Results for 'free choice'

968 found
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  1. The Free Choice Permission as a Default Rule.Daniela Glavaničová - 2018 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 25 (4):495-516.
    It is quite plausible to say that you may read or write implies that you may read and you may write (though possibly not both at once). This so-called free choice principle is well-known in deontic logic. Sadly, despite being so intuitive and seemingly innocent, this principle causes a lot of worries. The paper briefly but critically examines leading accounts of free choice permission present in the literature. Subsequently, the paper suggests to accept the free (...)
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  2. Free choice and homogeneity.Simon Goldstein - 2019 - Semantics and Pragmatics 12:1-48.
    This paper develops a semantic solution to the puzzle of Free Choice permission. The paper begins with a battery of impossibility results showing that Free Choice is in tension with a variety of classical principles, including Disjunction Introduction and the Law of Excluded Middle. Most interestingly, Free Choice appears incompatible with a principle concerning the behavior of Free Choice under negation, Double Prohibition, which says that Mary can’t have soup or salad implies (...)
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  3. Free choice.Donald L. M. Baxter - 1989 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):12-24.
    There are two inspirations for the theory presented. One is the Kantian idea that a free choice affects a deterministic sequence of events globally rather than just locally. The second is the Leibnizian idea that God chooses for actuality the possible world he deems best. But instead of God choosing, suppose free agents collectively do. Let actuality be an office which deterministic possible worlds are voted in and not of. In this way free choice can (...)
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  4. Agential Free Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1):57-87.
    The Free Choice effect—whereby \\) seems to entail both \ and \—has traditionally been characterized as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal ‘may’. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of free choice defended by Fusco to the agentive modal ‘can’, the ‘can’ which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. On this account, free choice is a nonspecific de re phenomenon that—unlike typical cases—affects disjunction. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, (...)
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  5. Free choice permission and the counterfactuals of pragmatics.Melissa Fusco - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (4):275-290.
    This paper addresses a little puzzle with a surprisingly long pedigree and a surprisingly large wake: the puzzle of Free Choice Permission. I begin by presenting a popular sketch of a pragmatic solution to the puzzle, due to Kratzer and Shimoyama, which has received a good deal of discussion, endorsement and elaboration in recent work :535–590, 2006; Fox, in: Sauerland and Stateva Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 2007; Geurts, Mind Lang 24:51–79, 2009; von Fintel, Central APA session (...)
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  6. Unconditionals and free choice unified.Anna Szabolcsi - 2019 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 29.
    Rawlins (2013: 160) observes that both unconditionals and more classical free choice can be meta-characterized using orthogonality, but does not actually unify the two. One reason may be that in English, different expressions serve in these roles. By contrast, in Hungarian, AKÁR expressions serve as NPIs, FCIs, and unconditional adjuncts, but not as interrogatives or free relatives. This paper offers a unified account of the Hungarian data, extending Chierchia 2013 and Dayal 2013. The account produces the same (...)
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  7. Wallace, Free Choice, and Fatalism.Gila Sher - 2015 - In Steven M. Cahn & Maureen Eckert (eds.), Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 31-56.
    In this paper I reconstruct David Foster Wallace’s argument against fatalism in his undergraduate honors thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”. My goal is to present the argument in a clear and concise way, so that it is easy to see its main line of reasoning and potential power. A secondary goal is to offer clarificatory and critical notes on some of the issues at stake. The reconstruction reveals interesting connections between Wallace’s argument and John MacFarlane’s (...)
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  8. Free Choice: A Self-referential Argument - book review. [REVIEW]Steven James Bartlett - 1979 - Review of Metaphysics (4):738-740.
    A book review of _Free Choice: A Self-referential Argument_ by J. M. Boyle, Jr., G. Grisez, and O. Tollefsen. The review concerns the pragmatical self-referential argument employed in the book, and points to the fact that the argument is itself self-referentially inconsistent, but on the level of metalogical self-reference.
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  9. Counterfactuals, counteractuals, and free choice.Fabio Lampert & Pedro Merlussi - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):445-469.
    In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can (...)
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  10. (1 other version)Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3.5, 1113b7-8 and Free Choice.Susanne Bobzien - 2014 - In R. Salles P. Destree (ed.), What is up to us? Studies on Causality and Responsibility in Ancient Philosophy. Academia Verlag.
    ABSTRACT: This is a short companion piece to my ‘Found in Translation – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics III.5 1113b7-8 and its Reception’ in which I examine in close textual analysis the philosophical question whether these two lines from the Nicomachean Ethics provide any evidence that Aristotle discussed free choice – as is not infrequently assumed. The result is that they do not, and that the claim that they do tends to be based on a mistranslation of the Greek. (There (...)
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  11. Independent alternatives: Ross’s puzzle and free choice.Richard Jefferson Booth - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1241-1273.
    Orthodox semantics for natural language modals give rise to two puzzles for their interactions with disjunction: Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice permission. It is widely assumed that each puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from the truth of a possibility or necessity modal with an embedded disjunction, hearers infer that each disjunct is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I argue that Diversity inferences are too weak to explain (...)
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  12. Free Will Free Choice under Constraints.Chaohui Zhuang - manuscript
    The problem of Free Will is an important topic in religion, philosophy and neuroscience. We will introduce a new model of free will: free choice under constraints. Under outer and inner constraints, human still have the ability of free choice. Outer constrains include physical rules, environment and so on. Inner constrains include customs, desires, habits, preferences and so on. Given a specific context, human have the ability of deciding Yes/No on a specific preference. The (...)
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  13. Free Will vs. Free Choice in Aquinas’ De Malo.Jacob Joseph Andrews - 2023 - Theophron 2 (1):58-73.
    The goal of this paper is to show that Thomas Aquinas, in his _Disputed Questions on Evil_, presents a theory of free will that is compatibilist but still involves a version of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) and even requires alternative possibilities for a certain kind of responsibility. In Aquinas’ view, choosing between possibilities is not the primary power of the will. Rather, choice arises through the complex interaction of various parts of human psychology, in particular through (...)
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  14. Review article: Free Choice: A Self-referential argument, by J. M. Boyle, Jr., G. Grisez, and O. Tollefsen.Steven James Bartlett - 1979 - Review of Metaphysics 32 (4):738-740.
    This review article provides a brief descriptive overview of past efforts to use self-referential argumentation, distinguishing pragmatical from metalogical self-referential approaches. The reviewer claims that the pragmatical self-referential argument proposed in this book is itself metalogically self-referentially inconsistent, and directs the reader to other relevant published works by the reviewer.
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  15. Choose Your Illusion: Philosophy, Self-Deception, and Free Choice.Robert Allen - manuscript
    Illusionism treats the almost universally held belief in our ability to make free choices as an erroneous, though beneficent, idea. According to this view, it is sadly true, though virtually impossible to believe, that none of a person’s choices are avoidable and ‘up to him’: any claim to the effect that they are being naïveté or, in the case of those who know better, pretense. Indeed, the implications of this skepticism are so disturbing, pace Spinoza, that it must not (...)
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  16. Heavenly freedom, derivative freedom, and the value of free choices.Simon Kittle - 2020 - Religious Studies 56 (4):455-472.
    Sennett (1999) and Pawl & Timpe (2009; 2013) attempt to show how we can praise heavenly agents for things they inevitably do in heaven by appealing to the notion of derivative freedom. Matheson (2017) has criticized this use of derivative freedom. In this essay I show why Matheson's argument is inconclusive but also how the basic point may be strengthened to undermine the use Sennett and Pawl & Timpe make of derivative freedom. I then show why Matheson is mistaken to (...)
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  17. (1 other version)Ontological Choices and the Value-Free Ideal.David Ludwig - 2015 - Erkenntnis (6):1-20.
    The aim of this article is to argue that ontological choices in scientific practice undermine common formulations of the value-free ideal in science. First, I argue that the truth values of scientific statements depend on ontological choices. For example, statements about entities such as species, race, memory, intelligence, depression, or obesity are true or false relative to the choice of a biological, psychological, or medical ontology. Second, I show that ontological choices often depend on non-epistemic values. On the (...)
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  18. Are We Free On Our Choices?Maide Ahsen Yücel - manuscript
    This essay examines the philosophical debate on free will, using Kierkegaard's life stages as a framework. It argues that despite the perception of free choice, human decisions are heavily influenced by emotions, environment, and past experiences. Analyzing aesthetic and ethical stages reveals constraints on free will, challenging its absoluteness. Insights from philosophers like Sartre and Aristotle suggest free will may be illusory. The essay underscores the complex interplay between choice and determinism, advocating for a (...)
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  19. Free will and the unconscious precursors of choice.Markus E. Schlosser - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):365-384.
    Benjamin Libet's empirical challenge to free will has received a great deal of attention and criticism. A standard line of response has emerged that many take to be decisive against Libet's challenge. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that this standard response fails to put the challenge to rest. It fails, in particular, to address a recent follow-up experiment that raises a similar worry about free will (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). In the (...)
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  20. From the 'Free Will Theorems' to the 'Choice Ontology' of Quantum Mechanics.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Philosophy of Science eJournal (Elsevier: SSRN) 13 (33):1-10.
    If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world share the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly certain preliminary goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which it can be achieved or not by the one who determines the goal. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will unlike (...)
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  21. All the freedom you can want: The purported collapse of the problem of free will.Edward C. Lyons - 2007 - St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary 22 (1):101-164.
    Reflections on free choice and determinism constitute a recurring, if rarified, sphere of legal reasoning. Controversy, of course, swirls around the perennially vexing question of the propriety of punishing human persons for conduct that they are unable to avoid. Drawing upon conditions similar, if not identical, to those traditionally associated with attribution of moral fault, persons subject to such necessitating causal constraints generally are not considered responsible in the requisite sense for their conduct; and, thus, they are not (...)
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  22. Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    I propose a unified solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle and free choice permission. I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of 'may' and 'ought'. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction — equivalent to (...)
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  23. Choice and Moral Responsibility in Nichomachean Ethics III 1–5.Susanne Bobzien - 2014 - In Ronald Polansky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 81-109.
    ABSTRACT: This paper serves two purposes: (i) it can be used by students as an introduction to chapters 1-5 of book iii of the NE; (ii) it suggests an answer to the unresolved question what overall objective this section of the NE has. The paper focuses primarily on Aristotle’s theory of what makes us responsible for our actions and character. After some preliminary observations about praise, blame and responsibility (Section 2), it sets out in detail how all the key notions (...)
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  24. Is free will compatible with determinism?Clement Dore - 1963 - Philosophical Review 72 (October):500-501.
    If we maintain that free will requires the absence of determinism, Then can we claim to be free without any wants? if we had no wants at all, What sense would there to be talk about free will? the difference between free will and the absence of free will is not that between indeterminism and determinism. Free choice presupposes determinism in that in order to make a choice an individual must have some (...)
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  25. Free Will and Responsibility.Eddy Nahmias - 2012 - WIREs Cognitive Science 3 (4):439-449.
    Free will is a set of capacities for conscious choice and control of actions and is essential for moral responsibility. While determinism is traditionally discussed as the main potential challenge to free will and responsibility, other potential challenges exist and need to be considered by philosophers and scientists. The cognitive sciences are relevant to free will both to study how people understand free will and potential challenges to it, and to study whether these challenges are (...)
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  26. Can AI systems have free will?Christian List - manuscript
    While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been relatively little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. In this article, I sketch a framework for thinking about this question. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, (...)
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  27. The free will inventory: Measuring beliefs about agency and responsibility.Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, Eddy Nahmias, Chandra Sripada & Lisa Thomson Ross - 2014 - Consciousness and Cognition 25:27-41.
