Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. A response to the problem of wild coincidences.Christopher P. Taggart - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11421-11435.
    Derk Pereboom has posed an empirical objection to agent-causal libertarianism: The best empirically confirmed scientific theories feature physical laws predicting no long-run deviations from fixed conditional frequencies that govern events. If agent-causal libertarianism were true, however, then it would be virtually certain, absent ‘wild coincidences’, that such long-run deviations would occur. So, current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely. This paper formulates Pereboom’s ‘Problem of Wild Coincidences’ as a five-step argument and considers two recent responses. Then, it offers a different (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Agent-causal libertarianism, statistical neural laws and wild coincidences.Jason D. Runyan - 2018 - Synthese 195 (10):4563-4580.
    Agent-causal libertarians maintain we are irreducible agents who, by acting, settle matters that aren’t already settled. This implies that the neural matters underlying the exercise of our agency don’t conform to deterministic laws, but it does not appear to exclude the possibility that they conform to statistical laws. However, Pereboom (Noûs 29:21–45, 1995; Living without free will, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; in: Nadelhoffer (ed) The future of punishment, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013) has argued that, if these neural (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Taming Pereboom’s Wild Coincidences.Thomas Müller - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):789-802.
    Pereboom’s ‘wild coincidences’ argument against agent-causal libertarianism is based on the claim that in a world governed by statistical laws, the dovetailing of indeterministic physical happenings with the free actions of agent causes would be a coincidence too wild to be credible. In this paper it is shown that the conclusion is valid for deterministic laws, but that it fails for statistical laws. Therefore, the ‘wild coincidences’ argument does not provide the promised empirical refutation of agent-causal libertarianism.
    No categories
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • “Let’s build an Anscombe box”: assessing Anscombe’s rebuttal of the statistics objection against indeterminism-based free agency.Thomas Müller - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-22.
    Towards the end of her famous 1971 paper “Causality and Determination”, Elizabeth Anscombe discusses the controversial idea that “ ‘physical haphazard’ could be the only physical correlate of human freedom of action”. In order to illustrate how the high-level freedom of human action can go together with micro-indeterminism without creating a problem for micro-statistics, she provides the analogy of a glass box filled with minute coloured particles whose micro-dynamics is subject to statistical laws, while its outside reliably displays a recognisable (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations