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  1. Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervetion.Tamler Sommers - manuscript
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  2. A Defense of Natural Compatibilism.Florian Cova - forthcoming - In Joe Campbell, Kristin Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Free Will. Blackwell.
    In this chapter, I survey the experimental philosophy literature on folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. I argue that the hypothesis that folk are natural compatibilists is a better fit and explanation of existing data than the hypothesis that folk are natural incompatibilists. I discuss the use of 'Throughpass' measures in the recent literature (arguing that these measures are inadequate) as well as experimental philosophers' reliance on mediation analysis and structural equation modelling to infer causality (arguing that this reliance is misguided).

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  3. Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and the Comprehension of Determinism.Daniel Lim, Ryan Nichols & Joseph Wagoner - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-27.
    The experimental validity of research in the experimental philosophy of free will has been called into question. Several new, important studies (Murray et al. forthcoming; Nadelhoffer et al., Cognitive Science 44 (8): 1–28, 2020 ; Nadelhoffer et al., 2021; Rose et al., Cognitive Science 41 (2): 482–502, 2017 ) are interpreted as showing that the vignette-judgment model is defective because participants only exhibit a surface-level comprehension and not the deeper comprehension the model requires. Participants, it is argued, commit _bypassing_, _intrusion_, and _fatalism_ errors. We respond in two ways: (1) we critique and improve existing methods for assessing deeper comprehension and (2) we develop videos to convey deterministic principles of change that succeed in significantly reducing participants’ bypassing, intrusion, and fatalism errors. Consequently, we have the best existing instrument for gauging folk intuitions about the relationship between free will and determinism.
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  4. Piercing the smoke screen: Dualism, free will, and Christianity.Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis & Thomas Nadelhoffer - forthcoming - Journal of Cognition and Culture.
    Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity.
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  5. Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefs.Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis & Thomas Nadelhoffer - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.
    Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will.
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  6. Not what I expected: Feeling of surprise differentially mediates effect of personal control on attributions of free will and responsibility.Samuel Murray & Thomas Nadelhoffer - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-25.
    Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will.
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  7. The Expertise Defense and Experimental Philosophy of Free Will.Kiichi Inarimori - 2024 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 24:125-143.
    This paper aims to vindicate the expertise defense in light of the experimental philosophy of free will. My central argument is that the analogy strategy between philosophy and other domains is defensible, at least in the free will debate, because philosophical training contributes to the formation of philosophical intuition by enabling expert philosophers to understand philosophical issues correctly and to have philosophical intuitions about them. This paper will begin by deriving two requirements on the expertise defense from major criticisms of it. First, precisely how philosophical training contributes to the formation of philosophical intuitions requires explanation (Contribution); second, it must be explained how philosophical training immunizes philosophical intuitions from distorting factors (Immunity). I shall argue that the Contribution requirement is crucial for the expertise defense and that this requirement can be satisfied at least in the domain of free will: recent research shows that most novices are unable to understand determinism correctly, suggesting that having intuitions about determinism requires philosophical expertise. I then discuss how this proposal can be applied to other philosophical disciplines.
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  8. The importance of epistemic intentions in ascription of responsibility.Katarina M. Kovacevic, Francesca Bonalumi & Christophe Heintz - 2024 - Scientific Reports 14:1183.
    We investigate how people ascribe responsibility to an agent who caused a bad outcome but did not know he would. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include, when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascribing responsibility for a bad outcome. We further investigate which epistemic intentions people are likely to consider when building counterfactuals for responsibility ascription. We find that, when an agent did not predict a bad outcome, people ascribe responsibility depending on the reasons behind the agents’ lack of knowledge. People judge agents responsible for the bad outcome they caused when they could have easily predicted the consequences of their actions but did not care to acquire the relevant information. However, when this information was hard to acquire, people are less likely to judge them responsible.

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  9. Bound to Share or Not to Care. The Force of Fate, Gods, Luck, Chance and Choice across Cultures.Renatas Berniūnas, Audrius Beinorius, Vilius Dranseika, Vytis Silius & Paulius Rimkevičius - 2023 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 23 (3-4):451-475.
    People across cultures consider everyday choices in the context of perceived various external life-determining forces: such as fate and gods (two teleological forces) and such notions as luck and chance (two non-teleological forces). There is little cross-cultural evidence (except for a belief in gods) showing how people relate these salient notions of life-determining forces to prosociality and a sense of well-being. The current paper provides preliminary cross-cultural data to address this gap. Results indicate that choice is the most important life-determining factor. Regression analyses indicate that choice and belief in gods and fate emerged as significant predictors of prosociality towards strangers. Moreover, luck was a significant predictor of decreased prosociality. A relation between life-determining forces and life satisfaction followed the same pattern: choice, gods, and fate emerged as significant predictors of greater life satisfaction, whereas luck was associated with decreased life satisfaction. The overall pattern of results indicates that participants across different cultures might sense being bounded to share or not to care depending on the perceived intentional agency and meaning in the external forces.
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  10. Freedom, moral responsibility, and the failure of universal defeat.Andrew J. Latham, Somogy Varga & Hannah Tierney - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):252-269.
    Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together.
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  11. Experimental Philosophy of Action: Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 327-352.
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  12. Intuitions About Free Will and the Failure to Comprehend Determinism.Thomas Nadelhoffer, Samuel Murray & Elise Dykhuis - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2515-2536.
    Theories of free will are often measured against how well they capture everyday intuitions about free will. But what are these everyday intuitions, and what theoretical commitments do they express? Empirical methods have delivered mixed messages. In response, some free will theorists have developed error theories to undermine the credentials of countervailing intuitions. These efforts are predicated on the idea that people might misunderstand determinism in any of several ways. This paper sheds light on the comprehension problem. We first discuss recent efforts to explain systematic errors in how people interpret determinism. Then, we present the alarming results of two new preregistered studies exploring three types of comprehension failure: (a) epiphenomenal bypassing, (b) fatalistic bypassing, and (c) indeterministic intrusion. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding runs deeper than others have supposed. This casts doubt on existing models of commonsense thinking about free will. Unless and until researchers properly control for the kinds of misunderstandings we identify, research on free will intuitions cannot shed light on whether ordinary thinking reflects commitments to compatibilism or incompatibilism.
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  13. The implications of experimental philosophy and moral psychology for the problem of free will.Garth Harold Elzerman - 2022 - Dissertation, University of South Africa
    The problem of free will has a long and intricate history. The millennia of development of the problem have seen the evolution of numerous free will viewpoints. A cursory look at the evolution of the concepts of free will and determinism, the various arguments, counterarguments, complex adjustments to arguments, the variety of sources of empirical research, and empirical insights illustrate the complexity of the debate. This elaborate reality opens itself to a pluralist account of free will and moral responsibility capable of accommodating this complexity and apparent contradiction. In this dissertation, I present such a pluralist account. I argue that a pluralistic approach to free will and moral responsibility makes room for discontinuities, accounts for conflicting free will values and regret, and acknowledges dissimilar responses to moral responsibility situations. I lay out the framework for this approach by engaging with free will research from moral psychology, investigating the findings of the sciences, such as neuroscience and physics, and considering our common-sense understanding of free will.
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  14. Experimental Philosophy of Mind: Free Will and a Scientific Conception of the World.Morteza Izadifar - 2022 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 22 (1-2):41-59.
    Experimental philosophy has been engaged in many fields of philosophy and has tried to challenge philosophy from a new horizon. In this article, I have tried to examine what the role of sciences are in altering people’s intuition about free will. Could science educate people’s philosophical intuitions? If yes, should we still rely on their intuition as a rational instrument for our philosophical questions? Do science plus cultural and social differences effect on folks’ view? In this cross-cultural research, the emphasis is mostly on recent breakthroughs on neuroscience and its impact on people’s perspective to free will. I have asked some questions about free will and determinism from two groups of Iranian and European participants. The results of this study revealed an interesting amount of cross-cultural similarities. The findings showed that people have a relatively independent view to free will and determinism. It seems that manipulating laymen’s opinion by either the idea of scientific determinism or living under pressure and challenging social conditions cannot touch their perspective. I tried to indicate that the techniques of experimental philosophy and the data offered might help us to learn more and more about the psychological processes, in the mind of the folks, that engender philosophical problems.
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  15. Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility.Thomas Nadelhoffer & Andrew Monroe (eds.) - 2022 - Advances in Experimental Philo.
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility brings together leading researchers from psychology and philosophy to present new findings and ideas about human agency and moral responsibility. Their contributions reflect the growth of research in these areas over the past decade and highlight both the ways that philosophy can be relevant to empirical research and how empirical work can be relevant to philosophical investigations. Mixing new empirical work with the meta-philosophical and philosophical upshot of the latest research being done, chapters cover motivated cognition and free will beliefs, folk intuitions about manipulation and agency, mental control in assessments of responsibility, the importance of skilled decision making to free will judgments and the relationship between free will and substance dualism. Blending cutting-edge research from philosophy with methods from psychology, this collection is a compelling example of the value of interdisciplinary approaches, contributing to our understanding of the complex networks of attitudes, beliefs, and judgments that inform how we think about agency and responsibility.
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  16. The weirdness of belief in free will.Renatas Berniūnas, Audrius Beinorius, Vilius Dranseika, Vytis Silius & Paulius Rimkevičius - 2021 - Consciousness and Cognition 87:103054.
    It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.
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  17. Lidový dualismus a dvě konceptuální říše.Michaela Jirout Košová - 2021 - Dissertation, Charles University, Prague
    The thesis focuses on the irreducibility of the concept of a person to scientific view of the world. The main inspiration for thematising this specific aspect of folk dualism comes from Donald Davidson (two realms) and Wilfrid Sellars (two images). The theoretical sections are complemented by reflexion on results of empirical studies provided mostly by experimental philosophy in order to demonstrate how this approach benefits attempts to reach complex view of philosophical questions that have close connection to moral dimension of human life. The first chapter addresses a wider concept of self and introduces the idea of the necessity to bring the two conceptual realms on the scene: there is a specific conceptual realm (irreducible to physical realm or scientific image) enabling proper grasp of the concept of a person. The subsequent chapters address particular sub-concepts of the concept of self. The second chapter focuses on the concept of free will, and by referring to different views it points to the necessity to bring folk concepts into consideration. It concludes that the folk concept of free agent is transcendent with regard to scientific accounts and bears certain \"supernatural\" characteristics connected to the concept of conscious will. The third (and central) chapter brings focus on the...
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  18. The Four-Case Argument and the Existential/Universal Effect.Andrew J. Latham & Hannah Tierney - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2379-2389.
    One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents.
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  19. Determinism and attributions of consciousness.Gunnar Björnsson & Joshua Shepherd - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (4):549-568.
    The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent’s behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or mediated by notions linked to agency – notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and their connection to attributions of agency by Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, and Shaun Nichols (Arico et al. 2011, Fiala et al. 2014) and supports it against recent criticisms (e.g., Sytsma 2014).
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  20. Natural Compatibilism, Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics.Thomas Nadelhoffer, David Rose, Wesley Buckwalter & Shaun Nichols - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (8):e12873.
    The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.
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  21. Folk intuitions and the conditional ability to do otherwise.Thomas Nadelhoffer, Siyuan Yin & Rose Graves - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (7):968-996.
    In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings.
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  22. For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.Ivar R. Hannikainen, Edouard Machery, David Rose, Stephen Stich, Christopher Y. Olivola, Paulo Sousa, Florian Cova, Emma E. Buchtel, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniûnas, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas López, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.
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  23. The Agency-Last Paradigm: Free Will as Moral Ether.Geoffrey S. Holtzman - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (2):435-458.
    I argue that free will is a nominal construct developed and deployed post hoc in an effort to provide cohesive narratives in support of a priori moral-judgmental dispositions. In a reversal of traditional course, I defend the view that there are no circumstances under which attributions of moral responsibility for an act can, should, or do depend on prior ascriptions of free will. Conversely, I claim that free will belief depends entirely on the apperceived possibility of moral responsibility. Orthodoxy dictates an agency-first thesis, according to which free will is necessarily antecedent to moral responsibility. However, I present a number of arguments against this view, and in favor of an agency-last stance, according to which the concept of free will is dependent upon that of moral responsibility. I provide further support for my case in the form of new empirical evidence regarding the stable mode of inference used to attribute free will across moral contexts. These experimental results can be interpreted to imply the deflation of one of the longest-standing veridical paradoxes in experimental philosophy. Furthermore, the sole conceptual scheme found to be capable of modeling the experimental results is also capable of illuminating several classic works in the analytic philosophy of moral agency.
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  24. The Conceptual Impossibility of Free Will Error Theory.Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (2):99-120.
    This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free will error theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from the conceptual impossibility thesis that many of our actions are in fact free. Hence it follows that free will error theory - the view that no judgement of the form ‘action A was performed freely’ - is false. I will show taking seriously the conceptual impossibility thesis helps makes good sense of some seemingly inconsistent results in recent experimental philosophy work on determinism and our concept of free will. Further, I will present some reasons why we should expect to find similar results for every other factor we might have thought was important for free will.
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  25. Indirect Compatibilism.Andrew James Latham - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Sydney
    In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current orthodoxy in the free will literature, which is that our concept of free will is an incompatibilist concept - a concept according to which we have free will only if determinism is false - I will show that our concept of free will is in fact a compatibilist concept - a concept according to which we can have free will even if determinism is true - and I do so using a new experimental philosophy methodology inspired by two-dimensional semantics.

    Of course, even if our concept of free will is a compatibilist concept, this does not mean that there are any free actions in the world: the current empirical evidence from the brain sciences appears to show that there might be no, or very few, free actions in the world, even on many compatibilist understandings of what it would take for there to be free will. The second component of the argument addresses this concern by extending our understanding of compatibilism. Agents act freely either when their actions are caused by compatibilistically acceptable psychological processes, or are indirectly caused by those same processes. Hence the name of my account: indirect compatibilism.

    The final component of the argument defends my new account against some interesting objections and provides evidence from cognitive neuroscience that some of our actions count as free by the lights of indirect compatibilism.

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  26. Experimental Philosophy: A Critical Study.Nikil Mukerji - 2019 - London, UK; New York, USA: Rowman & Littlefield International.
    Suitable for student readers and more advanced scholars who would like an introduction to experimental philosophy, this book guides the reader through current debates on the topic, and provides links to current and emerging work in the field.
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  27. When Do Robots Have Free Will? Exploring the Relationships between (Attributions of) Consciousness and Free Will.Eddy Nahmias, Corey Allen & Bradley Loveall - 2019 - In Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal & Andrew Cameron Sims (eds.), Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience. Leiden: Brill.
    While philosophers and scientists sometimes suggest (or take for granted) that consciousness is an essential condition for free will and moral responsibility, there is surprisingly little discussion of why consciousness (and what sorts of conscious experience) is important. We discuss some of the proposals that have been offered. We then discuss our studies using descriptions of humanoid robots to explore people’s attributions of free will and responsibility, of various kinds of conscious sensations and emotions, and of reasoning capacities, and examine the relationships between these attributions. Our initial results suggest that people’s attributions of free will are strongly influenced by their attributions of conscious emotions, such as happiness and disappointment, including Strawsonian emotions, such as pride and regret. These results provide some support for an intriguing proposal: Free will requires the capacity to make decisions that really matter to the agent, and for anything to really matter to the agent, she must be able to consciously experience the good and bad effects of the decisions she makes—to suffer and regret, or to enjoy and feel proud of, their outcomes.
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  28. Determinism, Moral Responsibility and Retribution.Elizabeth Shaw & Robert Blakey - 2019 - Neuroethics 13 (1):99-113.
    In this article, we will identify two issues that deserve greater attention from those researching lay people’s attitudes to moral responsibility and determinism. The first issue concerns whether people interpret the term “moral responsibility” in a retributive way and whether they are motivated to hold offenders responsible for pre-determined behaviour by considerations other than retributivism, e.g. the desires to condemn the action and to protect society. The second issue concerns whether explicitly rejecting moral responsibility and retributivism, after reading about determinism, would have any impact on “implicit” retributivism when recommending a sentence for a hypothetical offender. We will report the results of an exploratory study that investigated these questions. Our preliminary findings raise the possibility that a significant proportion of participants either i) may not interpret “moral responsibility” in the basic, retributive sense of the term, which is at issue in the determinism debate, or ii) may be unconsciously motivated by non-retributive considerations to judge that the offender is morally responsible, in the basic, retributive sense. If this is confirmed by future research, a wider implication would be that theorists’ arguments against retributivism are more likely to affect public attitudes to punishment when non-retributive ways of achieving important punishment goals are emphasised. Our preliminary findings also suggested that explicit retributivism did not correlate with implicit retributivism. If this is confirmed in future research, it would imply that free will theorists who wish to affect public attitudes toward punishment should, when communicating their research to the public, give detailed consideration to the implications for sentencing.
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  29. From Moral Intuitions to Free Will Intuitions: A Dual Interacting-Process Model.Ayhan Sol & Özge Dural Özer - 2019 - Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy 9 (9:4):881-897.
    In this essay, after first briefly reviewing the literature on experimental philosophy and how and why it is important especially for contemporary analytic philosophy, we focus on two earliest experimental research papers on free will intuitions. We also present psychological mechanisms that try to explain why both philosophers and ordinary people have incompatibilist and compatibilist intuitions and free will and moral responsibility. We then move on to another experimental research on moral intuitions and develop a dual process model based on the model to explain moral intuitions. However, our dual interacting-process model is not intended for moral intuitions but free will intuitions. Finally, we critically examine other mechanism and briefly defend our model.
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  30. Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions.Tillmann Vierkant, Robert Deutschländer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & John-Dylan Haynes - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10 (1133):1--6.
    A long-standing position in philosophy, law, and theology is that a person can be held morally responsible for an action only if they had the freedom to choose and to act otherwise. Thus, many philosophers consider freedom to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. However, empirical findings suggest that this assumption might not be in line with common sense thinking. For example, in a recent study we used surveys to show that – counter to positions held by many philosophers – lay people consider actions to be free when they are spontaneous rather than being based on reasons. In contrast, responsibility is often considered to require that someone has thought about the alternative options. In this study we use an online survey to directly test to which degree lay judgements of freedom and responsibility match. Specifically, we test whether manipulations of deliberation affect freedom and responsibility judgements in the same way. Furthermore, we also test the dependency of these judgements on a person’s belief that their decision had consequences for their personal life. We find that people are generally considered to be more responsible for their actions than they are considered free, across most of the conditions tested. Furthermore, we found that deliberation had an opposite effect on freedom and responsibility judgements. People were considered more free when they acted spontaneously, whereas they were considered more responsible when they deliberated about their actions. These results seem to suggest that deliberating about reasons is crucially important for the lay concept of responsibility, while it is not obviously ….
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  31. Laypersons’ beliefs and intuitions about free will and determinism: new insights linking the social psychology and experimental philosophy paradigms.Gilad Feldman & Subramanya Prasad Mgmt Chandrashekar - 2018 - Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (9):539-549.
    We linked between the social-psychology and experimental-philosophy paradigms for the study of folk intuitions and beliefs regarding the concept of free will to answer three questions: (1) what intuitions do people have about free-will and determinism? (2) do free will beliefs predict differences in free-will and determinism intuitions? and (3) is there more to free-will and determinism than experiencing certainty or uncertainty about the nature of the universe? Overall, laypersons viewed the universe as allowing for human indeterminism, and they did so with certainty. Examining intuitions of prosociality, future-orientation, learning, meaningfulness, human uniqueness, and well-being, ratings were highest in the indeterministic universe condition and lowest in the deterministic universe condition, both significantly different from the uncertain universe condition. Participants’ free will beliefs had only weak impact on realism, happiness, and learning intuitions, but did not reverse the general intuition favoring indeterminism, and showed no impact on other intuitions.
    32. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  32. Agency Beliefs Over Time and Across Cultures: Free Will Beliefs Predict Higher Job Satisfaction.Gilad Feldman, Jiing-Lih Farh & Kin Fai Ellick Wong - 2018 - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44 (3):304-317.
    In three studies, we examined the relationship between free will beliefs and job satisfaction over time and across cultures. Study 1 examined 252 Taiwanese real-estate agents over a 3-months period. Study 2 examined job satisfaction for 137 American workers on an online labor market over a 6-months period. Study 3 extended to a large sample of 14,062 employees from 16 countries and examined country-level moderators. We found a consistent positive relationship between the belief in free will and job satisfaction. The relationship was above and beyond other agency constructs (Study 2), mediated by perceived autonomy (Studies 2-3), and stronger in countries with a higher national endorsement of the belief in free will (Study 3). We conclude that free-will beliefs predict outcomes over time and across cultures beyond other agency constructs. We call for more cross-cultural and longitudinal studies examining free-will beliefs as predictors of real-life outcomes.
    33. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  33. Is compatibilism intuitive?Daniel Lim & Ju Chen - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):878-897.
    Eddy Nahmias, with various collaborators, has used experimental data to argue for the claim that folk intuition is generally compatibilist. We try to undermine this claim in two ways. First, we argue that the various formulations of determinism he uses are not conceptually equivalent, jeopardizing the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from the resulting data. Second, prompted by these conceptual worries we supplement the typical quantitative surveys that dominate the extant literature with short qualitative interviews. This, in turn, guides us to make a minor modification to the quantitative survey that provides better access to the relevant folk intuitions.
    34. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  34. Thinking in Action.Evangelos D. Protopapadakis & Georgios Arabatzis (eds.) - 2018 - Athens, Greece: The NKUA Applied Philosophy Research Lab Press.
