This paper proposes a reconciliation between libertarian freedomand causal indeterminism, without relying on agent-causation asa primitive notion. I closely examine Peter van Inwagen's recentcase for free will mysterianism, which is based in part on thewidespread worry that undetermined acts are too chancy to befree. I distinguish three senses of the term ‘chance’ I thenargue that van Inwagen's case for free will mystrianism fails,since there is no single construal of the term ‘change’ on whichall of the premises of his argument for (...) free will–causalindeterminism incompatibilism are true. By use of a particularevent-causal indeterminist account of free action, I support thecase for free will–indeterminism compatibilism. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of compassion and argues for the centrality of compassion to the proper practice of medicine. The argument proceeds by showing that failures of compassion can lead to poor medical treatment and disastrous outcomes. Several case studies are discussed, exemplifying the difference between compassionate and noncompassionate responses to patients seeking help. Arguments are offered in support of approaching reports of persistent pain with a trusting attitude, rather than distrust or skepticism. The article concludes by suggesting educational (...) improvements to encourage compassion. (shrink)

Palliative care philosophy is based on a holistic approach to patients, but research shows that possibilities for living up to this philosophy seem limited by historical and administrative structures. From the nurse perspective, this article aims to explore nursing practice in specialised palliative homecare, and how it is influenced by organisational and cultural structures. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews with nine nurses were conducted, inspired by Bourdieu. The findings showed that nurses consolidate the doxa of medicine, including medical-professional values that configure a (...) control-oriented, positivistic approach, supported by the organising policy for clinical practice. Hierarchically, nurses were positioned under doctors: medical rounds functioned as a structuring structure for their working day. They acted as medical assistants, and the prevailing medical logic seemed to make it difficult for nurses to meet their own humanistic ideals. Only short time slots allowed nurses to prioritise psychosocial needs of patients and relatives. Point-of-actions had high priority, added financial resources and ensured that budgets were allocated. Weekly visits made it possible for nurses to measure, control and govern patients’ drugs and symptoms which was a necessity for their function as medical assistants. The findings challenge nurses to take on an ethical point of view, partly to ensure that patients and their families receive good palliative care focusing on more than medical issues and logic, and partly to strengthen the nurses’ profession in the palliative field and help them implement palliative care philosophy in practice. (shrink)

In this comprehensive new study of human free agency, Laura Waddell Ekstrom critically surveys contemporary philosophical literature and provides a novel account of the conditions for free action. Ekstrom argues that incompatibilism concerning free will and causal determinism is true and thus the right account of the nature of free action must be indeterminist in nature. She examines a variety of libertarian approaches, ultimately defending an account relying on indeterministic causation among events and appealing to agent causation only (...) in a reducible sense. Written in an engaging style and incorporating recent scholarship, this study is critical reading for scholars and students interested in the topics of motivation, causation, responsibility, and freedom. In broadly covering the important positions of others along with its exposition of the author’s own view, Free Will provides both a significant scholarly contribution and a valuable text for courses in metaphysics and action theory. (shrink)

"This book focuses on arguments from suffering against the existence of God and on a variety of issues concerning agency and value that they bring out. The central aim is to show the extent and power of arguments from evil. The book provides a close investigation of an under-defended claim at the heart of the major free-will-based responses to such arguments, namely that free will is sufficiently valuable to serve as the good, or prominently among the goods, that provides a (...) God-justifying reason for permitting evil in our world. Offering a fresh examination of traditional theodicies, it also develops an alternative line the author calls a divine intimacy theodicy. It makes an extended case for rejection of the position of skeptical theism. The book expands upon an argument from evil concerning a traditional doctrine of hell, which reveals a number of interesting issues concerning fault, agency, and blameworthiness. In response to recent work contending that the problem of evil is defanged since God's baseline attitude toward human beings is indifference, the book defends the essential perfect moral goodness of God. Finally it takes up the question of whether or not it makes sense to live a religious life as an agnostic or as an atheist"--. (shrink)

This paper presents a conception of the self partially in terms of a particular notion of preference. It develops a coherentist account of when one's preferences are "authorized", or sanctioned as one's own, and presents a coherence theory of autonomous action. The view presented solves certain problems with hierarchical accounts of freedom, such as Harry Frankfurt's.

