It might help if you could sketch the case against reductionism-- I remember finding Fodor's argument pretty convincing in that paper about special sciences, but it's been way too long since I read it. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, this paper by Fodor has had a significant impact on my thinking also, as well as Putnam's 'square peg through the round hole' argument (in his Philosophy and our Mental Life paper). Both papers are anti-reductionist classics. I also have been helped a lot in overcoming my old physicalist prejudices by John Haugeland's Truth and Rule Following and Wiggins' Sameness and Substance Renewed. Those two works elucidate in two different ways how different levels of material organization relate to one another in a way that accounts both for their ontological independence and their undeniable mutual dependencies.

OK, I read that, but it just seems to me to be saying that the Laplacean 'perspective' ( which is really the God's eye 'view from everywhere') is different from the subjective (limited human epistemic) view. If subjective intentions, purposes, plans and understandings are limited perspectives on our decisions and actions, that ( necessarily) do not include the complex microphysical events that determine them, then what reason do we have to think that they are not merely epiphenomenal rationalizations? — John

Our intentions, and the practical reasons on the basis of which we act are causally efficacious, as are, in a different sense, our episodes of practical deliberation. (Those are instances of rational-causation and mental-causation, respectively. They are complementary forms of explanation. The first one cites the reasons of the agent as causal antecedents whereas the latter cites psychological 'states' such as beliefs or desires). But the sorts of causal explanation that they provide have different forms from the causal explanations (nomological causation) that subsume isolated physical events under universally quantified laws. The belief that all causation is nomological causation is what led Davidson to assert his principle of the "nomological character of causality", which is a principle that has no basis in science and merely seems to be a wild inductive generalization from familiar modes of explanation that focus on classical Newtonian physics (and classical electrodynamics) and ignore the actual scientific explanatory practice that have currency in almost every other fields, including chemistry, biology and modern physics.

When you explain the occurrence of an event with reference to the normal function, or natural power, of an object, or living organism, then the form of causality at issue is substance-causation (of which rational agent-causation is a special case) and those explanations aren't reducible to processes of event-causation neither do they disclose causal antecedent that belong to the same category as the objects and events which obey the laws of physics belong to. A philosophy that argues on the ground of some inchoate reductionism (or flawed supervenience arguments) that the causal efficacy of our intentions are preempted by the causal efficacy of our material constituents is no more prima facie plausible than a philosophy that argues that our perceptions of the external world constitute a veil between us and the way the world is in itself.

Also "1)" could not be a subset of "2)" because if subjective intentions are exhaustively emergent form microphysical processes which are rigidly deterministic then they are not causal of any of those objective microphysical processes, but only of decisions, actions etc understood from the subjective perspective.

What you are gesturing at is an argument for causal exclusion. Such arguments are based on supervenience relations between high-level descriptions of agents described in intentional terms and low-level realizations of those actions in terms of non-intentional bodily motions and their neural causal antecedents. Such arguments (such as Jaegwon Kim's) typically fail due to their overlooking issues of multiple realizability, among other things.

The two are correlated; and as Spinoza points out it would not be proper to say that one is causal of the other at all.

Spinoza also was arguing for the epiphenomenalism of mental phenomena on the basis of causal exclusion at the level of material embodiment. Kim attempted to make such arguments more rigorous but failed, on my view.

BUT, the microphysical is understood by determinists to be the prior determining matrix,

Yes, that seems to be the dogma, but it is poorly argued for and it goes beyond the thesis of microphysical determinism. There is more to what many macroscopic objects (such as artifacts and living organism, and even some inanimate natural entities such as stars, candle flames and hurricanes, than their material constituents and the laws that govern those constituents. There are emergent principles of organisation and individuation that are only weakly constrained by the laws that regulate the constituents.

and we are back to the position that our decisions only seem to be free from our necessarily limited subjective perspectives. Laplace's Demon should be able to see all our reasons as well as the physical causes that they are rigidly correlated with.

We only get back to this position if we accept the arguments for bottom-up causal exclusion that purport to establish it. It's not a default position in contemporary philosophy of science anymore. Even theoretical physicists like Michel Bitbol and George Ellis now are arguing against this position and in favor of strong emergence instead. And there is nothing magical or unnatural about it. Modern cognitive science, evolutionary biology, chemistry and even physics all have superseded the old metaphysics underlying the Cartesian/Newtonian/Galilean/Laplacian world view.

Also, your account does not seem to explain how it is possible for something utterly deterministic to give rise to something really free (undetermined). Waving towards complexity only explains why our actions would nonetheless seem free to us in a deterministic world; it cannot explain how freedom could be an actual reality.

