Argument For Incompatibility Research Articles

Externalism and A Priori Knowledge of the World: Why Privileged Access is Not the Issue

I look at incompatibilist arguments aimed at showing that the conjunction of the thesis that a subject has privileged, a priori access to the contents of her own thoughts, on the one hand, and of semantic externalism, on the other, lead to a putatively absurd conclusion, namely, a priori knowledge of the external world. I focus on arguments involving a variety of externalism resulting from the singularity or object-dependence of certain terms such as the demonstrative ‘that’. McKinsey argues that incompatibilist arguments employing such externalist theses are at their strongest, and conclusively show that privileged access must be rejected. While I agree on the truth of the relevant externalist theses, I show that all plausible versions of the incompatibilist reductio argument as applied to such theses are fundamentally flawed, for these versions of the argument must make assumptions that lead to putatively absurd knowledge of the external world independently of the thesis of privileged access.

THE IMPERTINENCE OF FRANKFURT-STYLE ARGUMENT

Discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities have largely ignored the limits of what Frankfurt-style counter-examples can show. Rather than challenging the coherence of the cases, I argue that even if they are taken to demonstrate the falsity of the principle, they cannot advance the compatibilist cause. For a forceful incompatibilist argument can be constructed from the Frankfurtian premise that agents in Frankfurtian circumstances would have done what they did even if they could have done something else. This ‘counterfactual stability’ meets the same fate under determinism as does the ability to do otherwise. Thus the cases are irrelevant to the compatibility debate.

Defending Lewis’s Local Miracle Compatibilism

Helen Beebee has recently argued that David Lewis’s account of compatibilism, so-called local miracle compatibilism (LMC), allows for the possibility that agents in deterministic worlds have the ability to break or cause the breaking of a law of nature. Because Lewis’s LMC allows for this consequence, Beebee claims that LMC is untenable and subsequently that Lewis’s criticism of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument for incompatibilism is substantially weakened. I review Beebee’s argument against Lewis’s thesis and argue that Beebee has not refuted LMC and concomitantly has not demonstrated that Lewis’s criticism of the Consequence Argument fails.

So-Far Incompatibilism and the So-Far Consequence Argument

The consequence argument is at the core of contemporary incompatibilism about causal determinism and freedom of action. Yet Helen Beebee and Alfred Mele have shown how, on a Humean conception of laws of nature, the consequence argument is unsound. Nonetheless, this paper describés how, by generalising their main idea, we may restore the essential point and force (whatever that might turn out to be) of the consequence argument. A modified incompatibilist argument — which will be called the consequence argument — may thus be derived.

Incompatibilism and the logic of transfer

Modal arguments for incompatibility of freedom and determinism are typically based on the “transfer principle” for inability to act otherwise (Beta). The principle of agglomerativity (closure under conjunction introduction) is derivable from Beta. The most convincing counterexample to Beta is based on the denial of Agglomeration. The defender of the modal argument has two ways to block counterexamples to Beta: (i) use a notion of inability to act otherwise which is immune to the counterexample to agglomerativity; (ii) replace Beta with a logically stronger principle Beta 2. I argue that the second strategy fails because the strengthened principle and Agglomeration together entail Beta. So this strategy makes sense only if Beta 2 is applied without Agglomeration. But if Beta 2 is used without Agglomeration, then the incompatibilist will undercut the rationale for the premise of his argument. I illustrate this point with the analysis of Warfield (1996) and his use of Beta 2 in the so called direct argument for incompatibilism.

Warfield's new argument for incompatibilism

Warfield (2000) has noticed that this argument commits a modal fallacy. For the most that one could hope to show by means of the argument is that there is no freedom if determinism is true. But the thesis of incompatibilism is not this (weak) claim, but rather its necessitation. And, as everyone accepts, from the fact that a proposition is true it does not follow that it is necessary. Warfield acknowledges that there might be ways to shore up the Consequence argument to avoid this objection, but proposes to sidestep the issue by offering an entirely new argument for incompatibilism. Despite its ingenuity, our purpose in this paper is to establish that Warfield's argument does not succeed. Let us begin by adopting some standard abbreviations, beginning with the use of 'D' for the material conditional:

