ABSTRACT: The present study seeks to put together a critical assessment of the role that that “Will,” actualized through techné, played in Aristotle’s physics. It will be shown how said concept of Will led to a theoretical fissure of the Aristotelian cosmos between the natural and the artificial, which was finally detrimental to the sustainability of his scientific proposals. Furthermore, light will be shed on the incompatibility between Aristotelian physics and mathematics, an area of knowledge that was to become the primordial tool of modern scientific inquiry. As a manner of conclusion, brief remarks will be made on the progress—if any—of science across history in light of Karl Popper’s views on the subject.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn argued that the dynamic evolution of science is not explained by the linear accumulation of new knowledge. On the contrary, science undergoes periods of theoretical revision that often destroy, not build upon, previous paradigms. Aristotle, whose ideas regarding physics dominated most of the history of western thought, formulated a framework of the cosmos where a rational account of Will brought about the principle that governs the world around us. The present study has been broken into two sections. The first section seeks to shed some light on the role that “Will,” actualized through craftsmanship, played in Aristotle’s physics. Secondly, some of the reasons that finally lead to a scientific paradigm shift away from Aristotle’s theories during the Age of Enlightenment will be examined.

I

It is difficult, from a modern perspective, to understand exactly what the study of physics meant for the ancient Greeks. When we talk about physics, we often refer to the study of matter, its properties, and its motion. Physics, in the modern sense, governs over everything that we can perceive through our senses (light, sounds, objects of any sort, etc). Yet, this is not what Aristotle had in mind. The word physics etymologically stems from the Greek word physus, which is often translated to English as “nature.” However, “nature,” a relatively ambiguous word in the first place, did not have the same meaning for the Ancient Greeks. When discussing nature[1], or physus, they were referring to something that had to do with change and growth. We could say, to use the word in the Aristotelian sense, that the “nature” of an acorn is to become a tree or that the “nature” of an egg is to become a chicken. Nature, for the ancient Greeks, entails a principle of motion that is dictated internally by the object’s essence[2].

Objects such as animals, plants, the earth, water, air and fire, belong to the Aristotelian class of natural entities (192b8). He claimed that such subjects have an independent and spontaneous Will to change into various forms. Static entities, such as a stone or the sand in a dessert, were not strictly speaking the main constituents of Aristotle’s natural world. Stones can move only insofar as the river’s current carries them along or insofar as a human grabs them and throws them in the air, for instance. Likewise, the dunes of the dessert move, not due to an internal principle of motion that guides their behavior, but only to the extent the wind blows them across the plains. However, stones and sand do belong to the natural world in the sense that they are constituents of an entity that has an internal principle of motion —earth, in this case (193a15). In Aristotle’s words, nature is “a type of principle and cause of motion and stability within those things to which it primarily belongs in their own right and not coincidentally” (Aristotle 192b22). Unlike the wind, animals, or water, stones and sand do not have a spontaneous Will to act.

Objects that are a product of human craftsmanship (of techné), such as a house or a bed, are certainly not part of nature (Aristotle 192b15). According to Aristotle, these kinds of things come to be not due to an internal principle that dictates what it is for them to become, but they are only insofar as a human being manipulates them or crafts them according to their various uses —their being is contingent upon the Will of humans. According to Aristotle, we, individuals endowed with the ability to make choices and capable of initiating motion, are able to shape wood into a bed in order to fulfill a functional purpose —in this case, resting more comfortably on an elevated surface. Likewise, we are able to literally “give form” to a lump of bronze that lacks a crafted shape. This takes us to the four causes that are necessary in order to explain the change of an entity that does not inherently contain the principle of spontaneous movement. The four causes are: (1) the material cause, which explains the physical component of the entity; (2) the formal cause, which explains the form or shape to which a thing corresponds; (3) the efficient cause, which is what we generally mean by “cause,” the original source of the energy that allows for the change; and (4) a final cause, which is the purpose it fulfills. For instance, bronze (the material cause) is shaped (the efficient cause) in order to constitute a statue (the formal cause) by the artist, who designates the purpose of its existence (the final cause). Thus, in Aristotle’s view of the cosmos there is not only matter and form, but also purpose. He says, for instance, that the existence of bricks is not coincidental; they have the purpose of becoming the material cause of a house (Physics, 200a25).

Aristotle, I believe, uses the previous principle of change in artificial objects in order to develop an analogy that may apply to natural objects as well, with certain adjustments. The logic, though very similar, has two basic differences. Let us proceed to construct the analogy in gradual steps: In regards to the material cause, just like the statue is made out of bronze, a musician is made out of flesh and bones. In terms of the formal cause, just like bronze constitutes the statue, flesh and bones constitute the form of the human being who is trained in the art of music. Yet, with regards to the efficient cause, the reasoning is somewhat different for natural and artificial objects. We discussed previously how natural objects have an internal principle of motion which artificial entities lack. In that sense, while the craftsmanship of the artist is a necessary condition for a statue to come to be, a man can become a musician by virtue of his own Will. Consequently, while bronze is potentially a statue contingent to the existence of an artist that makes the process come to be, a human is potentially a musician by virtue of his own ability to chose to become one. In that sense, the change that governs upon artifacts is contingent upon the Will of an external mover, contingent upon techné. Ultimately, with regards to the final cause, there is also a significant distinction between natural and artificial objects. In artificial objects, as discussed, an unmoved mover provides the final cause. For instance, the artist designs the end of the statue, and he will initiate motion in order to actualize what is potentially a statue (256a11). In natural objects, on the other hand, a first unmoved-mover gives the purpose. “We find, then, that among things that come to be and are by nature, things that are for something,” says Aristotle (199a8). This has to be the case since we would have an infinite regress otherwise, had we not had a first unmoved mover to designate the purpose of existence of the natural objects. An infinite regress, for Aristotle, is unfeasible. It is necessary for anything that moves, to be moved by the activity of some mover. This may be due to the intervention of an unmoved mover, like for artificial entities, or due to the involvement of a first mover that is not moved by anything else[3] (256a15). Since motion must be “everlasting and must never fail,” Aristotle posits the existence of an eternal, ever powerful first mover (258b10). Aristotle’s teleological world eventually leads to the thesis of a creator, a designer, a first mover. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle says, “there is something that initiates motion without being moved, something that is everlasting and a substance and actuality” (1072a25).

It must be the case—thought Aristotle— that what is true of the relationship between the artist and the statue, is true about the natural world and the first unmoved mover. Just like we shape the bronze and give a meaning, a telos, for the statue to be, the first unmoved mover gives us —natural entities— the essence, end, and meaning of existence[4].

Aristotle’s world, hence, is one governed by Will. That is one of the reasons he rejects the existence of randomness; everything has a reason to be, be it due to the Will of a natural entity —through techné— or else the Will of the first unmoved mover. It is true, however, that he does say that animals, entities of nature, do not have the capacity of Will. The fact that spiders build webs is not due to personal Will or deliberation but due to instinct—claimed Aristotle. This is evidence of the teleological design present in nature, he concluded. Since a spider’s web or a bird’s nest cannot come to be out of sheer randomness, and since birds and spiders do not have the capacity of Will or, as a result, techné, then they must be a direct creation of an external entity. In other words, it would seem to follow, animals and plants are entirely bound to the Will of the first unmoved mover.

II

Aristotle’s physics were the scientific paradigm until Galileo. However, Galileo’s observations of Venus’ phases, which were incompatible with the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos, over which Aristotle had a great deal of influence, set the evolution of science on a completely different path. It would be futile to enumerate particular flaws in Aristotle’s Physics in light of what is accepted today in modern science. Indeed, it is unlikely that “heavy things naturally move downward and light things upward,” as Aristotle claimed (200a3). A modern scientist would explain that the earth’s gravity causes all matter to move towards the earth’s core —what Aristotle called downward?— but denser fluids put pressure on lighter fluids in a way such that the latter seem to go upwards, away from the earth’s center of mass. However, Aristotle’s “mistaken”[5] argument regarding gravity seems like one that someone with the information and technology available to him at his time could reasonably make.

Therefore, it is more important to focus in broader aspects that —I believe— finally led to the paradigm shift away from Aristotle’s theory. At the most basic level, Aristotle made a big assumption when he divided the cosmos between natural and non-natural entities. In contrast, I do not see, based on what I can perceive, anything in reality that does not belong to the realm of nature. In other words, because humans shape their surroundings in different ways, the surroundings themselves do not cease to be natural. There is no fundamental distinction between the relation of a spider to its web or the relation of a human being to his or her house. In that sense, we either have no free Will, assuming that is the intrinsic nature of animals, or both animals and we have the capacity to develop techné, where free Will is a necessary condition.
Aristotle might argue in return that a house or a bed are not natural since they do not have the capacity to be self-sustaining. Aristotle argues, “a man comes to be from a man, but not a bed from a bed. In fact that is why some say that the nature of the bed is not the shape but the wood, because if it were to sprout the result would be wood, not a bed” (192a10). In that sense, a bed requires an “artificial” action by a human, a bed-maker, in order to exist. That is, Aristotle claimed, a proof that there is a distinction between the products of nature and the products of human beings (which can create objects that are outside of nature, or in other words artificial). However, just as a bed, a mule (the offspring between a female horse and a male donkey) does not have the capacity to be self-sustaining either. Mules are sterile; a mule does not come to be from a mule! Yet, it is very clear, even for Aristotle, that a mule is a natural creature[6]. Therefore, it is not the case that a natural object must be self-sustaining—mules are not, after all. Consequently, reductio ad absurdum, there is no reason to suppose that a bed is not a natural object. Similarly, a volcano, what Aristotle would define as a process of “nature,” is the consequence of tectonic pressure underneath the earth’s crust. A volcano does not come to be from a volcano. Yet, again, a volcano is clearly a natural process. Furthermore, we can create machines that can put together other machines like themselves. As a result, theoretically, machines (which would not be part of Aristotle’s natural world) can come to be from machines.

