, unlike Rovelli, Bitbol argues against the idea that the wave function (or vector state) that describes the composite system comprised of the observer, the apparatus and the observed system, constitutes a tool that allows for describing all the possible ways to factor this composite systems into an observed system an observer that this system is allegedly "relative" to. Bitbol rather interprets the wave function of the combined systems as merely a mathematical tool by means of which observers coordinate their mutual interactions and their intersubjective judgments about the physical systems that they interact with (and that are constituted by those interactions).

Hi Wayfarer,

I think that it is more a "perspectivism" of sorts. I mean it says that there is an objective reality but there are multiple descriptions possible. Whereas "relativism" denies that there are universal truths.

In some sense it is similar to "realistic pluralism" by Putnam.

But as I said to noAxioms I might recollect badly. — boundless

If I am to believe the Wikipedia entry on Model-dependent realism, it rather looks like a half-baked mixture of pragmatism and Popperian falsificationism. Putnam's mature pragmatic pluralism also is a form of realism, which he distinguishes from metaphysical realism. It is a realism that is essentially relational. It dispenses entirely with the idea of the world as it is in itself, which our models would only convey incomplete understandings or representations of. It is thus neo-Kantian and, likewise, not any more relativistic than Kantian epistemology is. While the elements of the open ended plurality of objective empirical domains, in Putnam's view, each are essentially related to definite sets of pragmatic considerations (or to ways of being-in-the-world), they don't constitute relative points of view on some fundamental reality that grounds them all.

Have to look it up. — noAxioms

Rovelli's paper on relational quantum mechanics is available here.
He also discusses his idea of relationality in non technical terms in his popular book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.
He also has co-written with Federico Laudisa the entry on Relational Quantum Mechanics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

As I mentioned above, Bitbol's paper Relations physiques ou relations fonctionnelles ? Une lecture non-métaphysique de l’interprétation relationnelle de la mécanique quantique de Rovelli is excellent. It's a pity that it's only available in French. Bitbol has written a bunch of papers in English about his favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, though. Most are available on his web-page. I recommend especially:

Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities and
Reflective Metaphysics: Understanding Quantum Mechanics for a Kantian Standpoint.

I've been following this thread with interest over the last few days, and read most of the messages. I've only been lurking because I've been quite busy with my readings. Some of my readings, though, may interest some of you.

Michel Bitbol, Relations physiques ou relations fonctionnelles
(In this paper, Bitbol compares his own pragmatist interpretation to Rovelli's relational interpretation, and he compares the latter to both Bohr's and Everett's. It's the fourth paper by Bitbol that I read on the topic of the intepretation of quantum mechanics.)

Michel Bitbol, De l'intérieur du monde : Pour une philosophie et une science des relations
(This is a fascinating 720 pages book. I've only read a few dozen pages. It appears to have much affinities with my own neo-Kantian pragmatist proclivities in metaphysics and epistemology.)

Manuel Bächtold, Interpreting Quantum Mechanics according to a Pragmatist Approcach
(This is a summary of Bächtold pragmatist interpretation, which he developed more fully in his thesis, written under the supervision of Michel Bitbol)

Manuel Bächtold, Le Possible, l'actuel et l'événement en mécanique quantique : Une approche pragmatiste
(This is Bächtold's thesis. I am currently reading section 3.8 Les interprétations everettiennes, and section 3.9 L’interprétation en termes de corrélations)

I certainly approve but... Benkei didn't even get to finish his popcorn!

And he actually ADMITS this ??!! — Dachshund

Thorongil is a post-structuralist Trostskyite. This often puts him at odds with Agustino who is more of a Derridean structural-Marxist.

I hear you. For each item that I read, ten more join my reading list. (I've learned in my probability theory class, though, that there is a way to add 10 new beads in a jar, and only draw one out at random, at each step, and end up with with an empty jar after countably infinitely many steps.)

Been reading through Jared Diamond's anthropological work, following it up with Debt by David Graeber. I think this is completing my late teenage Marxist deprogramming - better follow it up by finishing 'Society of the Spectacle' and making a thread about it. — fdrake

Thanks for drawing my attention to Graeber. If you've enjoyed Diamond's anthropological work (I've only read Guns, Germs and Steel, and maybe a couple chapters from The Third Chimpanzee), maybe you'll also find interesting Sterelny's The Evolved Apprentice, which I mentioned above. (I'm currently midway into the third chapter). It reaches deeper into the past than does Diamond's Guns but it articulates a conceptually overlapping framework for understanding the origins of culture.

Evidence and Inquiry by Susan Haack
History and Utopia by Cioran (rereading) — Maw

I much enjoyed Haack's paper Just Say 'No' to Logical Negativism. I share her profound dissatisfaction with Popper's falsificationism. She seems to have already expressed some of her critical arguments against falsificationism in Evidence and Inquiry (I merely browsed it). A minor criticism that I may have is that she doesn't have a clear view of the possibility of a disjuctivist epistemology as a fallibilist alternative to falsificationism. She seems not to distinguish fallible epistemic grounds (or defeasible criteria, as they're also called), from fallible epistemic abilities. To be fair, almost everyone working in epistemology makes this unfortunate conflation.

Vote for Richard Potato!!!! — charleton

Richard Potato-Head?

1. Racist people make racist comments and write racist books.
2. Charles Murray wrote a racist book.
3. Therefore, Charles Murray is a racist.

That's an entirely valid argument. — Benkei

While that clearly isn't ad hominem, and it may also have some inductive validity, it is deductively invalid. Benkei may have meant the first premise to read something like "Only racist people make racist comments and write racist books." In that case, it would be deductively valid.

To the extent though the rule does mean that there should be no legal protections or limitations upon those who lack the ability to comprehend what they're engaging in, I am encouraged by the overwhelming rejection of the rule by the various European countries. — Hanover

The main rationale for denying to mentally incapacitated individuals the right to represent themselves legally, or administratively, seems to be to protect them from themselves. They need help, and hence, some custodian such as a family member of some public agency is tasked with representing their interests. This doesn't appear to me to apply to the right to vote since a vote cast for the 'wrong' candidate is unlikely to harm the individual as much as denying them this fundamental civic right can potentially harm them morally should they express the wish to exercise this right. (Also, since it's a right that they are unlikely to demand to exercise anyway, there is no downside to granting them universally).

(4) the identification of performing hypothesis tests with enacting an empirical paradigm of research.
(5) the identification of scientific relevance with a rejected null hypothesis

is a driving force of poor quality science.

Hypothesis tests themselves reward noisy data collection. Gelman and his coauthors have worked extensively on this recently. — fdrake

I concur very strongly, as Trump would say. I've recently argued with some of my friends about what seems to be the damaging effect of the hegemony of the research paradigm of p-value hypothesis testing in many areas of social science. It seemed to me to reflect some unwarranted empiricist assumptions about the categorical separation of 'raw' data from 'subjective' theory, and to foster an unwarranted skepticism directed at our theoretical and practical (technically effective) understanding of the world. For one thing, those empiricist assumptions obscure the fact that the null hypothesis can't generally be meaningfully falsified since its initial credence (prior probability) must be evaluated in light of the plausibility and fruitfulness of the "theory" that supports it. One example that we discussed was the idea of rejecting the null hypothesis (with p=0.01, say) in light of a statistically significant "result" of telepathic communication, which is absurd. At best, the Bayesian analysis of the result of the experiment that we just performed ought to lead us to update our credence in the reality of telepathy from a microscopic 'prior credence' to a slightly higher but trill microscopic 'posterior credence'.

And in 2014 a biomedical science journal outlawed the use of p-value hypothesis testing in submitted papers. Hopefully the times they are a'changing.

That's remarkable! I'll show this to my friends.

— fdrake

Thanks for all those informative links!

On the other hand is the assertion that humans experience of duration is unique in experiencing not physical processes like clocks or anything else physical, but of the advancement of this "ontologically real" present. This would elevate it to an empirical claim, and despite being untested, would seem to be complete nonsense. — noAxioms

Totally agreed.

Here is perhaps the disconnect between what fdrake has been addressing and what I've been denying, which is the ontological status of duration, or of time. So I think some clarification is needed, because I think the wording you put here is the more standard one.
When people ask me if they think time is real, I don't know how to answer since I don't associate ontologly with my understanding. But apparently it is in contrast to 'prespectival', and no, I don't think it is real in that sense. — noAxioms

Proper time isn't perspectival, though, is it? This is the idea of the absolute duration of a localized process, as measured by a standard clock that travels alongside the process.

The times when events occur (or coordinate times), as referred to a specific inertial reference frame, for instance, are perspectival in the sense that they are relative to the choice one makes among many possible inertial reference frames. But there is another sense in which time is perspectival, and this is the sense in which the separation between the three classes of events that are past, present and future is relative to the locally and spatially singular perspective on an agent. And this ties up with the idea of one's power of intervention. This sense of temporal perspectivality is quite independent from whatever the special theory of relativity has to say about time, empirically, except for the manner in which it defines the three regions of the agent-centered light-cone at each instant: limiting possible intervention, or unintended causal influence, to the events located within the "future" region of the light-cone. The two other regions of the agent-centered light-cone can be assimilated to this agent's perspectival past, for all practical purpose, since they comprise all the events that this agent has no causal power influence anymore.

Still, the physical duration of processes seem to me not to be perspectival in any one of the two senses distinguished above (i.e. "frame-perspectical" or "agent-perspectival"). So, that would be one rather trivial sense in which time can be said to be "ontologically real". But this consideration is blind to the metaphysical significance of the distinction between past, present and future, which is better addressed with Kantian considerations on the relation between concept and intuition, or inquiries about the phenomenology of situated agency.

I had to look that up, and the flaw in the criticism was trivial. The barn and pole are treated as simultaneous objects instead of events. Using the latter, there is no paradox. — noAxioms

Yes, indeed, one ought to focus on events. To say of the moving pole that, at one moment, as measured in the reference frame where the barn is at rest, that it fits entirely (and exactly) within the barn, just is to make a (relative) claim regarding the simultaneity of the two events defined by the instantaneous spatial coincidences of the tail and head the pole with the back and front of the barn, respectively. In the inertial frame where the pole is at rest, however, those selfsame two events don't occur simultaneously. The pole is longer than the barn, and the moment when the back of the moving barn reaches the tip of the stationary pole occurs before the front of the barn reaches the tail of the pole.

Edit: The rule of thumb is: quantities derived from observational studies have indeterminate causal structure. The most you can do is rule some structures out. Further, thou shalt not interpret small studies causally without systematic controls and power calculations. He who does not do statistical power calculations (or type M&S error simulations) has forgotten the face of his father. — fdrake

I'm indeed reassured to hear that. The two papers by Glymour that I referenced are now 20 years old. Maybe political scientists and psychometricians presently better heed the warnings and caveats from the professional statisticians who devise their methods and the software packages that they use. It may be mainly intellectual celebrities like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux (who still reference The Bell Curve as the source of all their "scientific facts" regarding race, IQ and outcomes) who may not have gotten the memo.

Book 5 of Aristotles Ethics. Start there. Social justice is a subspecies of justice, e.g. the proper and proportionate distribution of common assets. Reasonable people can disagree on what people should be due because they hold different values but to think social justice means injustice and is oxymoronic doesn't make sense in light of the history of political philosophy. — Benkei

Agreed. Since there has been such a revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in contemporary analytic philosophy, thanks in part to Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Martha Nussbaum, this seems to have overshadowed some of Aristotle's equally deep reflections on the concept of justice. In his remarkable book Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality, David Wiggins (who possibly is my second favorite analytic philosopher, second only to John McDowell) neatly restores the balance between those two strands of though borrowed from Aristotle's ethical thinking (while linking them to Hume, Kant, Jouvenel and others).

There is an impressive body of recent research that strongly suggests:

(1) The "g-factor" represents a true high-order latent phenotype.
(2) The "g-factor" is largely a genetic phenomenon, with a heritability factor of over 0.85.
(3) "g" exists as a real phenomenon in the mind as well as in psychometric tests.
(4) "g" can be understood as a causal differences construct. — Dachshund

Yes, it's true that there exists such an vast body of literature. (Heritability of g over 85% seems to be an outlier, though). It's also true that most papers that criticize those general conclusions generally miss the mark. Clark Glymour stresses this fact. Most of the authors who question the general conclusions of Herrnstein and Murray do so on the basis of conflicting evidence that generally is produced by equally flawed applications of methods of factor analysis and multiple regression in order to derive causal inferences. Glymour knows this because he has devoted a significant part of his career to (1) investigating the epistemological limitations of statistical methods that are routinely being applied in both natural and social science, and, (2) together with a few colleagues, to developing more efficient and better validated methods with the help of computers. (Those methods were successfully applied in variety of biological and social fields, and even in aerospace. Check his home page for references, or Google up "TETRAD II")

If you are interested in any citations from the literature re the above, I can provide them for you.

Yes, please, do so. But also remember that the quantity of flawed studies that purportedly support a conclusion doesn't compensate for the common flaw that they may share. And also, if you have the time, have a look at the paper that I already provided a link to, and tell me if some of your studies still appear methodologically valid in light of Glymour's general objections.

(2) The ramifications of both relativity theories, like length contraction, time dilation, and the equivalence of mass and curvature distortions should not be treated as arising from 'deficiencies in measurement'. — fdrake

Yes, that seems to be a reasonable requirement in order to prevent the discussion from going off the rails. I have read this whole thread obliquely and I find myself mostly in agreement with you, with noAxioms and with Mr Bee. It's not so very often that there occurs a discussion about Einstein's theory of relativity on a philosophy forum and that some of the participants have a reasonably good understanding of its mathematical inner workings. So, that's cool. It means also that there is, at least, some scientific footing for further inquiring about the theory's implications for the metaphysics of time.

I had planned to first read the paper by Stephen E. Robbins (which fdrake linked to in his original post) before jumping into the discussion. The abstract seemed intriguing and promising enough, and I was quite happy to see J. J. Gibson being quoted in the epigraph. However, I leafed through the main text rapidly and was struck by the author's very crude misunderstanding of the infamous twin-paradox. The author displays a parallel misunderstanding of the barn-pole paradox. Robbins seems not even to have noticed or gasped how the relativity of simultaneity can be (and usually is) appealed to for neatly resolving those merely apparent paradoxes. He thus seems to believe that the asymmetrical ageing of the twins somehow violates the "abstract reciprocity of reference systems"(*). That's fairly disappointing because this is the very specific misunderstanding of the theory has been the linchpin for its rejection by many "skeptics" (very few of them learned physicists) over the last 100 years or so.