How to solve Blum's paradox

In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen (1983: 93-95) produced a classic argument for incompatibilism, the claim that freedom and determinism are incompatible. Van Inwagen begins by assuming that, for any proposition p, it is a necessary condition of someone's being free with respect to p that she have a choice about whether p. He then goes on to argue that 'if determinism is true, then no one ever has any choice about anything' (1983: 95). In his rigorous presentation of this 'consequence' argument, van Inwagen uses 'Op' to abbreviate 'it is broadly logically necessary that p', and uses 'Np' to abbreviate 'p and no one ever has, or ever had, any choice about whether p'. The argument itself relies on the following two principles, Alpha and Beta:

Externalism and Authoritative Knowledge of Content: A New Incompatibilist Strategy

A typical strategy of those who seek to show that externalism is compatible with authoritative knowledge of content is to show that externalism does nothing to undermine the claim that all thinkers can at any time form correct and justified self-ascriptive judgements concerning their occurrent thoughts . In reaction, most incompatibilists have assumed the burden of denying that externalism is compatible with this claim about self-ascription. Here I suggest another way to attack the compatibilist strategy. I aim to show that forming a justified true self-ascriptive judgement about one’s occurrent thought does not amount to or imply that one ‘knows the content’ of the self-ascribed thought. While the difference between present-tense self-ascription and knowledge of content has previously been brought out using the familiar trappings of world-switching examples, 1 here I attempt to establish the difference by appeal to actual (real-life) memory-involvingcases. To this end, I present a ‘recollection problem’ and argue that, so long as one conflates present-tense self-ascription and self-knowledge of content, there can be no satisfactory response to this problem. The result is that, even if the compatibilist strategy is correct in what it asserts about self-ascription, it has not delivered the relevant goods if it aims to establish a thesis asserting externalism’s compatibility with knowledge of content. I conclude by speculating how the recollection argument to be presented here can be transformed, from an argument against the compatibilist strategy, into an argument for incompatibilism.

Freedom, Causation, and the Consequence Argument

The problem of analyzing causation and the problem of incompatibilism versus compatibilism are largely distinct. Yet, this paper will show that there are some theories of causation that a compatibilist should not endorse: namely, counterfactual theories, specifically the one developed by David Lewis and a newer, amended version of his account. Endorsing either of those accounts of causation undercuts the main compatibilist reply to a powerful argument for incompatibilism. Conversely, the argument of this paper has the following message for incompatibilists: you have reason to consider defending a counterfactual theory of causation.

Davidson on first‐person authority and externalism

Incompatibilism is the view that privileged knowledge of our own mental states cannot be reconciled with externalism regarding the content of mental states. Davidson has recently developed two arguments that are supposed to disprove incompatibilism and establish the consistency of privileged access and externalism. One argument criticizes incompatibilism for assuming that externalism conflicts with the mind‐body identity theory. Since mental states supervene on neurological events, Davidson argues, they are partly ‘in the head’ and are knowable just by reflection. Another argument rejects incompatibilism by repudiating the object perception model of introspection. Once extemalism is freed from the internalist idea that thoughts take objects which are inner epistemological intermediaries, Davidson maintains, it poses no threat to privileged self‐knowledge. It is argued that neither of these arguments is successful, since both disprove assumptions irrelevant to incompatibilism. Moreover, it is indicated how Davidson would have to go about defending his positive account of privileged self‐knowledge against the principal incompatibilist arguments.

Ockhamists and Molinists in Search of a Way Out

If libertarianism is true, then there is a sense in which agents have it within their power to bring it about that some world is actual. Against recent arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, I offer an account of power over the past which takes this implication of libertarianism into consideration. I argue that the resulting account is available to Ockhamists and that it is immune to recent criticisms of the notion of counterfactual power over the past. But I contend that it is not an option for Molinists and that this fact leaves that position vulnerable to incompatibilist arguments.

Aristotle on Moral Responsibility: Character and Cause.

This book presents an examination of Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics. It makes the case that these constitute a theory of moral responsibility — albeit one with important differences from modern theories. Highlights of the discussion include a reconstruction of the dialectical argument in the Eudemian Ethics II 6-9, and a demonstration that the definitions of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ in Nicomachean Ethics III 1 are the culmination of that argument. By identifying the paradigms of voluntariness and involuntariness that Aristotle begins with and the opponents (most notably Plato) he addresses, the book explains notoriously puzzling features of the Nicomachean account — such as Aristotle's requirement that involuntary agents experience pain or regret. Other familiar features of Aristotle' account are cast in a new light. That we are responsible for the characters we develop turns out not to be a necessary condition of responsible agency. That voluntary action has its ‘origin’ in the agent and that our actions are ‘up to us to do and not to do’ — often interpreted as implying a libertarian conception of agency — turn out to be perfectly compatible with causal determinism, a point the book makes by locating these locutions in the context of Aristotle's general understanding of causality. While Aristotle does not himself face or address worries that determinism is incompatible with responsibility, his causal repertoire provides the resources for a powerful response to incompatibilist arguments. On this and other fronts Aristotle's is a view to be taken seriously by theorists of moral responsibility.