    Action can only be spontaneous and impulsive if not guided by contemplation; contemplation, on the other hand, may only be luxurious playfulness if not either purposed - or suitable - to motivate action. This volume seeks to prove what may seem self-evident to common sense, but adhering to common sense is never pointless nor excessive. Next to this, Thinking in Action is the offspring of friendship, respect and commitment between two academic communities, the Hellenic and the Serbian philosophical communities, that admittedly have a lot in common, especially with regard to philosophy, and hopefully as many differences as needed in order to secure a long-lasting and fertile exchange of ideas; it is also the natural-born child of necessity: philosophy is about argumentation, debate and confrontation. Thinking in Action inaugurates Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series that entertains no hesitation in being as ambitious as any philosophical series could be: it seeks to establish a permanent, wide and rich channel of fruitful philosophical interaction between the two philosophical communities. Having high aspirations is one thing; meeting these aspirations as well as the expectations of the reader is a totally different one. We wish Thinking in Action, the first volume of the Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series, apart from being the initial step of a long journey, will also be a fascinating one to the reader.
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  35. Free will beliefs predict attitudes toward unethical behavior and criminal punishment.Nathan D. Martin, Davide Rigoni & Kathleen D. Vohs - 2017 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (28):7325-7330.
    Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables.
    36. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  36. Effects of Manipulation on Attributions of Causation, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility.Dylan Murray & Tania Lombrozo - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (2):447-481.
    If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome.
    37. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  37. Neuroscientific Prediction and the Intrusion of Intuitive Metaphysics.David Rose, Wesley Buckwalter & Shaun Nichols - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (2):482-502.
    How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free will.
    38. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  38. The folk psychological roots of free will.Joshua Shepherd - 2017 - In David Rose (ed.), Experimental Metaphysics. Bloomsbury Academic.
    First, what are the psychological roots of our concept of free will? Second, how might progress on the first question contribute to progress regarding normative debates about the proper concept of free will? In sections two and three I address the first question. Section two discusses recent work in the experimental philosophy of free will, and motivates the study I report in section three. Section four reflects on the second question in light of the reported results. To preview, the results suggest that the psychological structure of our concept of free will is sensitive to three independent features: Liberty, Ensurance, and Consciousness. I argue this supports the view that our concept is incompatibilist more than the view that our concept is compatibilist, and I discuss two proposals regarding the normative upshot. On one proposal, these results might be taken to offer some support to incompatibilism about the proper concept. A second proposal, however, makes room for a much different upshot.
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  39. Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and Millan.James Andow & Florian Cova - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (4):550-566.
    In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy.
    40. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  40. What Do People Find Incompatible With Causal Determinism?Adam Bear & Joshua Knobe - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (8):2025-2049.
    Four studies explored people's judgments about whether particular types of behavior are compatible with determinism. Participants read a passage describing a deterministic universe, in which everything that happens is fully caused by whatever happened before it. They then assessed the degree to which different behaviors were possible in such a universe. Other participants evaluated the extent to which each of these behaviors had various features. We assessed the extent to which these features predicted judgments about whether the behaviors were possible in a deterministic universe. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people's judgments about whether a behavior was compatible with determinism were not predicted by their judgments about whether that behavior relies on physical processes in the brain and body, is uniquely human, is unpredictable, or involves reasoning. Experiment 3, however, found that a distinction between what we call “active” and “passive” behaviors can explain people's judgments. Experiment 4 extended these findings, showing that we can measure this distinction in several ways and that it is robustly predicted by two different cues. Taken together, these results suggest that people carve up mentally guided behavior into two distinct types—understanding one type to be compatible with determinism, but another type to be fundamentally incompatible with determinism.
    41. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  41. Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Derk Pereboom - 2016 - In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Blackwell. pp. 142-57.
    Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases.
    42. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  42. Free Will and Experimental Philosophy.Hoi-Yee Chan, Max Deutsch & Shaun Nichols - 2016 - In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 158–172.
    This chapter highlights the common practice of appealing to lay intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories of free will. These arguments often seem to assume that the purported intuitions in question are not results of error, and the purported intuitions are generalizable to some interesting extent. Some empirical investigations of these two assumptions, including some studies that revealed intra‐personal variation in compatibilist intuitions are reviewed. The chapter examines two popular error theories, the affect Hypothesis and the Bypassing Hypothesis, which take these findings to challenges. With new empirical results, it argues instead that both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions genuinely reflect how people think about free will and moral responsibility. A pluralistic approach of theorizing about free will that allows one to embrace either compatibilism or incompatibilism in different contexts is proposed.
    43. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  43. Experimental philosophy needs to matter: Reply to Andow and Cova.Adam Feltz, Edward T. Cokely & Brittany Nelson - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (4):567-569.
    Nearly a decade of research has provided overwhelming evidence that there is no the folk intuition about many fundamental philosophical questions, just as there is no the gender of human beings or...
    44. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  44. Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility, by Shaun Nichols: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. viii + 188, £25. [REVIEW]Joshua May - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2):416-417.
    45. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  45. Free will evolved for morality and culture.Andrew E. Monroe, Kathleen D. Vohs & Roy F. Baumeister - 2016 - In Arthur G. Miller (ed.), The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. Guilford Publications.
    46. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  46. Einführung in die experimentelle Philosophie.Nikil Mukerji - 2016 - Wilhelm Fink.
    Wie kann ein Experiment zur Beantwortung philosophischer Fragestellungen beitragen? Etwa: Was ist Wissen? Was bedeuten sprachliche Ausdrücke? Haben wir einen freien Willen? Kann man etwas absichtlich tun, ohne es zu beabsichtigen? Vertreter einer jungen philosophischen Bewegung wollen den Fragen ihres Fachs mithilfe empirisch-psychologischer Methoden auf den Grund gehen. Anstatt den Lehnstuhl (»armchair«) aufzusuchen, um sich philosophischen Problemen zu widmen, begeben sich experimentelle Philosophen ins Labor, um mithilfe empirischer Informationen aus Psychologie, Neurowissenschaft und Kognitionswissenschaft philosophische Schlussfolgerungen zu stützen. Die Einführung gibt einen anschaulichen Einblick in das neue Forschungsfeld der XPhi und stellt wichtige experimentelle Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie, Philosophie des Geistes und Handlungstheorie vor. In den Blick genommen wird außerdem die florierende metaphilosophische Debatte, die zwischen experimentellen Philosophen und ihren Kritikern geführt wird.
    47. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  47. 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 assuming that folk intuitions are exclusively either compatibilist or incompatibilist. They also identify a number of important new issues in the empirical study of free-will intuitions.
    48. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  48. When Choices Are Not Personal: The Effect of Statistical and Social Cues on Children's Inferences About the Scope of Preferences.Gil Diesendruck, Shira Salzer, Tamar Kushnir & Fei Xu - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Development 16 (2):370-380.
    Individual choices are commonly taken to manifest personal preferences. The present study investigated whether social and statistical cues influence young children's inferences about the generalizability of preferences. Preschoolers were exposed to either 1 or 2 demonstrators’ selections of objects. The selected objects constituted 18%, 50%, or 100% of all available objects. We found that children took a single demonstrator's choices as indicative only of his or her personal preference. However, when 2 demonstrators made the same selection, then children inferred that it generalized to other agents of the same kind as the original demonstrator's, but not to agents of a different kind. Lastly, only when both demonstrators blatantly violated random selection (i.e., in the 18% condition) did children generalize the preference even to an agent of a different kind. Thus, from a young age, social and statistical cues inform children's naïve sociology.
    49. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  49. Are we Living an Illusion? Folk Intuitions on the Problem of Free Will.Silvia Felletti - 2015 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 6 (1):161-175.
    In recent years, philosophy has witnessed the birth and development of a new research program that has provoked both enthusiasm and strong criticism: Experimental Philosophy. In this contribution, I will briefly examine the new field of experimental philosophy, its purposes and methodologies. I will then summarize some of the objections that have been raised against this research program, and the arguments with which experimental philosophers have used to counter these objections pointing to the usefulness of their studies for philosophy in general. I will then focus on a specific subject that has drawn the attention of experimental philosophers: the problem of free will, its compatibility with determinism, and the related issue of the role of intentionality in action generation. Free will is one of the most ancient and debated problems in philosophy, and also one of the issues on which experimental philosophy methods can be most fruitfully applied, the concepts of free will and of moral responsibility being pervasive in everyday life and grounded in common sense.
    50. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  50. An error theory for compatibilist intuitions.Adam Feltz & Melissa Millan - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (4):529-555.
    One debate in the experimental exploration of everyday judgments about free will is whether most people are compatibilists or incompatibilists. Some recent research suggests that many people who have incompatibilist intuitions are making a mistake; as such, they do not have genuine incompatibilist intuitions. Another worry is whether most people appropriately understand determinism or confuse it with similar, but different, notions such as fatalism. In five studies we demonstrate people distinguish determinism from fatalism. While people overall make this distinction, a large percentage of people still judge that a person who is fated to perform an action is both free and morally responsible for that action. Those who thought that one freely performs and is morally responsible for a fated action had much stronger compatibilist judgments. These data suggest that a substantial percentage of people have “free will no matter what” intuitions. As a result, even though many people may appear to be compatibilist..
    51. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  51. Is Free Will Necessary for Moral Responsibility?: A Case for Rethinking Their Relationship and the Design of Experimental Studies in Moral Psychology.Carrie Figdor & Mark Phelan - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (5):603-627.
    Philosophical tradition has long held that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. We report experimental results that show that the folk do not think free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Our results also suggest that experimental investigation of the relationship is ill served by a focus on incompatibilism versus compatibilism. We propose an alternative framework for empirical moral psychology in which judgments of free will and moral responsibility can vary independently in response to many factors. We also suggest that, in response to some factors, the necessity relation may run from responsibility to free will.
    52. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  52. Commentary on “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism”.Stephen G. Morris - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (6):802-807.
    In “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism,” Deery, Davis, and Carey recommend that experimental philosophers employ a new methodology for determining the extent to which the folk are natural compatibilists about free will and moral responsibility. While I agree that the general methodology that the authors developed holds great promise for improving our understanding of folk attitudes about free will and moral responsibility, I am much less enthusiastic about some of the conclusions that they reached on the basis of the particular studies they ran. Key among these are that the folk harbor some compatibilist intuitions and that the findings of both Nichols and Knobe , on the one hand, and Nahmias and Murray , on the other, are undermined by their reliance upon a particular formulation of determinism in the cases they presented to their subjects.
    53. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  53. Experimental Philosophy, Robert Kane, and the Concept of Free Will.J. Neil Otte - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 3 (1):281-296.
    Trends in experimental philosophy have provided new and compelling results that are cause for re-evaluations in contemporary discussions of free will. In this paper, I argue for one such re-evaluation by criticizing Robert Kane’s well-known views on free will. I argue that Kane’s claims about pre-theoretical intuitions are not supported by empirical findings on two accounts. First, it is unclear that either incompatibilism or compatibalism is more intuitive to nonphilosophers, as different ways of asking about free will and responsibility reveal different answers. Secondly, I discuss how a study by Josh May supporting a cluster concept of free will may provide ethicists with a reason to give up a definitional model, and I discuss a direction future work might take. Both of these objections come from a larger project concerned with understanding the cognitive mechanisms that people employ when they make judgments about agency and responsibility—a project that promises not only to challenge contemporary philosophy, but to inform it.
    54. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  54. Neuroscientific Prediction and the Intrusion of Intuitive Metaphysics.David Rose, Wesley Buckwalter & Shaun Nichols - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (7).
    How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free will.
    55. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  55. Consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility: Taking the folk seriously.Joshua Shepherd - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (7):929-946.
    In this paper, I offer evidence that folk views of free will and moral responsibility accord a central place to consciousness. In sections 2 and 3, I contrast action production via conscious states and processes with action in concordance with an agent's long-standing and endorsed motivations, values, and character traits. Results indicate that conscious action production is considered much more important for free will than is concordance with motivations, values, and character traits. In section 4, I contrast the absence of consciousness with the presence of consciousness in behaviorally identical agents. Most participants attribute free will to conscious agents, but not to nonconscious agents. Focusing in particular on two leading views of free will and moral responsibility, namely, Deep Self and Reasons-Responsive Views, I argue that these results present philosophers of mind and action with the following explanatory burden: develop a substantive theory of the connection between consciousness on the on..
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  56. Incompatibilism and "Bypassed" Agency.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - In Alfred R. Mele (ed.), Surrounding Free Will. Oxford University Press. pp. 95–112.
    Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have recently argued that when people take agents to lack responsibility in deterministic scenarios, they do so because they take agents’ beliefs, desires and decisions to be bypassed, having no effect on their actions. This might seem like an improbable mistake, but the Bypass Hypothesis is bolstered by intriguing experimental data. Moreover, if the hypothesis is correct, it provides a straightforward error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. This chapter argues that the Bypass Hypothesis, although promising and potentially highly significant, does not provide the best explanation of the data. Results from two new studies strongly suggest that subjects with incompatibilist intuitions do not take determinism to imply that belief, desires, and decisions are bypassed. Together with an independently motivated account of judgments of moral responsibility, the Explanation Hypothesis, they instead suggest, first, that subjects have incompatibilist intuitions because they see agents in deterministic scenarios from an explanatory perspective in which mental states and decisions provide no independent input into what happens, and, second, that this explains why subjects seem to think that these states and decisions are causally bypassed. The results also undermine the suggestion, by David Rose and Shaun Nichols, that subjects make what seems like bypass judgments because they take determinism to exclude he existence of decisions.
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  57. Frankfurt-Style Cases User Manual: Why Frankfurt-Style Enabling Cases Do Not Necessitate Tech Support.Florian Cova - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3):505-521.
    ‘Frankfurt-style cases’ (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy (J Philos 105:223–239, 2008) has recently argued that FSCs fail because we are not entitled to suppose that the agent is morally responsible, given that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make an agent lose responsibility-grounding abilities. Here, I distinguish two kinds of Frankfurt counter-arguments against the PAP: the direct and the indirect counter-arguments. I then argue that Levy’s argument, if valid, can shed doubt on the indirect argument but leaves the direct argument untouched. I conclude that FSCs can still do their job, even if we grant that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener can modify an agent’s abilities.
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  58. Experimental Philosophy and the Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism: A Survey.Florian Cova & Yasuko Kitano - 2014 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 22:17-37.
    The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the existing empirical evidence seems to support the view that most people have compatibilist intuitions.
    59. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  59. Free will is about choosing: The link between choice and the belief in free will.Gilad Feldman, Roy Baumeister & Kin Fai Wong - 2014 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55:239-245.
    Expert opinions have yielded a wide and controversial assortment of conceptions of free will, but laypersons seem to associate free will more simply with making choices. We found that the more strongly people believed in free will, the more they liked making choices, the higher they rated their ability to make decisions (Study 1), the less difficult they perceived making decisions, and the more satisfied they were with their decisions (Study 2). High free will belief was also associated with more spontaneous associating of choice with freedom, and with the perception of actions as choices. Recalling choices (Study 3) and making choices (Study 4) led to a stronger endorsement of the belief in free will, with an additional effect for the level of choice involved. These findings suggest that the everyday social reality of beliefs about free will is a matter of how people think and feel about choice.
    60. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  60. Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis.Adam Feltz & Florian Cova - 2014 - Consciousness and Cognition 30 (C):234-246.
    Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a metaanalysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.
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  61. Free Will and the Scientific Vision.Joshua Knobe - 2014 - In Edouard Machery & Elizabeth O'Neill (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    A review of existing work in experimental philosophy on intuitions about free will. The paper argues that people ordinarily understand free human action, not as something that is caused by psychological states (beliefs, desires, etc.) but as something that completely transcends the normal causal order.
    62. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  62. On the very concept of free will.Joshua May - 2014 - Synthese 191 (12):2849-2866.
    Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support for this hypothesis, including some experimental data gathered by probing the judgments of non-specialists.
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  63. Free Will and Substance Dualism: The Real Scientific Threat to Free Will?Alfred Mele - 2014 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4. MIT Press.
    Mele uses survey methods of experimental philosophy to argue that folk notions of freedom and responsibility do not really require any dubious mind–body dualism. In his comment, Nadelhoffer questions Mele's interpretation of the experiments and adds contrary data of his own. Vargas then suggests that Mele overlooks yet another threat to free will—sourcehood. Mele replies by reinterpreting Nadelhoffer's data and rejecting Vargas’ claim that free will requires sourcehood.
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  64. Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience.Alfred R. Mele (ed.) - 2014 - New York: Oup Usa.
    This cutting-edge volume showcases work supported by a four-year, 4.4 million dollar project on free will and science. In fourteen new articles and an introduction, contributors explore the subject of free will from the perspectives of neuroscience; social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; and philosophy.
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  65. Explaining Away Incompatibilist Intuitions.Dylan Murray & Eddy Nahmias - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2):434-467.
    The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’.
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  66. 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 of people’s associated beliefs and attitudes about free will, determinism, choice, the soul, predictability, responsibility, and punishment. Having presented the construction and validation of FWI, we discuss several ways that it could be used in future research, highlight some as yet unanswered questions that are ripe for interdisciplinary investigation, and encourage researchers to join us in our efforts to answer these questions.
    67. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  67. Is Free Will an Illusion? Confronting Challenges from the Modern Mind Sciences.Eddy Nahmias - 2014 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: Freedom and Responsibility. MIT Press.
    In this chapter I consider various potential challenges to free will from the modern mind sciences. After motivating the importance of considering these challenges, I outline the argument structure for such challenges: they require simultaneously establishing a particular condition for free will and an empirical challenge to that condition. I consider several potential challenges: determinism, naturalism, and epiphenomenalism, and explain why none of these philosophical challenges is bolstered by new discoveries from neuroscience and psychology. I then respond to relevant empirical challenges to the role of consciousness and rationality in action.
    68. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  68. It’s OK if ‘my brain made me do it’: People’s intuitions about free will and neuroscientific prediction.Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard & Shane Reuter - 2014 - Cognition 133 (2):502-516.
    In recent years, a number of prominent scientists have argued that free will is an illusion, appealing to evidence demonstrating that information about brain activity can be used to predict behavior before people are aware of having made a decision. These scientists claim that the possibility of perfect prediction based on neural information challenges the ordinary understanding of free will. In this paper we provide evidence suggesting that most people do not view the possibility of neuro-prediction as a threat to free will unless it also raises concerns about manipulation of the agent’s behavior. In Experiment 1 two scenarios described future brain imaging technology that allows perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on earlier neural activity, and this possibility did not undermine most people’s attributions of free will or responsibility, except in the scenario that also allowed manipulation. In Experiment 2 the scenarios increased the salience of the physicalist implications of neuro-prediction, while in Experiment 3 the scenarios suggested dualism, with perfect prediction by mindreaders. The patterns of results for these two experiments were similar to the results in Experiment 1, suggesting that participants do not understand free will to require specific metaphysical conditions regarding the mind–body relation. Most people seem to understand free will in a way that is not threatened by perfect prediction based on neural information, suggesting that they believe that just because “my brain made me do it,” that does not mean that I didn’t do it of my own free will.
    69. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  69. A Naturalistic Vision of Free Will.Eddy Nahmias & Morgan Thompson - 2014 - In Elizabeth O'Neill & Edouard Machery (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    We argue, contra Joshua Knobe in a companion chapter, that most people have an understanding of free will and responsible agency that is compatible with a naturalistic vision of the human mind. Our argument is supported by results from a new experimental philosophy study showing that most people think free will is consistent with complete and perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on prior activity in the brain (a scenario adapted from Sam Harris who predicts most people will find it inconsistent with free will). We explain why most people are "theory-lite" about the nature of mind and free will--they are not committed to substantive theories of the underlying causal structure of mind, such as Knobe's "transcendence vision". Rather, we suggest a "causal competition principle"--that an agent's actions will be deemed unfree when they are perceived to be fully caused by factors that do not include her reasons. This principle explains why people, including some scientists, perceive neuroscientific explanations as threatening free will when they are described in terms of neural processes fully causing actions to the exclusion of agents' reasons or reasoning processes.
    70. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  70. Manipulating Morality: Third‐Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning.Jonathan Phillips & Alex Shaw - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (8):1320-1347.
    The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent.
    71. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  71. From Intentions to Neurons: Social and Neural Consequences of Disbelieving in Free Will.Davide Rigoni & Marcel Brass - 2014 - Topoi 33 (1):5-12.
    The problem of free will is among the most fascinating and disputed questions throughout the history of philosophy and psychology. Traditionally limited to philosophical and theological debate, in the last decades it has become a matter of scientific investigation. The theoretical and methodological advances in neuroscience allowed very complex psychological functions related to free will (conscious intentions, decision-making, and agency) to be investigated. In parallel, neuroscience is gaining momentum in the media, and various scientific findings are claimed to provide evidence that free will is nothing more than an illusion. Why do neuroscientific findings have such a strong impact on our notion of free will? Does it really matter what neuroscience tells us about free will? Here we critically examine studies in experimental philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that attempt to provide an empirical answer to these questions. This overview of the literature demonstrates that inducing disbelief in free will has an impact on folk psychology, social behavior and intentional action.
    72. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  72. Experimentální filosofie o otázce kompatibility svobodné vůle s determinismem.Kateřina Šimáčková - 2014 - Pro-Fil:36-49.
    Jednou z důležitých otázek týkajících se svobodné vůle je tzv. otázka kompatibility. Táže se, zda jsou svobodná vůle a morální zodpovědnost slučitelné s platností determinismu. Existuje řada postojů k dané problematice. Na jedné straně se můžeme setkat s inkompatibilismem, který tvrdí, že svobodná vůle a morální zodpovědnost nejsou kompatibilní s kauzálním determinismem (ať již mluvíme o libertariánství či přísném determinismu), na straně druhé máme kompatibilismus, který se sloučením těchto dvou koncepcí nemá problém. Můj zájem je zaměřen pouze na současnou debatu týkající se svobodné vůle, která prozatím nedošla k jednotné odpovědi na danou otázku. Jedním ze způsobů podpory stanovisek (ať již jedné či druhé strany) je odkaz na jejich intuitivnost. Lidské intuice jsou ale empiricky testovatelné, proč tedy tvrzení filosofů neověřit? Tuto otázku si pokládají zástupci poměrně mladého filosofického směru, kterým je experimentální filosofie. Ta ve svém znaku nese hořící křeslo, aby demonstrovala vymezení vůči závěrům získaným skrze čistě apriorní přístup a snahu o empirická přezkoumání dosavadních poznatků filosofie. Za pomoci experimentálních metod se zástupci experimentální filosofie snaží mapovat intuice laiků (tedy nefilosofů), kteří nejsou zatíženi teoretickými závazky jako samotní filosofové, a nedochází tudíž k nechtěnému zkreslení výsledků. Mým cílem je představit výsledky experimentální filosofie ohledně otázky kompatibility. Aby to bylo možné, je nutné se zběžně seznámit se základními odpověďmi na otázku kompatibility. Dále shrnu nejvýznamnější experimenty, které do dané diskuse přispěly. Chci zároveň poukázat, že debata experimentálních filosofů nabrala velice rychle svébytného směru, čímž, dle mého názoru, má potenciál původní diskusi posunout a obohatit.