This crude mistake also appears to have led Robbins to a rather confused conception of what it is that it might mean for a duration to be "ontologically real" rather than its being merely perspectival or relative to a reference frame. Proper time is a quantity that can be integrated along the world-line of a material object and it is invariant according to both the special and the general theories of relativity. Robbins seems to be missing this point entirely. And, as a result, through construing the question of the ontology of time as a question regarding "elapsed times", which conflates the two distinct although related notions of (1) proper time (which is ascribed to a segment of a world-line, along which a real material clock might be tied) and (2) the time-coordinate interval between two events (which may have either a space-like or a time-like separation), he gets confused. Owing to this confusion Robbins seemingly misses the opportunity of even so much as correctly framing his interesting philosophical questions (which are of interest to StreetlightX, to myself and to others).

(*) Note: At some point, because Robbins can't grapple with what he sees as the paradoxical implications of his own ill-defined principle of "abstract reciprocity of reference systems", he is led to postulate that the augmentation of the half-lives of mesons travelling at high speed though the earth atmosphere might be the result of some sort of electromagnetic effects on nuclear processes. This sort of hypothesis lines up with Lorentz' own early postulation of physical ("ontologically real", Robbins might say) effects on material clocks and rulers that would be ascribable to the "luminiferous aether wind" and that would account for the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the apparent invariance of the speed of light, etc.

Current standardised IQ tests do accurately and reliably measure general intelligence ("g-factor") as I defined it above. — Dachshund

I recently read an excellent paper(*) by Clark Glymour, and reread another one(**), regarding the widespread misuse of factor analysis and multiple regression in social sciences. Regarding the former method, Glymour argues convincingly that Spearman made unwarranted statistical and causal assumptions while arguing for the existence of a unique g factor that would account for the correlations between results of tests of various cognitive abilities.

Moreover, these measures of IQ have a very high predictive validity.

Yes, they do. But there is an step from this constatation to the inference that what it is that they measure is the cause of what it is that they predict. Herrnstein and Murray, in The Bell Curve, purported to show by means of multiple regression that a variety of social ills, behaviors and outcomes likely were caused by heritable components of cognitive abilities. In order to make causal claims on the basis of observed sets of correlations, though, regression models must, here also, be supplemented with a range a statistical and causal assumptions. Glymour argues that Herrnstein and Murray, just like Spearman, made several unwarranted assumptions.

These are hard, incontrovertible facts. IQ tests DO NOT merely measure the ability to do IQ tests. Full Stop.

Only some of those facts are hard. And among those that are hard, they is much room for discussing what it is that they really mean and what it is that can be validly inferred from them.

(*) This paper appeared a chapter 12 -- "Social Statistics and Genuine Inquiry: Reflections on
The Bell Curve" -- in the book Intelligence, Genes and Sucess: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, Sptinger-Verlag 1997

(**) This one is available on Glymour's Carnegie Mellon University webpage: What Went Wrong: Reflections on Science by Observation and The Bell Curve, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), 1-32.

Back to Peterson and white privilege...

I thought some of you might be interested with those two recent pieces about Peterson, the first one by Žižek:

Why do people find Jordan Peterson so convincing? Because the left doesn't have its own house in order

And the second one (a little bit older), by Gyrus, packs an amazing number of insights, especially towards the end, not just about Peterson but also about the ways in which both the right and the left often tend to problematize humankind's relation to nature:

The Black Truths of Jordan Peterson

Yeah, I don't care to change anyone's mind on the matter. You can lookup Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the multiple testimonials of loud explosions going off from within both WTC's, traces of nano-thermite around the area. — Posty McPostface

I am very familiar with the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Several years ago I was very much involved in online fora discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories. Discussing the technical and scientific aspects of the events surrounding 9/11 provided a recreation from more serious philosophical work. Later on I moved on to discussing climate science with AGW-skeptics since this topic has more profound societal impacts. I think both of those conspiracies thrive on similar combinations of cherry-picked data, hyped and decontextualized "anomalies", poor technical understanding, lack of focus, and too much tolerance for fringe "science".

The rebuttal is that the building was structurally "magically" damaged from falling debris from the north or south tower. — Posty McPostface

Look up the NIST report devoted specifically to WTC7. WTC7 had a very peculiar structure, owing to its having been built on top of a preexisting Con-Ed substation. It was hosting large diesel tanks. The documented damage and massive fire, together with its structural peculiarities, account for the catastrophic failure with no magic involved.

The existence of Big Foot indeed may have the most circumstantial evidence going for it. One piece of circumstantial evidence that is almost decisive is the recent find by a group of trekkers of a three feet long toenail clipper.

I apologise unreservedly, wholeheartedly and ashamedly for mentioning the placard on the lectern of Jordan Peterson (remember him?). It seems to have derailed the thread for the last two pages, which was not my intention. — andrewk

I hope you didn't miss fdrake's brilliant interlude to the interlude.

— Gerald47

Welcome to the forum, Gerald the 47th,

Your very first post is one of the best things that I have read here since I joined. I hope you'll stick around.

Aaah so much interesting looking stuff here! Got a top 3? — StreetlightX

Selecting only three would be tough but I'll limit myself to the five items that I judged to be outstanding. As you may guess, I've been quite impressed with Alan Costall who I only discovered recently thanks to Louise Barrett having referenced him in her book Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds.

---

Bitbol Michel, Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)

Bauer Nathan, A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception (2012)

Costall Alan, From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004)

Costall Alan, The 'Meme' Meme Revisited
(Chapter 4 in Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology, Thiemo Breyer, Ed. 2015)

Costall Alan, From Direct Perception to the Primacy of Action: A Closer Look at James Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Psychology
(Chapter 3 in Theories of Infant Development, Gavin Bremner & Alan Slater eds, 2004)

Test. It says "latest gurugeorge" but Michael's comment was last. — Benkei

This seems to be happening occasionally. It looks like an 'end of page' related bug. When it occurs and I want to see the last message that was posted, I go to the profile page of the poster and look at his/her messages there.

Here are also most of my readings from last year, since February 2017 when I began reading and annotating pdf files mostly on my smartphone :

2017 December

SterelnyK Artifacts, Symbols, Thoughts
2017-12-31

CostallA The 'Meme' Meme Revisited
(Chapter 4 in Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology, Thiemo Breyer, Ed. 2015)
2017-12-11

MenaryR Cognitive integration, enculturated cognition and the socially extended mind (2013)
2017-12-31

SmitH Darwin’s Rehabilitation of Teleology Versus Williams’ Replacement of Teleology by Natural Selection (2011)
2017-12-01 (approximative date)


2017 November

KirchhoffMD Extended Cognition & the Causal-Constitutive Fallacy: In Search for a Diachronic and Dynamical Conception of Constitution (2015)
2017-11-23

PankseppJ (with Biven) The Archaeology of Mind
2017-11-28 (unfinished reading)

DennettD A Difference That Makes a Difference _Edge.org_
2017-11-17 (A conversation with Daniel Dennett)

GiuntiM (Simone Pinna) Toward a dynamical theory of human computation
2017-11-17 (unfinished reading)

PankseppJ (with peer commentaries in B&BS) Toward a general psychobiological theory of emotions
2017-11-13 (unfinished reading)

StoffregenTA Affordances Are Enough: Reply to Chemero et al.
2017-11-09 (First section only)

HackerPMS The Conceptual Framework for the Investigation of Emotions
(in Emotions and Understanding Wittgensteinian Perspectives, Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist and Michael McEachrane eds (2009)
2017-11-07

HackerPMS (with BennettM) Criminal Law as It Pertains to Patients Suffering from Psychiatric Diseases 2011
2017-11-09

HardcastleVG (with C. Matthew Stewart) What Do Brain Data Really Show? (2002)
2017-11-21

CostallA Socializing Affordances (1995)
2017-11-13

WellsAJ Cognitive Science and the Turing Machine: an Ecological Perspective
in Alan Turing_ Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker-Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2004)
2017-11-20

WellsAJ Gibson’s Affordances and Turing’s Theory of Computation
2017-11-19 (partially read)

WilsonRA Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences (2004)
2017-11-20 (Second reasing of some sections)

BarrettL Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (2011)
2017-11-25

BechtelW Explanation: Mechanism, Modularity, and Situated Cognition
2017-11-22

RollsET (with peer commentaries in B&BS) Précis of The brain and emotion
2017-11-13 (unfinished reading)

SmitH Inclusive Fitness Theory and the Evolution of Mind
and Language (2016)
2017-11-22

SandelMJ Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do (2010)
2017-11-07 (chapter 9)


2017 October

CostallA From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004)
2017-10-12

BarrettLF The Future of Psychology: Connecting Mind to Brain (2010)
2017-10-03

SmitH Popper and Wittgenstein on the Metaphysics
of Experience (2015)
2017-10-15

RollsET Emotion and decision making explained (2013)
2017-10-19 (read some sections only)

SmitH The Social Evolution of Human Nature: From Biology to Language (2014)
2017-10-26

ScrutonR My Brain and I (2014)
2017-10-14

PankseppJ How to Undress the Affective Mind An Interview with Jaak Panksepp
2017-10-19

LoveAC Hierarchy, causation and explanation: ubiquity, locality and pluralism
2017-10-05 (must reread)

LanceM (with WhiteWH) Stereoscopic Vision Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference
2017-10-12

HackerPMS (with BennettM) Chapter 7 on emotions, in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
2017-09-28 (second reading)

