Christian Loew

“General Abilities Compatibilism” (GAC) says that the ability to do otherwise relevant for free will is a mere general ability. It thus explains how free will is compatible with determinism: Nobody believes that an agent who is lawfully determined to not raise her hand thereby lacks the general ability (or capacity) to raise her hand. At the same time, GAC faces the charge of changing the subject. General abilities to do otherwise are compatible with determinism because they ignore circumstantial detail. But why are these general abilities pertinent for free will? Why not specific abilities that consider the complete circumstances? In this paper, I develop GAC in terms of how general abilities explain the freedom (or unfreedom) of actions. We know from the philosophy of science that we often prefer abstract explanations that ignore circumstantial detail. I use this insight to motivate GAC and respond to the above challenge.

A common objection against Humean reductionism about laws is an argument from governing: It is natural to think that laws of nature govern. But in order to govern the laws need to be independent of the phenomena they govern. Hence, Humean laws, which reduce to patterns in the phenomena and so lack this independence, cannot govern. A standard Humean response to this argument is that we should not place much weight on the intuition that laws govern. Non-Humeans, however, reply that the argument does not merely rest on intuitions but that scientific practice presupposes governing. In this paper, we offer a response to this revised challenge to Humeanism by giving a detailed account of the laws’ role in scientific modelling. We argue that while Humean theories indeed cannot capture certain governing-intuitions, they still can make sense of those aspects of science that allegedly motivate governing.

Humean Supervenience is a metaphysical model of the world according to which all truths hold in virtue of nothing but the total spatiotemporal distribution of perfectly natural, intrinsic properties. David Lewis and others have worked out many aspects of HS in great detail. A larger motivational question, however, remains unanswered: As Lewis admits, there is strong evidence from fundamental physics that HS is false. What then is the purpose of defending HS? In this paper, we argue that the philosophical merit of HS is largely independent of whether it correctly represents the world’s fundamental structure. In particular, we show that insofar as HS is an apt model of the world’s higher-level structure, it thereby provides a powerful argument for reductive physicalism and explains otherwise opaque inferential relations. Recent criticism of HS on the grounds that it misrepresents fundamental physical reality is, therefore, beside the point.