Phenomenal Abilities: Incompatibilism and the Experience of Agency
In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 126–50 (2013)
Abstract
Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism,
while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether
the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We
found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the
decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or
morally neutral. The only case in which participants did not give incompatibilist judgments was
when the question was explicitly about whether one’s ignorance of the future was compatible
with determinism. This lends empirical support to claims made by incompatibilists about the
experience of agency, while also showing that compatibilist accounts of ability are inadequate to
the reported phenomenology. Our results also inform recent debates about the presuppositions of
deliberation.
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2012-08-30
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1,947 ( #2,181 of 69,189 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
137 ( #4,590 of 69,189 )
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