Beds, as Aristotle rightly argued, do not come to be from beds. Indeed, a human being is a necessary condition to bring about their existence. However, a human being by itself is not a sufficient condition to bring about the existence of another human being. The growth of a fetus requires nutrients external to the mother, oxygen, a certain temperature, etcetera. Thus, it is not the case that we —according to Aristotle, natural beings— move and shape a static and independent world spontaneously. We are both shapers and shaped by our surroundings[7].

Why was this distinction between the natural and the non-natural so misleading for Aristotle’s theories? He saw that human beings, through craftsmanship and Will, could bring about changes in order to create artificial objects that, he thought, were not part of nature. An artist, through his talent and Will to act, could actualize a lump of bronze or marble that could potentially become a statue. By use of the analogy previously described, I think Aristotle thought that a similar method applied to natural processes. The first unmoved mover is to natural agents what natural agents are to artificial objects. In other words, God is to humans what Michelangelo is to the David. He thought that the end of our existence and our essence had to be defined by a macro first unmoved mover —a supernatural Will. Darwin was a fundamental figure in challenging the views of those that, like Aristotle, saw the human being as a special and elevated entity.

The work of the ancient atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, would resemble more what science was to become after the scientific revolution that Copernicus started in 1543 with the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. The atomists believed that there was no meaningful end or purpose in nature. All there is is atoms colliding against each other in the void. Atoms, they believed, are indestructible; the have always been and will always be. Since all there is is matter, and matter can be calculated mathematically, everything that will happen, like mathematical proofs, has to happen necessarily—a deterministic view, in other words. Aristotle, on the other hand, rejected the explanatory powers of mathematics (194a), an instrument that would become the nucleus of the scientific world after Galileo. The Atomists asked not “What purpose did this event serve?” like Aristotle, but “What earlier circumstances caused this event to be?” (Russell 67). From a pragmatic point of view, it seems to be the case that the latter question, the one the Atomists dealt with, has given us more answers regarding the reality that surrounds us. In other words, as Thomas Kuhn would say, modern physics increased the power to predict natural phenomena by embracing a non-teleological view. The former question, Aristotle’s question, led science in the road of superstition and theology for centuries.

After Newton, adopting related principles to those outlined by the Atomists, it seemed like scientific knowledge had finally reached solid foundations and the future of the discipline would only build up[8]. However, just like with Aristotle, we were mistaken. Albert Einstein revised most of the principles that were thought to be rock-solid. Consequently, Karl Popper proposed a theory of the development of science that cannot achieve ultimate certainty about anything. The material world, he claimed, exists independently from the human mind. Given the fact that their ontological nature is separate, the physical world is ultimately impenetrable and incommensurable to the human intellect. Therefore, like in other fields, problems start to arise when individuals and institutions become fanatical on their views of “certainty.” However, how is Popper so certain? I am troubled with whether or not Popper’s theory can be turned against itself. Could it be that his theory could be revised opening the possibility to find scientific certainty? After all, Popper is arguing that we can never be certain about knowledge, and I suppose that also applies to his own theory. So, will science ever reach certainty? I think it is impossible to know[9]. But again, how could I be even certain about that?

Works Cited

Aristotle. Introductory Readings. Indianapolis: Hackett Company, 1996. Print. (refer to this source for both Physics and Metaphysics)

Bertrand, Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Touchstone, 1967. Print.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Vol. 3. University Of Chicago, 1996. Print.

Popper, Karl. Open Society and its Enemies. Abingdon: Frank Cass, 1973. Print.

Notes

1. Thereof, the word “nature” will be used in accordance to the Ancient Greek connotation unless stated otherwise.
2. The essence of X is the answer to the question: What is F?
3. It is interesting how it seems impossible for Aristotle to have an effect without a proper cause in nature, but when he talks about the first mover having this particular quality the paradox instantaneously dissolves.
4. Such explanation is parodied in Voltaire’s Candide.
5. According to Karl Popper science can only work in the negative sense. That is, a scientist may only, with certainty, reject a theory as non-scientific but cannot, with certainty, put forward a theory as scientific.
6. After all, mules seem to have the “internal” principle of motion that Aristotle emphasized so much.
7. It would me interesting to wonder whether, in some ways, a bed can be a first cause. Imagine that your new bed is very uncomfortable. After a week of sleeping on it, you realize that you have developed problems in your back and you have to go to the doctor. Could it be said that the bed is the unmoved cause of these back problems? Aristotle would say no immediately (only natural objects are first causes). However, I think the answer to this question is not so clear.
8. In the Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper heavily criticized Plato, Marx, and Hegel (tracing the theories of the latter two to Aristotle) for formulating teleological theories of history and science that unfold in accordance with universal laws.
9. If we are aware that our theories have holes that remain unexplained, it seems clear that we have not reached ultimate certainty. On the other hand, even if it seems we have reached a “perfect” theory, we do not know what the future will bring and there is always the possibility that in the future a brilliant scientist will make us realize how wrong we were about what we though was certain (after all we ended up revising Newton’s physics).

Juan M. Botero-Duque (’10) is a Philosophy and Economics major at American University.

ABSTRACT: The following paper will seek to do two things: succinctly outline Dennett’s defense of propositional attitudes as having causal powers over human behaviour using the intentional stance, and subsequently analyze the specific downfalls in his position which render his argument ineffective. Dennett’s wish to validate propositional attitudes stems from the desire to retain a certain degree of scientific certainty without doing away with the language of beliefs, values and intentions. His answer to the body-mind problem is to explain the how abstract sounding phenomena such as intentions are able to affect the physical actions of humans. A critical analysis, it will be argued, exposes the limitations of Dennett’s argument. Potential defenses Dennett might offer will be considered. However, each will be shown to either fail to meet the challenge set by criticisms, or else appeal to faulty reasoning. It will be concluded that the intentional stance is ultimately flawed.

A propositional attitude is an umbrella term used to refer to a certain set of beliefs one holds towards a certain state of affairs. The topic of propositional attitudes is met with controversy when discussion of their nature and function is raised. The question of the causal powers of propositional attitudes and their ability to affect intentionality is hotly debated among philosophers and psychologists alike. There are those adopt the realist stance, discarding propositional attitudes as folk psychology that only works in limited domains and is unreliable as a scientific theory. In opposition to this are interpretationists, who argue that the commonsense psychological approach of propositional attitudes is viable and that it provides a satisfactory explanation of human actions. In general, one might say that realists treat intentions as objective criteria, while the interpretationist view considers beliefs in a way that renders them relative and purely subjective. In his article “True Believers: The Intentional Stance and Why it Works”, Daniel Dennett expresses his views on the legitimacy of propositional attitudes. In relation to the polarizing positions of realism and interpretationism, Dennett occupies somewhat of an intermediary stance; he accounts for propositional attitudes as objective phenomena that may be explained through an appeal to rationality and beliefs using the intentional stance. This approach will be analyzed; following an exegesis of his position, the strengths and weaknesses of Dennett’s theory will be evaluated.

Work Cited

Abstract. I aim to resolve a difficulty that has plagued post-Kuhnian philosophy of science. This difficulty stems from a simultaneous commitment to two theses: (1) that successive paradigms are incommensurable to such an extent that they define different puzzles and therefore different worlds, and (2) that each paradigm ‘improves’ on the one it replaces in a non-trivial way. I work through Davidson’s objection to the idea of a conceptual scheme (of which a scientific paradigm is a special case), as well as Kuhn’s response, to get in view a notion of ‘incommensurability’ that admits substantive conceptual differences between theories while still allowing for a non-arbitrary choice to be made among them. I argue that Kuhn’s response adequately addresses Davidson’s concerns, and work out in a deeper way than Kuhn how this response can pave the way for an account of scientific progress.

Surely one of the most puzzling aspects of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is his simultaneous insistence that (1) successive paradigms are incommensurable to such an extent that they define different puzzles and therefore different worlds, and (2) each paradigm ‘improves’ on the one it replaces in a non-trivial way. Given the puzzle-solving nature of normal science, asking which paradigm is better than another seems as silly as asking whether chess is better than checkers; each has its own set of rules, legitimate problems, and accepted solutions, and therefore ‘truth’ and genuine, cumulative progress make sense only relative to a particular paradigm. F=ma in Newton’s system, but not in Einstein’s, and asking which is closer to the way the world ‘actually is’ is impossible, since there is no way in which the world ‘actually is’ apart from a given set of categories to rend it apart. Kuhn says that the improvement is unidirectional and irrevocable, and he lists some criteria for so judging: “Accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved.”[1] All of these criteria, though, depend crucially on ‘sameness of subject matter’. It would be absurd to judge a scale for measuring weight better than an instrument for measuring radioactivity on the basis of accuracy; they need to be measuring the same sort of thing. But Kuhn also insists, for instance, that a pendulum and a constrained fall are two genuinely different entities; true statements about one may be false statements about the other. Judging one way better than another depends, therefore, upon sameness of subject matter in some sense; but what sense could that be given the nontrivial ways in which different paradigms really do define different worlds?

