An Argument for Libertarian Free Will From Cognition

Here's an argument that human persons have libertarian free will:

1. Cognition is (distinguished as) that which is properly subject to certain kinds of normative assessment.  (The "mark of the mental" is that it is subject to certain kinds of normative assessment.)
2. If cognizers did not have libertarian free will then cognition would not be properly subject to those kinds of normative assessment. 
3. Cognizers have libertarian free will.
4. Human persons are cognizers.
5. Therefore, human persons have libertarian free will.

The idea behind the 1 is that persons are responsible for their beliefs.  If someone believes that P, that if P then Q, and that not Q, then that person has transgressed in some sense.  Cognition is bound by rules, not in a nomic sense (these rules can be violated), but in a normative sense (one ought not to violate these rules).  Sapients are distinguished from non-sapients in precisely this way: one ought not to criticize a system on the grounds that its entropy is increasing, but one can criticize a person on the grounds that his beliefs are inconsistent.

The motivation for 2 runs along the same lines that are usually given for holding that moral responsibility requires libertarian free will: namely that if determinism is true then one's acts are consequences of laws of nature and past events, but (i) we are not responsible for what laws of nature and past events obtain, and hence (ii) we are not responsible for the consequences of what laws of nature and past events obtain (including the subset of those consequences that contains our actions).

Van Inwagen famously argues for libertarian free will on the grounds that we have moral responsibilities, but it seems to me that the argument from cognition has a dialectical advantage over the moral one.  Philosophers are largely willing to reject the existence of moral truths if they take this to be incompatible with their metaphysical commitments.  I doubt that philosophers generally would be as willing to give up cognition on those grounds.

I take it that 2 is the controversial premise here, but it seems prima facie plausible to me.

Languages Don't Exist

Here's an argument that we ought not to postulate the existence of languages.  The argument isn't formally valid, but it could easily be made formally valid, and I think that it would then be sound:

1. What a philosophy of language needs to account for is communication.  Once we have explained communication there are no further facts about language that need to be explained.
2. In order to account for both communication failure (the many occasions in which we talk past each other) and special cases of communicative success (when the meaning of our utterance is more than, less than, or has no overlap with what we intend to convey—as in, e.g., certain cases of definite description use, and metaphor), we must reject decoding accounts of communication and adopt relevance accounts of communication.
3. Relevance accounts of communication explain communication in terms of ampliative inferences as to a speaker’s communicative intentions.
4. An account of ampliative inference as to a speaker’s communicative intentions need not involve languages, only particular facts about individual speakers.
5. We can explain all the facts about language-use without positing the existence of languages.
6. (In practicing philosophy of language ) we should only postulate those entities required to explain the facts about language.
7. Hence, we should not postulate the existence of languages.

Perhaps some doubt could be cast on 1, but I'm sceptical that any other facts a philosophy of language ought to account for would require postulating the existence of languages.

One last post on understanding

1. Both intuitionistic logic and classical logic are understood.
2. It is not the case that both intuitionistic logic and classical logic are sound.
3. Hence, there is something that is understood which is not true.

More on whether understanding requires knowledge

In the last post I suggested that understanding needn't be factive, and hence isn't a species of knowledge.  I also suspect that understanding needn't be doxastic (viz. doesn't require belief).  Take for instance a historian of science who understands phlogiston theory, but doesn't take it to be true.  There's a retort here: sure enough the historian of science doesn't believe phlogiston theory, but there is something she is required to believe about phlogiston theory in order to have understanding; i.e. that such and such is what people took phlogiston theory to be, that "phlogiston theory" denotes such and such propositions, or whatever.  Certainly, in most ordinary cases of understanding, beliefs of this sort will be involved, but these might only be a contingent feature of ordinary cases of understanding, not essential to understanding itself.  Imagine a whimsical wizard implants in a person S's mind a grasp of some such theory $\Gamma$.  This person, being epistemically cautious, whilst having a conceptual grasp of $\Gamma$, forms no beliefs about its origin, its truth, whether anyone else believes $\Gamma$, or whatever.  It seems coherent to imagine someone who understands $\Gamma$ without having any beliefs about it (other than trivial ones such as "I grasp $\Gamma$").