I think it's a common misreading of the thesis of strong emergentism that deterministic processes "give rise" to non-deterministic processes. Maybe this is encouraged by a narrow focus on diachronic emergence where new forms of organisation of matter arise that didn't previously exist, as a result of evolution or change in boundary conditions. But focus on cases of inter-level synchronic emergence, where both the deterministic and non-deterministic processes characterize simultaneously two separate levels of organization, and thereby two different domains of entities, provide a more conspicuous picture of what is going on and why causal exclusion arguments are problematic.

I am not a determinist, by the way. I believe in freedom but I also believe it is irreducible; which means it cannot be explained in terms more basic than itself. All our objectivist explanations are produced in terms of causality; but to explain freedom in terms of causality would be to contradict it; to deny its reality.

I agree. But I don't think microphysical determinism constitutes a threat to freedom. It doesn't even entail determinism simpliciter.

If freedom is impossible to explain without contradicting it, then explaining how freedom could be compatible with determinism is obviously impossible. I think the fact is that the human intellect can understand its own logics of determinism and freedom; which apply properly to the space of causes and the space of reasons respectively, but the two cannot be made compatible, because those logics contradict one another; they are mutually exclusive.

John McDowell has proposed that the space of reasons and the space of laws are disjoint, but the space of causes intersect both. Human intentional actions (and their beliefs) are disclosed within the space of reasons. Human neurophysiology is disclosed, at lest partially, within the space of laws. But it is only excessively narrow conceptions of causality that make problematic the top-down and bottom-up causal relations between the two levels.

You say there is compatibility, but you provide no account of how it could be so. I'll believe it when I see a clear, convincing explanation of how microphysical processes which are completely deterministic could give rise to macro events that are really somehow free from that microphysical determination not merely in the epistemic sense (for us), but in the ontological sense (absolutely). I would want to know what that "somehow free" consists in, and how it could emerge from the "definitely not free". — John

I did provide such an account in this post.

I am yet to see any arguments; all I've seen are vague assertions. — John

Well, it's true that I haven't presented a full blown and fully argue defense of my thesis, but I have also been lambasted for my posts being too long. I have explained what appears to me to be the weak links in the arguments for the traditional forms of (anti-PAP) compatibilism and agent-causal incompatibilism, and provided links to the relevant literature where those positions are criticized. I've also provided several pointers to the theses that underlie my own position, with more references to the relevant literature. You may think it's too sketchy, but I've mainly been laying my cards on the table and answered all the requests for clarification.

Do you have any reading recommendations on that topic? — Mongrel

From a compatibilist perspective, Anthony Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility, is a favorite of mine, and it is written in an engaging style. From an incompatibilist perspective, Michael Ayers, The Refutation of Determinism is hard to beat but it is both difficult and hard to find (though there might be cheap second hand copies available). You will easily find papers by Michael Smith or Kadri Vihvelin online. (See for instance Vihvelin, Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account). Erasmus Mayr's Understanding Human Agency is excellent but not cheap. Also quite relevant, and excellent, are two papers by Don Levi: Determinism as a Thesis about the State of the World from Moment to Moment and The Trouble with Harry (this last one is available online and is especially relevant to the principle of alternative possibilities).

The question is though, whether those who claim compatibility between free will and determinism really mean to say both that the world is causally closed and causality is not probablistic at all but rigidly deterministic, and that free will of the kind that could justify attributions of praise and blame must be sui generis in a way that would deny either that the causal order of nature is closed or that our decisions and actions are completely determined by it. — John

One problem is that the thesis of nomological determinism seldom is precisely defined. It is often equivalent to the claim that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic laws, and that physics is somehow "complete" in the sense that all the other sorts of "high-level" weakly emergent features of the world somehow supervene over the totality of the underlying physical facts. This thesis of the completeness of physics can be denied consistently with the acceptance of the fact that everything is materially constituted by physical stuff (e.g. particles and fields and whatnot). When the possibility of strong emergence is acknowledged (as it increasingly tends to be in contemporary philosophy of physics!) then one can be both a compatibilist and an incompatibilist in two different senses: that is, one can hold that freedom of the will is compatible with microphysical determinism and the causal closure of the physical domain and also is incompatible with nomological determinism at the strongly emergent levels of psychology and intentional action.

If clear, unequivocal, easily comprehensible answers cannot be given to these questions by compatibilists, of whatever stripe, then I would say they are practicing some form of obfuscation or sophistry. They don't want to face the logical consequences of their own beliefs, and they are wriggling like crazy, but making no sense at all.

There is also the possibility what you don't fully understand the structure of the arguments that seem sophistic to you, or that your own strongly held metaphysical beliefs generate blind spots.

