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916Free Will and ResponsibilityWIREs Cognitive Science 3 (4): 439-449. 2012.Free will is a set of capacities for conscious choice and control of actions and is essential for moral responsibility. While determinism is traditionally discussed as the main potential challenge to free will and responsibility, other potential challenges exist and need to be considered by philosophers and scientists. The cognitive sciences are relevant to free will both to study how people understand free will and potential challenges to it, and to study whether these challenges are supported …Read more
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364Darwin's continuum and the building blocks of deceptionIn Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen & Gordon M. Burghardt (eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, Mit Press. pp. 353. 2002.
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8404Is Free Will an Illusion? Confronting Challenges from the Modern Mind SciencesIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: Freedom and Responsibility, Mit Press. 2014.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…Read more
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284Why Do Women Leave Philosophy? Surveying Students at the Introductory LevelPhilosophers' Imprint 16. 2016.Although recent research suggests that women are underrepresented in philosophy after initial philosophy courses, there have been relatively few empirical investigations into the factors that lead to this early drop-off in women’s representation. In this paper, we present the results of empirical investigations at a large American public university that explore various factors contributing to women’s underrepresentation in philosophy at the undergraduate level. We administered climate surveys to…Read more
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35Review of Joseph Keim Campbell (ed.), Michael O'Rourke (ed.), David Shier (ed.), Freedom and Determinism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (6). 2005.
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718Close calls and the confident agent: Free will, deliberation, and alternative possibilitiesPhilosophical Studies 131 (3): 627-667. 2006.Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some other way. I…Read more
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1284A Naturalistic Vision of Free WillIn Edouard Machery & Elizabeth O'Neill (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, Routledge. 2014.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…Read more
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2332When consciousness matters: A critical review of Daniel Wegner's the illusion of conscious will (review)Philosophical Psychology 15 (4): 527-541. 2002.In The illusion of conscious will , Daniel Wegner offers an exciting, informative, and potentially threatening treatise on the psychology of action. I offer several interpretations of the thesis that conscious will is an illusion. The one Wegner seems to suggest is "modular epiphenomenalism": conscious experience of will is produced by a brain system distinct from the system that produces action; it interprets our behavior but does not, as it seems to us, cause it. I argue that the evidence Wegn…Read more
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2691Intuitions about Free Will, Determinism, and BypassingIn Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will: Second Edition, Oup Usa. 2011.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. Compat…Read more
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333Explaining Away Incompatibilist IntuitionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2): 434-467. 2014.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 produ…Read more
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147Are the folk agent-causationists?Mind and Language 21 (5): 597-609. 2006.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 tak…Read more
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372The problem of painIn Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Mit Press. 2005.
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186Experimental Philosophy on Free Will: An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions.In Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.), New waves in philosophy of action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 189--215. 2011.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 wi…Read more
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1572Your Brain as the Source of Free Will Worth Wanting: Understanding Free Will in the Age of NeuroscienceIn Gregg D. Caruso & Owen J. Flanagan (eds.), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, Oxford University Press. 2018.Philosophical debates about free will have focused on determinism—a potential ‘threat from behind’ because determinism entails that there are conditions in the distant past that, in accord with the laws of nature, are sufficient for all of our decisions. Neuroscience is consistent with indeterminism, so it is better understood as posing a ‘threat from below’: If our decision-making processes are carried out by neural processes, then it might seem that our decisions are not based on our prior con…Read more
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2747Defining Free Will Away (review)The Philosophers Magazine 58 (3): 110-114. 2012.A critical review of Sam Harris' Free Will (2012).
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183Why 'Willusionism' Leads to 'Bad Results': Comments on Baumeister, Crescioni, and AlquistNeuroethics 4 (1): 17-24. 2009.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…Read more
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205It’s OK if ‘my brain made me do it’: People’s intuitions about free will and neuroscientific predictionCognition 133 (2): 502-516. 2014.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-predi…Read more
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955Agency, authorship, and illusionConsciousness and Cognition 14 (4): 771-785. 2005.Daniel Wegner argues that conscious will is an illusion. I examine the adequacy of his theory of apparent mental causation and whether, if accurate, it suggests that our experience of agency and authorship should be considered illusory. I examine various interpretations of this claim and raise problems for each interpretation. I also distinguish between the experiences of agency and authorship.
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3782Scientific Challenges to Free WillIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 345-356. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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Georgia State UniversityAssistant Professor
Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |