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Are the Folk Agent‐Causationists?
Abstract
Experimental examination of how the folk conceptualize certain philosophically loaded notions can provide information useful for philosophical theorizing. In this paper, we explore issues raised in Shaun Nichols’ (2004) studies involving people’s conception of free will, focusing on his claim that this conception fits best with the philosophical theory of agent-causation. We argue that his data do not support this conclusion, highlighting along the way certain considerations that ought to be taken into account when probing the folk conception of free will.
... Experiments are interpreted alternatively as either allying with compatibilism Nahmias 2006, Nahmias 2006) or some forms of incompatibilism (Nichols 2004). Thus Nichols (2004) suggests that the folk supports a libertarian notion of free will that is incompatible with determinism; Turner and Nahmias (2006) challenge Nichols' interpretation and Nahmias (2006) concludes that only certain kinds of reductionistic descriptions of decision-making are incompatible with free will, whereas the folk does not really pick determinism as a threat to free will and moral responsibility. Nahmias uses both Nichols studies, as well as some of its own, to suggest that the folk may see reductionism as incompatible with free will, but they do not consider that determinism is incompatible with free will. ...
... Moderate experimentalists, on the other hand, have helped challenge all claims made by TAP, while keeping the same commitment to the appeal to intuitions. 13 Apart from the free-will debate (for example , Nichols 2004;Nahmias et al. 2005Nahmias et al. , 2008Nahmias 2006;Turner and Nahmias 2006) mentioned above, see also the intentional action debate (Knobe 2003;Mele 2003;Nadelhoffer 2005;Knobe 2006;Phelan and Sarkissian 2008). ...
Today, experimental philosophers challenge traditional appeals to intuition; they empirically collect folk intuitions and then use their findings to attack philosophers’ intuitions. However this movement is not uniform. Radical experimentalists criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy altogether and they have been mostly attacked. Contrariwise, moderate experimentalists imply that lay persons’ intuitions are somehow relevant to philosophical problems. Sometimes they even use folk intuitions in order to advance theoretical theses. In this paper I will try to challenge the so-called moderate experimental attempts to rely on intuition in order to promote philosophical theses.
... Beginning with Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner's (NMNT) seminal studies, philosophers have attempted to directly probe folk intuitions on the compatibility question, and subsequent experiments have been developed to challenge, support, reinterpret, and shed new light on their results. Nahmias et al. (2005 Nahmias et al. ( , 2006) presented subjects with a series of vignettes in which an agent performs a moral or immoral action in a determined world. The first study used a Laplacian description of determinism: subjects were told that scientists in the next century have discovered the laws of nature and developed a supercomputer that can predict future events with 100% accuracy. ...
... 7 Although the details of Frankfurt and Watson's accounts differ, they share the basic view that we can be morally responsible for actions that stem are reflectively endorsed by a deeper self than a mere first-order desire. 8 For more detailed defenses of the relevance of experimental philosophy on free will and other topics, see Nahmias et al. (2006), Alexander and Weinberg (2006), Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007), Knobe and Nichols (2008, Chapter One). For a thoughtful critique, see Kauppinen (2007). ...
This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the “compatibility question”—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the compatibility question, but that their general approach suffers from significant practical and philosophical difficulties. Section 4 reviews experimental work addressing other aspects of the free will/moral responsibility debate, and section 5 concludes with a discussion of avenues for further research.
... Attempts to answer this question paint a rather mixed picture (Nichols 2011). Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues have argued that the folk have a predominantly compatibilist conception of free will (Nahmias et al. 2005;Turner & Nahmias 2006). They presented undergraduates with vignettes outlining a world in which human agency (along with everything else) was perfectly predictable, and asked them whether free will was possible in such a world. ...
There are three projects within the cognitive science of agency and consciousness that are of particular interest to neuroethics: the descriptive project, the genetic project, and the substantive project. The descriptive project is concerned with characterizing our everyday experience of, and beliefs about, agency. What is the folk view of agency? The aim of the genetic project is to give an account of the psychological mechanisms involved in constructing our experience of, and beliefs about, agency. How is the folk view of agency to be explained? The substantive project is concerned with determining the degree to which our experiences of, and beliefs about, agency are correct and to what degree they might need to be revised in light of findings from the cognitive sciences. Is the folk view of agency basically correct or does it need to be modified in fundamental ways (as “will skeptics” argue)? This entry provides an overview of recent research relating to all three projects.