All this seems to say, without acknowledging that it is saying it, is that free will is really an illusion caused by our lack of knowledge and understanding of all the ("fine-grained") forces determining our behavior. In other words free will and moral responsibility are inevitably "real for us" even if the world is really inexorably deterministic. Spinoza made that claim, and acknowledged it, some 350 years ago. — John

When I am arguing explicitly that a thesis is false, and propose arguments that purport to show the thesis to be false, that hardly is a way of saying that the thesis is true! I am arguing that the fine-grained description of the physical particles making up your body, which may or may not amount to deterministic processes, aren't relevant to the determination of the intentional action type that, together with the bodily motions that they cause, they happen to realize, then the issue of the real "cause" of them coming to realize a specific (multiply realizable and irreducible) action type remains unsettled from the microphysical perspective.

I was also interested in first-person data, subjective experience... is there a compatibilist perspective that considers that kind of thing? — Mongrel

I think the philosophical accounts regarding free will and determinism propounded by Michael Ayers, Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Erasmus Mayr are especially sensitive to the causal relevance of irreducible features of the first-person perspective of rational agents (and their characters, values and motivations). I am especially partial to the accounts of Ayers and Mayr, myself, but all four are illuminating. Consider Alfred Mele, also, though the specifics of his account are less congenial to me.

This sounds like obfuscation. The point is not that the ability was not actually exercised, but that, in a deterministic world, if it was not exercised then it was never actually (as opposed to merely logically) possible that it could have been exercised. — John

What you call "the point" is actually a substantive philosophical thesis that is in need of a rational defense however obvious its truth may seem from the standpoint of traditional compatibilist reasoning.

The traditional distinctions between logical, epistemic and nomological necessity/possibility are actually too crude to settle this question. That's because possibilities for action aren't equivalent to any of those three kinds of possibility. If an option still is open to you as a possibility for action, then it is both logically possible and epistemically possible that you will do it, but those possibilities for a range of different actions isn't simply a matter of your being ignorant of all the relavant facts regarding the (alleged) nomological possibility of only one of them. (It is 'nomologically possible' in the intended sense if its occurrence is consistent with already settled physical facts that you don't have any power over anymore at the time of practical deliberation in conjunction with the laws of physics).

If it were the case that the nomological necessity of just one determinate action implied a lack of alternative possibilities for other actions then, when faced with several choices for action and asked what it is that you will chose to do, it would make sense for you to reply: "I don't know yet, let's wait and see". (This would be a rationally justified answer if you were to accept the validity of van Inwagen's 'consequence argument'). But the sensible answer rather is: "I don't know, I haven't decided yet; what ought I to do?" And when you are deliberating what it is that you ought to do, you aren't inquiring about already settled facts that unbeknownst to you will cause you to act in a determinate manner, but rather about what it is that makes it reasonable for you to select one possible option in preference to the alternatives in your current situation.

This is simply a conflation of epistemological and ontological issues. — Terrapin Station

No, it's a metaphysical issue. It's a consequence of multiple realizability and of the falsity of nomological reducibility (of psychology to physics). That a given fine-grainedly characterized physical history of the set of material particle temporarily making up a human body happen to realize some specific form of intentional action of a person isn't determined by any level of physical details of this motion anymore than the value of a dollar bill is determined by the physical motion and structure of the atoms making it up. That you cannot know the value of the dollar bill on the basis of the knowledge of its material constitution isn't a matter of epistemic limitation regarding your precise knowledge of the latter, but rather a matter of the latter being insufficient to determining the former, in a metaphysical sense of "determination". This may be true even if the economic facts of the world supervene on the physical facts; and so might it be in the case of the psychological facts in relations to the physical facts that they supervene upon, or so even many non-reductive physicalists such as Jerry Fodor and Donald Davidson have convincingly argued.

Your exeternal observer is an external ideal observer, right?--Hence Laplacean. So how can it be the case that both there is only one possibility to the Laplacean observer but really and not just mistakenly from a phenomenal/belief perspective, more than one possibility open to the agent? How is that not contradictory? — Terrapin Station

It would be contradictory if both senses of "possible" were the same. But I've already taken care of distinguishing them.

The agent who deliberates among several open options ('possible-2') knows that only one of them will eventually become actual. What it is that determines which one will become actual is the reason this agent will disclose, through practical deliberation (which may include a process of rational assessment of her own conflicting desires, values and prior commitments), for making this intelligible choice. It is true that the 'ideal' Laplacean observer is able to foresee the necessity of just one among those outcomes being realized (and hence the only one being 'possible-1'. But what it is that the Laplacean observer thereby sees to be necessary is not the intelligible action itself but rather the fine-grained physical realization of this action through bodily motions that are caused by antecedent physical/neurophysiological events. The explanation why those particular motions happen to be realizing a specific sort of intentional action (characterized in high-level purposive terms) isn't supplied by any sort of understanding of physical laws since physics can say nothing about the way practical reason and intentions relate to intelligible action types. It is the deliberation of the agent that makes this determination; which is another way to say that the agent is the cause of her own actions. This is what agent-causation amounts to. What makes it the case that only one among several 'possible-2' actions is executed is that the agent herself determines what sort of purposive action her own bodily motions (whatever their deterministic causes may be) will come to realize.

If you can't communicate like you're having a conversation rather than someone with some sort of logorrheic disorder there is something wrong with you. It's not indicative of "deep thought" that you type a lot, especially when a lot of it has been unfocused, gobbledy-gooky word salad. — Terrapin Station

The best I can do is keep explaining as best as I know how what it is that you think is unclear and ignore the gratuitous insults. I can't do any better. I've already explained why twitter-style discussion isn't an option for me.

Okay, and these obtain by virtue of what? The agent simply thinking that they're possibilities? — Terrapin Station

No. The agent may mistakenly think that he has the power to do something and not have it. He may not be strong enough to lift the suitcase, say. He may also believe wrongly that he has an opportunity. The bus left the station earlier than expected, say. But when the agent has both the power, and a corresponding opportunity to exercise this power, and know that he has both, then that makes up an open option for him. And there typically are several such open options in each particular deliberative context. What then determine which one of those possibilities will become actual is the agent herself, through deciding what she has a good reason to do.

In the post that you elected not to read, I explained why there being thus several options that all are open (and hence possible) for the agent is compatible with the fact of there being only one of them that is possible from the perspective of an external observer.

Why must you type such long responses regardless of how short my replies are? Is it some sort of psychological inability to keep things short as if you're having a conversation? — Terrapin Station

Because those are complex issues and there is no point is repeating almost verbatim the same seductive albeit simplistic (and flawed) arguments that have already been expounded uncritically 10,000 times previously in very similar threads.

If you don't want to think deeply about the issue, and prefer twitter-like superficial exchanges, you are of course free to ignore my long responses. I produce them for my own benefit as well.

Re your two different types of possibilities, I'd say that (2) is simply a subset of (1) . . . — Terrapin Station

It's the opposite since there is only one possibility from the external non-interventionist Laplacean perspective (1) whereas that are typically several mutually incompatible options (powers conjoined with opportunities) from the perspective of an agent (2). So. (1) is a subset of (2).

Unless I'm not understanding something there, and I'd say that whether something is possible in way way rests on an observer

I agree that the fact that most options are impossible from the Laplacean perspective (and that the only one that is possible is thereby necessary) while several options are typically possible from the perspective of the agent boils down to... a difference in perspective. But only the Laplacean perspective is the perspective of an observer. The perspective of the agent is radically different, since the way she knows what will happen has nothing to do with her knowledge (or lack thereof) of the antecedent causes of her action (including her own character or states of mind -- those are enablers of her rational capacities, not premises of her practical deliberation). She merely decides what is best to do, by her own lights (rational and/or moral considerations) and forms the intention to do it. She thereby knows what she will do or is doing. Knowledge acquired through practical deliberation, and the formation of an intention, is what Elizabeth Anscombe called practical knowledge. You know what will happen through deciding what will happen, and you thereby know the reason why it happens: which is that it ought to happen by your own lights (and that it is hopefully in your power to accomplish it).

In a way, the Laplacean observer is more knowledgeable than you yourself are, as an agent, since he knows in advance what it is that you are going to do (or, at least, how it is that your body will move, although those motions may be unintelligible to him if he hasn't figured out what they mean in high-level intentional terms). But in another sense, you are more knowledgeable than the Laplacean observer is for, except in cases of self-delusion, you always know what meaningful and purposeful action your bodily motions are realizing, since the controlling intention is the outcome of your own rational deliberation. Thus, you know something that the Laplacean observer may be badly situated to know, which is that the bodily motions that he predicted would necessarily occur happen to be realizing some specific intention not by accident, but for a reason. This reason, which is the 'rational-cause' of your bodily motions coming to realize non-accidentally some intentional action that you may have an objective reason to do, by your own lights, explains why it occurred as the intentional action that it is. (The way in which the intelligible cause of your action -- i.e. the reason why you are doing it by your own lights -- explains why the underlying low-level neurophysiological processes and bodily motions that realize it precisely realize this specific sort of high-level intentional action is a typical instance of 'downward-causation', by the way. There is also a form of causation that runs in the opposite direction, but it is non-determinative; your neurophysiology enables your learned agential powers and rational abilities to operate. In that sense, the causal power of the low-level processes are enabling causes of your agency. They make things 'possible' for you, in the second sense previously discussed.)

In my ontology there are no real abstracts. Abstracts only exist as dynamic states in individuals' brains. In other words, they're particular mental content — Terrapin Station

There are different forms of explanations of events, and likewise there are different forms of causal processes that that are the topics of those different forms of explanation. For instance, biologists who make use of functional/teleological explanations of adaptative behaviors, or physiological processes, focus on different "causal structures" than do engineers who explain why a bridge collapsed. It really doesn't matter for the purpose of my argument if you are a realist or an anti-realist about universals or abstract objects. My only claim is that two specific forms of causal explanations don't reduce to one another and failure to properly distinguish them (or properly relate them) has produced mischief in the free will literature.

