If x is the ultimate source of a , then some condition, b, necessary for a, originates with x. If any condition, b, originates with x , then there are no conditions sufficient for b independent of x.
If determinism is true, then the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail every truth about the future. If, for any condition, b , necessary for any action, a, performed by any agent, x , there are conditions independent of x that are sufficient for b , then no agent, x , is the ultimate source of any action, a. This follows from C and D. If determinism is true, then no agent, x , is the ultimate source of any action, a.
This follows from E, F, and G. Therefore, if determinism is true, then no agent, x , performs any action, a , of her own free will. This follows from A, B, and H. For ease of reference and discussion throughout this entry, let us simplify the above argument as follows: A person acts of her own free will only if she is its ultimate source A-B.
If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions C-H. Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will I. To see how it might be supplemented, we turn to a distinctively incompatibilist way of undermining classical compatibilism 2.
Here is such an example: Suppose that Danielle is psychologically incapable of wanting to touch a blond haired dog. Compatibilism in Transition In the s, three major contributions to the free will debate radically altered it. Given these assumptions, here is a rough, non-technical sketch of the argument: No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future i. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.
Here is a close approximation to the example Frankfurt presented in his original paper: Jones has resolved to shoot Smith. Assuming that determinism is true, it states that: No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
Bibliography Adams, Robert M. Arpaly, Nomy, Unprincipled Virtue , New York: Oxford. Ayer, A. Beaty, Michael, ed. Bennett, Jonathan, Berofsky, Bernard, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Horstmann eds. Gert, Bernard, and Tim Duggan, Ginet, Carl, Glover, Jonathan, Responsibility , New York: Humanities Press. Graham, Peter A, Haji, Ishtiyaque, Haji, Ishtiyaque, and Stefaan Cuypers, Hobart, R. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan , R. Johnston eds. Honderich, Ted, Howard-Snyder, Daniel, and Jeff Jordan eds. Hume, David, Nidditch ed. A Treatise of Human Nature , P. Hunt, David P. Kane, Robert ed. Kapitan, Tomis, Kennett, Jeanette, Lamb, James, Lehrer, Keith ed.
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Strawson, P. Stroud, Sarah and Christine Tappolet, eds. Stump, Eleonore, Taylor, Richard, Metaphysics , Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Todd, Patrick and Neal Tognazzini, Trakakis, Nick and Daniel Cohen, eds. Time and Cause , Dordrecht: D. Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. Strawson , Oxford: Clarendon. Vargas, Manuel, Velleman, J. David, Vihvelin, Kadri, Wallace, R. Jay, Watson, Gary, Widerker, David, Widerker, David, and Michael McKenna eds. One of the most influential has been Erich Fromm As a result we give up our freedom and allow our lives to be governed by circumstance, other people, political ideology or irrational feelings.
However determinism is not inevitable and in the very choice we all have to do good or evil Fromm sees the essence of human freedom.
Psychologists who take the free will view suggest that determinism removes freedom and dignity, and devalues human behavior. By creating general laws of behavior, deterministic psychology underestimates the uniqueness of human beings and their freedom to choose their own destiny. There are important implications for taking either side in this debate.
Deterministic explanations for behavior reduce individual responsibility. A person arrested for a violent attack for example might plead that they were not responsible for their behavior — it was due to their upbringing, a bang on the head they received earlier in life, recent relationship stresses, or a psychiatric problem.
In other words, their behavior was determined. The deterministic approach also has important implications for psychology as a science. Scientists are interested in discovering laws which can then be used to predict events. This is very easy to see in physics, chemistry and biology.
As a science, psychology attempts the same thing — to develop laws, but this time to predict behavior. If we argue against determinism, we are in effect rejecting the scientific approach to explaining behavior. Mental illnesses appear to undermine the concept of freewill. For example, individuals with OCD lose control of their thoughts and actions and people with depression lose control over their emotions. Clearly, a pure deterministic or free will approach does not seem appropriate when studying human behavior.
Most psychologists use the concept of free will to express the idea that behavior is not a passive reaction to forces, but that individuals actively respond to internal and external forces.
The term soft determinism is often used to describe this position, whereby people do have a choice, but their behavior is always subject to some form of biological or environmental pressure. McLeod, S. Freewill vs determinism. Simply Psychology. In all this, we have been presupposing the common-sense Newtonian framework of space and time, in which the world-at-a-time is an objective and meaningful notion.
Below when we discuss determinism in relativistic theories we will revisit this assumption. For a wide class of physical theories i. That is, a specification of the state of the world at a time t , along with the laws, determines not only how things go after t , but also how things go before t.
Philosophers, while not exactly unaware of this symmetry, tend to ignore it when thinking of the bearing of determinism on the free will issue. The reason for this is that we tend to think of the past and hence, states of the world in the past as done, over, fixed and beyond our control. Forward-looking determinism then entails that these past states—beyond our control, perhaps occurring long before humans even existed—determine everything we do in our lives.
It then seems a mere curious fact that it is equally true that the state of the world now determines everything that happened in the past. We have an ingrained habit of taking the direction of both causation and explanation as being past—-present, even when discussing physical theories free of any such asymmetry. We will return to this point shortly. Another point to notice here is that the notion of things being determined thereafter is usually taken in an unlimited sense—i.
But conceptually speaking, the world could be only imperfectly deterministic: things could be determined only, say, for a thousand years or so from any given starting state of the world. For example, suppose that near-perfect determinism were regularly but infrequently interrupted by spontaneous particle creation events, which occur only once every thousand years in a thousand-light-year-radius volume of space. This unrealistic example shows how determinism could be strictly false, and yet the world be deterministic enough for our concerns about free action to be unchanged.
Part of understanding determinism—and especially, whether and why it is metaphysically important—is getting clear about the status of the presumed laws of nature. In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental, exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of modal force, usually goes unquestioned.
We can characterize the usual assumptions about laws in this way: the laws of nature are assumed to be pushy explainers. They make things happen in certain ways , and by having this power, their existence lets us explain why things happen in certain ways. For a defense of this perspective on laws, see Maudlin Laws, we might say, are implicitly thought of as the cause of everything that happens. If the laws governing our world are deterministic, then in principle everything that happens can be explained as following from states of the world at earlier times.
Interestingly, philosophers tend to acknowledge the apparent threat determinism poses to free will, even when they explicitly reject the view that laws are pushy explainers. Earman , for example, advocates a theory of laws of nature that takes them to be simply the best system of regularities that systematizes all the events in universal history.
Yet he ends his comprehensive Primer on Determinism with a discussion of the free will problem, taking it as a still-important and unresolved issue. Prima facie this is quite puzzling, for the BSA is founded on the idea that the laws of nature are ontologically derivative, not primary; it is the events of universal history, as brute facts, that make the laws be what they are, and not vice-versa.
Taking this idea seriously, the actions of every human agent in history are simply a part of the universe-wide pattern of events that determines what the laws are for this world. It is then hard to see how the most elegant summary of this pattern, the BSA laws, can be thought of as determiners of human actions. The determination or constraint relations, it would seem, can go one way or the other, not both.
On second thought however it is not so surprising that broadly Humean philosophers such as Ayer, Earman, Lewis and others still see a potential problem for freedom posed by determinism. For even if human actions are part of what makes the laws be what they are, this does not mean that we automatically have freedom of the kind we think we have, particularly freedom to have done otherwise given certain past states of affairs.
It is one thing to say that everything occurring in and around my body, and everything everywhere else, conforms to Maxwell's equations and thus the Maxwell equations are genuine exceptionless regularities, and that because they in addition are simple and strong, they turn out to be laws. It is quite another thing to add: thus, I might have chosen to do otherwise at certain points in my life, and if I had, then Maxwell's equations would not have been laws.
One might try to defend this claim—unpalatable as it seems intuitively, to ascribe ourselves law-breaking power—but it does not follow directly from a Humean approach to laws of nature.
Instead, on such views that deny laws most of their pushiness and explanatory force, questions about determinism and human freedom simply need to be approached afresh.
A second important genre of theories of laws of nature holds that the laws are in some sense necessary. For any such approach, laws are just the sort of pushy explainers that are assumed in the traditional language of physical scientists and free will theorists. But a third and growing class of philosophers holds that universal, exceptionless, true laws of nature simply do not exist. For these philosophers, there is a simple consequence: determinism is a false doctrine.
