RESEARCH NOTES

My research program operates simultaneously at the levels of first-order metaphysics, metaphilosophy, and intellectual history.

At the first-order level, it investigates the nature of free will, agency, mental caustion, and moral responsibility.

At the metaphilosophical level, it examines dialectical concerns such as the major "battle lines" in the contemporary debate, the distinction between intuition pumps and arguments, the individuation conditions between arguments and those between rhetorical structures for investigating the nature and existence of free will, and the limitations of classical logic in representing natural-langauge arguments. It also tracks how verbal disputes, motte-and-baileying, selective rigor, and undue deference to authority have obscured the problems that the field is attempting to solve.

Historically, the project traces the degeneration of the classical analytic paradigm—the mid-twentieth-century framework from which contemporary philosophers inherited the now deeply unstable jargon of “compatibilism” and “incompatibilism.” I argue that the general failure to recognize and respond to the collapse of the analytic paradigm has produced the false appearance of a dialectical stalemate in the contemporary literature. I also offer a new, fruitful research framework, The Paradox Paradigm, which not only better captures the dialectical structure of the Paradox of (In)determinism, but also relates this traditional problem to two relaeted paradigms: the paradox of self-creation and the paradox of moral luck.

In my Paradox Paradigm--a meta-paradigm for understanding the  structure of the problem of free will--traditional disputes about determinism and indeterminism, manipulation arguments, constitutive luck, and the paradox of moral luck are revealed to be distinct dialectical entry points into the same paradoxical tension: we appear to be intuitively committed both to the existence of free will and to there being a necessary condition on genuinely free agency that is itself intuitively impossible to satisfy. The traditional “problem of determinism” and the paradox of moral luck are therefore not fundamentally different problems requiring separate treatment, but instead developed along parallel tracks due largely to contingent historical factors. In reality, they are distinct dialectical frameworks that exploit different intuitive pressure points while probing the same underlying metaphysical problem concerning the nature and possible existence of free will. A candidate solution to one of these problems can no longer be considered in isolation; a solution which aims to solve one problem is successful only to the degree that it also provides a viable solution to the others.

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If you are looking to escape the tired debate between “compatibilists” and “incompatibilists”, one simple way forward is to begin with the distinction between two types of association relations: relevance relations and correation relations. Relevance relations include non-spurious relations like explanatory and metaphysical grounding relations, causal relations, superdupervenience, metaphysical incompatibility, and logical incompatibility. Non-relevance correlation relations include perhaps spurious relations such as correlation, logical inconsistency, metaphysical incompossibility, and supervenience. In typical scientific and philosophical discourse, ignoring the distinction between non-spurious relevance and potentially spurious association relations (e.g. conflating causation and spurious correlation, or inferring causation directly from a perhaps spurious correlation) is considered a breakdown in basic critical reasoning; in the contemporary free-will debate, unfortunately, running roughshod over this fundamental distinction is not the exception but the rule.

Among other things, this distinction reveals the "explanatory gap" between two theses that most people run together:

Thesis 1: The non-relevance thesis that deterministic causation is incompossible with human free will.

Thesis 2: The relevance thesis that there is an antagonistic relevance relation (typically called an “incompatibility” relation) between deterministic causation and free will.

Notably, Thesis 2 entails Thesis 1, but not vice versa. Put another way, Thesis 1 is a corollary of Thesis 2, such that any argument for Thesis 2 is also an argument for Thesis 1. However, Thesis 1 may easily be true even though Thesis 2 is false, which means that one does not get Thesis 2 "for free" from an argument (or mere intuition pump) for Thesis 1.  

Once the explanatory gap between Thesis 1 and Thesis 2 is brought into view, everything old begins to look new again. Here is just one surprising upshot of the seemingly mundane association/relevance distinction: there is currently no good argument for Thesis 2, i.e. the traditional incompatibilist thesis that deterministic causation (of the sort described by determinism) is antagonistically relevant to—precludes, undermines, destroys, rules out, or threatens—human free will. Every argument that purportedly supports Thesis 2 suffers from at least one of the following explanatory-gap problems:

(i) The argument closes the explanatory gap with question-begging background assumptions.

Primary example: Peter van Inwagen’s classical Consequence Argument closes the explanatory gap between Thesis 1 and Thesis 2 by implicit appeal to two background assumptions of his preferred research paradigm, i.e. the classical analytic paradigm. Specifically, this paradigm assumes that free will is some kind of ability to do otherwise, thereby begging the question against source theorists; it also assumes that it is at least metaphysically possible for a human being to exercise free will, thereby begging the question against impossibilists.

(ii) The argument offers nothing to close the explanatory gap, but merely proposes that there must be some adequate way of closing it, even though no such explanation is supplied.

Primary example: Derk Pereboom’s original Four-Case Argument supports Thesis 1 using a negative generalization argument and supports Thesis 2 with the untested metaphysical hypothesis that a human's having a deterministic causal history is freedom-undermining.

(iii) The argument offers nothing to close the explanatory gap, but instead infers Thesis 2 directly from Thesis 1 in a patently invalid inference.

Primary example: Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Arguments, i.e. all variants that conclude that “determinism precludes free will.” (Mele stopped using his original Zygote Argument in 2013 after I brought the invalidity of this argument to his attention; he also thereafter began using 'incompatibilism' to denote Thesis 1 and now denies that there's any standard or traditional name for Thesis 2.)

(iv) The argument offers nothing whatever to close the explanatory gap, but instead assumes or asserts that there is no dialectically interesting reason to mention or address the gap at all. In such cases, the term “incompatibilism" is typically re-assigned to Thesis 1, leading unsuspecting readers—especially those unaware of the explanatory-gap problem—to mistake the argument for a defense of the traditional relevance-relation claim expressed by Thesis 2.

Primary example: Alfred Mele’s revised Zygote Arguments, i.e. those with perhaps spurious incompossibility conclusions such as: “So in no possible deterministic world in which a human being develops from a normal human zygote is that human being morally responsible for anything he or she does.”

(v) The argument closes the explanatory gap in a dialectically apt way, but also in a way that entails that Thesis 1 is a true but metaphysically arbitrary claim and that Thesis 2 is false.

Primary examples: Kristin Mickelson’s Master Manipulation Argument; Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument.

From the perspective of the paradox paradigm, seemingly exhausted and well-trodden debates become philosophically alive again, opening new avenues of research and pushing the discourse back where I believe it belongs: traditional, first-order metaphysics.

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