What two different sorts of possibilities are you positing? — Terrapin Station

The two sorts of possibilities that I was discussing were (1) an event being possible consistently with the system it is involved in being in some initial state and the laws governing the evolution of that system. And (2) some choice or action being possible as an action that an agent has both the power and the opportunity to perform at some time in the future, from the prior perspective of her practical deliberation. That an event is impossible from the standpoint of an external observer (e.g. a Laplacean demon) who observes the agent from some external non-intervening standing point doesn't entail that this event can't constitute an open option, and hence be possibly realizable in the second sense. Furthermore, and this is where I am parting company with most compatibilists, the possiblitity of this event being realized by the agent isn't merely a matter of the epistemic limitations of the agent. Finally, since I am not denying that this event, which is possible form the agent's practical perspective, may also be 'impossible' (in the first sense) from the external Laplacean perspective, I am also parting company with most libertarians. As I suggested, the apparent incoherence in holding the same event to be both possible and impossible, in the future, at the same time, from two different sorts of perspectives, only seems contradictory owing to the failure to distinguish two radically different forms of causation.

Couldn't disagree with you more here. There's nothing extant that's not a process. — Terrapin Station

It's not something extant that I meant to refer to. I was suggesting that two different sorts of occurrences -- agent-causation and event-event Humean causation, specifically -- exemplify different forms of causation. Forms of causation, or "causal structures" as I meant the phrase, are abstracta. They are exemplified by causal processes that are similarly structured in some respect, and it is this respect of similarity that I called "causal structure". Thus, what I was objecting to is the common belief that explanations of human actions in terms of rational-causation, or agent-causation, can be reduced, somehow, or identified with, or eliminated in favor of, explanations in terms of Humean event-event causation (rendered popular by Donald Davidson in the philosophy of action) relating either mental states to one another (and to bodily motions) or their underlying realizations into deterministically evolving neurophysiological states and events.

I haven't the faintest idea what this is saying. — Terrapin Station

It it really that hard? Apologies if it is badly formulated. I am simply referring to the fact that rational agents such as us, when we deliberate about what we are going to do, are contemplating a range of options that we have both the power and the opportunity to do. All of those options are 'possible', or so do we believe, just in virtue of our having both the power and the opportunity of realizing any one of them. The traditional compatibilist philosopher, on the other hand, claims that only one of those 'possibilities' is really possible, and, indeed, necessary; and that, consequently, the other options that seem open to us only appear to be open due to our unavoidable epistemic limitations regarding the past state of the universe and the implications from the laws of physics. I am further claiming that this claim by the compatibilist stems in part from a confusion over two different sorts of possibilities, or lack of attention to the way in which they relate to one another (allegedly, through supervenience, on Kim's influential albeit misguided account).

The actual causal structure of anything is a deterministic processes that is causal-chains of physical events, by the way. (There's no need for invoking supervenience or "underlying" there.) — Terrapin Station

This is a category error. A causal structure isn't a process of any kind. And yes, there most definitely is a need to invoke supervenience in order to bridge the categorical gap in the argument that you are attempting to make. Jaegwon Kim has developed such sophisticated supervenience based arguments to get from the determinism (assumed) of the laws of physics to the causal exclusion of high-level causal/explanatory powers of agents (or of mental states of agent). The supervenience of the events that involve the high-level entities (psychological processes, bodily motions, etc) over the microphysical events must be assumed in order that the deterministic causal efficacy of the low-level initial state of the "system" exclude the possibility of of their being independent causes of the agent's actions at the higher level.

But that "misconstrual" is what the debate is tradtionally about. — Terrapin Station

It is actually ignored by a majority of participants in the debate. The relevance of the metaphysics of substances and powers (which contrasts with the metaphysics of Humean event-event causation) to rational-causation is often ignored because libertarian agent-causation is taken to conflict with our understanding of physics and neurosciences. (But traditional libertarian agent-causation hardly is the only alternative to traditional determinism.) Hence, a recent discussion between proponents of four different main orientations in the philosophy of free-will: John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Manuel Vargas, (Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell, 2007), who are semi-compatibilist, libertarian, hard determinist and revisionist-compatibilist, respectively, never mention the possibility of agent-causation (as opposed to event-event causation) except as a topic of joke.

