Rolling Back the Rollback Argument

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2012

The "rollback argument," pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in any form is incompatible with free will. The argument has two major premises: the first claims that certain facts about chances obtain in a certain kind of hypothetical situation, and the second that these facts entail that some actual act is not free. Since the publication of the rollback argument, the second claim has been vehemently debated, but everyone seems to have taken the first claim for granted. Nevertheless, the first claim is totally unjustified. Even if we accept the second claim, therefore, the argument gives us no reason to think that free will and indeterminism are incompatible. Furthermore, seeing where the rollback argument goes wrong illuminates how a certain kind of incompatibilist, the "chance-incompatibilist," ought to think about free will and chance, and points to a possibility for free will that has remained largely unexplored.

The Consequence Argument is one of the most signifi cant challenges to compatibilist accounts of practical freedom. In brief, the argument is that if determinism is true then whatever happens is a consequence of the laws of nature and past events over which we have no control. But whatever is a consequence of what's beyond our control is not itself under our control. Therefore, if determinism is true then nothing that happens is under our control or avoidable by us, including our own actions and thoughts (van Inwagen 1983 , 16) . Assuming that practical freedom implies control and avoidability, this conclusion is a denial of the characteristic compatibilist thesis that such freedom is consistent with determinism.

2022

Strong notions of free will are closely connected to the possibility to do otherwise as well as to an agent's ability to causally influence her environment via her decisions controlling her actions. In this paper we employ techniques from the causal modeling literature to investigate whether a notion of free will subscribing to one or both of these requirements is compatible with naturalistic views of the world such as non-reductive physicalism to the background of determinism and indeterminism. We argue that from a causal modeler’s perspective the only possibility to get both requirements consists in subscribing to reductive physicalism and indeterminism. Citation information: Gebharter, A., Sekatskaya, M., & Schurz, G. (2022). Free will, control, and the possibility to do otherwise from a causal modeler's perspective. Erkenntnis, 87(4), 1889-1906. doi:10.1007/s10670-020-00281-w

Philosophy Compass, 2010

This article surveys several interrelated issues in the metaphysics of chance. First, what is the relationship between the probabilities associated with types of trials (for instance, the chance that a twenty-eight-year old develops diabetes before age thirty) and the probabilities associated with individual token trials (for instance, the chance that I develop diabetes before age thirty)? Second, which features of the the world fix the chances: are there objective chances at all, and if so, are there non-chancy facts on which they supervene? Third, can chance be reconciled with determinism, and if so, how? Philosophy Compass 5/11 (2010):

2020

Probabilistic theism according to Dariusz Łukaszewicz is a theism which ennobles the concept of chance and explains the role which chance plays in the context of Divine Providence. An epistemologist can, however, be interested in a much more basic issue and ask whether our beliefs concerning chance can be called knowledge. This article is divided into three parts. In the first one I discuss selected ways of justifying knowledge of chance, namely common sense justification, pragmatic justification, empirical justification, and a priori justification and I conclude that we possess tychical knowledge in reference to non-intentional chance (C2), epistemic chance (C3), probabilistic chance (C5), and causal chance (C6). In the second part I undertake the problem of skepticism in the problem of chance and I suggest that a significant role in the discussion with tychical skepticism is played by the standards of rationality. In the third section I refer to the concept of composite chance discussed by Łukasiewicz, and I claim that (i) we do not possess knowledge of composite chance as understood by Łukasiewicz, and that (ii) this fact should not be treated as a reason in favor of tychical skepticism.

Erkenntnis, 2005

Orthodox physicalism has a problem with mental causation. If physics is complete and mental events are not identical to physical events (as multiplerealisation arguments imply) it seems as though there is no causal work for the mental to do. This paper examines some recent attempts to overcome this problem by analysing causation in terms of counterfactuals or conditional probabilities. It is argued that these solutions cannot simultaneously capture the force of the completeness of physics and make room for mental causation.

This article surveys the most recent versions of the Consequence Argument and objections to them. It considers objections made to some of the more well-known versions of the argument and recent attempts by defenders to answer these objections by offering reformulated versions of it. Many objections involve a principle van Inwagen called "Beta," which is regarded by many as the most controversial assumption of the argument. Beta is a "transfer of powerlessness" principle, which states, roughly, that if you are powerless to change something "p" (e.g., the past or the laws of nature), then you are also powerless to change any of the logical consequences of "p." The discussion considers various formulations of Beta as well as purported counterexamples to it and responses to these counterexamples by current defenders of the Consequence Argument. ACCORDING to incompatibilism, freedom and determinism cannot obtain together. Somewhat more precisely, incompatibilism is the thesis that, necessarily, if determinism is true, then no one enjoys free will. Some twenty-five years ago, Peter van Inwagen (1983) insisted with considerable plausibility that discussion of this thesis was not taking place on a very high level. Whatever complaints one might have about the present state of the free-will debate, the claim that discussion of the compatibility question is not conducted on a high level no longer appears to be one of them. No doubt, we owe thanks to van Inwagen himself for elevating the discussion. In particular, it seems to me that the single most influential contribution to the overall philosophical quality of the recent free-will debate is van Inwagen's careful development of what he has dubbed the "Consequence Argument." This chapter is a sympathetic assessment of the argument, offered in the light of some of the most recent criticisms of it. After making the argument sufficiently explicit, I consider three recent brands of compatibilist response to it and, in each case, I make some gestures in the direction of incompatibilist replies.

2018

In this paper I will examine and defend a type of propensity theory of objective chance that, while far from new, has been largely neglected in recent decades. I am not aware of a general term for views of this sort, but I will call it the epistemic view of chance. Physical chances, on this view, have all their generally-accepted properties, so that the view does not offer some mere epistemic surrogate for chance, but the real thing. After surveying the history of this approach to chance, I will advocate a particular version of it. The epistemic view of chance has a long history, and (as shown in Section 6) it entails all our common beliefs about chance, so why is it often overlooked? The main reason, as far as I can judge, is that it conflicts with accepted views in related areas such as causation, laws of nature, and the extent of rational constraints on subjective probability. In particular, the three problems of chance, causation, and natural laws are interlocked, like pieces of...

Giornale di Metafisica, 2018

The main thesis proposed by von Wright on causality is: to say that “p causes q” is identical to say that “p makes q happen” or that “by doing p we could bring about q”1. Even though causal relations have an objective status in the world independently of human awareness, knowledge of causal relations depends on our ability to freely make things happen. As we will see, also our attitude to consider counterfactual state of affairs, is linked to this ability. In the work at hand I will argue that counterfactual reasoning and manipulative theory of causation are both grounded on free action.

Philosophia, 2016

has recently argued that the notion of determinism employed in the Consequence Argument is such that, if our world turns out to be deterministic in this way, then an interventionist God is logically impossible. He further argues that because of this, we should revise our notion of determinism. However, this notion of determinism is prevalent in the free will literature, 1 and a rejection of it would have a much larger impact than merely giving us grounds to reject the Consequence Argument. In this paper I show that Sehon's argument for the claim that the truth of determinism, in this sense, would make an interventionist God logically impossible ultimately fails. I then offer and respond to a weaker version of the argument for the claim that we should revise our notion of determinism. Finally, I develop and respond to a possible worry for my argument 1