Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

De Caro

Conceptual analysis vs. empirical investigations:  the case of the free will issue

 Today one of the most crucial metaphilosophical debates concerns the relevance of the scientific findings for philosophical investigations. In general, three stances can be adopted with regard to this issue:

 1) Scientific naturalism, which tends to reduce philosophy to science (more precisely, to the natural sciences -- if not to physics alone). W.V Quine and Daniel Dennett have defended this stance: the latter, for example, recently wrote that philosophy has “to clarify and unify the often warring perspectives [of the sciences] into a single vision of the universe”.

 2) Liberal or moderate naturalism, whose advocate tend generally to maintain that the possible philosophical relevance of (some) scientific results does not imply that philosophy is not autonomous from the sciences. Today Hilary Putnam and John Dupré hold this view (the former, for example, recently wrote that he wanted to defend “a modest nonmetaphysical [i.e., non-scientistic] realism squarely in touch with the results of science”).

 3) Antinaturalism, which tends to deny any philosophical relevance to the acquisitions of the natural sciences. Many of the advocates of this stance are influenced by Wittgestein’s views, as when he wrote, for example, that, as philosophers, " ... we are not doing natural science, nor yet natural history".

 The contemporary debate on free will is a case in which these three stances compete very clearly, and this fact gives us a good opportunity to evaluate their respective merits and demerits. In general, three views (corresponding to the three mentioned metaphilosophical stances) are held with regard to the roles that philosophy and science can respectively play in the free will discussion:

1)      The scientific-isolationist view, according to which the free will problem is empirical in character, and in principle it can be solved by empirical science alone (Benjamin Libet and D.M. Wegner have arguably been using this approach);

2)      The interactionist view, according to which the free will problem has to be treated by both philosophy and empirical science (many libertarians and some compatibilists belong to this group);

3)      The philosophical isolationist view, according to which the free will problem is a conceptual problem that has to be treated a priori. And this means that this problem pertains entirely to philosophical conceptual analysis (Roderick Chisholm and P.F. Strawson were two of the most influential advocates of this view).