Jason Miller

ArgumentThe Thematic Apperception Test was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life”. It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology.

An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be morally responsible, blameworthy, deserving of blame, and at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate

Are free will and determinism compatible? Philosophical focus on this deceptively simple `compatibility question' has historically been so pervasive that the entire free will debate is now standardly framed in its terms - that is, as a dispute between compatibilists, who answer the question affirmatively, and incompatibilists, who respond in the negative. This dissertation, in contrast, adopts a position that I call `descriptive variantism,' according to which prevailing notions of free will exhibit significant aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism. My formulation and defense of this position provides a framework for considering several important issues that cannot be adequately addressed on the traditional conception of the free will debate. The theoretical advantages of descriptive variantism become apparent, I argue, only after adopting needed refinements to the compatibility question itself. As it stands, this question conflates at least two distinct issues: whether free will, as ordinarily understood, does in fact conflict with determinism, and whether free will should be taken to involve such a conflict. The vast majority of work in this area, I maintain, implies that (a) the shared notion of free will exemplified in everyday usage conforms exclusively to either compatibilism or incompatibilism, and (b) the (singular) position suggested by this shared notion constitutes the most adequate response to the compatibility question. This is a mistake: it ignores several other possibilities, among them the prospect that multiple `shared notions' are implicated in the complex network of judgments, attitudes, and social practices related to free will. Having reformulated various aspects of the free will debate in ways that address these issues, I go on to argue that no single account of free will can underwrite the broad range of phenomena associated with this notion. Most importantly, I maintain that contextual features, especially those related to abstraction and concreteness, engender significantly different notions of free will: abstract contexts tend to elicit judgments and other behaviors conducive to incompatibilism, while concreteness often promotes tendencies best captured by compatibilist theories. I support these empirical claims primarily by drawing out the conceptual implications of recent experimental work on these topics in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and defend my interpretation against alternative accounts that purport to `explain away' the contextual differences exhibited in the experimental data. If these claims are correct, then the fundamental conflicts inherent in prevailing notions of free will have the potential to manifest themselves in some highly problematic ways. For example, criminal laws enacted in abstract contexts may presuppose constraints on free agency deeply at odds with those implicitly adopted by jurors evaluating concrete violations of these laws. I attempt to make some preliminary progress on these vexing, but vital, issues by suggesting that revision towards compatibilism represents an initially appealing method of resolving some of these practical difficulties. Importantly, though, this suggestion is tentative, particularly insofar as the extent to which such revision is ultimately desirable, feasible, or even psychologically possible remains unclear. Further consideration of these issues thus constitutes an important avenue for future research