    73. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  73. Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention.Tamler Sommers - 2014 - In J. Clausen & Neil Levy (eds.), Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. pp. 273-286.
    This chapter reviews and then criticizes the dominant approach that experimental philosophers have adopted in their studies on free will and moral responsibility. Section “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will” reviews the experimental literature and the shared approach: probing for intuitions about the so-called compatibility question, whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Section “The Intervention” argues that this experimental focus on the compatibility question is fundamentally misguided. The critique develops in the form of a dialogue: a staged “intervention” for an experimental philosopher who works on free will. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the literature can move in a more fruitful direction.
    74. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  74. Social Explanations and the Free Will Problem.Manuel Vargas - 2014 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4: Free Will and Moral Responsibility. pp. 403-411.
    There is strikingly little agreement across academic fields about the existence of free will, what experimental results show, and even what the term ‘free will’ means. In Lee and Harris’ “A Social Perspective on Debates About Free Will” the authors argue that group identities and their attendant social rewards are part of the problem. As they portray it, “different philosophical stances create social groups and inherent conflict, hindering interdisciplinary intellectual exploration on the question of free will because people incorporate their support for a particular stance into their identity” (ms 1). Lee and Harris’ exciting approach downplays the stated basis of academic disagreements, instead looking to social phenomena to explain why academic theorists adopt their positions. In particular, they argue that (1) philosophical convictions are structured by social group membership, and (2) the way such groups operate disfavors alternative philosophical commitments on free will.
    75. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  75. The Effect of What We Think may Happen on our Judgments of Responsibility.Felipe De Brigard & William J. Brady - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2):259-269.
    Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while those of the second kind are processed by an abstract cognitive system. The current paper reports the results of three studies exploring whether or not considerations about possible future consequences of holding an agent responsible at a present time affect people’s judgments of responsibility. The results obtained suggest first that the concrete system does not produce compatibilist judgments of responsibility unconditionally, even when facing appropriately mechanistic, reductionistic, emotionally loaded and concretely worded deterministic scenarios. Second, these results suggest that considerations about possible future consequences for innocent third parties that may follow as a result of holding an agent responsible affect people’s judgment as to whether or not the agent is responsible for what she did. Finally, it is proposed that these results compliment extant evidence on the so-called “Side-effect effect”, as they suggest that emotional reactions toward possible future side effects influence people’s judgment of responsibility. The impact of these results for philosophy and moral psychology is discussed.
    76. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  76. Phenomenal Abilities: Incompatibilism and the Experience of Agency.Oisín Deery, Matthew S. Bedke & Shaun Nichols - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 126–50.
    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.
    77. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  77. Pereboom and premises: Asking the right questions in the experimental philosophy of free will.Adam Feltz - 2013 - Consciousness and Cognition 22 (1):53-63.
    Sommers (2010) argues that experimental philosophers of free will have largely been asking the wrong question – the question whether philosophically naïve individuals think that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. The present studies begin to alleviate this concern by testing the intuitive plausibility of Pereboom’s (2001) four case argument. The general pattern of responses from two experiments does not support Pereboom’s predictions. Moreover, those who were high in the personality trait emotional stability tended to judge that manipulated agents were more free and morally responsible compared to individuals low in emotional stability.
    78. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  78. What Makes an Intuition a Compatibilist Intuition? A Response to Sripada.Moti Gorin - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1205-1215.
    So-called “manipulation arguments” have played a significant role in recent debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Incompatibilists take such arguments to show that agents who lack ultimate control over their characters or actions are not free. Most compatibilists agree that manipulated agents are not free but think this is because certain of the agent’s psychological capacities have been compromised. Chandra Sekhar Sripada has conducted an interesting study in which he applies an array of statistical tools to subjects’ intuitive responses to a manipulation case, and he insists that the results of his study provide compelling evidence that people favor compatibilist views of freedom. I argue that because the case that forms the centerpiece of his study is relevantly different from the sort of cases incompatibilists have developed and because he fails to build deterministic conditions into this case, Sripada’s data cannot help settle the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists.
    79. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  79. The Lesson of Bypassing.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4):599-619.
    The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition.
    80. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  80. Experimental evidence for free will revisionism.Chris Weigel - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (1):31 - 43.
    Philosophers who theorize about whether free will is compatible with causal determinism often rely on ordinary intuitions to bolster their theory. A revisionist theory of free will takes a different approach, saying that the best philosophical theory of what we ought to think about free will conflicts with what we ordinarily do think about free will. I contend that revisionism has not been taken as seriously as should be because philosophers have not realized the extent to which ordinary intuitions are inconsistent. I present an experiment that gives empirical evidence for revisionism. The experiment shows that, in spite of the fact that the ?is compatible with? relation is symmetric, folk intuitions change as a function of whether we ask ?Is determinism compatible with free will?? versus ?Is free will compatible with determinism?? The paper explores possible explanations for why folk intuitions do not mirror the symmetry of the ?is compatible with? relation, but regardless of which of these explanations is correct, I argue that we must be revisionists in at least this sense: what we ought to believe about free will cannot include everything we do believe about free will.
    81. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  81. A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):611-639.
    Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.
    82. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  82. Judgments about moral responsibility and determinism in patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia: Still compatibilists.Florian Cova, Maxime Bertoux, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & Bruno Dubois - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):851-864.
    Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data.
    83. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  83. The Empirical Psychological Perspectives on Free Will.Rui Dong, Kai-Ping Peng, Feng Yu & Ruo-Qiao Zheng - 2012 - Advances in Psychological Science 20 (11):1869-1878.
    Free will is one of the oldest and most debated topics in the history of philosophy. Both positivist philosophy and humanist philosophy considered the problem of free will to be the most difficult issues to untangle. In recent years, psychologists have begun to apply the methods of empirical science to study the psychological mechanism, impact and expression of free will. The general consensus is that free will is an illusion, but people still believe in its existence. Free will has been found closely related to moral responsibility, moral behavior, creativity, self-esteem and subjective well-being. Future research should define free will in more psychological sense, and to explore the generation mechanism and function of free will in everyday life. Theoretical and methodological advances are need to extend our understanding of free will and its psychological impacts to human being.
    84. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  84. Free will, causes, and decisions: Individual differences in written reports.Adam Feltz, A. Perez & M. Harris - 2012 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (9-10):166-189.
    We present evidence indicating new individual differences with people's intuitions about the relation of determinism to freedom and moral responsibility. We analysed participants' written explanations of why a person acted. Participants offered one of either 'decision' or 'causal' based explanations of behaviours in some paradigmatic cases. Those who gave causal explanations tended to have more incompatibilist intuitions than those who gave decision explanations. Importantly, the affective content of a scenario influenced the type of explanation given. Scenarios containing highly affective actions (e.g. murder) tended to generate more decision explanations than scenarios with low affective content (e.g. cheating on taxes). These results give important clues about the proximal processes generating some intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.
    85. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  85. Intuitivamente liberi: il contributo della filosofia sperimentale al dibattito sul libero arbitrio.Consuelo Luverà - 2012 - Modena: Mucchi.
    86. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  86. Explaining the Abstract/Concrete Paradoxes in Moral Psychology: The NBAR Hypothesis.Eric Mandelbaum & David Ripley - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3):351-368.
    For some reason, participants hold agents more responsible for their actions when a situation is described concretely than when the situation is described abstractly. We present examples of this phenomenon, and survey some attempts to explain it. We divide these attempts into two classes: affective theories and cognitive theories. After criticizing both types of theories we advance our novel hypothesis: that people believe that whenever a norm is violated, someone is responsible for it. This belief, along with the familiar workings of cognitive dissonance theory, is enough to not only explain all of the abstract/concrete paradoxes, but also explains seemingly unrelated effects, like the anthropomorphization of malfunctioning inanimate objects.
    87. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  87. The Indeterminist Intuition.Shaun Nichols - 2012 - The Monist 95 (2):290-307.
    Evidence from experimental philosophy indicates that people think that their choices are not determined. What remains unclear is why people think this. Denying determinism is rather presumptuous given people’s general ignorance about the nature of the universe. In this paper, I’ll argue that the belief in indeterminism depends on a default presumption that we know the factors that influence our decision making. That presumption was reasonable at earlier points in intellectual history. But in light of work in cognitive science, we are no longer justified in sustaining the presupposition that we know what influences our choices. As a result, I’ll suggest, our belief in indeterminist choice is unjustified.
    88. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  88. Neuroscience, Choice, and the Free Will Debate.Jason Shepard & Shane Reuter - 2012 - American Journal of Bioethics - Neuroscience 3 (3):7-11.
    A number of scientists have recently argued that neuroscience provides strong evidence against the requirements of the folk notion of free will. In one such line of argumentation, it is claimed that choice is required for free will, and neuroscience is showing that people do not make choices. In this article, we argue that this no-choice line of argumentation relies on a specific conception of choice. We then provide evidence that people do not share the conception of choice required of the argument, nor do people hold that free will requires the conception of choice on which the argument relies. This leaves the proponents of the no-choice argument with a dilemma: Either they adopt a conception of choice that is not required of the folk concept of free will and thus they cease to be talking about the folk concept of free will, or they adopt a conception of choice that aligns with the folk concept of choice and thus the no-choice argument fails.
    89. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  89. Free Will and Consciousness: Experimental Studies.Joshua Shepherd - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):915-927.
    What are the folk-conceptual connections between free will and consciousness? In this paper I present results which indicate that consciousness plays central roles in folk conceptions of free will. When conscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent acted freely. And when unconscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent did not act freely. Further, these studies contribute to recent experimental work on folk philosophical affiliation, which analyzes folk responses to determine whether folk views are consistent with the view that free will and determinism are incompatible (incompatibilism) or with the opposite view (compatibilism). Conscious causation of behavior tends to elicit pro-free will judgments, even when the causation takes place deterministically. Thus, when controlling for consciousness, many folk seem to be compatibilists. However, participants who disagree with the deterministic or cognitive scientific descriptions given of human behavior tend to give incompatibilist responses.
    90. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  90. New waves in philosophy of action.Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.) - 2011 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Andrei A. Buckareff is Assistant Professor at Marist College, USA --.
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  91. Experimental Philosophy and the Concept of Moral Responsibility.Alicia Finch - 2011 - Modern Schoolman 88 (1/2):146-160.
    In recent years, so-called experimental philosophers have argued that participants in the moral responsibility debate ought to adopt a new methodology. In particular, they argue, the results of experimental surveys ought to be introduced into the debate.According to the experimental philosophers, these surveys are philosophically rel- evant because they provide information about the moral responsibility judgments that ordinary people make. Moreover, they argue, an account of moral responsibility is satisfactory only if it is tightly con- nected to ordinary judgments. The purpose of this paper is to under- mine this argument. I will argue that experimental philosophers have not adequately acknowledged the distinction between metaphysics and conceptual analysis; they have not carefully distinguished what-it-is- to-be morally responsible from the concept of moral responsibility. I will draw this distinction, and then argue that metaphysicians qua metaphysicians may both ignore experimental data and offer an account of moral responsibility that satisfies the tight connection desideratum.
    92. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  92. Experimental Philosophy and the Concept of Moral Responsibility.Alicia Finch - 2011 - Modern Schoolman 88 (1-2):145-160.
    In recent years, so-called experimental philosophers have argued that participants in the moral responsibility debate ought to adopt a new methodology. In particular, they argue, the results of experimental surveys ought to be introduced into the debate. According to the experimental philosophers, these surveys are philosophically relevant because they provide information about the moral responsibility judgments that ordinary people make. Moreover, they argue, anaccount of moral responsibility is satisfactory only if it is tightly connected to ordinary judgments. The purpose of this paper is to undermine this argument. I will argue that experimental philosophers have not adequately acknowledged the distinction between metaphysics and conceptual analysis; they have not carefully distinguished what-it-is-to-be morally responsible from the concept of moral responsibility. I will draw this distinction, and then argue that metaphysicians quametaphysicians may both ignore experimental data and offer an account of moral responsibility that satisfies the tight connection desideratum.
    93. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  93. Free Will and the Bounds of the Self.Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols - 2011 - In Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford University Press.
    If you start taking courses in contemporary cognitive science, you will soon encounter a particular picture of the human mind. This picture says that the mind is a lot like a computer. Specifically, the mind is made up of certain states and certain processes. These states and processes interact, in accordance with certain general rules, to generate specific behaviors. If you want to know how those states and processes got there in the first place, the only answer is that they arose through the interaction of other states and processes, which arose from others... until, ultimately, the chain goes back to factors in our genes and our environment. Hence, one can explain human behavior just by positing a collection of mental states and psychological processes and discussing the ways in which these states and processes interact. This picture of the mind sometimes leaves people feeling deeply uncomfortable. They find themselves thinking something like: 'If the mind actually does work like that, it seems like we could never truly be morally responsible for anything we did. After all, we would never be free to choose any behavior other than the one we actually performed. Our behaviors would just follow inevitably from certain facts about the configuration of the states and processes within us.' Many philosophers think that this sort of discomfort is fundamentally confused or wrongheaded. They think that the confusion here can be cleared up just by saying something like: 'Wait! It doesn't make any sense to say that the interaction of these states and processes is preventing you from controlling your own life. The thing you are forgetting is that the interaction of these states and processes – this whole complex system described by cognitive science – is simply you. So when you learn that these states and processes control your behavior, all you are learning is that you are controlling your behavior. There is no reason at all to see these discoveries as a threat to your freedom or responsibility.'2 Philosophers may regard this argument as a powerful one, perhaps even irrefutable..
    94. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  94. Intuitions about Free Will, Determinism, and Bypassing.Eddy Nahmias - 2011 - In Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will: Second Edition. Oxford University Press.
    It is often called “the problem of free will and determinism,” as if the only thing that might challenge free will is determinism and as if determinism is obviously a problem. The traditional debates about free will have proceeded accordingly. Typically, incompatibilists about free will and determinism suggest that their position is intuitive or commonsensical, such that compatibilists have the burden of showing how, despite appearances, the problem of determinism is not really a problem. Compatibilists, in turn, tend to proceed as if showing that determinism is not a problem thereby shows that we have free will, as if determinism is the only thing that might threaten free will. In this chapter, I reject both of these elements of the traditional debate; the question of whether we have free will should neither begin nor end with the so-called problem of determinism. I present and discuss evidence from a variety of studies that suggests that incompatibilism is not particularly intuitive. Most people do not have to be talked out of incompatibilism but rather talked into it. This provides some reasons—though certainly not decisive reasons—to think that compatibilism is true. I conclude by pointing out that, even if compatibilism were true, it would not dissolve the problem of free will, because there are problems other than determinism that need to be confronted—namely, challenges to free will suggested by current and “future science,” including neuroscience and psychology. The threats to free will suggested by these sciences are distinct from the traditional threat of determinism, and they are the ones that “ordinary persons” find intuitively threatening to free will. In fact, I will argue that the reason incompatibilism about free will and determinism appears to be intuitive is that determinism is often and easily misunderstood to involve these distinct threats to free will—threats that suggest that our rational, conscious mental activity is bypassed in the process of our making decisions and coming to act.
    95. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  95. Experimental Philosophy and the Problem of Free Will.Shaun Nichols - 2011 - Science 331 (6023):1401-1403.
    Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.
    96. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  96. Apparent Paradoxes in Moral Reasoning; Or how you forced him to do it, even though he wasn’t forced to do it.Jonathan Phillips & Liane Young - 2011 - Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society:138-143.
    The importance of situational constraint for moral evaluations is widely accepted in philosophy, psychology, and the law. However, recent work suggests that this relationship is actually bidirectional: moral evaluations can also influence our judgments of situational constraint. For example, if an agent is thought to have acted immorally rather than morally, that agent is often judged to have acted with greater freedom and under less situational constraint. Moreover, when considering interpersonal situations, we judge that an agent who forces another to act immorally (versus morally) uses more force. These two features can result in contradictory response patterns in which participants judge both that (1) a forcer forced a forcee to act and (2) the forcee was not forced by the forcer to act. Here, we characterize potential psychological mechanisms, in particular, “moral focus” and counterfactual reasoning that account for this paradoxical pattern of judgments.
    97. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  97. What Makes a Manipulated Agent Unfree?Chandra Sekhar Sripada - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3):563-593.
    Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will.
    98. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  98. Free will in everyday life: Autobiographical accounts of free and unfree actions.Tyler F. Stillman, Roy F. Baumeister & Alfred R. Mele - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (3):381 - 394.
    What does free will mean to laypersons? The present investigation sought to address this question by identifying how laypersons distinguish between free and unfree actions. We elicited autobiographical narratives in which participants described either free or unfree actions, and the narratives were subsequently subjected to impartial analysis. Results indicate that free actions were associated with reaching goals, high levels of conscious thought and deliberation, positive outcomes, and moral behavior (among other things). These findings suggest that lay conceptions of free will fit well with the view that free will is a form of action control.
    99. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  99. Distance, anger, freedom: An account of the role of abstraction in compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions.Chris Weigel - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (6):803 - 823.
    Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.
    100. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  100. The Paradox of Moral Focus.Liane Young & Jonathan Phillips - 2011 - Cognition 119 (2):166-178.
    When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent (“forcer”) forces another agent (“forcee”) to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the “forcer” and the “forcee.” Paradoxically, participants judged that the “forcer” forced the “forcee” to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the “forcee” was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants’ focus from one agent to another (forcer vs. forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee.
    101. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  101. Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will * By ALFRED R. MELE. [REVIEW]G. Botterill - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):395-398.
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
    102. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  102. Responsibility.Joshua Knobe & John M. Doris - 2010 - In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    A great deal of fascinating research has gone into an attempt to uncover the fundamental criteria that people use when assigning moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it seems that most existing accounts fall prey to one counterexample or another. The underlying problem, we suggest, is that there simply isn't any single system of criteria that people apply in all cases of responsibility attribution. Instead, it appears that people use quite different criteria in different kinds of cases. [This paper was originally circulated under the title 'Strawsonian Variations.'].
    103. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  103. From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will.Andrew E. Monroe & Bertram F. Malle - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):211-224.
    People’s concept of free will is often assumed to be incompatible with the deterministic, scientific model of the universe. Indeed, many scholars treat the folk concept of free will as assuming a special form of nondeterministic causation, possibly the notion of uncaused causes. However, little work to date has directly probed individuals’ beliefs about what it means to have free will. The present studies sought to reconstruct this folk concept of free will by asking people to define the concept (Study 1) and by confronting them with a neuroscientific claim that free will is an illusion (Study 2), which invited them to either reconcile or contrast free will with determinism. The results suggest that the core of people’s concept of free will is a choice that fulfills one’s desires and is free from internal or external constraints. No evidence was found for metaphysical assumptions about dualism or indeterminism.
    104. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  104. Experimental Philosophy on Free Will: An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions.Eddy Nahmias & Dylan Murray - 2010 - In Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.), New waves in philosophy of action. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 189--215.
    We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists.
    105. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  105. Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Felipe de Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols & Smita Sirker - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (3):346-358.
    Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.
    106. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  106. Experimental philosophy and free will.Tamler Sommers - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (2):199-212.
    This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the compatibility question, but that their general approach suffers from significant practical and philosophical difficulties. Section 4 reviews experimental work addressing other aspects of the free will/moral responsibility debate, and section 5 concludes with a discussion of avenues for further research.
    107. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  107. Adaptive variation in judgment and philosophical intuition.Edward T. Cokely & Adam Feltz - 2009 - Consciousness and Cognition 18 (1):356-358.
    Our theoretical understanding of individual differences can be used as a tool to test and refine theory. Individual differences are useful because judgments, including philosophically relevant intuitions, are the predictable products of the fit between adaptive psychological mechanisms (e.g., heuristics, traits, skills, capacities) and task constraints. As an illustration of this method and its potential implications, our target article used a canonical, representative, and affectively charged judgment task to reveal a relationship between the heritable personality trait extraversion and some compatabilist judgments. In the current Reply, we further clarify major theoretical implications of these data and outline potential opportunities and obstacles for this methodology. Discussion focuses on (1) the need for theoretically grounded a priori predictions; (2) the use of precise process level data and theory; (3) the possibility of convergent validity as personality is known to predict life experiences and outcomes; and (4) the fundamentally adaptive nature of cognition.
    108. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  108. Compatibilism vs. Incompatibilism: An Integrated Approach from Participant Stance and Affect.Sharmistha Dhar - 2009 - Logos Architekton 3 (1):247-269.
    Following the recent surge in experimental philosophy exploring how unprimed intuitions enable the folk arrive at judgments concerning free will and moral responsibility, a widespread anomaly in folk intuitions has been reported. This has given rise to two different explanatory frameworks- one counting on affect that has been projected as making all the difference between compatibilism and Incompatibilism and the other relying on Strawsonian participant attitude while accounting for compatibilist responses. The aim of this paper is to bring to the fore the asymmetric folk intuitions regarding ascription of moral responsibility, the expository accounts- one put forward by Shaun Nichols and the other by Eddy Nahmias, and show possibility of reconciliation between the two apparently different views, especially when it comes to unravelling the psychological mechanism underlying compatibilist intuition.
    109. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  109. Do judgments about freedom and responsibility depend on who you are? Personality differences in intuitions about compatibilism and incompatibilism.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2009 - Consciousness and Cognition 18 (1):342-350.
    Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable.