What would an analysis of how we talk have to do with an ontological discussion? — Terrapin Station

It is relevant to the 'free will and determinism' debate because the way 'possible' is tacitly understood in discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities often loses touch with the 'possibilities' that figure as open options from the perspective of the rational practical deliberation of agent (conceived by them as powers and opportunities that they have). Paying attention to how 'possibilities' likewise are involved in our conceptions of the powers of ordinary objects can alert us to the manner in which they are often misconstrued within a Humean metaphysics of event-causation. Talking about objects having powers and events being historically possible, in a deterministic universe, are two different things. Philosophers who aren't attentive to the problematic connection between those two sorts of (im)possibilities (i.e. historical impossibilities of specific events versus merely unactualized powers of agents) are led to mischaracterize agents as bundles of events, or deterministic processes that somehow supervene on underlying causal-chains of physical events. And those philosophers thereby lose track of the actual causal structure of rational agency.

Yes. If you posit any possibility other than one, it's inconsistent with determinism. — Terrapin Station

The analysis is meant as a conspicuous definition that captures how we talk about dispositions of ordinary things. Those dispositions may be linked either deterministically, or merely probabilistically, in the analysis, to their normal conditions of actualization. Hence the possibility of such an analysis of dispositions makes no commitment whatsoever to the universe being deterministic or not. Again, where you seem to balk, is not over the specific analyses of abilities and dispositions that new dispositionalists are relying on. It is rather its relevance to free agency that you seem to be skeptical of. But you are dismissing the analysis on faulty grounds (implying falsely that it is inconsistent with determinism) before even considering how it my be used to support a compatibilist account of alternative possibilities that might be relevant to free will and agency.

I disagree. It is not consistent with determinism. — Terrapin Station

You are not disagreeing with the analyses of dispositions that I have mentioned being consistent with determinism, are you? If anything, those analyses are tantamount to the recasting of power ascriptions to specific kinds of objects as statements of universal deterministic laws that link the actualization of those powers to triggering circumstances. Maybe that's not quite true of Vihvelin's analysis of practical rational abilities in terms of bundles of dispositions, but those constituent dispositions are deterministic and the overall account is completely insensitive to the underlying physical and/or neurophysiological levels of implementation being either deterministic or indeterministic (e.g. quantum-indeterministic).

You didn't seem to understand my comment. I'm saying that hinging the whole thing on that particular linguistic characterization is silly. — Terrapin Station

What are you referring to as "that particular linguistic characterization"? It would be a mistake to view those conditional analyses as mere arbitrary semantic conventions. The analysis of G. E. Moore was a first attempt. Lewis improved on it to account for 'finks'. Michael Fara improved again to account for 'masked abilities' and Kadri Vihvelin improved the analysis even further to account for asymmetries in PAP (the fact that we want agents who acted badly to have had the ability of have acted well, but not vice versa, as a requirement for them being deserving of praise or blame) in a manner that rather deeply illuminates the metaphysics of rational agency.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that there's not the possibility in any sense. If you say that the possibility obtained, you're not a determinist. Hence not a compatibilist. — Terrapin Station

Sure, there is a sense of possibility that applies to unactualized dispositions (or unexercised powers or abilities). This is the sense that is captured by a conditional analysis such as those of G. E. Moore, David Lewis or their 'new dispositionalist' sucessors, and it is perfectly consistent with determinism. For sure, you may not be satisfied with the way this clearly defined sense of 'possibility' can be adduced to secure the 'principle of alternate possibilities' in a way that makes it adequate for the ascription of freedom and responsibility to rational agents. But you'd have to actually look up the details of the proposals in order to assess them.

Confusing. I think compatibilism is an off-road to nowhere. — Mongrel

I agree with you -- regarding traditional PAP-denying-compatibilism -- but I think traditional incompatibilist libertarianism also is on such an off-road. New dispositionalists also seem to have made a wrong turn, but their attempt is instructive for they seem to have traveled on the right track for a little longer than either of their two predecessors. And they are in the best position to see the shortcomings of both.

It would be silly to frame the whole thing around the "could have done otherwise" phrase. You can just state it as "there is more than one possibility that has a >0 probability of obtaining." — Terrapin Station

The discussion of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for decades and it isn't silly at all. There is a genuine cost for accepting it (usually incurred by libertarians) and a genuine cost for rejecting it (usually incurred by compatibilists). The reason libertarian believe compatibilists to be silly, and vice versa, is because each side is acutely aware of the bullet being bitten by the other side. Compatibilists are resigned to accept that free agents only have the illusion of having several genuinely (as of yet unsettled) open options to them, and libertarians struggle with the problems of luck and control.

New dispositionalist analyses of the abilities of rational agents aim at providing an account of free will that avoids both of those costs. I am not a new dispositionalist myself, but I can credit them with seeing the blind spots of both libertarians and compatibilists, whereas those two traditional opponents usually only see each other's blind spots, not realizing that they themselves are paying too high a cost.

