dmb quotes someone talking about James: > It remained for William James, Peirce's close friend, to assert that CHANCE > CAN PROVIDE unpredictable alternatives from which THE WILL CAN CHOOSE or > determine one alternative.
Steve: As a pragmatist James simply can't support unpredictability as ontological randomness. A pragmatist wouldn't even take a side on the ontological version of determinism versus indeterminism. Since that can't be what he is talking about, he must mean unpredictability as an epistemological concern. But in that sense, unpredictability is just our current lack of ability to make good predictions. How could that INability "provide" us with anything we want let alone something worth touting as freedom of will? dmb continues quoting: James was the first thinker to enunciate clearly a two-stage decision process, with CHANCE in a present time of random alternatives, LEADING TO A CHOICE which selects one alternative and transforms an equivocal ambiguous future into an unalterable determined past. There are undetermined alternatives followed by adequately determined choices."The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for CHANCE...What is meant by saying that my CHOICE of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be CHOSEN." (James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in The Will to Believe, 1897, p.155) Steve: I raised the issue of free will being a "small god" theory when the will is taken as a metaphysical entity which neither you nor James want to admit into the discussion, but this argument reminds me of the "god of the gaps" sorts of arguments as it attempts to find a tiny place where "the will" can operate. I think it fails miserably. If the choice between Divinity and Oxford can't be explained with any reasoning then it is just epistemically random. If it can be explained with reasoning, then we could point to the reasons rather than being forced to stop at "the will" as the final cause for the choice. Why would a choice cease be worth calling a choice if we can come up with causal explanations for why it was chosen? How could we know that some choices could simply never be explained in terms of causation? How could ignorance--not knowing why something was chosen--amount to freedom? How could expansion of the human capacity to come up with reasons for why something happened (i.e. reducing unpredictability) take away our freedom? Rather than touting unpredictability as a source of freedom, the only way to make sense of all this pragmatically is to think of expanding our power of prediction as compatible with and even adding to our freedom. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