For those who maintain that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, a persistent problem is to give a coherent characterization of action that is neither determined by prior events nor random, arbitrary, lucky or in some way insufficiently under the control of the agent to count as free action. One approach—that of Roderick Chisholm and others—is to say that a third alternative is for an action to be caused by an agent in a way that is not reducible to (...) event causal terms. A different approach than the Chisholmian appeal to primitive substance causation is one that, instead, involves causal relations purely among events. This paper presents a particular event-causal indeterminist account of free action, describing both its attractions and recent objections to it, and then proposes a revised version, with the aim of supporting the plausibility of an event-causal indeterminist approach to free will. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reconciliation between libertarian freedomand causal indeterminism, without relying on agent-causation asa primitive notion. I closely examine Peter van Inwagen''s recentcase for free will mysterianism, which is based in part on thewidespread worry that undetermined acts are too chancy to befree. I distinguish three senses of the term chance I thenargue that van Inwagen''s case for free will mystrianism fails,since there is no single construal of the term change on whichall of the premises of his argument for (...) free will–causalindeterminism incompatibilism are true. By use of a particularevent-causal indeterminist account of free action, I support thecase for free will–indeterminism compatibilism. (shrink)

This study analyses sequences where people with dementia are positioned as third parties in stories about their own lives. Previous research emphasises how people with dementia are frequently excluded from social encounters, and how others tend to speak for or about them in their co-presence. Drawing on conversation analytic methods when analysing 15 video recorded interviews with Swedish couples living with dementia, we argue that telling stories in which a spouse with dementia is positioned as a third party in his (...) or her co-presence does not have to be an activity of exclusion. Rather, among couples, third-party positioning is a multifaceted activity where couples employ different practices to organise participation frameworks and manage both inclusion and exclusion in talk-in-interaction. Furthermore, we show how participants display joint speakership and counteract actions of exclusion by making use of various communicative resources such as gaze, touch and bodily orientation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, (...) where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalisation of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice, both drawing on and contributing to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric. (shrink)

A companion volume to Free Will: A Philosophical Study, this new anthology collects influential essays on free will, including both well-known contemporary classics and exciting recent work. Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom is divided into three parts. The essays in the first section address metaphysical issues concerning free will and causal determinism. The second section groups papers presenting a positive account of the nature of free action, including competing compatibilist and incompatibilist analyses. The third section concerns (...) free will and moral responsibility, including theories of moral responsibility and the challenge to an alternative possibilities condition posed by Frankurt-type scenarios. Distinguished by its balance and consistently high quality, the volume presents papers selected for their significance, innovation, and clarity of expression. Contributors include Harry Frankfurt, Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Elizabeth Anscombe, John Martin Fischer, Michael Bratman, Roderick Chisholm, Robert Kane, Peter Strawson, and Susan Wolf. The anthology serves as an up-to-date resource for scholars as well as a useful text for courses in ethics, philosophy of religion, or metaphysics. In addition, paired with Free Will: A Philosophical Study, it would form an excellent upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in free will, responsibility, motivation, or action theory. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that personalization technologies used by Google for the purpose of tailoring search results for individual users create filter bubbles, which reinforce users’ political views. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for a personalization-induced filter bubble has not been forthcoming. Here, we investigate whether filter bubbles may result instead from a searcher’s choice of search queries. In the first experiment, participants rated the left-right leaning of 48 queries (search strings), 6 for each of 8 topics (abortion, benefits, climate change, sex (...) equality, immigration, nuclear family, Islam, and taxation). An independent sample of participants were then asked to select one of these queries for each of the 8 topics. With the exception of the topic of Islam, participants were significantly more likely to select a query corresponding to their own political leaning, compared to other queries, explaining between 12% and 39% of the variance. A second experiment investigated the effect of the political leaning of the same queries on the overall political leaning of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in Google Search. The top six results of each SERP were rated collectively by a third group of participants, explaining 36.3% of the variance across all 48 search terms (p < .00001). That is, (1) participants in our experiments tended to select own-side search queries, and (2) using those queries tended to yield own-side search results when using the Google search engine. Our results are consistent with the notion of a self-imposed filter bubble in which query selection plays a salient role. (shrink)