At the root of this confusion lies the troublesome question of what precisely ‘incommensurability’ means. This issue, or some variant of it, vexes interpretation of Structure and post-Kuhnian philosophy of science. My aim is to sort out, in at least a preliminary way, what precisely Kuhn can mean by ‘incommensurability’, given his description of normal science as puzzle-solving and his insistence on the reality of scientific progress through paradigms. I draw the basic Kuhnian frame from Structure, but my main thematic focus will be on Davidson’s critique of Kuhn’s position in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (VICS), and Kuhn’s response in Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability (CCC). Though these essays are not in direct dialogue—Davidson addresses conceptual schemes in contexts broader than science, and Kuhn answers many critics, not just Davidson—the main lines of argument presented therein cut fairly deeply into the confusion surrounding the notion of incommensurability itself, and I shall therefore take them as archetypal instances of the sorts of arguments at issue. I argue that Kuhn’s distinguishing between interpretation and translation adequately addresses Davidson’s structural critique of the notion itself, but that Kuhn fails to address the question how scientific progress is possible. I take this to be a sin primarily of omission rather than commission, and I propose a way of using the above argument between Kuhn and Davidson to pave the way toward a more complete and intelligible account of scientific progress through paradigms.

I proceed in three parts. First I sketch the main thrust of Davidson’s argument in VICS, and work through Kuhn’s response to that type of criticism in CCC. Then I evaluate Kuhn’s response, asking what of Davidson’s argument it does and does not address. Finally, I briefly use Kuhn’s distinction between translation and interpretation to develop a more explicit account of scientific progress than does Kuhn, one that does not undermine genuine failure of translation between paradigms.[2]

I

Davidson’s goal in VICS is to show that any assertion that there are incommensurable (untranslatable) conceptual schemes is either trivial or false.[3] His argument is long and slightly meandering, but the basic idea remains relatively consistent throughout. Without getting mired in too much detail, the basic form is this: First he reduces the claim of incommensurable conceptual schemes to sets of mutually untranslatable languages. Then he describes the various metaphors people use to talk about different conceptual schemes, showing that each of them implicitly depends upon some sort of calibration between the languages. (For example, the metaphor of each scheme providing a different point of view depends on a common coordinate system on which to plot them.) Then, in the meatiest part of the essay, he exposes a crucial assumption underlying of the very idea of conceptual schemes: the scheme/content dualism. The idea behind it, he says, relies on two separate but not entirely unrelated metaphors: a scheme either organizes or fits something, and the something that it organizes or fits is either experience or the world.

He attacks each of the metaphors separately. The first, that of organizing experience or the world, cannot function as a metaphor for separate conceptual schemes because it depends upon already individuated entities to organize in the first place. One cannot organize a simple entity. But given already individualized entities, we can talk about other languages lacking in particular entities within the world only if the two languages largely “share an ontology common to the two languages, with concepts that individuate the same objects.”[4] Local failures can only be made intelligible in the light of overwhelming similarity. The metaphor of organizing experience fares little better, since a language must do more than organize experience—it must form entities out of those experiences, and thereby populate an actual world. But, as observed above, local untranslatability between worlds given by various languages depends on a largely similar ontology; if two schemes were drastically different, then we could not talk about one using the other at all. Failures must be highly localized, in a way that fails altogether to make sense of genuinely different conceptual schemes.

Davidson then dispenses with the second metaphor, that of a scheme ‘fitting’ experience (or the world as it is experienced), by arguing that it depends upon some sort of raw, unmediated notion of ‘sensory experience’ that cannot be made intelligible in any way other than talk of ‘being true’. What does a sentence within a theory fit, exactly? The sentence ‘it is cold’ fits exactly those cases in which it is cold. That is to say, ‘it is cold’ fits a state of affairs. But that is just to say that the sentence is true. Nothing more fundamental than this may be expressed, since no thing makes sentences true; at the root of ‘fitting’, therefore, lies the irreducible notion of ‘truth’. “Our attempt,” he says, “to characterize languages or conceptual schemes in terms of the notion of fitting some entity has come down, then, to the simple thought that something is an acceptable conceptual scheme or theory if it is true.”[5] But we cannot make any sense whatever of ‘truth’ independently of our ability to translate into a language we understand; ‘truth’ makes sense only when stated within a comprehensible language. Thus even this ‘fitting’ metaphor implicitly depends upon the ability to translate purportedly untranslatable languages.
Above is a rather sketchy picture of the argument that Davidson gives; there are other considerations, but no substantially different style of argumentation. The overwhelmingly important idea underlying all of it is that asserting the existence of incommensurable conceptual schemes already depends upon a basic structure and ontology that they share; if there were a conceptual scheme so different from ours that it could not be translated, then it also could not be talked about, and in no real way could be called a conceptual scheme in the first place. The ability to translate other schemes is, then, a necessary condition for talking about them at all.

It is precisely this kind of criticism with which Kuhn primarily concerns himself in CCC. He organizes complains against his position into two main groups. The first contends that “if there is no way in which the two [languages] can be stated in a single language, then they cannot be compared, and no arguments from evidence can be relevant to the choice between them” (670).[6] This is the puzzle that began this paper. The second, related criticism is that “people like Kuhn tell us that it is impossible to translate old theories into a modern language. But they then proceed to do exactly that, reconstructing Aristotle’s or Newton’s or Lavoiser’s or Maxwell’s theory without departing from the language they speak everyday” (670). It is the latter criticism that fits Davidson’s, and it is the one to which Kuhn devotes most of his attention. Working through Kuhn’s response to the latter criticism will shed light on the former.

Much of Kuhn’s response in CCC is quite technical, addressing such things as Ramsey definitions and the Quinian translation manual, but, luckily for us, the main argument against Davidson’s type of position is clear and relatively straightforward. People like Davidson, Kuhn says, err by failing to distinguish translation from interpretation. Translation is something “done by a person who knows two languages,” where “the translator systematically substitutes words or strings of words in the other language for words or strings of words in the text in such a way as to produce an equivalent text in the other language” (672). The exact meaning of ‘equivalent’ can quickly become a thorny issue, but Kuhn does not concern himself with it: “let us simply say that the translated text tells more or less the same story, presents more or less the same ideas, describes more or less the same situation as the text of which it is a translation” (672). The point is that translation is a direct function from sets of symbols in one language to sets of symbols in the other. Interpretation, on the other hand, depends only upon an initial knowledge of a single language. The interpreter is confronted by a text that is completely unintelligible to him, and his goal is to make sense of it. He “observes behavior and the circumstances surrounding the production of the text, assuming throughout that good sense can be made of apparently linguistic behavior” (673). The ability to interpret does not imply the ability to translate; an interpreter can give sense to ‘gavagai’ without ever being able to find an equivalent English word. Going back to scientific paradigms, an interpreter can make sense of Aristotle’s theory without ever being able to translate it into Newton’s or Einstein’s.
Once we make this distinction, Kuhn says, Davidson’s type of argument loses almost all of its bite. Recall that his argument revolved around the claim that talking about or giving any sense whatever to another conceptual scheme presupposes a way of translating it into one’s own. Kuhn can now simply say that it does indeed presuppose the ability to interpret the other scheme, but not to translate it. There need not be equivalent symbols in one scheme as another; not all languages are isomorphic.[7] To address this argument, Davidson would have to show either that the distinction between translation and interpretation is not a real one, or that the ability to interpret another conceptual scheme still renders ‘incommensurability’ impotent.

II

In the preceding section I stayed quite close to the Davidson’s and Kuhn’s structure and language. As I noted, though, the two are not in completely direct dialogue, and the preceding section may make it seem as though the two are, in a certain sense, talking past each other. In particular, while Davidson’s main point is a critique of the scheme/content dualism, Kuhn nowhere mentions any such thing in CCC. It is my aim in this section to show that, while Kuhn does not address the scheme/content dualism directly, his distinction between translation and interpretation undermines much of Davidson’s argument against the very idea of it, and that the rest of Davidson’s argument unfairly attributes to Kuhn a dependence on ‘raw, unmediated experience’—a concept that Kuhn directly repudiates in Structure. All of the above argument will assume the reality of the distinction between translation and interpretation; I conclude the section by arguing that the distinction is indeed a real and apt one, and that it gives clearer sense to ‘incommensurability’ that does Structure itself.

Let us assume, then, the reality of Kuhn’s distinction. Can Davidson still show that Kuhn is nonetheless guilty of an untenable dualism between scheme and raw content, or does Kuhn’s distinction undermine that argument? Davidson attacked mainly the metaphors people use to give sense to distinct conceptual schemes, and to those metaphors I here return. Kuhn’s position now amounts to saying that two schemes are different if and only if they cannot be translated—which is to say, if there is no isomorphism from strings of words in one scheme to strings of words in another. To take an example, this is to say that there is nothing in Einstein’s system that directly corresponds to Newton’s ‘force’. This is not to say that the two systems have nothing to do with each other—remember, interpretation is always possible—but the point is that the symbols in one system do not correspond directly to symbols in the other. Einstein and Newton speak of the same world in the sense that experiments in Newton’s system can be explained in Einstein’s, but the symbols they use to describe that world are not inter-translatable.