Soft Facts And Harsh Realities: Reply To William Craig

(I). In a number of papers I have sought to discuss and cast some doubt on a certain strategy of response to an argument that purports to show that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. This argument proceeds from the alleged ‘fixity of the past’ to the conclusion that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. William Lane Craig has (rather vigorously) criticized my approach to these issues. Here I should like to respond to some of Craig's claims. My goal is to attempt to achieve a clearer, more penetrating view of some of the issues pertaining to the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The focus here will be on a strategy of response to the incompatibilist's argument which is associated with William of Ockham.

Reasons Explanation of Action: An Incompatibilist Account

Incompatibilism is the thesis that any free action must be an undetermined event. By a free action I mean one such that until the time of its occurrence the agent had it in her power to perform some alternative action (or to be inactive) instead. By an undetermined event I mean one that was not nomically necessitated by the antecedent state of the world. (Hence, a determined event is one that was nomically necessitated by its antecedents.) By saying of an event that it was nomically necessitated by the antecedent state of the world, I mean that the antecedent state together with the laws of nature determined that that event, rather than some alternative, would occur. I believe that a compelling argument for incompatibilism can be given but I will not undertake to give it here.' I want rather to rebut two arguments against incompatibilism that have been put forward from time to time. One of these, to which I will give by far the larger response, combines the consideration that a free action can be influenced by the agent's intentions, desires, and beliefs-can have an explanation in terms of reasons for which the agent did it-with the assumption that only a determined event can have such an explanation.2 My response to this will be to counter the assumption by offering an adeterministic or anomic account of such explanations. The other argument does not assume that reasons explanations are deterministic (nor does it assume the contradictory) but simply claims that where we have an undetermined action we do not have an agent

Freedom and Miracles

There is a in the air.' One argument in the family of new arguments for incompatibilism might be called the argument for incompatibilism. I have presented a version of the modal argument (following Carl Ginet), and Peter Van Inwagen has recently presented basically the same sort of argument.2 ( I shall also refer to the modal argument for incompatibilism as the Ginet/Van Inwagen argument.) Elsewhere, I argued that the Ginet/ Van Inwagen argument is importantly incomplete; there is no single interpretation of the premises of the argument on which it is uncontroversially sound.3 Both Ginet and Van Inwagen have defended the modal argument against the sort of criticism which I developed.4 In this paper, I propose to look again at the modal argument for incompatibilism. I shall present a simplified version of the argument, and I intend to show that the compatibilist can explain the examples adduced by Ginet and Van Inwagen in defense of their argument by narrower principles than those used in the argument, principles which don't support incompatibilism. Thus, I shall defend a version of my original claim that the incompatibilist's argument is incomplete. I do not here purport to defend compatibilism; rather, my project is to make clear where the gaps are in the modal argument for incompatibilism. Further, I shall point out that, whereas the incompatibilist's argument is not entirely convincing, it has an important virtue it exposes a commitment of certain compatibilists which appears to stand in need of some explanation and justification. In the course of this discussion, I hope to shed light on the relationship between human freedom and the laws of nature. I shall argue that the compatibilist has a distinctive and not obviously false view about this relationship.

Hard-Type Soft Facts

There is a quite general argument which purports to establish that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom to do otherwise.' The argument proceeds from the claim that the past is fixed-out of our control-to the conclusion that if a certain sort of God exists, then no human is ever free to do otherwise. One way of resisting the argument is Ockhamism. The Ockhamist distinguishes between two sorts of facts about the past: genuine, non-relational facts (hard facts), which are now fixed, and non-genuine, relational facts (soft facts), which needn't be fixed now. Further, the Ockhamist claims that certain facts alleged by the incompatibilist to be hard facts are in the class of soft facts which are not fixed, and thus that the incompatibilist's argument is unsound.

