The Intelligibility Question for Free Will: Agency, Choice and Branching Time

Abstract

AbstractIn their important work, Facing the Future (Oxford 2001), Nuel Belnap and his collaborators, Michael Perloff and Ming Xu, say the following (p. 204): “We agree with Kane (1996) that ... the question whether a kind of freedom that requires indeterminism can be made intelligible deserves ... our most serious attention, and indeed we intend that this book contribute to what Kane calls ‘the intelligibility question.”’ I believe their book does contribute significantly to what I have called “the Intelligibility Question” for free will (which as I understand it is the question of how one might make intelligible a free will requiring indeterminism without reducing such a free will to either mere chance or to mystery and how one might reconcile such a free will with a modern scientific understanding of the cosmos and human beings). The theory of agency and choice in branching time that Belnap has pioneered and which is developed in detail in Facing the Future is just what is needed in my view as a logical foundation for an intelligible account of a free will requiring indeterminism, which is usually called libertarian free will. In the first two sections of this article, I explain why I think this to be the case. But the logical framework which Belnap et al. provide, though it is necessary for an intelligible account of an indeterminist or libertarian free will, is nonetheless not sufficient for such an account. In the remaining sections of the article (3–5), I then discuss what further conditions may be needed to fully address “the Intelligibility Question” for free will and I show how I have attempted to meet these further conditions in my own theory of free will, developed over the past four decades.KeywordsFree willlibertarianismSelf-forming actionsIntelligibility questionIndeterminismStit theory