BoullierDG Le danger du "débat" lancé par Bronner et Gehin sur les sociologies (2017)
2017-10-11


2017 September

PankseppJ Exchange with BarrettLF and IzardCE:

1- BarrettLF Are Emotions Natural Kinds (2006)
2017-09-25

2a- PankseppJ Neurologizing the Psychology of Affecs (2007)
2017-09-29

2b- IzardCE Basic Emotions, Natural Kinds, Emotion Schemas, and a New Paradigm (2007)
2017-09-26 (unfinished reading)

3- BarrettLF et al. Of Mice and Men: A Response to Panksepp and Izard (2007)
2017-09-28

4- PankseppJ Cognitive Conceptualism - Where Have All the Affects Gone (2008)
2017-09-29

5- BarrettLF & LindquistKA Corrections to Panksepp (2008)
2017-09-29

IsmaelJ Interview by Andres Lomena Cantos about How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-10

IsmaelJ Freedom and Determinism, chapter 5 in How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-10

IsmaelJ From Physical Time to Human Time, chapter 6 in How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-12

IsmaelJ Decision and the Open Future, chapter 8 in Adrian Bardon (ed.) The Future of the Philosophy of Time - Routledge (2011)
2017-09-14

BarrettLF (With Kristen A Lindquist) A functional architecture of the human brain: emerging insights from the science of emotion (2012)
2017-09-30

BlackmanR Why Compatibilists Need Alternative Possibilities (2015)
2017-09-04

AlbertDZ Time and Chance (2008)
Chapter 6: The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention
2017-09-17

KhooJ Backtracking counterfactuals, revisited
2017-09-19

MenziesP The Consequence Argument Disarmed: An Interventionist Perspective
in Beebee, Hitchcock, Price (eds) Making a difference: Essays on the philosophy of causation - OUP (2017)
2017-09-10

PankseppJ (workshop with Stephen Asma, Glennon Curran, Rami Gabriel & Thomas Greif) The Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience (2010)
2017-09-20

RestallG A cut-free sequent system for two-dimensional modal logic, and why it matters (2010)
2017-09-17


2017 August

ShafferJ Causal Contextualism
2017-08-28 Chapter 2 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy

SinnottArmstrongW Free Contrastivism
Chapter 7 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy
2017-08-31

SmallW Practical Knowledge and the Structure of Action
Chapter in Abel & Conant eds. Rethinking Epistemology Volume 2 (2012)
2017-08-14

HitchcockC Contrastive Explanation
2017-08-25 Chapter 1 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy

HornsbyJ A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons
Chapter 10 in Macpherson and Haddock ed. Disjunctivism: Action, Perception, Knowledge
2017-08-04 (second reading)

HornsbyJ Knowledge How in Philosophy of Action (2017)
2017-08-03

BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy - Routledge (2013)
2017-08-31 Introduction

FrostK Action as the exercise of a two-way power
2017-08-18 Second reading


2017 July

ClarkeR Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism - clarke2009
2017-07-14

SmallW Agency and Practical Abilities
2017-07-27

SøvikAO (partial reading) Free Will, Causality and the Self
2017-07-22

SmithM Rational Capacities, or: How to Distinguish Recklessness, Weakness, and Compulsion
Chapter 1 in Stroud & Tappolet eds. Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality OUP (2003)
2017-07-06

TuckerC Agent Causation and the Alleged Impossibility of Rational Free Action
2017-07-20

VihvelinK Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account
2017-07-11

WallerBN A Metacompatibilist Account of Free Will, Making Compatibilists and Incompatibilists More Compatible
2017-07-20

StewardH Action as Downward Causation
2017-07-21

KannistoT Freedom as a Kind of Causality
2017-07-18

MarcusE (second reading) Events and States
Chapter 5 in Rational Causation HUP (2012)
2017-07-12

LeviDonS The Trouble with Harry
2017-07-08


2017 June

RankinWK Ifs as Labels on Cans
2017-06-13

Carl Ginet's review of Rankin's Choice and Chance
2017-06-12

SchmidtJH Newcomb's Paradox Realized with Backward Causation
2017-06-10

SpohnW Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box
2017-06-06

RottschaeferWA The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency
Chapter 7: The neurophysiological bases of moral capacities: Does neurophysiology have room for moral agents?
2017-06-01

SainsburyRM Paradoxes CUP (Section on Newcomb's Probelm)
2017-06-08

AyersMR Reviews of The Refutation of Determinism by

Elizabeth Telfer (review of TROD)
2017-06-12

John W Yolton (review of TROD)
2017-06-12

K W Rankin (review of TROD)
2017-06-12

BerowskyB
Curd's review of Freedom From Necessity: The Metaphysical Basis of Responsibility
2017-06-17

John Martin Fischer's of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-17

Widerker and Katzoff's review of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-18