To this example let us apply Davidson’s argument directly. The idea, he would say, is that both systems ‘fit’ or ‘chop up’ the experience of observing a moving object, or simply a moving object within the world. (I use Davidson’s quadripartite division, without inquiring which one fits Kuhn’s language best; in truth, all metaphors are at work in interrelated ways, making it prudent to consider them all.) The two theories cannot be said to ‘chop up’ anything while remaining genuinely separate theories because to speak thus presupposes already individuated entities, and thus an ontology common to each of them—they are really largely the same theory, expressed in different symbols. As for each theory ‘fitting’ something (sensory experience or the world), to say that they ‘fit’ the world or experience is just to say that they are largely true; but to judge that something is largely true one must be able to translate it into his language. Thus they are inter-translatable.

With the distinction between translation and interpretation in hand, it becomes clear that the above line of reasoning proves only the ability to interpret the other theory, not the ability to translate it. Just because the theories are nontrivially co-referential, at least insofar as a Newtonian and an Einsteinian would agree that they are both describing ‘that entity moving on the table’, gives no faith for supposing that the concepts that they use to describe the entity are isomorphic. Indeed, Kuhn argues persuasively and at length that they are not; the terms in Einstein’s system and in Newton’s, while they both pick out many of the same particular physical entities, really do mean different things, and, crucially, stand in different relations to each other.[8] Thus the theories are interpretable but not translatable, and Davidson’s argument is moot.

There is, however, one part of Davidson’s complaint that could be brought to bear on Kuhn’s picture—that is, if Kuhn held any such thing in the first place. Part of Davidson’s argument against the scheme/content dualism—indeed, the part of it that Kuhn nowhere mentions in CCC—is the insistence that it relies on something like ‘raw, unmediated experience’ or ‘formless content’ out of which conceptual schemes give shape. And indeed, if Kuhn’s system did depend on this, he would be in considerable trouble, for Davidson’s argument would still have a solid foothold. Clearly something is amiss here, though, since one of the notions Kuhn actively repudiates in Structure is the idea that we can make any sense whatever of raw content unmediated through already existing concepts. Davidson would have to show, then, that for all of Kuhn’s insistence that there is no such thing, his theory stealthily depends on the notion. The question then becomes: Does talking of a conceptual scheme at all depend upon unmediated content to which the scheme may be applied (either to break up the content or to fit the content)? Davidson argues that it does; there is no scheme without raw content to put into it.

The argument that Davidson provides is one that depends mostly on grammar. The grammar of ‘schemes’ seems to require something to fit into a scheme. The scheme, that is, provides what Davidson calls ‘posits’. “It is reasonable,” he says, “ to call something a posit if it can be contrasted with something that is not. Here the something that is not is sensory experience.”[9] The posits then ‘fit’ or ‘break up’ the raw experience. This structure depends, it seems, on raw experience to break up in the first place. Thus having different schemes make sense only if ‘raw experience’ makes sense; ‘raw experience’ does not make sense; therefore there are no different schemes. At least, that is the basic idea.
I argue that, though this is a tempting line to take, it is overhasty and leaves room for substantial objection. It is enough to undermine Davidson’s argument to show that the metaphor can depend on something other than raw, unmediated experience, and that is what I intend to do, following a pseudo-Kuhnian line. I agree that there is no way of talking about sensory experiences apart from any set of categories or concepts; else there would be no experience, only dumb perception (I use the distinction in Kant’s sense). But this is not the only way of rendering intelligible two untranslatable ways of talking about experience. There is no way of talking about a pendulum or a constrained fall apart from those (or other) determinate categories; Davidson then infers that talking about both of them as different schemes about the same sort of thing depends upon each of them fitting the same raw, unmediated sense perception. But why not take a merely pragmatic approach? The two schemes pick out the same entity if and only if an inhabitant of one scheme and an inhabitant of another agree that it is the same entity—a necessary step in interpretation, and one that does not necessarily imply translation. They need not try to sort out what raw experience underlies their schemes—indeed, they need not even posit such a thing. It is enough that they can interpret each other well enough to understand that it is the same physical entity—that their schemes are, in at least this case, locally co-referential. Their having a scheme need not depend on raw, unmediated experience; it need depend only on the mutual ability to interpret each other. Thus raw experience need not make sense in order for conceptual schemes to make sense. All that is required is interpretation. In this way, then, there can be untranslatable schemes—or at least, Davidson’s argument that there cannot be falters. The scheme does indeed give rise to content, but it is not ‘raw, unmediated’ content. The scheme is what makes any content at all possible, and the ability to interpret allows the two schemes to pick out some of the same things without requiring ‘raw experience’ underlying them, whatever that could be.

Therefore, if the distinction between translation and interpretation is a real and apt one, Davidson’s argument fails, and there we can indeed make sense of untranslatable (though not uninterpretable) schemes.[10] I do not intend to give an exhaustive argument for the reality of the distinction, but I shall address two possible complaints against Kuhn’s distinction that someone like Davidson could make. The first is that the bar for translation is so high as to include only relatively specialized formal languages. The second is that the claim of the ability to interpret but not to translate various schemes still amounts to a trivialization of the notion of conceptual schemes.

Translation is something that occurs between symbols; one can program a computer to do it, and no reference to the world is required. I substitute ‘casa’ for ‘house’ without knowing or caring what content these terms have. This is why translation is so clean, and why it provides an extremely strong notion of ‘sameness’. But is such a thing usually possible at all? Defining the distinction thus seems to render much of what we call ‘translation’ mere interpretation. Indeed, Kuhn says, “if a gloss is required, we shall have to ask why.”[11] But my copy of Being and Time includes hundreds of linguistically relevant footnotes; if that is not a translation, what is? Clearly base 10 arithmetic and base 3 arithmetic can be translated in this strong sense; there is absolutely no loss of information, merely different symbolic ways of expressing the same exact thing. But besides mathematical and computer languages, it seems as though there can never be such a thing as genuine translation. Thus the distinction is inapt at best and pigheaded at worst; most every sort of calibration between languages worth talking about is just interpretation.

It is worth remembering, though, that the primary question at issue in this paper is the nature of scientific paradigms. A scientific paradigm, whatever it is, depends on formal and mathematical vocabulary. Normal science may well be an activity learned by doing something, but the something that one does is to try to fit nature into the mathematical equations that characterize one’s paradigm. Seen in this way, the distinction is still an apt one. As Kuhn demonstrates in Structure, the equations that govern special relativity really cannot be translated into the equations that govern the Newtonian universe; they consist of entirely different mathematical apparatuses. This holds even of the less mathematical sciences, like chemistry. Kuhn argues at length that a phlogiston cannot be translated legitimately into modern terminology without destroying intelligibility. Interpretation is therefore necessary; one must look to the world, not only to symbols. Furthermore, something like translation can obtain here: I can do Newtonian physics in Spanish or English while still doing the same physics. The distinction therefore makes sense at very least when dealing with the activities of science. I leave its impact on more everyday uses of the term undecided, but I do not think it is a stretch to say that my copy of Being and Time does indeed require a bit of interpretation to supplement what is otherwise a translation (implying some sort of local untranslatability between German and English). Indeed, since interpretation is required to learn another language in the first place, translation must always be founded on prior interpretation.

The second complaint that someone like Davidson could lodge against the distinction is that even admitting the ability to interpret another scheme renders the very idea of a conceptual scheme trivial. If any other scheme can be interpreted, then why call them different at all? We can describe one in terms of the other fairly well, if not symbolically faithfully, and therefore truth-values of one can be evaluated with respect to the other. ‘Incommensurability’ winds up amounting to a failure only to substitute symbols for symbols, not actually to compare the two theories in a meaningful way. Theories are untranslatable in Kuhn’s sense, but so what? They still amount to more or less the same thing, differing only on were the boundaries for concepts are drawn.

This complaint is more substantial than the last. It calls for a more extended discussion, one that will need to get clear on what sort of ‘sameness’ we can ascribe to different scientific paradigms. We have said that the ability to interpret requires at least being able to tell when two theories are largely co-referential; in order to understand Newton’s theory, we need to be able to pick out some of the same entities as described by Einstein’s theory, and, while failing to make systematic symbolic substitutions a la translation, still interpret the former to the extent that we can see that ‘what it is about’ can be made to resemble in some way the entities that populate Einstein’s universe. The worry here, then, is that this amounts to saying that the theories really are the same in a non-trivial way—they pick out the same entities, and thus the claim that they are ‘incommensurable’ amounts to saying nearly nothing of importance for anything a philosopher of science might want to ask. Since they are about the same entity, where the theories differ, one or both are simply wrong, and the bite of incommensurability is gone.