    110. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  110. Natural compatibilism versus natural incompatibilism: Back to the drawing board.Adam Feltz, Edward T. Cokely & Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (1):1-23.
    In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. These studies also illustrate some problems that pertain to all of the studies that have been run thus far.
    111. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  111. explaining Compatibilist Intuitions About Moral Responsibility: A Critique Of Nichols And Knobe's Performance Error Model.Scott Kimbrough - 2009 - Florida Philosophical Review 9 (2):38-55.
    Experimental philosophy studies show that ordinary people have conflicting moral intuitions: when asked about events in a deterministic universe, respondents exhibit compatibilist intuitions about vignettes describing concrete actions, but they have incompatibilist intuitions in response to more abstract queries. Nichols and Knobe maintain that concrete compatibilist intuitions should be explained as emotion-induced performance errors in the psychological process of moral judgment. Their theory is criticized in two main ways. First, they fail to establish that the role of emotion in generating compatibilist intuitions justifies the charge of performance error. Second, doubts are raised about the reliability of the psychological processes that generate incompatibilist intuitions.
    112. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  112. Temperament and intuition: A commentary on Feltz and Cokely.Thomas Nadelhoffer, Trevor Kvaran & Eddy Nahmias - 2009 - Consciousness and Cognition 18 (1):351-355.
    In this paper, we examine Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely’s recent claim that “the personality trait extraversion predicts people’s intuitions about the relationship of determinism to free will and moral responsibility”. We will first present some criticisms of their work before briefly examining the results of a recent study of our own. We argue that while Feltz and Cokely have their finger on the pulse of an interesting and important issue, they have not established a robust and stable connection between extraversion and compatibilist-friendly intuitions.
    113. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  113. Why 'Willusionism' Leads to 'Bad Results': Comments on Baumeister, Crescioni, and Alquist.Eddy Nahmias - 2009 - Neuroethics 4 (1):17-24.
    Drawing on results discussed in the target article by Baumeister et al. (1), I argue that the claim that the modern mind sciences are discovering that free will is an illusion ( willusionism ) is ambiguous and depends on how ordinary people understand free will. When interpreted in ways that the evidence does not justify, the willusionist claim can lead to ‘bad results.’ That is, telling people that free will is an illusion leads people to cheat more, help less, and behave more aggressively, but these responses may be based on people’s interpreting willusionist claims to mean that they lack the powers of rational choice and self-control.
    114. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  114. How can psychology contribute to the free will debate?Shaun Nichols - 2009 - In J. Baer, J. Kaufman & R. Baumeister (eds.), Psychology and Free Will. Oxford University Press.
    Are people free and morally responsible? Or are their actions determined, i.e. inevitable outcomes of the past conditions and the laws of nature? These seem fairly straightforward questions, but it is important to distinguish 3 different dimensions of the free will debate: a descriptive project, a substantive project, and a prescriptive project. In this chapter, I’ll consider how psychology can contribute to each project in turn. First, I should say a bit more about the projects.
    115. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  115. Moral judgments and intuitions about freedom.Jonathan Phillips & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Psychological Inquiry 20 (1):30-36.
    Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cites an elegant study he conducted a number of years ago (Reeder & Spores, 1983). All subjects were given a vignette about a man who goes with his date to a pizza parlor and happens to come across a box that has been designated for charitable donations. In one condition, the man’s date then requests that he make a donation; in the other, she requests that he steal the money that is already in the box. In both conditions, the man chooses to comply with this request. The key question is how subjects will use his behavior to make inferences about whether he is a morally good or morally bad person. The results revealed a marked difference between conditions. When the man donated to charity, subjects were generally disinclined to conclude that he must have been a morally good person. It is as though they were thinking: ‘He didn’t just do this out of the goodness of his heart.
    116. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  116. Determinism: Do Untutored Intuitions Feed the Bugbears?Dhar Sharmistha - 2009 - International Journal on Humanistic Ideology 2 (1):167-189.
    Philosophers have since long been relying on their own intuitions to shore up their own belief about agency and about the possibility of reconciliation with the domain of physical events that seems to be freewheeled by an underlying necessitarian process. In a certain philosophical circle, a trend has now emerged to put unprimed intuitions to test through psychological experiments, in order to figure out whether philosophers should exercise some temperance in bringing their own belief about agency to the fore, and the possible sources of the intuitional dilemma. This paper aims to explore the folk concept of agency and figure out the implications of the extant empirical work for our concept of free will.
    117. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  117. Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe - 2008 - In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oup Usa.
    118. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  118. The Nature, Common Usage, and Implications of Free Will and Determinism.Shirley Matile Ogletree & Crystal D. Oberle - 2008 - Behavior and Philosophy 36:97 - 111.
    Philosophers and psychologists have debated what is meant by free will as well as the nature of human choice. However, only recently have data been gathered to consider common usage of the term; our data support college students' belief in free will as indicating some degree of choice that is not constrained by genetic or environmental factors and as separate from a "soft" determinism perspective. How free will and determinism beliefs relate to other psychological attitudes, such as moral responsibility and tolerance, is also considered.
    119. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  119. Folk intuitions, slippery slopes, and necessary fictions : an essay on Saul Smilansky's free will illusionism.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2007 - In Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Philosophy and the Empirical. Blackwell. pp. 202–213.
    During the past two decades, an interest among philosophers in fictitious and illusory beliefs has sprung up in fields ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus primarily on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—i.e., the purportedly descriptive claim that most people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will, coupled with the normative claim that because dispelling these illusory beliefs would produce negative personal and societal consequences, those of us who happen to know the dangerous and gloomy truth about the non-existence of libertarian free will should simply keep quiet in the name of the common good.
    120. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  120. Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: Experiments on folk intuitions.Eddy Nahmias, D. Justin Coates & Trevor Kvaran - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):214–242.
    In this paper we discuss studies that show that most people do not find determinism to be incompatible with free will and moral responsibility if determinism is described in a way that does not suggest mechanistic reductionism. However, if determinism is described in a way that suggests reductionism, that leads people to interpret it as threatening to free will and responsibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the philosophical debates about free will, moral responsibility, and determinism.
    121. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  121. Do we have a coherent set of intuitions about moral responsibility?Dana K. Nelkin - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):243–259.
    I believe that the data is both fascinating and instructive, but in this paper I will resist the conclusion that we must give up Invariantism, or, as I prefer to call it, Unificationism. In the process of examining the challenging data and responding to it, I will try to draw some larger lessons about how to use the kind of data being collected. First, I will provide a brief description of some influential theories of responsibility, and then explain the threat to them from the experimental results. Finally, I will set out my general approach to the data, as well as some specific suggestions about how to think about each set of experiments. I will conclude that philosophers searching for a unified theory need not give up, but that at the same time they can learn a great deal from the new data.
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  122. After incompatibilism: A naturalistic defense of the reactive attitudes.Shaun Nichols - 2007 - Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):405-428.
    From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism. Libertarianism seemed delusional, and compatibilism seemed in bad faith. Hence I threw my lot in with philosophers like Paul d’Holbach, Galen Strawson, and Derk Pereboom who conclude that no one is truly moral responsible. But after two decades of self- identifying as a nihilist, it occurred to me that I had continued to treat my friends.
    123. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  123. Moral responsibility and determinism: The cognitive science of folk intuitions.Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe - 2007 - Noûs 41 (4):663–685.
    An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.
    124. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  124. Abstract + concrete = paradox.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2007 - In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
    125. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  125. The Illusion of Freedom Evolves.Tamler Sommers - 2007 - In Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid & G. Lynn Stephens (eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context. MIT Press. pp. 61.
    1. “All Theory is Against Free Will…” Powerful arguments have been leveled against the concepts of free will and moral responsibility since the Greeks and perhaps earlier. Some—the hard determinists—aim to show that free will is incompatible with determinism, and that determinism is true. Therefore there is no free will. Others, the “no-free-will-either-way-theorists,” agree that determinism is incompatible with free will, but add that indeterminism, especially the variety posited by quantum physicists, is also incompatible with free will. Therefore there is no free will. Finally, there are the a priori arguments against free will. These arguments conclude that it makes no difference what metaphysical commitments we hold: free will and ultimate moral responsibility are incoherent concepts. Why? Because in order to have free will and ultimate moral responsibility we would have to be causa sui, or ‘cause of oneself.’ And it is logically impossible to be self-caused in this way. Here, for example, is Nietzsche on the causa sui.
    126. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  126. Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?Jason Turner, Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris & Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):28-53.
    Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.
    127. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  127. Folk fears about freedom and responsibility: Determinism vs. reductionism.Eddy Nahmias - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):215-237.
    My initial work, with collaborators Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner (2005, 2006), on surveying folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility was designed primarily to test a common claim in the philosophical debates: that ordinary people see an obvious conflict between determinism and both free will and moral responsibility, and hence, the burden is on compatibilists to motivate their theory in a way that explains away or overcomes this intuitive support for incompatibilism. The evidence, if any, offered by philosophers to support the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive has consisted of reports of their own intuitions or informal polls of their students. We were skeptical about the reliability of such evidence, so we used the methodology--”now associated with the label 'experimental philosophy'--”of conducting formal surveys on non-philosophers. Our participants read a scenario that describes a deterministic universe and were then asked to judge whether agents in those scenarios act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. Using three different scenarios with hundreds of participants, we consistently found that the majority (2/3 to 4/5) responded that agents in deterministic universes do act of their own free will and are morally responsible. That is, we found that most ordinary folk do not seem to find incompatibilism intuitive or obviously correct. Our results have been challenged in various ways, philosophical and methodological. For instance, Shaun Nichols (2004, this volume) and Nichols and Joshua Knobe (unpublished) offer some experimental evidence suggesting that, in certain conditions, most people express incompatibilist and libertarian intuitions. I will respond to this work in the following section. I agree that people express conflicting intuitions about free will (after all, we consistently found a minority of participants expressing incompatibilist.
    128. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  128. Folk intuitions on free will.Shaun Nichols - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):57-86.
    This paper relies on experimental methods to explore the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions about free will and responsibility. In different conditions, people give conflicting responses about agency and responsibility. In some contexts, people treat agency as indeterminist; in other contexts, they treat agency as determinist. Furthermore, in some contexts people treat responsibility as incompatible with determinism, and in other contexts people treat responsibility as compatible with determinism. The paper considers possible accounts of the psychological mechanisms that underlie these conflicting responses.
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  129. Free will and the folk: Responses to commentators.Shaun Nichols - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):305-320.
    Experimental research on folk intuitions concerning free will is still in its infancy. So it is especially helpful to have such an excellent set of commentaries, and I greatly appreciate the work of the commentators in advancing the project. Because of space limitations, I can’t respond to all of the comments. I will focus on just a few issues that emerge from the comments that I think are especially promising for illumination.
    130. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  130. Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility.Adina Roskies - 2006 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (9):419-423.
    131. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  131. Are the folk agent-causationists?Jason Turner & Eddy Nahmias - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (5):597-609.
    Experimental examination of how the folk conceptualize certain philosophically loaded notions can provide information useful for philosophical theorizing. In this paper, we explore issues raised in Shaun Nichols' (2004) studies involving people's conception of free will, focusing on his claim that this conception fits best with the philosophical theory of agent-causation. We argue that his data do not support this conclusion, highlighting along the way certain considerations that ought to be taken into account when probing the folk conception of free will.