    In this paper, we present the results of the construction and validation of a new psychometric tool for measuring beliefs about free will and related concepts: The Free Will Inventory (FWI). In its final form, FWI is a 29-item instrument with two parts. Part 1 consists of three 5-item subscales designed to measure strength of belief in free will, determinism, and dualism. Part 2 consists of a series of fourteen statements designed to further explore the complex network (...)
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  28. (1 other version)Did Epicurus discover the Free-Will Problem?Susanne Bobzien - 2000 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 19:287-337.
    ABSTRACT: I argue that there is no evidence that Epicurus dealt with the kind of free-will problem he is traditionally associated with; i.e. that he discussed free choice or moral responsibility grounded on free choice, or that the "swerve" was involved in decision processes. Rather, for Epicurus, actions are fully determined by the agent's mental disposition at the outset of the action. Moral responsibility presupposes not free choice but that the person is unforced (...)
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  29. Decision theory presupposes free will.Christian List - manuscript
    This paper argues that decision theory presupposes free will. Although decision theorists seldom acknowledge this, the way decision theory represents, explains, or rationalizes choice behaviour acquires its intended interpretation only under the assumption that decision-makers are agents capable of making free choices between alternative possibilities. Without that assumption, both normative and descriptive decision theory, including the revealed-preference paradigm, would have to be reinterpreted in implausible ways. The hypothesis that decision-makers have free will is therefore explanatorily indispensable (...)
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  30. Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1417-1436.
    Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative (...)
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  31. Free Will & Empirical Arguments for Epiphenomenalism.Nadine Elzein - 2019 - In Peter Róna & László Zsolnai (eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Virtues and Economics, vol 5. Springer. pp. 3-20.
    While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of (...)
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  32. The Free Agent, Luck, and Character.Zahra Khazaei - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 23 (3):173-192.
    Whether we are free agents or not and to what extent depends on factors such as the necessary conditions for free will and our definition of human agency and identity. The present article, apart from possible alternatives and the causality of the agent regarding his actions, addresses the element of inclination as a necessary condition for free will. Therefore, an analysis of these conditions determines that even though in some circumstances the range of alternatives the agent can (...)
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  33. Free Will in Human Behavior and Physics.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Labor and Social Relations 30 (6):185-196.
    If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world shares the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly a certain goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which the aim can be achieved or not by the one who determines the target. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will (...)
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  34. What kinds of alternative possibilities are required of the folk concept(s) of choice?Jason Shepard & Aneyn O’Grady - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 48:138-148.
    Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a (...). The experiments indicate that the two concepts of choice can be differentiated from each other on the basis of the kind of alternatives to which each is sensitive. The results indicate that the folk concept of choice is more nuanced than has been assumed. This new, empirically informed understanding of the folk concept of choice has important implications for debates concerning free will, responsibility, and other debates spanning psychology and philosophy. -/- Specifically, 'having a choice' appears to require genuinely open alternatives, or alternative possibilities that are actually realizable, while 'making a choice' appears to only require psychological open alternatives, or the ability to consider alternatives independent of whether these alternatives are actually realizable. We argue that these findings are relevant to the free will debate because choice is central to the folk concept of free will and many philosophical analysis of free will. The kinds of alternatives required for having a choice appear to be incompatibilist in nature, while the kinds of alternatives required for making a choice appear to be compatibilist in nature. If free will requires having choices, then this is perhaps evidence against compatibilism. If free will requires making choices, then this is perhaps evidence in favor of--or at least consistent with--compatibilism. (shrink)
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  35. The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the question of natural compatibilism.Oisín Deery, Taylor Davis & Jasmine Carey - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (6):776-801.
    Standard methods in experimental philosophy have sought to measure folk intuitions using experiments, but certain limitations are inherent in experimental methods. Accordingly, we have designed the Free-Will Intuitions Scale to empirically measure folk intuitions relevant to free-will debates using a different method. This method reveals what folk intuitions are like prior to participants' being put in forced-choice experiments. Our results suggest that a central debate in the experimental philosophy of free will—the “natural” compatibilism debate—is mistaken in (...)
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  36. Influencing choice without awareness.Jay A. Olson, Alym A. Amlani, Amir Raz & Ronald A. Rensink - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 37 (C):225-236.
    Forcing occurs when a magician influences the audience's decisions without their awareness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this effect, we examined several stimulus and personality predictors. In Study 1, a magician flipped through a deck of playing cards while participants were asked to choose one. Although the magician could influence the choice almost every time (98%), relatively few (9%) noticed this influence. In Study 2, participants observed rapid series of cards on a computer, with one target card shown longer (...)
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  37. Choice Paralysis: A Challenge from the Indeterminacy of Intentional Content.Ryne Smith MacBride - 2023 - Dissertation, Georgia State University
    Christian List argues that three requirements are “jointly necessary and sufficient” for free will: intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control. In contrast, I argue that List’s accounts of intentional agency and alternative possibilities do not adequately explain how an agent has free will. Specifically, I argue that if an agent has free will, then it must also have phenomenality; because phenomenality determines the propositional contents of an agent’s intentional states. I demonstrate that List’s analysis of (...) will brackets phenomenality and, as such, an agent on his account may find itself in a permanent state of “choice paralysis,” a state in which it lacks the ability to choose due to the indeterminate content of its intentional states. I conclude by suggesting that philosophers must adopt methodologies derived from both the third- and first-person perspectives in order to adequately explain how an agent with free will interacts with the environment. (shrink)
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  38. Free Will and Open Alternatives.Carlos J. Moya - 2017 - Disputatio 9 (45):167-191.
    In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom are (...)
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  39. Weakly Free Multialgebras.Marcelo E. Coniglio & Guilherme V. Toledo - 2022 - Bulletin of the Section of Logic 51 (1):109-141.
    In abstract algebraic logic, many systems, such as those paraconsistent logics taking inspiration from da Costa's hierarchy, are not algebraizable by even the broadest standard methodologies, as that of Blok and Pigozzi. However, these logics can be semantically characterized by means of non-deterministic algebraic structures such as Nmatrices, RNmatrices and swap structures. These structures are based on multialgebras, which generalize algebras by allowing the result of an operation to assume a non-empty set of values. This leads to an interest in (...)
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  40.  48
    Free Will & Empirical Arguments for Epiphenomenalism.Nadine Elzein - 2019 - In Peter Róna & László Zsolnai (eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Springer Verlag. pp. 3-20.
    While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of (...)
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  41. Force and Choice.Sam Carter - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (4):873-910.
    Some utterances of imperative clauses have directive force—they impose obligations. Others have permissive force—they extend permissions. The dominant view is that this difference in force is not accompanied by a difference in semantic content. Drawing on data involving free choice items in imperatives, I argue that the dominant view is incorrect.
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  42. A psychologically based taxonomy of magicians’ forcing techniques: How magicians influence our choices, and how to use this to study psychological mechanisms.Alice Pailhès, Ronald A. Rensink & Gustav Kuhn - 2020 - Consciousness and Cognition 86 (C):103038.
    “Pick a card, any card. This has to be a completely free choice.” the magician tells you. But is it really? Although we like to think that we are using our free will to make our decisions, research in psychology has shown that many of our behaviours are automatic and unconsciously influenced by external stimuli (Ariely, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), and that we are often oblivious to the cognitive (...)
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  43. Why Moral Rights of Free Speech for Business Corporations Cannot Be Justified.Ava Thomas Wright - 2021 - Southwest Philosophy Review 37 (1):187-198.
    In this paper, I develop two philosophically suggestive arguments that the late Justice Stevens made in Citizens United against the idea that business corporations have free speech rights. First, (1) while business corporations conceived as real entities are capable of a thin agency conceptually sufficient for moral rights, I argue that they fail to clear important justificatory hurdles imposed by interest or choice theories of rights. Business corporations conceived as real entities lack an interest in their personal security; (...)