... In this paper, we contribute to this project by presenting results from a series of experiments that reveal flaws in all of the studies that have been run thus far. Along the way, we first provide an overview of some early attempts to probe folk intuitions that produced data that seemed to support Natural Compatibilism (NC)—i.e., the view that compatibilism 2 best settles with folk intuitions (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner, 2005; 2006). Then we examine some recent follow-up studies that seem to support Natural Incompatibilism (NI)—i.e., the view that incompatibilism 3 best settles with folk intuitions (Nichols and Knobe, forthcoming). ...
In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the fi eld of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. These studies also illustrate some problems that pertain to all of the studies that have been run thus far. In the free will literature, compatibilists and libertarians alike claim that their respective views best capture our ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. So what is the most useful way of understanding and addressing this sort of intuitional stalemate? One of the primary goals of researchers working in the fi eld of experimental philosophy has been to probe intuitions in a controlled and systematic way in order to shed light on precisely these kinds of debates. 1 In this paper, we contribute to this project by presenting results from a series of experiments that reveal fl aws in all of the studies that have been run thus far. Along the way, we fi rst provide an overview of some early attempts to probe folk intuitions that produced data that seemed to support Natural Compatibilism (NC) — i.e. the view that compatibilism 2 best settles with folk intuitions (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner , 2005; 2006). Then we examine some recent follow-up studies that seem to support Natural Incompatibilism (NI) — i.e. the view that incompatibilism 3 best settles with folk intuitions ( Nichols and Knobe, 2007 ). 4 Having examined the debate between these two competing camps, we
... In such cases, people may have shared intuitions about the paradigmatic applications of the concepts, but differing intuitions about the boundaries, as demonstrated by their different judgments about certain, often non-paradigmatic, cases. 37. We have worries about the way Nichols and Knobe describe determinism that make us skeptical that they have shown most ordinary people have incompatibilist intuitions (see Nahmias 2006;Turner and Nahmias 2006), but we think the differences they find across scenarios are fascinating and important. 38. ...
Experimental philosophy is the name for a recent movement whose participants use the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates. Given both the breadth of the research being carried out by experimental philosophers and the controversial nature of some of their central methodological assumptions, it is of no surprise that their work has recently come under attack. In this paper we respond to some criticisms of experimental philosophy that have recently been put forward by Antti Kauppinen. Unlike the critics of experimental philosophy, we do not think the fledgling movement either will or should fall before it has even had a chance to rise up to explain what it is, what it seeks to do (and not to do), and exactly how it plans to do it. Filling in some of the salient details is the main goal of the present paper.
... We are not yet convinced that Nichols and Knobe's results suggest that, in the scenarios they use, people are expressing incompatibilist intuitions. We worry that their experimental setup does not test whether people find determinism per se incompatible with MR-rather, we think they have found evidence that people judge in the abstract case that "full moral responsibility" is impossible in a world in which decisions have to happen the way they do (see Nahmias 2006;Turner and Nahmias 2006). 4 Nonetheless, we are convinced that Nichols and Knobe have found impressive evidence that people's judgments about MR are significantly influenced by their emotional responses to agents performing bad acts. ...
... What do those without an investment in the free will debate say about their experiences of freedom? Nahmias et al. (2004) provides limited support for claim that the folk represent their experiences of freedom in compatibilist rather than libertarian terms, but see Nichols (2004) and Turner and Nahmias (2006) for evidence that the folk also harbour libertarian inclinations about free will, if not about experiences of freedom per se. one must not only represent it as undetermined by one's prior psychological properties but also as undetermined by one's physical properties—or indeed any physical properties. ...
This paper provides an overview of recent discussions of the phenomenology of agency. By ‘the phenomenology of agency’ I mean those phenomenal states that are associated with first-person agency. I call such states ‘agentive experiences’. After briefly defending the claim that there is a phenomenology distinctive of first-person agency, I focus on two questions: (i) What is the structure of agentive experience? (ii) What is the representational content of agentive experience? I conclude with a brief examination of how agentive experiences might be generated and what role they might play in the subject's cognitive economy.
