The Pseudo-Problem of Free Will
The Pseudo-Problem of Free Will is a misnomer. Free Will is a real problem.
Ludwig Wittgenstein had convinced Schlick and his Vienna Circle of logical positivists/empiricists that philosophical problems could not be solved, only dis-solved, by careful attention to the use of language.
In
C. A. Campbell's inaugural address at Glasgow University in 1938,
In Defence of Free Will, he attempted to restore sensible discussion to a problem he regarded as unparalleled in the history of metaphysics. Later he attacked Schlick directly in his 1951 Mind article
Is Free Will A Pseudo-Problem?
More likely to be Pseudo-Problems are
Determinism, which is a
dogma,
Compatibilism, which is mostly sophistical word play to deny common sense, and
Incompatibilism, which
simultaneously refers to two opposing ideas - "Hard Determinism" and "Free Will."
Is it any wonder that such confused and abused language has resulted in the muddle of philosophizing on free will?
Determinism has always been more a matter of faith than an empirically established truth about the world or human beings. There is no scientific evidence for the strict determinism of philosophy. It is merely a
dogma.
And the non-intuitive claim, thought true only by cerebral philosophers and brain-washed students of philosophy, that freedom is
compatible with determinism is a black mark on the academy. It is the product of logicians who think the tortoise beats the hare and the ass starves to death if equidistant between two piles of hay. To be sure,
what compatibilists may want and see correctly is that free will requires a degree of determination.
R.E.Hobart had part of the idea in his essay
Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It.
Hobart's argument is similar to
John Locke's simple insight that
The Will Is Not Free, it is
The Man Who Is Free. The Will is an Act of Determination.
Locke says in
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI,Section 21
Of Power
"To return, then, to the inquiry about liberty, I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free."
And Locke knew that language like "free will is incompatible with determinism" was itself the source of philosophical errors.
"This way of talking, nevertheless, has prevailed, and, as I guess, produced great confusion."
Peter van Inwagen had another part of the idea in his
Essay on Free Will when he found
Incompatibilism to be true but could not see the proper place for
Indeterminism.
An improved, new, or strong Compatibilism
might be:
Free Will is Compatible with both "Adequate" Determinism and Indeterminism
Resolution of the Pseudo-Problem of Determinism
The very simple answer is to recognize the term "free will" as a complex of two independent concepts, free and will, arranged in a
temporal sequence.
The Free in Free Will is
Compatible with (Some) Indeterminism
And Incompatible with (Strict) Determinism
The Will in Free Will is
Compatible with (Adequate) Determinism
And Incompatible with (Total) Indeterminism
The
Free in Free Will Creates and
Liberates Alternative
Possibilities
The
Will in Free Will
De-Liberates and Determines
the one
Possibility among many
that is to become
Actuality
Chance, in a
present time of random alternatives, allows the Mind a
Choice which selects one possibility and transforms an equivocal and open
future into an unalterable and closed
past.
The Will Is Not Free (per se), as
John Locke first pointed out. It is the
Mind that is Free.
Free and
Will combine to describe the
Mind's ability:
- To Choose from among Multiple Alternative Possibilities
- To Start New Causal Chains
- To Create New Information Structures - information that was not present, implicitly or explicitly, in the immediate past world.
- To Develop Emergent Phenomena
- To Make "Hard Facts" or "Truths"
- To Be Unpredictable, even to Oneself
- To Feel Correctly that One Could Have Done Otherwise.
- To Feel Correctly that Our Actions are "Up to Us."
Philosophers appear to be logical monists with respect to determinism. Either "Determinism is true" they say
or "Determinism is false," In which case, they lament, "Indeterminism is true," which many otherwise sensible thinkers take, in a most simple-minded way, to mean that everything is random, that that every event has no cause, that
chance is the direct cause of our actions, and that absolute chance rules the world.
Here is
P. H. Nowell Smith
The fallacy of [Incompatibilism] has often been exposed and the clearest proof that it is mistaken or at least muddled lies in showing that I could not be free to choose what I do unless determinism is correct. For the simplest actions could not be performed in an indeterministic universe. If I decide, say, to eat a piece of fish, I cannot do so if the fish is liable to turn into a stone or to disintegrate in mid-air or to behave in any other utterly unpredictable manner.
Origin of the Concept and the Term - Pseudo-Problem
Ludwig Wittgenstein was fond of quoting the introduction to Heinrich Hertz's
Principles of Mechanics, which traced many problems to confusion in language. Such problems were not really soluble, but could be eliminated by clarifying the language. Wittgenstein's biographer, Ray Monk, says this was the origin of his concept of dis-solving problems.
In The Principles of Mechanics Hertz had proposed that, instead of giving a direct answer to the question: 'What is force?' the problem should be dealt with by restating Newtonian physics without using `force' as a basic concept. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein regarded Hertz's solution to the problem as a perfect model of how philosophical confusion should be dispelled, and frequently cited – as a statement of his own aim in philosophy – the following sentence from Hertz's introduction to The Principles of Mechanics:
When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.
In a conscious echo of this sentence, Wittgenstein wrote:
In my way of doing philosophy, its whole aim is to give an expression such a form that certain disquietudes disappear. (Hertz). [Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p.446]
Wittgenstein used many pseudo-terms in the Tractatus - pseudo-concept, pseudo-relation, and most importantly pseudo-proposition. But he does not use pseudo-problem.
Recall that Russell and Whitehead had defined knowledge of the world as a set of true propositions. We still find this definition in recent works of analytic philosophers. Here is Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).
4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine [a theory] but an activity.
Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions.
Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
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