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  44. The Free Will Problem [Hobbes, Bramhall and Free Will].Paul Russell - 2011 - In Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy in early modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 424-444.
    This article examines the free will problem as it arises within Thomas Hobbes' naturalistic science of morals in early modern Europe. It explains that during this period, the problem of moral and legal responsibility became acute as mechanical philosophy was extended to human psychology and as a result human choices were explained in terms of desires and preferences rather than being represented as acts of an autonomous faculty. It describes how Hobbes changed the face of moral philosophy, through his (...)
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  45. Free action as two level voluntary control.John Dilworth - 2008 - Philosophical Frontiers 3 (1):29-45.
    The naturalistic voluntary control (VC) theory explains free will and consciousness in terms of each other. It is central to free voluntary control of action that one can control both what one is conscious of, and also what one is not conscious of. Furthermore, the specific cognitive ability or skill involved in voluntarily controlling whether information is processed consciously or unconsciously can itself be used to explain consciousness. In functional terms, it is whatever kind of cognitive processing occurs (...)
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  46. Against free will in the contemporary natural sciences.Martín López-Corredoira - 2016 - In López-Corredoira Martín (ed.), Free Will: Interpretations, Implementations and Assessments. Nova Science Publ..
    The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and refuted in the present paper. The hypothesis of reductionism finds no obstacle within contemporary natural sciences. Determinism in classical physics is irrefutable, unless classical physics is itself refuted. From quantum mechanics, some authors argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological (...)
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  47. Heroin addiction and voluntary choice: The case of informed consent.Edmund Henden - 2012 - Bioethics 27 (7):395-401.
    Does addiction to heroin undermine the voluntariness of heroin addicts' consent to take part in research which involves giving them free and legal heroin? This question has been raised in connection with research into the effectiveness of heroin prescription as a way of treating dependent heroin users. Participants in such research are required to give their informed consent to take part. Louis C. Charland has argued that we should not presume that heroin addicts are competent to do this since (...)
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  48. CHOICE: an Objective, Voluntaristic Theory of Prudential Value.Walter Horn - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):191-215.
    It is customary to think that Objective List (“OL), Desire-Satisfaction (“D-S”) and Hedonistic (“HED”) theories of prudential value pretty much cover the waterfront, and that those of the three that are “subjective” are naturalistic (in the sense attacked by Moore, Ross and Ewing), while those that are “objective” must be Platonic, Aristotelian or commit the naturalist fallacy. I here argue for a theory that is both naturalistic (because voluntaristic) and objective but neither Platonic, Aristotelian, nor (I hope) fallacious. In addition, (...)
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  49. Relativity of a Free Will Concept Depending on Both Conscious Indeterminism and Unconscious Determinism.Franz Klaus Jansen - 2011 - Philosophy Study 1 (2):103 - 117.
    Free will is difficult to classify with respect to determinism or indeterminism, and its phenomenology in consciousness often shows both aspects. Initially, it is felt as unlimited and indeterminate will power, with the potentiality of multiple choices. Thereafter, reductive deliberation is led by determinism to the final decision, which realises only one of the potential choices. The reductive deliberation phase tries to find out the best alternative and simultaneously satisfying vague motivations, contextual conditions and personal preferences. The essential sense (...)
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  50. Mechanical Choices: A Compatibilist Libertarian Response.Christian List - 2023 - Criminal Law and Philosophy:1-23.
    Michael S. Moore defends the ideas of free will and responsibility, especially in relation to criminal law, against several challenges from neuroscience. I agree with Moore that morality and the law presuppose a commonsense understanding of humans as rational agents, who make choices and act for reasons, and that to defend moral and legal responsibility, we must show that this commonsense understanding remains viable. Unlike Moore, however, I do not think that classical compatibilism, which is based on a conditional (...)
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