We are finally at the point of addressing the question with which this paper began: how is there incommensurability but still ‘sameness of subject matter’ in some nontrivial sense? I answer that we need a distinction between types of ‘sameness’, one that will hopefully dispel these worries. The idea is this: Two theories can be largely co-referential within the world while still defining completely different worlds. Here is how it works:

Recall the pendulum and the constrained fall. In order for us to be able to interpret the one that is not within our paradigm, we need to be able to say that the two refer to the same entity in some cases and in some sense. That is, I agree with an Aristotelian that this particular physical object, which I observe within the world, and which he calls a constrained fall and I call a pendulum, is the same. How do we determine that it is the same? With a particular, physical entity within the world, this is not difficult—we can pick it out by pointing, or, to be more pedantic, by picking up the entity and moving it, and mutually verifying that it was the selfsame entity that we moved.[12] Our theories are co-referential at least in this sense. But this does not undermine the sense in which Kuhn says that the two entities are genuinely different entities. That is, the theoretical apparatus that we use to refer to the entity differ completely. One entity falls with difficulty; the other keeps going with difficulty. One essentially falls, while the other essentially keeps going according to sinusoidal equations. These are two different descriptions that, in this particular case, can be brought to bear on same entity. And we can agree that our theories are co-referential in many cases. Going forward one major paradigm, I can describe most particular physical entities using Einsteinian or Newtonian vocabulary; I acknowledge that it is the same physical entity, but depending on which way I describe it, I subsume the physical entity under a different theoretical model. ‘Space’ means different things depending on whether you ask Einstein or Newton, but when I ask it to bear on a particular thing—asking whether this table is in space, for instance—they agree.
Perhaps the analogy will be cleaner if we abstract into the world of mathematics. Whatever sort of space we live in, it is homeomorphic to R^3 (this just means that locally it looks and acts very much like R^3). I can describe this world, though, by using linear algebra (treating it as an actual instantiation of R^3), or algebraic topology (treating it as curved in some more complicated structure). Whichever way I adopt, I commit myself to a genuinely different way that the world looks. But in any local neighborhood (ours, say), we mostly agree on how the world behaves. Given any particular entity within this world, we agree that it looks three-dimensional, and that, whatever version of space we adopt, this particular entity is in space. It is only when we abstract to the theoretical that we differ—that is, when we ask what ‘space’ means. Thus we have genuinely different theories about how the world looks, but these theories agree on the behavior of most particular entities within the world. The table is really a different thing depending on which way I adopt—but it differs in the theoretical description, not in the physical instantiation. The equations for describing motion are completely different in either model (they are not at all translatable), but they can both approximately fit any particular entity I can observe. I propose that in a quite similar way this is how scientific paradigms can describe completely different worlds yet remain locally co-referential. They can agree that they are each ‘about’ some of the same particular entities, but still disagree about the fundamental nature of any particular entity. [13] A pendulum and a constrained fall refer to the same physical entity, but describe two different entities. This difference is, at very least, not wholly trivial—at least insofar as the difference between a curved space and a non-curved one is not trivial. The analogy is not perfect, since in mathematics both spaces are subsumed under a strict well-defined notion of ‘topological space’, and also the two spaces can be mapped onto each other in a continuously invertible way, whereas nothing of the sort is possible between scientific paradigms, but the basic idea holds nonetheless. The ‘sameness of subject matter’ with scientific paradigms comes from asking the theory to bear on the world, just as the ‘sameness of subject matter’ with R^3 and a curved space comes from being able to describe the world in one way or the other in such a way as to make the world look genuinely different whichever way we adopt.

III

Now that we have a more explicit account of incommensurability—incommensurable theories may be interpreted but not translated, interpretation entails discovering where theories are mostly co-referential, theories can be largely co-referential while defining genuinely different worlds—we are in a position to give a better account of scientific progress. The problem, as Kuhn describes it in CCC, is that if two paradigms define genuinely different worlds, then “no argument from evidence can be relevant to the choice between them.”[14] This is because each theory includes different and untranslatable entities. Newtonian space is flat, while Einsteinian space-time is curved; phlogiston is not translatable into oxygen. But given that the entities are different, how can one appeal to evidence in support of one theory over another? Scientific paradigms seem different from natural languages in this respect: one need not decide whether Spanish is a better language than English. The scientific community, though, must decide between Newton and Einstein. The two theories are mutually incompatible. But any argument from evidence, it seems, could not privilege one theory over another. Since theories define different puzzles and hence worlds, different things are admissible as evidence in each theory. Evidence about a constrained fall may not be evidence about a pendulum, since they are essentially different entities.

Adding to the difficulty, Kuhn says, is the fact that each theory is circular at its base. An Einsteinian cannot appeal to evidence to undermine a Newtonian’s version of space, because the latter defines space in a particular way. To be more concrete, consider the equation ‘F=ma’. Here we define force as ‘that which, when applied to a certain mass, yields constant acceleration’, and then we go on to define mass as ‘that which accelerates constantly when a constant force is applied’. Kuhn argues that neither of these terms is primitive. No argument from evidence could undermine this system, because it is self-justifying (and so is Einstein’s). Furthermore, each of these systems uses its equations to establish what counts as evidence in the first place; a Newtonian could say to an Einsteinian that the latter’s ‘evidence’ for the curvature of space was simply not about space in the first place, because space just means something flat. How could we possibly appeal to evidence to privilege one over another if the standard for evidence varies?
With the conclusions of the preceding section in hand, the answer to this puzzle (which Kuhn mentions but abandons in CCC) follows with at least some clarity. Incommensurable means untranslatable, but not uninterpretable. An Einsteinian can interpret Newtonian physics without ever translating the concepts and equations it employs into his own paradigm. And a necessary step in interpreting another scientific paradigm is determining where it is co-referential with one’s own. One cannot interpret Newtonian physics properly without being able to describe a Newtonian object in its own language, and to identify it as the same object one can also describe using the Einsteinian model. We established the necessity of ‘sameness of subject matter’ at least in this sense, and argued that it depends on interpretation, but not on raw sense-data.

I now invoke the criteria for judging ‘betterness’ that Kuhn provides in Structure: “Accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved.”[15] These criteria do depend on sameness of subject matter in some sense, and now we are in a position to say what sort of sense that is. Since interpretation allows the inhabitant of one theory to give sense to the other and locate the places where the two theories are co-referential, one can ask which theory makes, for instance, more accurate quantitative prediction. An Einsteinian cannot translate Newton’s experiments into the mathematical vocabulary of relativity, but he can explain ‘the same’ experiment using either paradigm, and ask which one can predict the behavior of the particular entity more accurately. This does not describe an act of translation, but rather an act of interpretation. The other criteria Kuhn lists likewise make sense under this model; I can solve ‘more’ different puzzles using Einstein than I can using Newton, and I am not comparing checkers and chess. I can interpret the puzzles of either one, I just cannot translate one theory into the other. In particular, and perhaps most importantly, Einstein’s theory can interpret and satisfactorily deal with the crises that destroyed Newton’s theory, while explaining equally well many of the other things that Newton predicts. This may be the most important sense in which one theory is better than the other: one has not yet reached crisis, while the other has, and the better theory can explain (interpret) the crisis of the other theory in its terms. Since scientific theories imply what sort of entities there are in the world, those theories are beholden to the behavior of the entities they predict. Einstein’s equations may not be translatable into Newton’s, but once we have each theory with each admitting certain things as evidence, each theory is beholden to the observed behavior of the entities within the world. Again, this need not imply a raw sense-data language describing the entities. All that is required is that the theory gives rise to certain entities, and that these entities which are in the world then hold the theory accountable. Einstein’s theory can be accountable to the behavior of the entities in more cases than Newton’s, even if the theories are incommensurable.

The above gives a coherent picture that can account for scientific progress without undermining real incommensurability between paradigms. I shall conclude by extending Kuhn’s puzzle-solving metaphor in a way, hopefully, that will better illustrate the above picture.

Normal science is puzzle-solving; it has the characteristics of a game, with entities defined by certain rules. Thus the activity of doing normal science is much like playing chess. But there are no crises in chess; why do they occur in normal science? The answer is that doing normal science is like playing a game with nature, where nature has not agreed on the rules beforehand. As soon as someone thinks to treat nature as though one could supply determinate rules that govern its behavior, one begins to play the game, and one makes certain moves (experiments) to observe how nature responds. A paradigm develops when a group finally agrees that a certain base level structure of the game can be taken for granted, and the group begins testing it, making new moves and filling in more details. Occasionally, though, nature makes a move that the paradigm explicitly disallows—remember, nature did not agree to play our game. Crisis then occurs, and the foundational structure of the game must be reevaluated. Neglecting all of the intermediary steps, a new paradigm develops to account for the anomalous move. The makers of this paradigm have the benefit of all of the past moves, and so their paradigm must also account for them. The new paradigm then creates what may well amount to an entirely different game structure, and must completely reinterpret nature’s actions prior to the crisis that were explained adequately well with the old paradigm.[16] The paradigms must be mutually interpretable enough to call each individual move ‘the same’, but the rules that describe the game may be completely different, having absolutely nothing to do with each other except that they agree on some particular cases of moves. This does not imply a raw sense-data language describing the moves, since one cannot have any notion of moves apart from a particular game. The games must only be mutually interpretable. And, finally, the two games are incommensurable. The rules of one game may be untranslatable with respect to the rules of the other. In this sense the game looks completely different from the perspective of either set of rules. But the later version of the game is nonetheless an improvement on the earlier one, since it can interpret all of the moves that the old one could interpret and more. The games are not inter-translatable, but there is progress nevertheless. Paradigm shifts work in a similar way.[17]

I have argued, following the general outline of the above metaphor, that scientific paradigms can be incommensurable while still allowing for a non-trivial account of scientific progress through paradigms. The key is interpretation, which can undermine both the structural complaints Davidson lodges against the very idea of a conceptual scheme itself, and the complaint that asking which of two incommensurable theories is better is impossible. These questions now have adequate answers, grounded in Kuhn’s distinction between translation and interpretation, and the distinction between mere co-reference and having the same meaning (defining the same world).