As with the Humean view, this does not mean that concerns about human free action are automatically resolved; instead, they must be addressed afresh in the light of whatever account of physical nature without laws is put forward.
We can now put our—still vague—pieces together. Determinism requires a world that a has a well-defined state or description, at any given time, and b laws of nature that are true at all places and times. If we have all these, then if a and b together logically entail the state of the world at all other times or, at least, all times later than that given in a , the world is deterministic. How could we ever decide whether our world is deterministic or not?
Given that some philosophers and some physicists have held firm views—with many prominent examples on each side—one would think that it should be at least a clearly decidable question.
Unfortunately, even this much is not clear, and the epistemology of determinism turns out to be a thorny and multi-faceted issue. As we saw above, for determinism to be true there have to be some laws of nature. Most philosophers and scientists since the 17 th century have indeed thought that there are. But in the face of more recent skepticism, how can it be proven that there are? And if this hurdle can be overcome, don't we have to know, with certainty, precisely what the laws of our world are , in order to tackle the question of determinism's truth or falsity?
The first hurdle can perhaps be overcome by a combination of metaphysical argument and appeal to knowledge we already have of the physical world.
Philosophers are currently pursuing this issue actively, in large part due to the efforts of the anti-laws minority. The debate has been most recently framed by Cartwright in The Dappled World Cartwright in terms psychologically advantageous to her anti-laws cause. Those who believe in the existence of traditional, universal laws of nature are fundamentalists ; those who disbelieve are pluralists.
This terminology seems to be becoming standard see Belot , so the first task in the epistemology of determinism is for fundamentalists to establish the reality of laws of nature see Hoefer b.
Even if the first hurdle can be overcome, the second, namely establishing precisely what the actual laws are, may seem daunting indeed. In a sense, what we are asking for is precisely what 19 th and 20 th century physicists sometimes set as their goal: the Final Theory of Everything. Both a and b are highly debatable, but the point is that one can see how arguments in favor of these positions might be mounted. The same was true in the 19 th century, when theorists might have argued that a whatever the Final Theory is, it will involve only continuous fluids and solids governed by partial differential equations; and b all such theories are deterministic.
Here, b is almost certainly false; see Earman ,ch. Even if we now are not, we may in future be in a position to mount a credible argument for or against determinism on the grounds of features we think we know the Final Theory must have. Determinism could perhaps also receive direct support—confirmation in the sense of probability-raising, not proof—from experience and experiment. For theories i. And in broad terms, this is the case in many domains we are familiar with.
Your computer starts up every time you turn it on, and if you have not changed any files, have no anti-virus software, re-set the date to the same time before shutting down, and so on … always in exactly the same way, with the same speed and resulting state until the hard drive fails.
These cases of repeated, reliable behavior obviously require some serious ceteris paribus clauses, are never perfectly identical, and always subject to catastrophic failure at some point. But we tend to think that for the small deviations, probably there are explanations for them in terms of different starting conditions or failed isolation, and for the catastrophic failures, definitely there are explanations in terms of different conditions.
Most of these bits of evidence for determinism no longer seem to cut much ice, however, because of faith in quantum mechanics and its indeterminism. Indeterminist physicists and philosophers are ready to acknowledge that macroscopic repeatability is usually obtainable, where phenomena are so large-scale that quantum stochasticity gets washed out.
But they would maintain that this repeatability is not to be found in experiments at the microscopic level, and also that at least some failures of repeatability in your hard drive, or coin-flipping experiments are genuinely due to quantum indeterminism, not just failures to isolate properly or establish identical initial conditions.
If quantum theories were unquestionably indeterministic, and deterministic theories guaranteed repeatability of a strong form, there could conceivably be further experimental input on the question of determinism's truth or falsity.
Unfortunately, the existence of Bohmian quantum theories casts strong doubt on the former point, while chaos theory casts strong doubt on the latter.
More will be said about each of these complications below. If the world were governed by strictly deterministic laws, might it still look as though indeterminism reigns? This is one of the difficult questions that chaos theory raises for the epistemology of determinism.
A deterministic chaotic system has, roughly speaking, two salient features: i the evolution of the system over a long time period effectively mimics a random or stochastic process—it lacks predictability or computability in some appropriate sense; ii two systems with nearly identical initial states will have radically divergent future developments, within a finite and typically, short timespan.
