Abstract
This paper concerns the effect that confused thinking has had on the language in which the free-will problem has been framed and discussed in recent philosophy. The thesis of the paper is that this language, this family of interwoven technical terms, has, as a consequence of this confused thinking, been corrupted – has in fact become hopelessly corrupt.
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- 1.
The “fat baby” can only have been Julius Ebbinghaus (1885–1981), later to become a well-known philosopher.
- 2.
I concede that “able to” has many senses. In the text, I alluded to the “radical ambiguity” of “could have done otherwise”, and it is my firm opinion that “was able to …” is less dangerously ambiguous – less likely to slip from one of its senses to another in the course of a philosophical argument –, than “could have …”. Nevertheless, the phrase “is able” (whatever its tense; whatever the infinitive it governs) is ambiguous. For example: Grisha Sokolov has been stranded on a desert island; is he able to play the piano? In one sense, yes, in another, no. Or: the loan officer at your bank knows that she would lose her job if she approved your application for a loan; is she able to approve it? Of course: she has only to sign this piece of paper – and yet she says to you, “I’m afraid I’m unable to approve the loan you’ve applied for”. Is she mistaken? Lying? I have discussed ambiguities of these and various other kinds that attend the phrase “is able to” in Section 1.4 of An Essay on Free Will (van Inwagen 1983, 8–13). But the sense of “is able to” that figures in the argument of this paper may be specified by a simple device – by considering what is involved in being in a position to make a promise. Suppose that Alice asks Tim to give her a ride to work the following day (it’s a serious matter: she’ll lose her job if she counts on Tim for a ride and he fails to provide it). A necessary (and I think sufficient) condition for Tim’s being in a position to promise to give Alice the requested ride is that he believes that he is able to give her a ride. And those italicized words have, in that context, the sense I mean “is able to” to have in the argument in the text. Suppose Winifred and Sokolov are both castaways on the same pianoless island; able though he is to play the piano (in one sense of “able”), he is not in a position to promise Winifred that he will play the piano that evening. And the loan officer is no doubt in a position to promise you to approve the loan (“no doubt”: it might be that she is unsure whether it is psychologically possible for her to sign the piece of paper in those circumstances) – although of course it would be either foolish or dishonest of her to make such a promise.
- 3.
The supposed refutation was first presented in his celebrated and widely reprinted essay “The Principle of Alternate Possibilities” (Frankfurt 1969). The essay has generated a vast body of discussion and commentary.
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- 5.
Reporter: “What do you call that haircut?”; George Harrison: “Arthur.”
- 6.
A very misleading phrase. I shall explain why in a moment.
- 7.
Dennett actually has “solid” and not “colored” here. I have substituted “colored” for “solid” in order that my scattered quotation should express a unified thought. Dennett had earlier used solidity and color as parallel examples of things that are real and yet not much like what we thought they were before science revealed their true nature.
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van Inwagen, P. (2018). The Problem of Free Will Revisited. In: Jansen, L., Näger, P. (eds) Peter van Inwagen. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70052-6_1
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