Notes

1. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996. 206
2. Throughout the paper I use ‘translation’ and ‘interpretation’ in the senses Kuhn reserves for them (see below), except when quoting or channeling Davidson, for whom there is no such distinction.
3. For the purposes of this paper, I treat a scientific paradigm as a special case of what Davidson calls a conceptual scheme. Whether this substitution is entirely fair I leave undecided, but at very least, Davidson and Kuhn treat them thus.
4. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In The Essential Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. 203
5. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In The Essential Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. 205
6. The remaining citations in this section are all from Kuhn, Thomas S. “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Two (1982): 669-688.
7. Technical vocabulary is often odious, but sometimes helpful; here I believe it to be the latter. An isomorphism is just a function that is one-to-one and preserving all the relevant structures. The term, while in use primarily in mathematics, can also be used of non-formal languages: ‘Ich habe drei Beine’ is isomorphic to ‘I have three legs’. Each word in one sentence has an equivalent in the other without intermediary loss of meaning, and the way in which they are put together yields the same sense. By contrast, ‘to be’ cannot be translated into Spanish in this way; we have two choices, ‘estar’ and ‘ser’, between which we choose depending on context. By ‘translation’, Kuhn means something like a loose version of ‘isomorphism’.
8. See Structure, 101.
9. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In The Essential Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. 204
10. Actually, there are probably some cases of uninterpretability, but they are far removed from those with which we are concerned. For example, it may well be that one cannot interpret chess using the rules for scrabble. But these are highly localized and contrived games, not large-scale conceptual schemes for describing something like the world. And, in any case, both chess and scrabble can be interpreted in English.
11. Kuhn, Thomas S. “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Two (1982): 672
12. Of course, this can be difficult when there are no living Aristotelians. But even in this case we are not totally helpless; we can read the description of their experiments, and use our interpretive powers to reconstruct what it was that they were doing.
13. Different theories often commit one to the existence of different physical entities—some theories include electrons while others do not, and so no statement about ‘electrons’ can be interpreted in the theory that does not—but interpretation nonetheless requires that we can find some entities that both theories can describe (tables, for instance).
14. Kuhn, Thomas S. “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Two (1982): 670
15. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996. 206
16. It is important that one does not obtain the same game structure with more complicated cases and exceptions to the old game. A necessary condition for science, it seems, is precisely not accepting exceptions to general rules. The picture, then, is not as though nature is playing chess, and up until move n no pieces have been able to jump any other piece, and at move n+1 nature uses the knight to jump over another piece, and we modify the game to allow for this one particular move. At that point we must reevaluate what the entity ‘knight’ is, and supply general rules that account for all observed cases of its behavior. Even this case could be accounted for with modification, and for the most part we would need to make little departure from normal science. For more profound paradigm shifts we may have to redo the entire game—for example, if we thought we were playing chess and all of a sudden nature moved its piece off of what we thought was the board.
17. Readers of Kuhn will note that I am oversimplifying slightly; in particular, Kuhn says that there are almost always anomalies within paradigms, and that not all anomalies lead to crisis. I do not here address what other characteristics an anomaly must have in order to lead to crisis. This is another issue, one that does not seem to get adequate treatment in Structure. His account there is mainly sociological, going something like, “Well, some do and some don’t, and we can tell which is which based on how the scientists within the paradigm respond to it,” without asking what particular characteristics of an anomaly tend to evoke that response.

Ethan Jerzak (’10) is a Philosophy and Allied Fields major at the University of Chicago

Cover art by atomfuer

I. Introduction

The debate on the role of neuroscience in the context of the law has crucial repercussions for the notion of legal responsibility. Legal responsibility and moral responsibility are not necessarily analogous; however, there is a strong correlation. Moral responsibility often informs our sense of legal responsibility, but the latter is best understood as a subset of the former. Legal responsibility is less demanding than moral responsibility mainly due to the context of its function: the courtroom. In the courtroom, evidence is the focus of judgments, whereas moral responsibility adjudicates in cases that are purely internal to an agent and transcend evidence. For example, when dealing with virtuous actions, a person probably upholds their legal responsibility when she works in a soup kitchen to feed those in need. If she would be doing so, only for personal benefit (e.g. to look virtuous or solely for economic gain) we would mostly only judge this act deplorable on moral grounds. Conversely, if a person shoots and kills another person, both legally and morally we are interested in the internal workings of the agent. Exculpatory factors derived from impairment of mental faculties, specifically in the legal domain, suggest that committing an act alone is not adequate for justifying the attribution of guilt and responsibility. These are some common conceptions of legal and moral responsibility, many of which rely on some conception of an intentional moral agent that has a will. In this paper, I first examine the text of Greene & Cohen and their conclusion that a shift to a consequentialist justification of punishment follows from a new understanding gained by neuroscience. After criticising their conclusion, I look at an article by Joel Feinberg where he outlines the differences between legal and moral responsibility. This will prepare the ground for considering Levy & Bayne as well as Ryan & Deci who argue that the will is an essential part of our understanding of responsibility and self-determination respectively. Finally, I consider Levy & Bayne’s characterological account and the plausibility it gains in direct balance to the implausibility of Greene & Cohen’s conclusion.

Greene & Cohen describe the dialectic that neuroscience encroaches on in the field of philosophy of law. There are two recourses, (1) discoveries and understanding gained through neuroscience will transform our legal attitude or (2) such a new understanding would only provide details that the current legal framework is adequately able to accommodate. They advocate the latter and take the position that neuroscience will have a transformative effect, “not by undermining [the law’s] current assumptions, but by transforming people’s moral intuitions about free will and responsibility” (Greene and Cohen 1775). They further state that our current legal principles owe their veracity to our intuitive sense of justice. It is this sense of justice that they believe will be transformed by neuroscientific discoveries. To this effect, they conclude our intuition of justice should shift from the use of punishment for retribution to punishment for consequentialist reasons. I will reject the claim that a change in our sense of justice as they describe it would not also affect current legal principles. I will attempt to expose a fundamental intuition that underlies both the current law and our intuitions of justice such that they are interdependent. Further, the arguments of Levy & Bayne 2004 about the indispensability of the will and its role within legal responsibility will add on to this discussion. I will also evaluate the potential of characterological accounts of “will” to pose a viable alternative to switching to the consequentialist solution Green & Cohen suggest to be necessary.

The interest in neuroscience for questions of law follows naturally from the dual component for legal conviction in criminal cases. The defendant must not only be proved to have committed an illegal act, but mens rea must also be established. Greene & Cohen suggest mens rea can be understood narrowly and loosely: Narrowly, Intention and on the other hand loosely as “all mental states consistent with moral and/or legal blame,” (Greene and Cohen 1775). An interest in mental states is evidence of a main assumption inherent in our legal system. This crucial connection is where our dialogue of will is most important. However, I will first outline Greene & Cohen’s theory in more detail before illustrating this point.

II. Legal Principles and Moral Intuitions

Amongst others, there are two premises that the arguments of Greene & Cohen rely upon. First, that science, specifically neuroscience will undermine the common libertarian convictions of free will and take with it the retributivist justification that depends on these convictions. This appears to be an assumption because such a move assumes we can eliminate the will. This is something Adina Roskies (2006) believes neuroscience alone is unable to do. The second premise is that a rejection of common-sense free will and retributivism “[ensues] a shift towards a consequentialist approach to punishment’ (Greene and Cohen 1776). Is this the only other option? Could the characterological approach of Levy & Bayne be plausible and thereby still preserve a notion of will? If so this would weaken Greene & Cohen‘s argument.

With these questions in mind, I will now explicate Greene & Cohen’s position. The conceptual playing field takes shape by contrasting consequentialist and retributivist justifications for punishment. Retributivist justifications of punishment according to Greene & Cohen suffer from an internal tension: compatibilism and incompatibilism of free will with determinism. They argue incompatibilist libertarian intuitions underlie the current law. This is evident, say Green & Cohen, because there is often a gap between moral intuitions and what the law deems relevant (Greene and Cohen 1776).

Greene & Cohen provide critiques of both justifications. Consequentialist justifications are forward-looking. Their aim is to insure future societal welfare but they are susceptible to objections as are most other utilitarian type theories. For many it may appear that utilitarian type theories allow the justification of anything as long as there is a greater benefit to the whole. In the case of legal responsibility, Greene & Cohen admit that “consequentialist theories fail to capture something central to common-sense intuitions about legitimate punishment” (Greene and Cohen 1776). Retributivist justifications are backward-looking and are less concerned with the welfare of society as a whole. Retributivist punishment functions more to remedy a debt that has been incurred by a criminal whether to society or another individual. Their critique of the retributivist justifications focuses on the scepticism of free will in a deterministic world.

What of this deterministic world? On the subject of determinism, they reference Peter van Inwagan (1982): “determinism is true if the world is such that its current state is completely determined by (i) the laws of physics and (ii) past states of the world” (Greene and Cohen 1777). They admit free will is often conceived as the ability to do otherwise, but note that Frankfurt (1966) questions this assumption. Later in the paper, we will consider those implications, which I believe Greene & Cohen have neglected to do. In the end, say Greene & Cohen, there are three main solutions to the problem of free will: hard determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism. They argue for a consequentialist justification for punishment since it is plausible with all three options, whereas retributivist justifications necessitate a stance on free will. They continue to expand their argument by assuming punishment can reasonably only be carried out for actions that are freely willed. Since hard determinism would undermine justification for any punishment and, according to a previous claim, libertarian views are “scientifically suspect” (Greene and Cohen 1778) they conclude that retributivism requires a compatibilist view. However, Green & Cohen believe that neuroscience will increase the tension between the “compatibilist legal principles and libertarian moral intuitions” beyond its breaking point (Ibid.), ending with an inability to support retributivist claims.