Is Misunderstanding a Species of Understanding?

I take it that something of the sort Kvanvig says about understanding is correct:

The central feature of understanding, it seems to me, is in the neighborhood of what internalist coherence theories say about justification. Understanding requires the grasping of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships in a large and comprehensive body of information. One can know many unrelated pieces of information, but understanding is achieved only when informational items are pieced together by the subject in question.  [Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding: 192]

and

[U]nderstanding requires, and knowledge does not, an internal grasping or appreciation of how the various elements in a body of information are related to each other in terms of explanatory, logical, probabilistic, and other kinds of relations that coherentists have thought constitutive of justification. [ibid.: 192-3]

(My own view actually differs slightly from Kvanvig's in that I want to take understanding as fundamental and explain explanation in terms of it, rather than the other way around, but this is tangential to what I'm talking about here.) So, for example, someone who misunderstands evolutionary theory might think that humans evolved from chimpanzees, while someone who understands evolutionary theory will hold that both humans and chimps evolved from a common hominid ancestor. Broadly speaking then we might think that there are four states a person can be in: (i) understanding; (ii) misunderstanding; (iii) befuddlement (when a person's beliefs in a particular domain are largely incoherent); and (iv) simple non-understanding (when a person doesn't have any beliefs about a particular domain, coherent or otherwise). In this case, it seems that misunderstanding is a species of understanding: the person who beliefs that humans evolved from chimps grasps coherence-making relationships between a body of propositions. Now, a dissenter might just define understanding as the factive kind, but at the very least, misunderstanding shares all the distinctive features of understanding, while lacking factivity, and so the two are naturally grouped together as cognate phenomenon. If this is right, understanding is not a species of knowledge because truth is not a necessary condition for understanding.

Solving Meno's Paradox the Semantic Inferentialist Way

Semantic inferentialists hold that understanding an expression amounts to having a practical mastery over the ‘material’ infererences it is involved in. (‘Material’ is intended to invoke the old Aristotelian distinction between form and matter: logically valid inferences are hold in virtue of their form, materially valid inferences hold in virtue of their content.)  Grasping ‘That’s red’, to use a well-trodden example, involves treating the commitment as incompatible with ‘That’s green’ and as entailing commitment to ‘That’s coloured’.  Logical locutions (paradigmatically negation and the conditional), are used to make explicit the inferential relations one endorses in practice.  The inference from ‘That’s red’ to ‘That’s coloured’, although materially valid, is logically invalid.  The enthymematic gap can be plugged with ‘For all x, if x is red then x is coloured’.

That’s a (very) brief synopsis of one central tenet of semantic inferentialism, but what bearing does this have on the Meno paradox?  Plato’s Socrates states the paradox this way:

Do you realize what a controversy you’re conjuring up? The claim is that it’s impossible for a man to search either for what he knows or for what he doesn’t know: he wouldn’t be searching for what he knows, since he knows it and that makes the search unnecessary, and he can’t search for what he doesn’t know either, since he doesn’t even know what it is he’s going to search for. [Meno, 80e]

Socrates was inquiring into the nature of virtue, but any project of analysis—the analysis of knowledge, for instance—is subject to the paradox. If we already understand what knowledge is, then the analysis of knowledge appears superfluous; but, if we do not understand what knowledge is then we will have no grip on what analysis is the correct one.  It looks like the semantic inferentialist can avoid this dilemma by appealing to the difference between practical mastery and making explicit.  We began with an implicit understanding of ‘knowledge’; a practical mastery of the inferences it licenses, its circumstances and consequences of application.  By making explicit the inferences that a concept licenses, what is gained from the project of analysis is an explicit understanding of the concept of knowledge; so on the one hand analysis is not superfluous. On the other hand, our implicit understanding of knowledge allows us to check it against various analyses: are there occasions where it is appropriate to ascribe knowledge but where it is not appropriate to ascribe the analysans, or vice versa? So, there is no puzzle surrounding how we can know which analysis is the correct one. Our implicit inferential mastery of concepts makes the project of analysis possible.