Abstract
Shaun Nichols has recently argued that while the folk notion of free will is associated with error, a question still remains whether the concept of free will should be eliminated or preserved. He maintains that like other eliminativist arguments in philosophy, arguments that free will is an illusion seem to depend on substantive assumptions about reference. According to free will eliminativists, people have deeply mistaken beliefs about free will and this entails that free will does not exist. However, an alternative reaction is that free will does exist, we just have some deeply mistaken beliefs about it. According to Nichols, all such debates boil down to whether or not the erroneous folk term in question successfully refers or not. Since Nichols adopts the view that reference is systematically ambiguous, he maintains that in some contexts it’s appropriate to take a restrictivist view about whether a term embedded in a false theory refers, while in other contexts it’s appropriate to take a liberal view about whether a token of the very same term refers. This, according to Nichols, affords the possibility of saying that the sentence “free will exists” is false in some contexts and true in others. In this paper I argue that even if we grant Nichols his pluralistic approach to reference, there is still good reason to prefer eliminativism to preservationism with regard to free will. My argument focuses on one important difference between the concept of “free will” and other theoretical terms embedded in false theories—i.e., the role that the phenomenology of free agency plays in reference fixing.
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Notes
As Nichols notes, his main argument can also be made if we assume instead that (1) in addition to the presupposition of indeterminism, people also have a presupposition that choice isn’t random and that (2) all events are either determined or random (cf. Russell 1995, 14; Kane 1996, 11) (Nichols 2013, fn.1).
Nichols, however, notes that a descriptivist can be more or less liberal about reference fixing, depending “on how much of the theory has to be true in order for the term to refer” (2013, fn.2).
I should note that there is some precedent of natural kind terms getting their reference fixed by phenomenology by causal-historical theorists Kripke (1980), for example, famously does this for the concept of pain.
Consider the practice of collective punishment—“retaliation against people who play no part in committing the offence that is to be avenged” (2012, 48). “The anthropologist Ram Nath Sharma (1997, 377) writes that in most tribal societies, ‘the punishment given for murder is death, but this punishment may not be given to him who has murdered. In his place, some other member of his family, group, or clan may be killed since the group is collectively responsible for the criminal acts of each of its members” (Sommers 2012, 48).
In honor cultures, it is very important that the victim respond personally, and not necessarily to the person that harmed them. As Sommers describes it, “Third-party punishment strips the victim of his opportunity to avenge himself. Since personal retaliation is crucial, one would expect the emergence of norms that discourage third-party punishment and attitudes that find it to be unsatisfying” (2012, 44).
A preservationist could, perhaps, argue that there is an underlying common property (or set of properties) among cultures, but that moral responsibility practices evolved differently given different ways of life resulting from adaptations to local ecological conditions (Justin Caouette, in correspondence). The challenge, however, is for the preservationist to explain exactly what this common property (or set of properties) is. The proposal under consideration, remember, is to conceive of the initial baptism in terms of an external set of reference-fixing properties, such as the cultural practices associated with punishment, reward, praise, and blame. Sommers, however, maintains that there is no common property (or set of properties) that can fit this bill, hence preservationists looking to make this move need to address his challenge head on.
As Sommers notes, “In many honor cultures, the condition appears to either be de-emphasized or in some cases absent; agents need not have control over an act in order to be deemed fair and morally appropriate targets of blame and retaliation” (2012, 48).
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Caruso, G.D. Free will eliminativism: reference, error, and phenomenology. Philos Stud 172, 2823–2833 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0453-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0453-x