Fischer on Freedom and Foreknowledge

In an article recently published in The Philosophical Review entitled Freedom and Foreknowledge,' John Martin Fischer issues what he calls a general challenge to any sort of Ockhamist to explain the distinction between (so called) hard and soft facts and, thereby, to defeat the incompatibilist claim that if God exists, and is eternal as well as essentially omniscient, no human action is freely performed. As a point of departure, Fischer reviews with approval an argument that I offered some time ago in an article called Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action2 defending the incompatibilist thesis just mentioned. The bulk of his paper then consists of an attempt to show that the reply to my argument made by Marilyn McCord Adams in Is the Existence of God a 'Hard' Fact?3 is not only deficient, but represents a kind of response to the incompatibilist position (Fischer calls it Ockhamism) that is unpromising in the extreme. As regards the merits of Fischer's paper, I think that it includes some things that contribute importantly to the literature on the foreknowledge problem. However, I also think that in the end, Fischer fails to make contact with the point of Adams's objection to my original incompatibilist argument and that the reason for this rests finally in the fact that in a very important way, Fischer fails to make contact with my original argument itself. In the next few pages following, it will be my purpose (1) to reestablish the importance of an element in my reasoning that Fischer deletes from his own formulation of my incompatibilist argument; and (2) to make clear how this omission blinds Fischer to the thrust of Adams's response to that argument and thus results in a gap of some consequence in his general challenge to the partisans of Ockham. I should add that my reflections are offered in the hope that they will have corrective as well as more broadly conceived clarificatory value in the ongoing discussion of the divine foreknowledge problem. I hope, too, that they will not detract from the things of merit in Fischer's ofttimes stimulating paper.

Baryon asymmetry and low energy parity restoration

We examine the question of baryon number generation in the early universe in theories with low intermediate mass scales It is shown that the recently proposed O(10) grand unified theory with parity restoration at E ≈ few hundred GeV allows for the creation of matter-antimatter asymmetry in accord with cosmological observations. This evades a recent general argument for incompatibility between weakly broken left-right symmetry and substantial baryon generation.

Digging Deeper into Determinism

Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism commonly depend on the claim that if all events are caused then, for every action, the agent could not have acted otherwise than he did. But as Winston Nesbitt and Stewart Candlish have recently pointed out ('Determinism and the Ability to do Otherwise', Mind, I978, pp. 415420), this claim is far from obvious, even ignoring the many and sophisticated attempts to avoid it by an appropriate analysis of causation, or of 'could have', or both. 'For while it is clear why it should be thought that if it is determined that one will do something on a given occasion then one will not in fact do anything else on that occasion, it is much less clear why it should be thought that if it is determined that one will do something on a given occasion, then one will be incapable of doing anything else on that occasion' (p. 415). Surely determinism does not have 'the peculiar consequence that on any particular occasion, one's abilities are restricted in number to just one, namely the ability to do precisely as one does' (p. 4I7)! What has happened, Nesbitt and Candlish suggest, is that incompatibilists have committed the familiar modal fallacy of arguing from LCpq to CpLq, by arguing from 'Necessarily, if determinism is true, then one will not do otherwise than one does on any particular occasion' (which Nesbitt and Candlish are themselves prepared to accept) to 'If determinism is true, then one cannot do other than one does on any particular occasion' (which is what the incompatibilist's argument requires). Now first of all it is worth being clear that, in claiming that the agent could not have acted differently, the incompatibilist need not be claiming that his abilities are restricted to just one. Take an example where it is as clear as it ever can be that I cannot do other than what I am doing: where I fall over a cliff and, lacking any parachutes, jet thrusters or efficacious magic, plummet towards the ground at an acceleration of 9-8 metres per second per second. Yet even then I do not lose my ability to type or drive a car-at least not until I hit the ground-any more than I lose my ability to drive when I am in my study and my car is safely locked in my garage. What is the case, rather, is that I am not, in those circumstances, in a position to exercise those abilities. It is for this reason that I have elsewhere distinguished the 'can' of ability from the 'can' of being able (see 'The Can of Being Able', Philosophia, I976, sec. i). The question at issue in the free will debate is not whether determinism deprives me of my abilities, but whether it means that I am, on any particular occasion, unable to exercise any such abilities except those which, at the time, I happen to be exercising. Nevertheless, however we interpret the 'can' it remains true, as Nesbitt and Candlish insist, that what follows from determinism is not that the