... 4 However, a growing body of research indicates that some philosophers are wrong about what intuitions the folk have. For example, some of the first work to determine in an empirically informed way what intuitions the folk have about the relationship of determinism with freedom and moral responsibility was done by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner (2004, 2005, 2006). They gave non-professional philosophers various scenarios describing a person who performs an action in a deterministic universe. ...
Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable.
Judgments about freedom and moral responsibility have been argued to be essential to how we view ourselves and others. Being free and morally responsible (or at least a belief to that effect) has been argued to underwrite elements of human existence ranging from one’s sense of self-worth to having genuine, loving relationships. One extensively explored question in the philosophical literature about freedom and moral responsibility is: can you be free and morally responsible if all your actions are determined? There is substantial philosophical disagreement about the right answer to that question. Those who answer “yes” are called compatibilists and those who answer “no” are called incompatibilists . This chapter documents extensive evidence using representative and diverse materials and methods indicating that the global personality trait extraversion predicts those who tend to be compatibilists. These relations have also been observed to exist in diverse cultures and languages (e.g., those who speak English, Spanish, or German in North America and Europe). The evidence presented in this chapter represents the paradigmatic example in our book of personality predicting philosophically relevant judgments.
The paper addresses two issues that have been recently debated in the literature on free will, moral responsibility, and the theory of punishment. The first issue concerns the descriptive project, the second both the substantive and the prescriptive project. On theoretical, historical and empirical grounds, we claim that there is no rationale for fearing that the spread of neurocognitive findings will undermine the ordinary practice of responsibility attributions. We hypothetically advocate two opposite views: (i) that such findings would cause the collapse of all punitive practices; (ii) that, on the contrary, such findings would open the way to more humane forms of punishment, which would be justified on purely utilitarian grounds. We argue that these views are both wrong, since whereas a sound punitive system can be justified without any reference to moral responsibility, it will certainly not improve the humaneness of punishment.
For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments–and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.
See updated full text here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319944911_Forget_the_Folk_Moral_Responsibility_Preservation_Motives_and_Other_Conditions_for_Compatibilism
The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The “agent-executed-event-causal libertarianism”, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the “Introduction” the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective.
It’s called “the problem of free will and determinism,” but much depends on what determinism is taken to mean and entail. Incompatibilists claim that it is impossible for people to have free will and moral responsibility if determinism is true, and they often suggest that this is the natural position to take, supported by our pre-theoretical intuitions. Robert Kane, for instance, states that “ordinary persons start out as natural incompatibilists” (1999, 217), and Galen Strawson claims that “it is in our nature to take determinism to pose a serious problem for our notions of responsibility and freedom” (1986, 89). Sometimes people take “determinism” to mean “the opposite of free will,” in which case incompatibilism is indeed intuitive, but at the cost of being an empty tautology. In philosophical debates, determinism has a technical meaning: a complete description of the state of the universe at one time and of the laws of nature logically entails a complete description of the state of the universe at any later time.1 However, it is not obvious why determinism, defined in this way, is supposed to be incompatible with free will; rather, a further explanation of just why determinism precludes some ability associated with free will seems required. The explanations generally offered by incompatibilists are that determinism precludes either (i) the ability to choose among alternative possibilities for action, while holding fixed the actual past and the laws of nature (AP), or (ii) the ability to be the ultimate source of one’s actions, such that one is ultimately responsible for some aspect of the conditions that led up to one’s actions (US).
This chapter discusses the relevance of recent developments in experimental philosophy and social psychology to fundamental issues that arise in the criminal law -especially when it comes to the decisions made by juries and judges concerning crime and punishment. In light of the empirical research the chapter discusses, it concludes that philosophers and legal theorists alike need to pay more attention to folk intuitions about legal responsibility than has traditionally been the case. In the chapter's view, gaining a perspicuous view of the criminal law requires more work at the cross-roads of philosophy, psychology, and cognate fields.
This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will is a sourcebook and guide to current work on free will and related subjects. Its focus is on writings of the past forty years, in which there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional issues about the freedom of the will in the light of new developments in the sciences, philosophy, and humanistic studies. Special attention is given to research on free will of the first decade of the twenty-first century since the publication of the first edition of the text. This edition contains new articles surveying topics that have become prominent in debates about free will recently, including new work on the relation of free will to physics, the neurosciences, cognitive science, psychology, and empirical philosophy, new versions of traditional views (compatibilist, incompatibilist, libertarian, etc.) and new views (e.g., revisionism) that have emerged. The twenty-eight articles cover a host of free-will related issues, such as moral agency and responsibility, accountability and blameworthiness in ethics, autonomy, coercion and control in social theory, criminal liability, responsibility and punishment in legal theory, issues about the relation of mind to body, consciousness and the nature of action in philosophy of mind and the cognitive and neurosciences, questions about divine foreknowledge, providence and human freedom in philosophy of religion, and general metaphysical questions about necessity and possibility, determinism, time and chance, quantum reality, and causation and explanation.
Recent empirical evidence indicates that (1) people tend to believe that they possess indeterminist free will, and (2) people’s experience of choosing and deciding is that they possess such freedom. Some also maintain that (3) people’s belief in indeterminist free will has its source in their experience of choosing and deciding. Yet there seem to be good reasons to resist endorsing (3). Despite this, I maintain that belief in indeterminist free will really does have its source in experience. I explain how this is so by appeal to the phenomenon of prospection, which is the mental simulation of future possibilities for the purpose of guiding action. Crucially, prospection can be experienced. And because of the way in which prospection models choice, it is easy for agents to experience and to believe that their choice is indeterministic. Yet this belief is not justified; the experience of prospection, and hence of free will as being indeterminist, is actually consistent with determinism.
One debate in the experimental exploration of everyday judgments about free will is whether most people are compatibilists or incompatibilists. Some recent research suggests that many people who have incompatibilist intuitions are making a mistake; as such, they do not have genuine incompatibilist intuitions. Another worry is whether most people appropriately understand determinism or confuse it with similar, but different, notions such as fatalism. In five studies we demonstrate people distinguish determinism from fatalism. While people overall make this distinction, a large percentage of people still judge that a person who is fated to perform an action is both free and morally responsible for that action. Those who thought that one freely performs and is morally responsible for a fated action had much stronger compatibilist judgments. These data suggest that a substantial percentage of people have “free will no matter what” intuitions. As a result, even though many people may appear to be compatibilists, they are not.
Some experimental philosophers imply that philosophers should endorse folk intuitions and even use them to advance philosophical theses. In this paper I will try to contrast experimental appeals to intuition with J. L. Austin’s, whom some experimentalists cite as a precursor of their method. I will suggest that Austin evokes ordinary intuitions in order to dismantle philosophical quests. He even suggests (a) that the appeal to ordinary intuitions of the folk can hardly prescribe answers to extraordinary circumstances and (b) that philosophical quests themselves are extraordinary. Therefore, the appeal to folk intuitions cannot prescribe answers to philosophical problems. It can only dissolve philosophical quests; yet, the dismantling of philosophy hardly accords with the experimentalists’ agenda.
Today, experimental philosophers challenge traditional appeals to intuition; they empirically collect folk intuitions and then use their findings to attack philosophers' intuitions. However this movement is not uniform. Radical experimentalists criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy altogether and they have been mostly attacked. Contrariwise, moderate experimentalists imply that laypersons' intuitions are somehow relevant to philosophical problems. Sometimes they even use folk intuitions in order to advance theoretical theses. In this paper I will try to challenge the so-called moderate experimental attempts to rely on intuition in order to promote philosophical theses. Hoy en día, los filósofos experimentales ponen en duda la tradición de apelar a la intuición; coleccionan intuiciones empíricas populares y después utilizan sus descubrimientos para atacar las intuiciones de los filósofos. Sin embargo, esta estrategia no es uniforme. Los experimentalistas radicales critican cualquier uso de intuiciones en filosofía y han sido objeto de los mayores ataques. A diferencia de ellos, los experimentalistas moderados sugieren que las intuiciones del vulgo son de alguna manera pertinentes en los problemas filosóficos. Algunas veces incluso usan intuiciones populares para defender tesis teóricas. En este trabajo pretendo poner en duda los intentos de los llamados experimentalistas moderados de apelar a intuiciones para promover tesis filosóficas.
Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.
In a recent paper I argued that agent causation theorists should be compatibilists. In this paper, I argue that compatibilists
should be agent causation theorists. I consider six of the main problems facing compatibilism: (i) the powerful intuition
that one can’t be responsible for actions that were somehow determined before one was born; (ii) Peter van Inwagen’s modal
argument, involving the inference rule (β); (iii) the objection to compatibilism that is based on claiming that the ability
to do otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom; (iv) “manipulation arguments,” involving cases in which an agent is
manipulated by some powerful being into doing something that he or she would not normally do, but in such a way that the compatibilist’s
favorite conditions for a free action are satisfied; (v) the problem of constitutive luck; and (vi) the claim that it is not
fair to blame someone for an action if that person was determined by forces outside of his or her control to perform that
action. And in the case of each of these problems, I argue that the compatibilist has a much more plausible response to that
problem if she endorses the theory of agent causation than she does otherwise.
KeywordsFreedom and determinism–Compatibilism–Agent causation–Compatibilist version of the theory of agent causation–ComTac
Libertarian accounts of free will face objections that the indeterminism they require would leave behavior random, inexplicable, and beyond agents' control. This book examines three main types of libertarian views-noncausal, event-causal, and agent-causal-to see how well they can meet such challenges. Noncausal accounts are found not to offer satisfactory views of action and reason-explanation. Event-causal and agent-causal accounts are defended against a number of objections. But if both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism, then there is no adequate account of free will.
Philosophers working in the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy' have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of surveying people's prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research.
This volume defends an integrated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying "mindreading," the commonplace capacity to understand the mind. The authors maintain that it is, as commonsense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others' minds and reading one's own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretense and imagination which proposes that pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the "Possible World Box," which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms subserving pretense get recruited in reading other minds, a capacity that implicates multifarious kinds of processes, including those favored by simulation approaches to mindreading, those favored by information-based approaches, and processes that don't fit into either category. None of these mechanisms or processes, though, explains how we read our own minds, which, according to the authors, requires invoking an entirely independent set of mechanisms. © Shaun Nichols and Stephen P. Stich, 2003. All rights reserved.
According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.
Folk psychology is the body of information people have about the mind. It is often regarded as the basis for our capacity to attribute mental states and to predict and explain actions.
The Theory of Agent Causation has always been formulated as an incompatibilist view, but I think that this has been a mistake. The aim of this paper is to argue that, contrary to what agent causation theorists and their opponents have always believed, the most plausible version of the Theory of Agent Causation is actually a compatibilist version of that theory. I formulate the traditional version of the Theory of Agent Causation, and consider a series of objections to it and related views. With each objection comes a corresponding revision of the theory that is motivated by that objection, and with each revision the theory becomes increasingly compatibilistic until, finally, we arrive at a completely compatibilistic version of the Theory of Agent Causation, which I take to be the most plausible version of that theory.
The ability to construe ourselves and others as agents with minds having mental states such as perceptions, attention, desires and beliefs, is critical to humans’ social, linguistic, and cognitive competence. When and how this ability becomes available to us during development is therefore of particular theoretical importance. Historically, most work in this area has concentrated on the ability of three- and four-year-olds to predict and explain behaviors based on false beliefs. With recent advances in the methods available for studying cognition in pre-verbal infants however, more research is now focused on earlier age groups. In this review, arguments are presented for and against the presence of a rudimentary ‘theory of mind’ in infancy, with evidence discussed from three sources: (1) infants’ active interactions with people; (2) infants’ passive observations of people; and (3) infants’ interactions with, and observations, of non-human agents.
Persons and Causes 1983 : An Essay on Free Will
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O ' Connor, T. 2000 : Persons and Causes. New York : Oxford University Press.
van Inwagen, P. 1983 : An Essay on Free Will. Oxford : Oxford University Press.