It is common to believe that some of our concerns are deeper concerns of ours than are others and that some of our attitudes are central rather than peripheral to our psychological identity. What is the best approach to characterizing depth or centrality to the self? This paper addresses the matter of the depth and authenticity of attitudes and the relation of this matter to the autonomy of action. It defends a conception of the real self in terms of preferences (...) and convictions that cohere in a particular structural sense. It thereby gives content to the notion of wholeheartedness to which various action theorists make appeal. The approach is defended in part by an examination of how it handles the phenomenon of ambivalence.1. (shrink)

Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees’ difficulties to answer into consideration; a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients’ circumstances and professional’s enactment of expertise in assessments of clients’ disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish Social (...) Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing. (shrink)

This study focuses on troubles-tellings in calls to the Swedish Board for Student Support, where the caller wants to negotiate the repayment contract of a student loan. The study relates to research on the organization of troubles-tellings in institutional interaction, and the overall question of how talk about money is a delicate matter that is shaped by moral concerns. The data consist of 94 calls in which the caller proposes either a reduction or a temporal suspension of repayment. The analysis (...) shows that troubles-tellings are launched to account for past failures to adhere to the contracted payment schedule. These tellings are met with minimal responses, which in turn engender a shift towards solutions that resonate with the institutional agenda. The study explores the resources recruited by the participants to deal with a potentially stigmatic situation by formulating the troubles as merely temporary and projecting a future situation where payments are made on time. (shrink)

The present study examines 1- to 5-year-old children’s emotion socialization in an early childhood educational setting (a preschool) in Sweden. Specifically, it examines social situations where teachers respond to children’s negative emotional expressions and negatively emotionally charged social acts, characterized by anger, irritation and distress. Data consist of 14 hours of video observations of daily activities, recorded in a public Swedish preschool, located in a suburban middle-class area and include 35 children and five preschool teachers. By adopting a sociocultural perspective (...) on children’s development and socialization, the study examines the communicative practices through which the expressions of negative emotions are responded to and the norms and values that are communicated through these practices. The data are analysed by using multimodal analysis of interaction that provides a tool for detailed analysis of participants’ verbal and embodied actions and sense-making. The analyses show that teachers responded to children’s negatively charged emotional expressions as social acts (that were normatively evaluated) and the adults instructed children how to modify their social conduct (rather than deploying explicit discussions about emotions). The teachers used communicative genres that prioritized general moral principles and implemented the non-negotiability of norms over individual children’s emotional-volitional perspectives and individual preferences. The teachers’ instructive socializing activities were characterized by movement between multiple temporal horizons, i.e., general (emotional) discourse that transcended the here-and-now, and specific instructions targeting the children’s conduct in a current situation. The study discusses how emotion socialization can be related to the institutional characteristics and collective participatory social conditions of early childhood education. (shrink)

The problem of analyzing causation and the problem of incompatibilism versus compatibilism are largely distinct. Yet, this paper will show that there are some theories of causation that a compatibilist should not endorse: namely, counterfactual theories, specifically the one developed by David Lewis and a newer, amended version of his account. Endorsing either of those accounts of causation undercuts the main compatibilist reply to a powerful argument for incompatibilism. Conversely, the argument of this paper has the following message for incompatibilists: (...) you have reason to consider defending a counterfactual theory of causation. (shrink)