Mark Ravizza's review of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-19

MayrE (Erasmus) Understanding Human Agency OUP (2011)
2017-06-22 to 2017-07-18

Stewart Goetz's review of Understanding Human Agency
2017-05-23

CraigWL Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb's Paradox
(Only re-read the beginning on 2017-06-08 but found references therein to interesting one-boxing papers by GrandyRE and GalloisA)
2017-06-08

FaraM Masked Abilities and Compatibilism (2008)
2017-06-21

SpohnW Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box
2017-06-06

SobelJH Critical Notice John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will
2017-06-03

SobelJH Puzzles for the Will, chaper 2 -- Predicted Choices
2017-06-04 (About Newcomb's problem)

MenziesP (with Huw Price) Causation as a Secondary Quality (1993)
2017-06-02 (unfinished reading)

NoonanHW Two-Boxing is Irrational
2017-06-05

RobertsonLH The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus (2017)
2017-06-16

GrandyRE What the Well-Wisher didn't Know
2017-06-10

GalloisA How Not to Make a Newcomb Choice
2017-06-09

BurgessS The Newcomb Problem: an Unqualified Rresolution (2004)
2017-06-05

AltshulerR Character, Will, and Agency
2017-06-02

BishopJ Is Agent-Causation a Conceptual Primitive
2017-06-18


2017 May

VargasM Precis of Building Better Beings
2017-05-16

Tamler Sommers' review of Building Better Beings
2017-05-16 (To be revised; the NDR of his book BBB seems to be missing the first part)

Desert, responsibility, and justification: a reply to Doris, McGeer, and Robinson
2017-05-17 (Incomplete reading)

MumfordS (with AnjumRL) Freedom and Control: On the Modality of Free Will
2017-05-04

(with AnjumRL) Getting Causes from Powers (2011)
2017-05-15 (second reading, first chapter)

Powers, Non-Consent and Freedom
2017-05-07

ThalosM The gulf between practical and theoretical reason
2017-05-25 (Incomplete reading)

(Also read two reviews of her book: Without Hierarchy, 2017-05-24)

ListC Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle
2017-05-28

Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise
2017-05-30

What's wrong with the consequence argument
2017-05-31

DorisJM Doing without (arguing about) desert
2017-05-16 (Comment about Vargas' Building Better Beings)

McGeerV Building a better theory of responsibility
(Comment on Vargas' Building Better Beings)
2017-05-16

MerricksT Against the Doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience
2017-05-15

MooreD Supervenient Emergentism and Mereological Emergentism
2017-05-13

MeleAR Weakness of Will
in 'Donald Davidson', Kirk Ludwig ed. (2003)
2017-05-24

BishopRC The Hidden Premise in the Causal Argument for Physicalism
2017-05-10

BalaguerM A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will
2017-05-18

LavinD Action as a form of temporal unity: on Anscombe’s Intention
2017-05-21

RigatoMJ Reductionism, Agency and Free Will
2017-05-08

RigatoMJ The Agent as Her Self
2017-05-09

RobinsonM Revisionism, libertarianism, and naturalistic plausibility
2017-05-16 (Comment on Vargas' Building Better Beings)

SpeakD Review of Four Wiews on Free-Will in NDPR
2017-05-18


2017 April

DeWallF Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
with Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer, EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (2006)
2017-04-07

Andrew McAninch's review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06

Zed Adams' review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06

Wade L. Robison's review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06

AllaisL Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism
Chapter 3: Things in Themselves Without Noumena
2017-04-22

BainJ Emergence in Effective Field Theories
2017-04-08

CrowtherK Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics (2013)
2017-04-10

GlymourC Android Epistemology for Babies: Reflection on Words, Thoughts and Theories (2000)
2017-04-27

KlaymanJ (with Young-Won Ha) Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Information in Hypothesis Testing (1987)
2017-04-29

StanovichKE (with Richard F. West and Maggie E. Toplak) Intelligence and Rationality (Chapter 39 in the Cambridge Hanbook of Intelligence) (2011)
2017-04-28

HaackS Just Say "No" to Logical Negativism
chapter 12 in Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and its Place in Culture
2017-04-26


2017 March

WeinbergS Reductionism Redux
Chapter 10 in Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries
2017-03-24

GroffRP Agents, Powers and Events: Humeanism and the Free Will Debate
Chapter 6 in Ontology Revisited Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (2012)
2017-03-15

GroffRP Sublating the free will problematic: powers, agency and causal determination (2016)
2017-03-16

GroffRP Causal Mechanisms and the Philosophy of Causation (2016)
2017-03-19

BauerN A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception (2012)
2017-03-09

BauerN Kant's Subjective Deduction
2017-03-10

BitbolM (with Pierre Kerszberg and Jean Petitot eds) Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)
Introduction
2017-03-26 (or earlier)

BitbolM Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)
2017-03-26 (or earlier)

DeutshD Constructor theory (2013)
2017-03-16 (incomplete reading)

MayrErnst Analysis or Reductionism
Chapter 10 in What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline (2004)
2017-03-24