An argument that states neuroscience will not change the law (Green & Cohen refer to Morse 2004), maintains the law only requires “a general capacity for rational behaviour” to deem people legally responsible. This means a neurological explanation may well provide better and more detailed evidence of rationality, but it will not fundamentally change the law “unless it shows that people in general fail to meet the law’s very minimal requirements for rationality” (Greene and Cohen 1778). This point will be instrumental in undermining Greene & Cohen’s argument. Proponents of the fact that neuroscience will change the law, says Morse, are often committing the fundamental psycholegal error. If neuroscience provides us with a neuronal explanation of acts committed then one who commits this fallacy would argue that this fact is exculpatory for legal responsibility. However, under the assumption of physicalism, every action is caused in some way by the brain. Thus, establishing a causal relation between brain states and action is not sufficient to bring into play any legal ramifications except perhaps in the case where some brain state sufficiently impairs minimal rationality.

For this reason, Morse believes neuroscience does not pose a challenge to the law, as we currently know it. Greene & Cohen agree in principle with the subtle notion the psycholegal error elucidates but add a distinctive appeal to the moral intuitions and commitments of society. According to Greene & Cohen, “The legitimacy of the law itself depends on its adequately reflecting the moral intuitions and commitments of society. If neuroscience can change those intuitions, then neuroscience can change the law” (Greene and Cohen 1778). To circumscribe these intuitions they say what really matters for responsibility for most people is evidenced by the kinds of disjunctive questions they ask in these situations. Questions such as “was it him, or was it his genes? … Was it him, or was it his brain?” (Greene and Cohen 1778-9)

The example of Mr. Puppet highlights these intuitions. The example also accentuates the disparity between what the law’s interests are and what we intuitively hold to be true about responsibility. The law is interested in establishing minimal rationality as a prerequisite for legal responsibility, but since we can construct hypothetical situations such as Mr. Puppet, where outside control does not come at the cost of impairing rationality it appears that in the face of a deterministic worldview, which precisely postulates outside control, the law seems inadequate in separating these cases. Greene & Cohen put it this way, “rationality is just a presumed correlate of what most people really care about” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is what underlies the fundamental psycholegal error. We are intuitively opposed to any outside forces that exert control over us, that we are quick to exculpate in any situation where that is the case. Greene & Cohen conclude that we are all similar to Mr. Puppet since determinism is true at least to some degree because of physical laws. Further, free will seems to require actions that are independent of external forces and thus requires us to reject determinism. Since determinism is true to some degree a libertarian free will is a misunderstanding and incompatible with determinism. In principle, I agree with Greene & Cohen that Mr. Puppet brings forth some vital questions about our intuitions, but I believe they have not gone deep enough in investigating a fundamental assumption that both the law and the case of Mr. Puppet share.

They believe that as we discover more about the mechanistic processes about the brain the plausibility of “dualist and libertarian intuitions” will decrease. In this respect, they compare the brain to a bottleneck through which every influence on our behaviour must flow. Neuroscience will provide us with the tools to discover what is going through this bottleneck. In a reflection on how this may play out in the future Greene & Cohen see a time where the dichotomy between the questions of being truly guilty and simply a victim of neuronal and external forces will become obsolete. For this to happen there must be an intermediate step. We need first accept that being a victim of neuronal and external forces is still sufficient for legal responsibility of any kind. Is it possible to preserve a notion of will (whatever its status) and is this perhaps required to justify any sense of being responsible for ones actions? Greene & Cohen themselves sate that “it is possible that we will never be able to fully talk ourselves out of [our intuitive sense of free will]”. (Greene and Cohen 1781). It seems plausible to say that neuroscience may inform and fine-tune our intuitions to some degree in this area. However, the central question for this paper investigates whether its elimination altogether would leave sufficient grounds for the law’s current assumptions.

III. The Case for the Law’s Dependence on Intuitions About Justice

At this point I present an intermittent argument to challenge Greene & Cohen’s conclusion that neuroscience will change our moral intuition but not change the law’s current assumptions. We pick up on the idea of rationality in a setting such as Mr. Puppet. I believe just because neuroscience may show a one-to-one correlation between brain states and actions this does not mean that our actions can be sufficiently explained at the level of a deterministic world. If the functioning within the brain does adhere to some physical laws and even if the outside world has the same physical laws this is not in principle sufficient to conclude that our environment determines our actions. This detail is putatively dismissed by Green & Cohen with the example of Mr. Puppet, and means that their conclusion makes certain implicit assumptions about the phenomenon of will.

Let us be more concrete with some examples. There are two options both in respect to the world and to our brain/mind. Either the world is (1a) determined (knowing the beginning state and all the physical laws that regulate movement to future states) or (1b) it is indetermined. On the other hand, the will could be (2a) libertarian in nature (the possibility of doing otherwise) or (2b) the will could be an illusion (where we at least appear to have the possibility of choosing otherwise) or (2c) there is no will (no moral responsibility). Greene & Cohen believe a determined world eliminates both 2a and 2b. I believe 2b is still a viable option.

To consider this, let us look at external versus internal factors. Feinberg mentions that an external factor (e.g. dust in the eye) can interfere with internal workings such as intentions, but I propose this “interference” only makes sense if the internal processes are viewed as self-contained and not just an extension of the external (determined or indetermined) world.

Thus, if neuroscience were to reveal that our will can be reduced to determined brain states we would still be interested in one person’s specific brain state for questions of moral or legal responsibility. It would not make sense to ask what the state of the world is in our attempt to discover what this person’s particular role was in the deterministic world and from this make an inference about responsibility. This illuminates a fundamental assumption, precisely, that looking at a particular part of the causal network (e.g. the individual’s brain) has more moral significance than the world at large. I believe this is a fundamental assumption the law makes. However, the kind of justice that Greene & Cohen support when they suggest that consequentialist justifications for punishment are the only plausible ones in face of a deterministic worldview undermines this assumption. Thus, they are presupposing that we would accept such a view of justice to argue that neuroscience will lead us to change our intuitions in precisely that direction. It is also possible that our intuitions about justice and more specifically our intuitions about individuality prevent us from conceiving of ourselves as simply a physical extension of the world, even if this world were to be physically determined.

The fact that the current law is interested in the internal as exemplified in the individual brain precludes such a conception of justice. Specifically, on Greene & Cohen’s account, the law’s assumptions center on the question of rationality. Recall, Morse’s statement about minimal rationality. I propose that this rationality is a question of the internal and individual brain state as opposed to a question about the world at large. Therefore, if Greene & Cohen were to suggest that our sense of justice were to change in the way they propose then this would mean “we all lack minimal rationality.” On the other hand, if we would like to argue that the law’s current assumptions are unaffected, then we must be able to maintain individuality, which has the correlate of will despite an externally determined world.

Rationality in the abstract is behaviour or reasoning that is precisely not just based on external influences. Can nature be rational? Would an earthquake be morally responsible for the deaths it caused? These two questions alone illustrate the intuitions we have about justice. If the law establishes a difference between nature at large and us as people (moral agents, who are rational) this distinction itself is witness that at least in principle there is a separate standard that we apply in the case of assumed intentional agents in both the areas of moral and legal responsibility. Using this terminology, I believe Greene & Cohen wish to say that neuroscience will demonstrate that there are no moral agents therefore we need consequentialist justifications for punishment. Does this then not change the fundamental assumptions underlying current law?

It may be possible that neuroscience reveals that we are just an extension of a determined environment. We can then either continue with an illusion to maintain our intuitions (N.J. Block (1971) makes an argument for the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological explanations of behaviour), or we can change our intuitions, but then we will also affect the law’s current assumptions. More so, because of the interconnectedness of rationality, individuality and moral agency it appears implausible to change our notion of justice without also fundamentally challenging the law’s current assumptions.

IV. Eliminating the Will

To bring forth the complexity that underlies our intuitive sense of free will Greene & Cohen delve into a psychological analysis of our perceptions of inanimate objects versus those that appear to move around at will. To make sense of the behaviour of different objects in the world our minds, say Greene & Cohen have developed two distinct cognitive systems. In this fundamental folk psychological intuition, we find the grounds for the psycholegal error. A moral agent must necessarily be seen as having a mind that acts as its own cause. Determinism would clearly undermine our attribution of such minds and thus challenge our attribution of responsibility. Greene & Cohen themselves on the topic of eliminating the will include this passage:

“many compatibilists sceptically ask what would it mean to give up on free will. Were we to give it up, wouldn’t we have to immediately reinvent it? Does not every decision involve an implicit commitment to the idea of free will? And how else would we distinguish between ordinary rational adults and other individuals, such as young children and the mentally ill, whose will – or whatever you want to call it – is clearly compromised? Free will, compatibilists argue, is here to stay, and the challenge for science is to figure out how exactly it works and not to peddle silly arguments that deny the undeniable (Dennett 2003)” (Greene and Cohen 1777)

For Greene & Cohen, the compromise that allows responsibility despite a lack of free will is exemplified with a consequentialist justification for punishment. They conclude that neuroscience will not change the law, because the law’s concerns lay elsewhere, but that the underlying intuitions or moral responsibility will change by what neuroscience can bring to the table. Free will is an illusion and our intuitions will ultimately have to change from retributivist to consequentialist justifications for punishment.