This article explores political discourse in the context of an online-mediated 2021 rapprochement between Swedish ‘mainstream’ and far-right parties paving the way for their eventual 2022 electoral success and later joint government coalition. The article analyses specifically how the above political accord on the Swedish right – often seen as breaking the long-term cordon sanitaire around Sweden’s far right – would be legitimised via discourses that carried significant elaboration and deepening of the ‘criminality’ and ‘immigration’ connection later recontextualised into the (...) broader Swedish public discourse and public imagination. Using social media analytics and qualitative, critical discourse analysis, we explore in depth a ‘discursive shift’ wherein the focus on criminality would become a key ‘proxy discourse’, i.e., a public-wide implicature, which, while referring to and debating a potentially genuine social issue would be strategically instrumentalised to effectively pre-legitimise ‘moral panics’ around immigration and cultural diversity. The analysis highlights that the emergence as well as the later recontextualisation of the ‘proxy discourse’ in question – implicitly suggesting that criminality, immigration, and cultural diversity are ‘somehow’ inherently connected – not only supported the political mainstreaming of the Swedish far-right’s anti-immigration stance but also normalised the wider tenets of illiberal, nativist ‘politics of exclusion’. (shrink)

This article investigates the announced refusal to answer as a form of dispreferred and challenging response in broadcast political interviews. The aim is to study how the rightness and wrongness of conduct is dealt with in situations of announced refusal. More specifically, the paper focuses on: announced refusal as a particular type of conduct; the orientation to norms and accountability in situations of announced refusal; how the legitimacy of politics and journalism is negotiated in broadcast interviews. The data consist of (...) 23 cases from Swedish election campaigns, and the analysis is based on Conversation Analysis, focusing on how the participants treat themselves and others as normatively accountable. The study indicates that the politicians understand themselves as accountable and avoid hostile actions in the interviews. Their refusals are designed mainly to be understood as appropriate distancing actions without explicitly complaining about the interviewers’ conduct. (shrink)

This study takes an interest in instructions and instructed actions in the context of manual skills. The analysis focuses on a video recorded episode where a teacher demonstrates how to crochet chain stitches, requests a group of students to reproduce her actions, and then repeatedly corrects the attempts of one of the students. The initial request, and the students’ responses to it, could be seen as preliminary to the series of corrective sequences that come next: the request and the following (...) attempts make it possible for the teacher to launch instructional sequences specifically designed and addressed to the students who need further guidance. In the interaction between the teacher and the novice student, the reasoned character of the instructed actions is not explained so much as installed and tuned. The materiality of the project makes it possible for the two parties to methodically and meticulously adjust their actions in accordance with each other, and towards the gradual realization of the aimed-for results. In connection to this, a number of issues pertaining to the reproducibility and recognizability of manual skills are raised: how instructions-in-interaction orient towards the progression of the skill rather than the interaction itself; how attempts by and mistakes of the instructed party provide grounds for further instruction; and, consequently, how instructions in the form of corrections build on the instructor’s continuous assessments of the instructed actions. (shrink)

A plausible theory of human freedom must give some account of both alternate possibilities and self-determination. Debate over the correct interpretation of the first feature gives rise to the metaphysical problem of whether or not freedom is compatible with the thesis of determinism, according to which, given the actual past and the actual laws of nature, there is at any time only one physically possible future. It is my view that persons act freely only if the thesis of determinism is (...) false. But since a distinction must be made between a free act and a random event, the incompatibilist who affirms the existence of freedom must say more about a free act than that it is indeterministically caused. A free act is one's own: it is authorized by the self. ;In this dissertation, I propose a conception of the self and a coherence theory of autonomous or self-determined action, modeled after Keith Lehrer's coherence theory of knowledge. I defend the consequence argument for incompatibilism and argue that the compatibilist understanding of freedom is unsatisfactory. Hence, drawing on the coherence account of autonomy, I develop a coherentist libertarian theory of freedom. I respond to challenges to that account and consider, finally, reasons for thinking that we sometimes act and will freely. (shrink)

For a symposium on Dana Nelkin's Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility.

This chapter contains sections titled: Will as Faculty, Capacity, or Power Will as an Attitude or Collection of Attitudes Will and Free Will Theory Volitional Disunity and Wholeheartedness References Further reading.