MacbethD Responses to Brassier Redding and Wolfsdorf (2017)
(response to comments on her book Realizing Reason)
2017-03-01

RödlS Roedl Law as the Reality of the Free Will
2017-03-09

BonioloG Chapter 9 - Laws of Nature: The Kantian Approach (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)

HarréR Chapter 6: The Transcendental Domain of Physics (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)

KauarkLeiteP Chapter 10: The Transcendental Role of the Principle of Anticipations of Perception in Quantum Mechanics (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)


2017 February

BitbolM Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities (2014)
2017-02-22

EarleyJE Three Concepts of Chemical Closure and their Epistemological Significance (2010)
2017-02-23

EllisG How Can Physics Underlie the Mind: Top-Down Causation in the Human
Context (2014)
2017-02-11 (First chapter: Complexity and Emergence)

FeserE From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature (2016)
2017-02-21

HarréR (with Steen Brock) Nature’s affordances and formation length:
The ontology of quantum physical experiments (2016)
2017-02-21

PihlströmS Kant and Pragmatism
2017-02-24 (skipped third section)

A few interesting things that I am reading or have read this year. Sorry for the bad formatting of references; this is copied from a wikidPad page ('personal wiki'):

2018 February

Walsh Denis M Mechanism, Emergence, and Miscibility: The Autonomy of Evo-Devo
(in Functions: selection and mechanisms, Synthese Library, Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science vol. 363)
2018-02-03 (currently reading)

Moreno Alvaro (with Xabier Barandiaran) Adaptivity: From Metabolism to Behavior (2008)
2018-02-03 (currently reading)


2018 January

Bechtel William (with Adele Abrahamsen) Mental Mechanisms, Autonomous Systems, and Moral Agency
2018-01-29

Lennox James G Darwin was a Teleologist (1993)
2018-01-28

A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation
2018-01-27

Collins Arthur W The Nature of Mental Things (1986)
2018-01-26 (Second reading of chapter 6: Action and Teleology)

Noble Denis Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework
2018-01-24

Bechtel William Explicating Top-Down Causation Using Networks and Dynamics (2016)
2018-01-24

Bateson Patrick The Nest’s Tale: A reply to Richard Dawkins
2018-01-23

Glenberg Arthur M (with Justin Hayes) Contribution of Embodiment to Solving the Riddle of Infantile Amnesia (2016)
2018-01-22

Sterelny Kim The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (2012)
2018-01-20 (first two chapters)

Hacker PMS Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt
Chapter 6 in The Passions: A Study of Human Nature Wiley-Blackwell (2017)
2018-01-19 (unfinished reading)

Sterelny Kim Dawkins Vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest (2001)
2018-01-16

David Cole's review of The Evolved Apprentice
2018-01-16

Costall Alan From Direct Perception to the Primacy of Action: A Closer Look at James Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Psychology
(Chapter 3 in Theories of Infant Development, Gavin Bremner & Alan Slater eds, 2004)
2018-01-12

A Piecewise Aggregation of (Some) Philosophers' and Biologists' Perspectives (review of Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings by Isabella Sarto-Jackson1, Miles MacLeod, Stephan Handschuh, Christoph Frischer, Julia Lang, Martin Schlumpp and Werner Callebaut)
2018-01-11

Wimsatt William C Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings (2007)
2018-01-10 (first 14 pages only)

Estany Anna (with Sergio Martínez) “Scaffolding” and “affordance” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences (2013)
2018-01-09

Wiegman Isaac Angry Rats and Scaredy Cats Lessons from Competing Cognitive Homologies (2016)
2018-01-08

I should point out that I haven't read all of the responses in this thread, so if my response has already been addressed, feel free to ignore this post or copy and paste the relevant response. — czahar

Your response isn't redundant but it's broadly compatible with the conception that I am advocating, which portrays 'reactive attitudes' broadly construed (such as praise and blame, gratitude and resentment, shame and pride, etc.) not as implying the mere acknowledgement of an agent's (or one's own) intrinsic freedom but rather, in part, as constituting this freedom through functioning as social scaffolds of rational and moral growth and competence.

In other words, I view most popular philosophical discussions of free will, determinism and responsibility to go wrong when they seek to establish the antecedent and objective criteria of freedom of choice on account of which an agent can reasonably be held responsible for her actions. I rather view the range of sentiments and social attitudes associated with the normative appraisal of other people's (and one's own) choices and actions to make up the essential cement necessary to hold various bits of human behavior together and thereby to make it possible for people's to behave rationally and morally at all.

But the way you constructed your post, was not incompatible with compatibilism. — charleton

I didn't mean to rule out compatibilism. Quite the contrary, I meant to point out that bahman's definition was too strict to accommodate many common conceptions free will, such as compatibilists ones, and also some libertarian ones (which don't all rely on the most restrictive and implausible understanding of the principle of alternative possibilities).