    132. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  132. Philosophy and the Folk: On Some Implications of Experimental Work For Philosophical Debates on Free Will.Manuel Vargas - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):239-254.
    I discuss experimental work by Nichols, and Nichols and Knobe, with respect to the philosophical problems of free will and moral responsibility. I mention some methodological concerns about the work, but focus principally on the philosophical implications of the work. The experimental results seem to show that in particular, concrete cases we are more willing to attribute responsibility than in cases described abstractly or in general terms. I argue that their results suggest a deep problem for traditional accounts of compatibilism, and that they may cast some light on the literature surrounding Frankfurt cases. I also suggest a way in which mature philosophical convictions about free will may reflect a contingent process of refining and defending either of two competing strands of intuitions, and suggest that this may partly explain the persistence of philosophical debates about free will.
    133. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  133. Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Jason Turner - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (5):561-584.
    Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research.
    134. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  134. The phenomenology of free will.Eddy Nahmias, Stephen G. Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Jason Turner - 2004 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8):162-179.
    Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological research on the experiences relevant to the philosophical debates and then describe some pilot studies of our own with the aim of encouraging further research. The data seem to support compatibilist descriptions of the phenomenology more than libertarian descriptions. We conclude that the burden is on libertarians to find empirical support for their more demanding metaphysical theories with their more controversial phenomenological claims.
    135. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  135. The folk psychology of free will: Fits and starts.Shaun Nichols - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (5):473-502.
    According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.
    136. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  136. Oxford Handbook on Free Will.Robert H. Kane (ed.) - 2001 - Oxford University Press.
    This comprehensive reference provides an exhaustive guide to current scholarship on the perennial problem of Free Will--perhaps the most hotly and voluminously debated of all philosophical problems. While reference is made throughout to the contributions of major thinkers of the past, the emphasis is on recent research. The essays, most of which are previously unpublished, combine the work of established scholars with younger thinkers who are beginning to make significant contributions. Taken as a whole, the Handbook provides an engaging and accessible roadmap to the state of the art thinking on this enduring topic.
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  137. An Essay on Free Will.Peter Van Inwagen - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    "This is an important book, and no one interested in issues which touch on the free will will want to ignore it."--Ethics. In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, the author defends the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. He disputes the view that determinism is necessary for moral responsbility. Finding no good reason for accepting determinism, but believing moral responsiblity to be indubitable, he concludes that determinism should be rejected.
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  138. Are We Free? Psychology's Challenges to Free Will.Zachary Thomas Martin - unknown
    Do we really have as much control over our behavior as we think we do? Might we be mistaken that our actions are ultimately up to us? Some philosophers argue that recent scientific research shows that we don't have the control required to act freely (even when we think we do) and, therefore, we should not be held responsible for what we do. This dissertation examines the scientific research that has been marshaled in support of such claims which I argue does not threaten our freedom and the control we have over our actions. This work proceeds by looking at four broadly construed areas of research in psychology: situationism, self-control, automaticity, and conscious control. I identify ways in which each research program has been used in an attempt to demonstrate that we do not have the control required to act freely. One research program that has been of interest to the free will community in philosophy and psychology is situationism. The results of situationism, which include demonstrating the behavioral effects of seemingly insubstantial situational features on our thoughts and actions, have been cited as a threat to our freedom of action on two fronts. The first is that situationism indicates a widespread absence of awareness of the reasons for which we act. The second has it that situationism actually disturbs some of our capacities to respond and react to reasons that are crucial for acting freely. I make a contribution to the debate involving the first sort of threat by developing a taxonomy of types of awareness along two dimensions: objects of awareness in acting freely and ways of being aware in acting freely. This allows me to evaluate what situationism demonstrates we are unaware of compared to what is required for free action. I defend the claim that the lack of awareness involved in situationism doesn't appear to threaten our prospects of acting freely. I make a contribution to the debate involving the second sort of threat by defending the claim that situationism hasn't demonstrated that the general or specific capacities required for acting freely have been hampered to such an extent that we are rendered unfree even if most participants in the situationist experiments fail to exercise such capacities. A second research program that has claimed to indicate a threat to our acting freely involves the study of self-control. Psychologists have demonstrated that our capacity for self-control relies on a limited resource the depletion of which impairs subsequent attempts to regulate behavior. I carefully examine this research and argue that while it may indicate an impairment in the degree to which we control our behavior, it is not diminished free will to such an extent that we are rendered unfree in a sense of lacking moral responsibility. I then look at research on automaticity that has been used to argue that we are not free and morally responsible. Such research maintains that automatic processes can perform tasks once thought to be
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  139. Experimental Philosophy on Free Will and Determinism.Robin Aldridge-Sutton - unknown
    In the debate over whether free will is compatible with determinism most philosophers on both sides think that folk intuitions are a constraint on philosophical theorising. Most also think that the same criteria are required for free will in all cases. But recent attempts to empirically study folk intuitions about free will appear to show that these two positions cannot be jointly maintained. That is because folk intuitions about free will appear to represent compatibilist and incompatibilist criteria for free will in different cases. In response to this some philosophers have run new studies to demonstrate problems with older ones and undermine their results. One such study has been claimed to show that some participants mistakenly inferred that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions given determinism. In this thesis I argue that the questions about causation that were used in this study were too ambiguous to show this. My central point is that when considering the causal history of an action we tend to privilege the earlier causes over later ones. When participants responded that an agent‘s mental states have no effect on their actions they may have meant that there were earlier conditions that caused the agent‘s mental states which then caused their actions. This would show that the participants had made the correct inference that given determinism the causal histories of an agent‘s actions extend back in time to events outside of the agent‘s mind. Thus the problem of the apparent mismatch between folk intuitions and philosophical theories of free will remains. I also suggest that the results of these studies also appear to demonstrate a greater level of disagreement among folk intuitions about the same cases than philosophers seem to expect. This raises questions about whether the same theory of free will has to apply to everyone, and if so, whether folk intuitions support any such theory. In chapter one I begin by briefly describing the free will debate and the role that folk intuitions usually play within it. I describe some debate over the usefulness of folk intuitions in philosophy, and make some small contributions on behalf of their usefulness. I describe and defend the recent movement towards attempting to empirically study folk intuitions on philosophical issues. In chapter two I describe the empirical studies that seem to show that folk intuitions about free will represent compatibilist criteria in some cases and incompatibilist criteria in others. I suggest that they also seem to show that when considering the same case some folk have compatibilist intuitions and some have incompatibilist intuitions. I raise some questions about the implications of rejecting the assumption, which most philosophers seem to make, that people generally have the same intuitions about the same cases. In chapter three I present the study that is claimed to show that participants in the earlier studies were confused, and thus that they di
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  140. Free will and experimental philosophy : when an old debate meets a new movement.Hoi-yee Chan & 陳凱宜 - unknown
    Consider this scenario: A terrorist just bombed the subway in London, which resulted in the casualties of numerous innocent people. His act can be considered well-planned for he fully knew what consequences his act would bring. If determinism is true, is it possible that the terrorist in question bombed the subway out of free will? An incompatibilist would respond to this question with a resounding “no”. A compatibilist, on the other hand, would answer yes, as long as the terrorist possessed certain psychological characteristics, causal histories, etc. This underlies the basis of disputes between the compatibilists and incompatibilists, who appear to hold opposite views on whether it is possible for someone to act out of free will if determinism is true. However, as I shall discuss in Chapter One, this disagreement is partly a verbal one that stems from the diverse meanings of the term “free will”. This thesis aims to transcend the verbal disagreement and explore where the deeper, more substantial disagreements may lie between compatibilists and incompatibilists. One possible sphere where substantial disagreements between compatibilists and incompatibilists may lie is the content of the ordinary concept of free will, or that of the strongest sense of control condition necessary for securing the ordinary concept of moral responsibility. On this view, the metaphysical question and the conceptual question about free will are inseparable; in order to find out the metaphysical satisfaction conditions of free will, one must first identify the conceptual satisfaction conditions of free will. Further, the latter is reflected in everyday free will/ moral responsibility ascriptions about hypothetical or real scenarios. In Chapter Two, I analyze how the recent experimental philosophy movement bears on this issue. By examining the findings of some current experimental philosophy studies, I argue that neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism can sufficiently capture the ordinary concept of free will or moral responsibility. In the light of my discussions in Chapter Two, I explain in Chapter Three why each of the various traditional accounts of free will cannot independently provide an adequate “package deal” of solutions for the problem of free will. Near the end of the chapter, I propose a pluralistic, agnostic account of free will as an alternative solution. Despite its great instrumental value, experimental philosophy is not widely recognized as a philosophically significant methodology. Hence, Chapter Four is devoted to discussing the actual and potential values of experimental philosophy in the light of its contribution to the free will debate. I conclude that the encounter between the free will debate and the experimental philosophy movement is a fruitful one; the former proves the value of the latter by receiving helpful insights from it.
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  141. Free Will in Context: a Defense of Descriptive Variantism.Jason S. Miller - unknown
    Are free will and determinism compatible? Philosophical focus on this deceptively simple `compatibility question' has historically been so pervasive that the entire free will debate is now standardly framed in its terms - that is, as a dispute between compatibilists, who answer the question affirmatively, and incompatibilists, who respond in the negative. This dissertation, in contrast, adopts a position that I call `descriptive variantism,' according to which prevailing notions of free will exhibit significant aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism. My formulation and defense of this position provides a framework for considering several important issues that cannot be adequately addressed on the traditional conception of the free will debate. The theoretical advantages of descriptive variantism become apparent, I argue, only after adopting needed refinements to the compatibility question itself. As it stands, this question conflates at least two distinct issues: whether free will, as ordinarily understood, does in fact conflict with determinism, and whether free will should be taken to involve such a conflict. The vast majority of work in this area, I maintain, implies that (a) the shared notion of free will exemplified in everyday usage conforms exclusively to either compatibilism or incompatibilism, and (b) the (singular) position suggested by this shared notion constitutes the most adequate response to the compatibility question. This is a mistake: it ignores several other possibilities, among them the prospect that multiple `shared notions' are implicated in the complex network of judgments, attitudes, and social practices related to free will. Having reformulated various aspects of the free will debate in ways that address these issues, I go on to argue that no single account of free will can underwrite the broad range of phenomena associated with this notion. Most importantly, I maintain that contextual features, especially those related to abstraction and concreteness, engender significantly different notions of free will: abstract contexts tend to elicit judgments and other behaviors conducive to incompatibilism, while concreteness often promotes tendencies best captured by compatibilist theories. I support these empirical claims primarily by drawing out the conceptual implications of recent experimental work on these topics in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and defend my interpretation against alternative accounts that purport to `explain away' the contextual differences exhibited in the experimental data. If these claims are correct, then the fundamental conflicts inherent in prevailing notions of free will have the potential to manifest themselves in some highly problematic ways. For example, criminal laws enacted in abstract contexts may presuppose constraints on free agency deeply at odds with those implicitly adopted by jurors evaluating concrete violations of these laws. I
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