Making sense of the libertarian’s semantic claim about agential phenomenology

Abstract

Libertarians about free will sometimes argue for their position on the grounds that our phenomenology of action is such that determinism would need to be false for it to be veridical. Many, however, have thought that it would be impossible for us to have an experience that is in contradiction with determinism, since this would require us to have perceptual experience of metaphysical facts. In this paper I show how the libertarian claim is possible. In particular, if experience depicts the world such that there is more than one physically possible future, then determinism would need to be false for that experience to be veridical. I show that we have experiences, or perceptual episodes, of this kind on the basis of recent work in the study of perception. Theorists in this area have argued that we have vision-for-action, and that what we visually perceive are not just objects but also possibilities for action. If we experience that it is possible that we ϕ, then we also experience that it is possible that we not ϕ. Furthermore, we probably experience more than one possibility for action at any one moment. I argue that these are physical possibilities, and therefore that we experience the world such that there is more than one physically possible future. So the libertarian claim about the semantics of agential phenomenology is highly plausible, even if this does not entail libertarianism.

Keywords:

• free will
• incompatibilism, perception
• pragmatism
• agential phenomenology

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due for the helpful feedback from an audience at a workshop on ‘Sense of Agency and Moral Responsibility’ as well that of colleagues and students who saw me showcase an early iteration of this argument at the Institut supérieur de philosophie. I gratefully acknowledge the funding of the ARC project “Causality and Free Will,” as well as the support of the INSOSCI research group for “A Methodological Study on Economic Policies and the Neurosciences of Agency.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Sims is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institut supérieur de philosophie at Université catholique de Louvain. Here he works on the project “Causality and Free Will,” run jointly by the ISP and the Institute of Neuroscience. Before that he earned his doctorate at Deakin University with a dissertation on motivated reasoning in anosognosia, after having spent two years as a visiting fellow in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London.

Notes

1 The term “agential phenomenology” is sometimes used in order to demarcate a putatively distinct kind of conscious experience which accompanies action and is not reducible to perceptual phenomenology (e.g. Mylopoulos 2015). This is sometimes also called “sense of agency.” I do not intend to commit myself on this question. I just mean to indicate the general family of experiences that are associated with mental events preceding and accompanying action and which are discussed in the free will literature: deciding, choosing, deliberating, and so on. Furthermore, it seems less likely that agentive experiences understood in that former sense are particularly relevant to the argument I give here, given that those experiences are contiguous with action that is already occurring or which has already occurred (Haggard 2017). These may be relevant to a phenomenological defence of agent-causation, but I am not defending the view that agentive experiences have an agent-causal content.

2 I do not mean to rule out a conjunction between judgments and experiences, such that perceptual experiences cannot be a distinct species of judgment or belief. I just mean to underline the epistemic difference between judgments that are self-evidencing and judgments that are not.

3 Some modest pragmatists deny that inferentialism about perception is mandatory (e.g. Orlandi 2014; Tillas et al. 2017). However, even these authors argue for some kind of process which looks like the influence of prior knowledge or learning on perception, like “bias” (in Orlandi) or “a matching process” (in Tillas et al.). It is just that they deny inferentialism of a more full-blooded sort. So it seems to me that this disagreement hinges on an unnecessarily strong idea of “inference.”

4 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing my attention to this point.

5 See, e.g. Gallese (2007); Brogaard (2011); Madary (2011).

6 Please continue to keep in mind that I am not arguing for the validity of this entire argument, but just for the plausibility of (2). I say more about this in the conclusion.

7 I think, however, that a good case can be made that we do experience affordances. But I will not argue that here. Some good recent treatments of this issue can be found in Nanay (2011) and Siegel (2014). The former author denies that he is discussing affordances, but one will see that his “action-properties” nonetheless appear to be modally significant in the way that interests me here.

8 For the rest of the paper I will speak loosely in the sense that I don’t clearly distinguish these, but everything I say about the semantics of affordances is straightforwardly applicable in both cases.

9 Of course, there is always the possibility that we are wrong about the existence of faster-than-light travel. But that would not mean that we can perceive metaphysical possibilities, but just that we were wrong about what those possibilities are.

10 It was thanks to a brief yet very helpful exchange with Richard Holton that I was able to see this Kratzerian way of putting the concern.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Université Catholique de Louvain