This article analyses the orientation of gaze as a significant communicative resource in televised political interviews. The study explores how interviewees use their gaze, in coordination with talk, in receiving and answering adversarial questions. It is guided by conversation analysis, Goffman’s work on gaze in interaction, and the approach on embodied actions developed primarily by Goodwin. Gaze is described as a flexible recipient and speaker resource available for stance-taking, the downgrading and upgrading of actions, and the claiming of the floor. (...) The study is based on taped and transcribed data from two formats of election campaign interviews on Swedish television, including 350 question and response sequences. (shrink)

This conversation analytic study investigates how couples manage conflicting knowledge claims when one of the persons has dementia. The data are video-recordings of 16 couples talking with a third party. The analysis focuses on the negotiation of epistemic rights, more precisely how partners initiate repair and correct claims made by the PWD on matters belonging to the latter’s epistemic domain. We identified three main practices for correcting the PWD: correcting the statement, thereby claiming epistemic authority for oneself and denying it (...) to the PWD, inviting the PWD to self-correct, thereby attributing some epistemic authority to the PWD, and disagreeing and providing reasons for one’s alternative claim, establishing a more symmetric epistemic gradient. The PWDs responses to the corrections displayed different degrees of acceptance, ranging from self-denigration to resistance and insistence. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Inner conflict and identification Features of a successful account The nature of the self The coherence theory of autonomous action Complexity and worth Coping with ambivalence Conclusion.

This chapter develops a divine intimacy theodicy. The central idea is that, sometimes when persons suffer, they experience closeness to God, either through an awareness of God's presence with them or through identification with a God who suffers. Some instances of human suffering, then, might reasonably be viewed as religious experiences that serve as a means to knowledge of God.

This essay attempts to illustrate the vital dialogue there is between architecture and theatre, not only in the sense that the former resembles a worldly stage but also in the way it intentionally designates spaces for events to be seen and experienced. The origins of architecture go back to the erection of spaces to facilitate the dialogue between humans and gods. The stage is the embodiment and objectification of the flow of life. It makes it possible to contemplate both the (...) present and the past thereby creating narratives. Architecture is also a mediator for us to observe our own actions. The theatrical quality of space in relation to the movements of the body and the bodily perceptions of spatial elements, leads to an active participation in the unfolding of meanings. The city has not only been defined as theatre by many urbanists; it has also throughout history been designed and formed as a natural stage. Baroque Rome, the impressionists’ paintings of Paris, or Byzantine Constantinople with its many spectacles illustrate well this dimension of the city. (shrink)

That the Latin word translatio translates the Greek word metaphora is not a coincidence. Translatio designates two interrelated instances of linguistic “transportation,” one phenomenological and conceptual, the other idiomatic, hermeneutic and intercultural. The person who calls an unsavoury man a swine may be said to ”trans-late,” ”trans-fer,” or carry over a set of perceived characteristics – for example, the inarticulate grunts and filthiness of the animal rolling in mud – from one realm (that of the animal) to another (that of (...) man). In the other kind of translation, the translator carries a literary work over from one linguistic and cultural setting to another. Let us fuse the two meanings of translatio and inquire into the Aristotelian concept of metaphoraitself. Does it translate into a linguistic, cultural and conceptual setting as different as that of early China? If it does, then under which conditions and circumstances? (shrink)

Every normally developing human infant solves the difficult problem of mapping their native-language phonology, but the neural mechanisms underpinning this behavior remain poorly understood. Here, motor constellation theory, an integrative neurophonological model, is presented, with the goal of explicating this issue. It is assumed that infants’ motor-auditory phonological mapping takes place through infants’ orosensory “reaching” for phonological elements observed in the language-specific ambient phonology, via reference to kinesthetic feedback from motor systems, and auditory feedback from resulting speech and speech-like sounds. (...) Attempts are regulated by basal ganglion–cerebellar speech neural circuitry, and successful attempts at reproduction are enforced through dopaminergic signaling. Early in life, the pace of anatomical development constrains mapping such that complete language-specific phonological mapping is prohibited by infants’ undeveloped supralaryngeal vocal tract and undescended larynx; constraints gradually dissolve with age, enabling adult phonology. Where appropriate, reference is made to findings from animal and clinical models. Some implications for future modeling and simulation efforts, as well as clinical settings, are also discussed. (shrink)