But I'm not getting how the dispositionalist is offering an option. Determinists don't disagree that talk of logical possibility is valuable. — Mongrel

That depends on what it is that you want them to offer as "an option". Since they are compatibilists, they are not offering "an option" for agents to "chose otherwise" consistently with the past state of the universe (and the laws of nature) remaining the same, as most traditional incompatibilist libertarian required. Rather, they are offering an compatibilist analysis of "could have done otherwise", as opposed to traditional compatibilists who rather accept the lack of alternative possibilities and rather argue for the compatibility of free will and responsibility with this alleged lack of options.

That's fine, but determinism, if we're indeed talking about determinism, DOES imply that the powers in question are not available. Otherwise we're not talking about determinism. We're talking about something else and calling it determinism. — Terrapin Station

When you are saying that the powers in question "are not available" you are merely pointing out that they are not exercised in the actual circumstances, which is something that is accepted by dispositionalists. But to ascribe a power to an object, according to them, is not the same thing as saying that it was actualized. It is not either to say that it could have been actualized consistently with the past state of the universe and the laws of nature remaining the same. Maybe it was indeed necessary that the power would remain unmanifested. But according to the conditional analysis of powers, this is no ground for the denial of the object's possessing the power. Rather, the ascription of the power is akin to the attribution of some sort of intrinsic structural 'causal basis' to the object that explains why objects of that sort manifest this specific power when and only when the triggering conditions are realized. This is perfectly consistent with determinism, and with common sense, according to which attribution of dispositional attributes to objects (e.g. solubility in water, to sugar) is true irrespective of the possible truth of determinism. If theoretical physicist were to prove tomorrow that the fundamental laws of the universe were deterministic, it would not follow that they would have discovered that dry sugar cubes aren't soluble in water.

I grant that issues get more complicated when "new dispositionalism" gets adduced to defend the compatibility of determinism with the requirement for alternative possibilities for freedom and responsibility. One issue concerns the problem of "ultimate responsibility" when the antecedent features of the rational/moral character of agents are construed as antecedent conditions that determine their choices "externally", as it were. (That is, as determining conditions that aren't under those agent's control anymore). But such objections also rest of very problematic presuppositions about the nature of rational agency. For some recent statements of the objections to new dispositionalism, see Randolph Clarke, Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will-The New Dispositionalism, and Chistopher Evan Franklin, Masks Abilities and Opportunities Why the New Dispositionalism Cannot Succeed. I don't think, though, that Clarke's and Franklin's objections are definitive though they point to genuine problems with the current proposals.

A determinist like Schopenhauer simply notes that apriori every event can only have one outcome. If the outcome of a die roll is that the 5 is face up, it is not possible that the 2 is also face up.

Talk of the "power of the die roll to produce a 2 face up" is an analysis of logical possiblity. — Mongrel

For sure, this is a common way to be a determinist. In his book The Refutation of Determinism, Michael Ayers (London: Methuen, 1968) calls this sort of determinism actualism. Actualism, as applied to human and natural powers (e.g. the powers of objects) yields the denial that objects (or humans) have unactualized powers. But the sort of conditional analysis of dispositions and abilities proposed by the new dispositionalists show that actualism isn't the only option. (And their view was anticipated by Michael Ayers although he isn't, himself, a compatibilist or a determinist)

If they had the ability to do something else then the world in question isn't deterministic. You can't simply rename the ideas and say "There, compatibilism works." — Terrapin Station

According to a dispositional analysis of powers, the fact that an object doesn't exercise a power on some occasion doesn't show that the object didn't have this power on that occasion: only that is wasn't actually exercised. This is a common sense difference between the non-actualization of an existing power and a lack-of-power, which can be recognized irrespective of the truth of determinism.

For instance, a sugar cube has the (passive) power of dissolving in water. We call this power solubility. The general circumstance consisting in this sugar cube being immersed in water can be construed as a triggering condition (or triggering cause) for the actualization of this power. We don't say of the sugar cube, when is it kept dry, that it is not soluble at that time, only that it didn't actually dissolve. It's still soluble. A conditional analysis of solubility (in water) would look like this: "X is soluble in water if and only if X would dissolves if it were immersed in water" where the conditional is understood as a causal counterfactual. The counterfactual conditional is true even in circumstances where the antecedent isn't true.

In order to adapt this sort of analysis of powers (or dispositions) to the problem of free will, you may have to identify the 'triggering condition' of the agent's practical abilities with some feature of this agent's rational will. In that case, the agent who choses to steal a book didn't actualize her power from refraining to do so. This doesn't show that she didn't have the power from refraining to do so, anymore than a sugar cube remaining dry shows that it isn't soluble. An incompatibilist may object that the 'triggering' condition that was missing for the agent to refrain from stealing the book (having a honest character, say) isn't something that the agent had any control over at the time of acting if the world is deterministic. But it is far from obvious that rational agents relate to their own rational/moral characters in an extrinsic way such as to restrict their freedom. This is a much more difficult argument to make than it seems.