I have already made a case for a dependency of the law on our moral intuitions. Now that we have analyzed Greene & Cohen’s argument in depth, and argued against a change of intuitions that still preserves the current law, we can address the claims they have made with regard to the will. The heart of their argument depends on challenging the conception of free will. At this point, it is helpful to consider the difference between free will and will proper. Greene & Cohen’s dialectic focuses on free will since they wish to pin this against a deterministic worldview. Do they also mean to eliminate a psychological understanding of action in terms of will? Are free will and will proper synonymous, or can we derive an explanation of action in terms of will that is compatible with determinism? These questions force us to ask what it is about will that is so important in our conception of moral agency. A firm stand on this issue will help us gage the extent of influence neuroscientific discoveries may have. To help in elucidating this issue we must certainly consider the contribution of Harry Frankfurt. I believe it is plausible to take the view of Frankfurt with respect to free will combined with neurological explanations to preserve a sense of will. We shall also consider the option of replacing will with a characterological account.

First, we delineate moral responsibility by considering Feinberg; in Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals, he provides a detailed discussion. The greatest factor separating legal and moral responsibility according to Feinberg is that “judgments of legal responsibility are strongly influenced by ulterior practical purposes” (Feinberg 341). These practical concerns deal with the inherent vagueness in judging “how … losses can best be distributed and whether certain kinds of risk-taking are to be encouraged or deterred” (Feinberg 343). Punishment and compensation are further practical concerns that a legal system must deal with (Feinberg 343). Moral responsibility according to Feinberg has many unique aspects. At large, it is “liability to charges and credits on some ideal record” (Feinberg 345). The exactness that legal questions demand such as the year and a day rule (to determine if an act contributed to a death) is inappropriate when considering moral responsibility. However moral responsibility is in principal precisely decidable as it must be read off facts and deduced from them. Further, moral judgments are “absolute” in contrast to legal judgments. Legal judgments are not as strong, since they only say the agent had an “‘important’ contribution for the purpose of the law” (Feinberg 345). Finally, moral responsibility must deliver regular and predictable judgments that are not subject to luck (Feinberg 346).

Feinberg asserts that in many situations it may be impossible to make moral judgments, since actions are not the only contributor to the outcome. Being “at fault” and moral responsibility are not identical. “A person can well be morally at fault in what he does without being morally responsible for some given harm” (Feinberg 347). Our intuition about morality is that “moral responsibility for external harm makes no sense, … moral responsibility is therefore restricted to the inner world of the mind, where the agent rules supreme and luck has no place” (Ibid.). He further mentions that this is where volition is undertaken and intentions formed where an agent “govern[s] those inner thoughts and volitions which are completely subject to [her] control” (Ibid.)

Even though moral responsibility primarily looks towards the inner workings Feinberg continues and shows how even moral responsibility can be susceptible to an outside influence (e.g. luck) such as a speck of dust in one’s eye that interrupts someone’s rage from progressing (Feinberg 349). Feinberg notices it is odd to speak of responsibility for one’s intentions, but: “having a character of a certain sort is often a necessary condition for the forming of any particular intention” (Ibid.). By hypothesizing two agents with similar character but different intentions formed (due to external influence), Feinberg concludes that responsibility is not derived from character alone, but rather from how important of a contributor the character was in the particular situation (Feinberg 350). By making a list of possible contributors towards forming a certain intention despite character Feinberg points out that some of these contributing factors are external in nature (ie. Upset stomach, rude remarks, hyperactive adrenal gland). In this sense, we arrive at the same problem as with legal responsibility; (Feinberg 350-1) the problem of exactness and balancing factors that have contributed to the intention. Feinberg’s final and central claim is that it is a “mistake to think that by restricting responsibility to an inner jurisdiction we can thereby make precise its vaguenesses [sic]and eliminate its contingencies [sic]” (Feinberg 351). This illustrates some of the similarities between legal and moral responsibility.

What of the balance between internal and external factors? What Morse calls the fundamental psycholegal error is summed up by “regard[ing] actions only as fully free when those actions are seen as robust against determination by external forces” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is evidence to their anti-compatibilist tendencies. Most of their discussion looks at the role of free will. They believe libertarian conceptions of free will are in contradiction with neuroscience. (Ibid.) Ryan & Deci hash out what kind of understanding of will can stand in the face of neuroscience. They agree that the understanding of Descartes postulating a force that tilts the mechanical processes in the brain is such a version of the will that cannot stand up to neuroscience (Ryan and Deci 1571). In their discussion on autonomy, Ryan & Deci explore several philosophical notions to define autonomy. Both from a phenomenological perspective and modern analytical approaches we see that independence from external influences or constraints is not necessary to have autonomy. In both cases, assent or consent to these influences is sufficient for autonomy (Ryan and Deci 1560-2). The self-determination theory (SDT) of autonomy is used in discussions of psychological aspects relevant to autonomy. In this context the opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, is defined as “regulation…by forces experienced as alien or pressuring, be they inner impulses or demands, or external contingencies” (Ryan and Deci 1562). Ryan & Deci bring further depth to an understanding of autonomy. Instead of an all or nothing autonomy, they propose that “within SDT, autonomy for any given action is a matter of degree” (Ryan and Deci 1563). If this is the case, it makes the dispute between proponents of will-talk and those that maintain it to be an illusion more complex.

Both the notions that Feinberg and Ryan & Deci bring forth show that despite external influences (even inner workings of the brain) our intuitions still support an investigation of intention. Even though Feinberg admits our character can be influenced by alien forces it is a determination of the degree of influence that has a bearing on responsibility. The term “will” can thus be understood as an overarching term, a mental place holder, that bears testimony to a fundamental assumption underlying our intuitions about responsibility.

V. The Charaterological Account

Levy & Bayne bring to the table examples of pathologies of the will. Since it is our purpose to argue for behaviour with the aid of the notion of will it would be begging the question to speak of pathologies of the “will”. Thus, we will consider the example of Levy & Bayne as pathologies of the common notion of agency. If we succeed in showing that these pathologies indispensably require the notion of will to make them intelligible then we would succeeded in opening the way for the indispensability of the will. Evaluating this claim, however, is not within the scope of this paper, rather, if we can show that the characterological account of the will, which Levy & Bayne provide is sufficient for maintaining a retributivist justification of punishment we have still weakened the claim of Greene & Cohen.

We begin by looking at the argument of Levy & Bayne. A very helpful distinction they make is to separate the notion of will into three senses of the notion: genesis of action, phenomenology of agency and degree of effort. For responsibility Levy & Bayne maintain that an agent must “exercise a certain form (or degree) of control” (Levy and Bayne 465). They then discuss the situation of loss of control. If rational control is required for responsibility there can be two “disorders of control” namely failures of authority and failures of inhibition. Failures of authority: “call[s] into question the ascription of the action to the agent” (Ibid.). Failures of inhibition: the action is ascribed to the agent, but the agent “has lost rational control over their actions” (Ibid.). They also note that there is a parallel between the depletion of rationality in delusional persons and the impaired agency at the root of pathologies of the will.

Since much rests on the ability of control Levy & Bayne, strongly link this capacity with responsibility. They then continue to offer another possibility in the form of a characterological account that maintains a notion of responsibility despite a lack of traditional control over one’s actions. Frankfurt is instrumental in providing an example where this would be desired. Levy & Bayne summarize this contribution of Frankfurt by saying “rather than identify an agent’s character with the mechanisms that underlie the normal control of their actions….agents are fully responsible for their actions only if they are the product of desires that they endorse” (Levy and Bayne 467). On this account, the notion of will could simply correspond to an endorsement of actions. This would be similar to Ryan & Deci’s self-determination theory. Hereby we rescue retributivist justifications by appeal to character. This only leaves the problem of adjudicating between a lack of the capacities of self-control and the degree to which they have been exercised to determine whether an agent endorses an action (Levy and Bayne 468).

VI. Conclusion

I thus conclude that elimination of will may not prevent a model of legal/moral responsibility, but doing so would change the current intuitions about moral responsibility quite extremely. The discoveries of neuroscience will not be sufficient to change our moral intuitions to such a degree, especially because we have other alternative ways of conceiving will that preserve the underlying libertarian intuitions. Even in the case where alien influences on our will challenge our libertarian intuitions, Frankfurt and Levy & Bayne offer responsibility grounded in character. Inclusion of will is a prima facie requirement for legal responsibility, but even if a libertarian will cannot be supported it is not necessary to adopt a consequentialist justification for punishment. Finally, if this strong conclusion is unconvincing I propose that the will is at minimum a critical notion that functions as a mental placeholder to make discussions of legal/moral responsibility intelligible, since moral responsibility conceptually requires an intentional agent. Thus, even in a consequentialist justification we would need to acknowledge moral agents if we want to have a conception of what is best for a society of intentional agents.

References

Feinberg, Joel. “Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals.” The Philosophical Review July 1962: 340-351.

Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy (1969): 829-839.

Golding, Martin P. “Responsibility.” The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Ed. M. Golding and W. Edmunson. 2006. 236-247.

Greene, Joshua and Jonathan Cohen. “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.” The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2004): 1775-1785.

Levy, Neil and Tim Bayne. “A will of one’s own: Consciousness, control, and character.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2004): 459-470.

Morse, Stephen J. “Moral and legal responsibility and the new neuroscience.” Neuroethics. Defining the issues in theory, practice and policy. Oxford University Press, 2006. 33-49.

Roskies, Adina. “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility.” TRENDS in Cognitive Science 10.9 (2006): 419-423.

Ryan, Richard M. and Edward L. Deci. “Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will?” Journal of Personality (2006): 1557-1585.

Markus Prinz (’09) is a Philosophy Major at McGill University.