•  
  •  
 

Abstract

In their “Free Will and the Bounds of the Self”, Knobe and Nichols try to get at the root of the discomfort that people feel when confronted with the picture of the mind that characterizes contemporary cognitive science in order to establish whether such discomfort is warranted or not. Their conclusion is that people’s puzzlement cannot be dismissed as a product of confusion, for it stems from some fundamental aspects of their conception of the self. In this paper I suggest, contrary to their conclusion, that there is a sense in which the skeptical worries about responsibility elicited by the computer model of the mind do result from confusion. Those worries can be traced back to an irrational over-generalization concerning the scope of cognitive science and the alleged exhaustiveness of the range of facts formulated in its vocabulary.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

References

Dennett, D. 1984. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge: the MIT Press.

Horwich, P. 2005. ‘Wittgenstein’s meta-philosophical development’. From a Deflationary Point of View 159–171.

Horwich, P. 2010. ‘Rorty’s Wittgenstein’. In A. Ahmed (ed.) ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide’, 145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750939

Knobe, J. & Nichols, S. 2011. ‘Free Will and the Bounds of the Self’. In R. Kane (ed.) ‘The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd Edition’, 530–554. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nahmias, E. 2006. ‘Folk Fears about Freedom and Responsibility: Determinism vs. Reductionism’. Journal of Cognition and Culture 6: 215–237.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853706776931295

Nahmias, E. & Murray, D. 2011. ‘Experimental Philosophy on Free Will: An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions’. In J. Aguilar, A. Buckareff & K. Frankish (eds.) ‘New Waves in Philosophy of Action’, 189–216. London & New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Nahmias, E., Coates, J. & Kvaran, T. 2007. ‘Folk Fears about Freedom and Responsibility: Determinism vs. Reductionism’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31: 214–242.

Nichols, S. & Knobe, J. 2007. ‘Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions’. Noûs 41: 663–685.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00666.x

Van Inwagen, P. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. 1953/2001. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing.

Download

Share

COinS