Alfred R. Mele

Free will in everyday life: Autobiographical accounts of free and unfree actions

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.

Ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck

My topic lies on conceptual terrain that is quite familiar to philosophers. For others, a bit of background may be in order. In light of what has filtered down from quantum mechanics, few philosophers today believe that the universe is causally deterministic (or “deterministic,” for short). That is, to use Peter van Inwagens succinct definition of “determinism,” few philosophers believe that “there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.” Even so, partly for obvious historical reasons, philosophers continue to argue about whether free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Compatibilists argue for compatibility, and incompatibilists argue against it. Some incompatibilists maintain that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. But most are libertarians , libertarianism being the conjunction of incompatibilism and the thesis that at least some human beings are possessed of free will and moral responsibility.

The Intention/Volition Debate

People intend to do things, try to do things, and do things. Do they also will to do things? More precisely, if people will to do things and their willing bears upon what they do, is willing, or volition, something distinct from intending and trying? This question is central to the intention/volition debate, a debate about the ingredients of the best theory of the nature and explanation of human action. A variety of competing conceptions of volition, intention, and trying have been advanced in the literature; it would be impossible to examine each thoroughly in a single paper. We can show, however, that the major functional roles ascribed to volition are nicely filled by a triad composed of intention, trying, and information feedback. Sections I and II below develop an account of the connection between intention and trying. Section III examines leading arguments for the existence of volitions and decomposes volitions into members of the triad just identified.

Kane, Luck, and the significance of free will

Abstract This paper raises a pair of objections to the novel libertarian position advanced in Robert Kanes recent book, The Significance of Free Will.The first objections target is a central element in Kanes intriguing response to what he calls the “Intelligibility” and “Existence” questions about free will. It is argued that this response is undermined by considerations of luck.The second objection is directed at a portion of Kanes answer to what he calls “The Significance Question” about free will: “Why do we, or should we, want to possess a free will that is incompatible with determinism? Is it a kind of freedom ‘worth wanting’... and, if so, why?” A desire for “objective worth” has a featured role in his answer. However, a compatibilist can have that desire.

The Role of Intention in Intentional Action

A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the functional roles of intentions in intentional action. In this paper we sketch and defend a position on this issue while attacking a provocative alternative. Our position has its roots in a cybernetic theory of purposive behavior and is only part of the larger task of understanding all goal-directed behavior. Indeed, a unified model of goal-directed behavior, with appropriate modifications for different types of systems, is a long-range ambition. Section I details a control model of intention in intentional action.

Understanding and explaining real self-deception

This response addresses seven main issues: (1) alleged evidence that in some instances of self-deception an individual simultaneously possesses “contradictory beliefs”; (2) whether garden-variety self-deception is intentional; (3) whether conditions that I claimed to be conceptually sufficient for self-deception are so; (4) significant similarities and differences between self-deception and interpersonal deception; (5) how instances of self-deception are to be explained, and the roles of motivation in explaining them; (6) differences among various kinds of self- deception; (7) whether a proper conception of self-deception implies that definitive ascriptions of self-deception to individuals are impossible.

Motivated belief and agency

Abstract Can the existence of motivationally biased beliefs plausibly be explained without appealing to actions that are aimed at producing or protecting these beliefs? Drawing upon some recent work on everyday hypothesis testing, I argue for an affirmative answer. Some theorists have been too quick to insist that motivated belief must involve, or typically does involve, our trying to bring it about that we acquire or retain the belief, or our trying to make it easier for ourselves to believe a preferred proposition—and too quick to conclude that such exercises of agency are involved in specific instances of the phenomenon. There are alternative ways to accommodate the data, and it is far from clear that the “agency view” accommodates them better.

Moral responsibility for actions: epistemic and freedom conditions

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The articles main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course.

The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: A Commentary

THE FOLK CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL ACTION: A COMMENTARY Alfred R. Mele, Florida State University In this commentary, I discuss the three main articles in this volume that present survey data relevant to a search for something that might merit the label “the folk concept of intentional action” – the articles by Joshua Knobe and Arudra Burra, Bertram Malle, and Thomas Nadelhoffer. My guiding question is this: What shape might we find in an analysis of intentional action that takes at face value the results of all of the relevant surveys about vignettes discussed in these three articles?

X. Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception

According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceivers intentionally deceive others into believing something, p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe that p is false while their victims falsely believe that p is true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something, p, and there is a time at which they believe that p is false while also believing that p is true. Elsewhere (most recently in Mele 2001), I have criticized the traditional conception of self-deception and defended an alternative, deflationary view according to which self-deception does not entail any of the following: intentionally deceiving oneself; intending (or trying) to deceive oneself, or to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two contradictory propositions. Indeed, I have argued that garden-variety instances of self-deception do not include any of these things. On my view, to put it simply, people enter self-deception in acquiring a belief that p if and only if p is false and they acquire the belief in a suitably biased way. Obviously, this shoulders me with the burden of showing what suitable bias amounts to, and I have had a lot to say about that. The suitability at issue is a matter of kind of bias, degree of bias, and the nondeviance of causal connections between biasing processes (or events) and the acquisition of the belief that p. In Mele 2001 (pp. 106-12), I suggested a test for relevant bias. I called it “the impartial observer test,” and I argued that its appropriateness is underwritten by the ordinary concept of self-deception. Here is an improved version: If S is self-deceived in believing that p, and D is the collection of relevant data readily available to S, then if D were made readily available to S’s impartial cognitive peers (including merely hypothetical people) and they were to engage in at least as much reflection on the issue as S does and at least a moderate amount of reflection, those who conclude that p is false would significantly outnumber those who conclude that p is true. This is a test for the satisfaction of a necessary condition of being self-deceived in believing that p. One requirement for impartiality in the present context is that one neither desire that p nor desire that ~p. Another is that one not prefer avoidance of either of the following errors over the other: falsely believing that p and falsely believing that ~p. The kind of bias at issue may broadly be termed “motivational or emotional bias.” Although I have discussed biasing causes and processes – especially motivational ones – at length, I have left it open that a motivationally biased treatment of data is not required for self-deception and that emotions sometimes do the biasing work without motivation’s playing a biasing role. This is one of the two possibilities that I explore in this essay. The other is a more moderate thesis about the place of emotion in selfdeception.