Do you have the actual power to do otherwise and believe this power to do otherwise is somehow necessary for moral responsibility? Then you are not a compatibilist, but believe in libertarian free will. — Chany

Yes, I also noticed that jkop began by mentioning and defining compatibilism and then seemed to be describing a form of incompatibilist libertarianism.

There is an issue, though, with contrasting compatibilism with the traditionally incompatibilist idea that free will requires the 'ability to do otherwise'. There now is a variety of compatibilism that incorporates this requirement but maintains that the 'ability to do otherwise' (or 'PAP', principle of alternative possibility, in the literature) is compatible with determinism. Endorsers of this new variety of compatibilism (e.g. Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Michael Fara) also endorse a view called "new dispositionalism" (by one of its detractors: Randolph Clarke) that adapts to abilities a (revised) conditional analysis of dispositions first proposed by David Lewis. The core idea is that when an agent performs an action in a deterministic world, that doesn't entail that this agent didn't have the ability to do something else but only that this ability was not actually exercised. This is much more to this new dispositionalist form of compatibilism, and the idea isn't without trouble, but it is worth mentioning that some sophisticated contemporary compatibilists now accept the requirement for alternative possibilities that was traditionally only insisted upon by incompatibilists.

It's always difficult deciding what kind of an -ist one foremost is.

I'm all for eudemonia and flourishing. So I may primarily be a florist.
I approve of the locution chi va piano va sano. So, I may also be a pianist.
In other moods I simply feel like being a recidivist, a playlist or a quarterfinalist.

Jonathan Edwards - Freedom of the Will — Sineview

Nice. I notice that it's available for free on the Google Play Store.

Is that taking into consideration the paradigm between local and global spatial geometry? — TimeLine

I am unsure what issue you are trying to raise. The rotating disk is in a stationary state. It is not undergoing any sort of deformation as seen from the inertial frame in which its center is at rest, or the non-inertial rotating frame that is constituted by measuring rods and clocks affixed to it.

His book Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I was my introduction to Heidegger. — John

Me too! I read it as preparation for an undergraduate course on Being and Time. I would have been lost without it.

Reading philosophy by dead philosophers that didn't have access to the findings of modern science is like reading a science book written by some dead scientist who didn't have access to the findings of modern science. It's nice if you are interested in a history lesson, but not if you are interested in modern ideas involving modern knowledge. — Harry Hindu

What about older insights, scientific or philosophical, that have *not* been rendered obsolete by modern knowledge? Do ideas all come labeled with a expiration date? I would be hard pressed, myself, to think of a single Wittgensteinian insight that has been rendered obsolete by a recent scientific discovery. On the other hand, reading some philosophical musings produced by philosophically illiterate modern scientists, it often seems to me that what they are saying had already been rendered obsolete by Aristotle more than twenty-three centuries ago!

Isn't linear speed synonymous to tangential speed in this case? I'm not convinced that the spatial distance between the clocks located away from the centre of the disk would change considering that we don't even know whether the disk itself is Born rigid. — TimeLine

Yes, linear speed just is tangential speed in this case. I was not picturing a moving clock but rather an observer skipping from one clock to the next at various distances from the center of rotation of the disk and comparing their rates to the rate of the clock at the center. Such an observer could explain the various rates of those clocks as a result of their various positions in the apparent gravitational field. There is no issue with rigidity if the disk is assumed to be rotating at constant angular velocity.

Yes, but look at it from the perspective of the edge. According to SR, a clock on the edge, in its own frame, is stationary and thus runs faster, not slower, than the moving clock at the center. But that frame is not maintained for even a moment, so SR doesn't really apply. The change of reference frame, and thus the change of the instant with which the center-clock is simultaneous, is what makes the center clock steadily gain time, not lose it. The effect is a moment-of-acceleration thing: acceleration component multiplied by the distance of the reference object in the direction of said acceleration component. — noAxioms

Yes, that's true if you construe the rotating observer at the edge constantly shifting from one ("co-moving") inertial frame to another, and the simultaneity between this observer's clock and the moving clock at the center of the disk thus being constantly redefined. This constant redefining of simultaneity between the two clocks accounts for the fact that the accelerating observer sees the center clock running faster in spite of the fact that it is lagging as seen from the co-moving inertial frames temporarily occupied by the observer at the edge. This is also how one can account for the fact that, in the twin-paradox, the twin traveler sees her stationary twin aging more overall in spite of the fact that she sees her aging slower during the two legs of her trip (assumed to take place at constant speed) away and back. It's when the travelling twin rapidly reverses course at the far point of her trip, and she becomes stationary relative to a new inertial frame, that the other twin (and the whole Earth) skips to an older age due to simultaneity being redefined in the new inertial frame of the far away travelling twin.

The frame that I was discussing in my previous post is non-inertial, and both the center clock and the clock at the edge are stationary in this frame, since the whole frames rotates with the disk.