Definitions of chaos may focus on either or both of these properties; Batterman argues that only ii provides an appropriate basis for defining chaotic systems. A simple and very important example of a chaotic system in both randomness and SDIC terms is the Newtonian dynamics of a pool table with a convex obstacle or obstacles Sinai and others. See Figure 1. Figure 1: Billiard table with convex obstacle.
The usual idealizing assumptions are made: no friction, perfectly elastic collisions, no outside influences. The ball's trajectory is determined by its initial position and direction of motion. If we imagine a slightly different initial direction, the trajectory will at first be only slightly different. And collisions with the straight walls will not tend to increase very rapidly the difference between trajectories. But collisions with the convex object will have the effect of amplifying the differences.
After several collisions with the convex body or bodies, trajectories that started out very close to one another will have become wildly different—SDIC. In the example of the billiard table, we know that we are starting out with a Newtonian deterministic system—that is how the idealized example is defined.
But chaotic dynamical systems come in a great variety of types: discrete and continuous, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional and higher, particle-based and fluid-flow-based, and so on. Mathematically, we may suppose all of these systems share SDIC. But generally they will also display properties such as unpredictability, non-computability, Kolmogorov-random behavior, and so on—at least when looked at in the right way, or at the right level of detail.
This leads to the following epistemic difficulty: if, in nature, we find a type of system that displays some or all of these latter properties, how can we decide which of the following two hypotheses is true?
In other words, once one appreciates the varieties of chaotic dynamical systems that exist, mathematically speaking, it starts to look difficult—maybe impossible—for us to ever decide whether apparently random behavior in nature arises from genuine stochasticity, or rather from deterministic chaos.
There is certainly an interesting problem area here for the epistemology of determinism, but it must be handled with care. It may well be true that there are some deterministic dynamical systems that, when viewed properly , display behavior indistinguishable from that of a genuinely stochastic process.
For example, using the billiard table above, if one divides its surface into quadrants and looks at which quadrant the ball is in at second intervals, the resulting sequence is no doubt highly random. Human behaviors are the result of their inherited genetic pattern, their chromosomes, and their basic physical drives and their prior experiences conditioning, learned behaviors.
All humans are animals and as such they have a drive for food, drink, sex, and rest. All humans have learned other behaviors from their interactions with their physical and social environments other people.
Humans have been conditioned by deliberate and accidental patterns of stimulus response reinforcements. Humans have been rewarded or punished for their behaviors.
Humans repeat those behaviors they are rewarded for and avoid those behaviors they have been conditioned to associate with punishment. The conditioning may have been deliberate with hugs and kisses and food from parents for good behavior and frowns and scolding and denial of food or other experiences for behavior that was not to be repeated. Teachers in school act in a similar pattern offering rewards and punishments and so they condition our behavior as well. Siblings and friends act likewise towards us.
So humans are the products of physical factors. All human actions are caused by those prior factors. Each of us knows that humans have behaviors that are predictable.
The determinists believe that when they have greater knowledge of the laws of human behavior they will be able to:. All that would be needed would be :. Each person knows of the following expressions:. Everyone has a price. You know how to push his buttons. These expressions support the determinist view. Children learn quickly about conditioning.
Small children learn what cries and screams will get their parents attention. They learn what hugs and kisses will get them the gift they want. Parents learn what rewards and punishments will get their children to do what the parent wants. Each of us knows that there have been time when someone has pushed our buttons and we have wished that we would not have lost control but that we did!
We feel bad. We wanted to act otherwise, under control. But we lost it! They push our buttons, really got our goat, got to us and we behaved in a manner that we wished were otherwise. Well, that little description of an experience we all can relate to establishes evidence in support of the determinist position. We are the products of conditioning. Advertisers pay as great deal of money to people who believe that they know something of the laws of human behavior.
Advertising is effective in raising the sales of products. People buy things to look classy or to fit in with a group. They often buy things that they can not afford and have little use for but do so because of the advertising. The ads push the buttons and get the response that has been conditioned. People make a great deal of money each year proving that this is so. At casinos people put money into slot machines and other games of chance.
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