Metaphysics of Agent Libertarian Free Will

Again, I’m not saying that “to say that we have an experience of believing we cause” is sufficient to say “we do cause”. I’m saying that when the argument is arranged such that there is no way to distinguish between LFW and chance - that they, while being different theories, offer descriptions of mechanisms that are otherwise indistinguishable from each other - that the point remains that LFW, not chance, is where intuition leads, quite possibly universally. And if all else is equal between the choices, it seems that reason indicates LFW be the preferred explanation.

Now, intuition here can still be wrong - it’s only functioning as an intellectual tie-breaker between two supposedly equivalent descriptions. But what’s the alternative? Discarding LFW in favor of chance, even though it doesn’t offer a better description of what’s going on - and is counter-intuitive besides?

Clark:

I think I grasped from the get-go the force of your point as asking for an epistemic sign that would indicate a real difference between causal and free events. But I’m going to be a bit Kantian here in contesting whether we do directly discern relations like causality in experience, outside of some sort of framework of interpretations and inferences, (which I don’t think need be termed a theory in any strong sense), by which we engage with the world of our experience, and whether there is any such “thing” as experience that is neutral across all frameworks. I do think that our causal attributions derive from our practical interactions with the world, which already presupposes some sort of agency, and, of course, we can form quite extended and elaborate scientific theories of causal processes by generalizing and abstracting from such particular contexts. But that still and already involves an interpretedness of experience, that is, the drawing out or discernment of differences whereby on thing can be taken as a sign indicating another. Attribution of causal relations is not absolutely different in kind than attribution of agency. And they are both distinguished in practice, as a condition for experience, before they are distinguishable in theory. (Wittgenstein remarks that I distinguish between an inanimate thing, something animate, and something dead. He goes on, when I consider a stone, the notion of pain doesn’t enter in there, but when I consider plucking the wings off of a fly, the notion of pain begins to take hold). If theories make distinctions that can’t be made out in practice, (which is not simply the same as observational experience, since the two must be connected in some more-or-less ramified way), then those theories are open to criticisms, ranging from Occam’s Razor to inquiring into their underlying motivations to indicating the uselessness or futility of the theoretical project. But then it’s also possible to criticize the construction of a problem or question in such a way that it obstructs any possible answer.

I did have some confusion as to what you were referencing by “chance”, as to whether it concerned stochastic processes at the basis of a non-deterministic universe or the singularity of an entirely contingent event. If it’s a simple “luck” objection to LFW, that there is no way to distinguish the causal effect of an intentional from an unintentional act, well, yes, but then does the issue reduce to single events or relations between two such events, one mental, one physical? The trouble with a “punctual” account of agency is that it is so nominalistic that it virtually invites a skeptical response, such that the closer one looks for the singular moment of “free” decision as the unique source of the act, the blurrier the picture becomes and the more the prospect of such an identification recedes. My own suggestion was that, if agency is a structured phenomenon, i.e. organized and governed through the operation of rules, which however don’t just simply operate or apply themselves, then it is temporally distended, and can only be inferred from a series of singular moments and corresponding external events, to the extent that their cross-correlations would disrupt and reorganize the statistical distributions of environmental or external causal events, such that, through successive reiterations, the “force” of sheerly contingent singular events on the question would be reduced and eventually eliminated: call it “reverse eliminationism”. It all comes down to what sort of “thing” agency would be, and what one’s expectations of it would be. But agency would be precisely what disrupts one’s expectations and recurrently so. That’s not an account of LFW, but then I’m not partial to LFW. But it is an attempt to answer the epistemic question of a discernible sign of agency, which was posed apparently from the standpoint of what the mind of God would know. A Bayesian God, then. But then I’m not a party to any theological dispute here. And as I’ve already indicated, I think the question of agency and its possible freedom can really only be adequately opened up and addressed through the relation to the other, in which case it’s also not primarily a question of knowledge.

But I’m going to be a bit Kantian here in contesting whether we do directly discern relations like causality in experience, outside of some sort of framework of interpretations and inferences, (which I don’t think need be termed a theory in any strong sense), by which we engage with the world of our experience, and whether there is any such “thing” as experience that is neutral across all frameworks.

I’m more than willing to be Kantian here. But if you go Kantian doesn’t that give my argument more, not less, strength? The problem of causality is notorious. Let alone talk about kinds of causality.

If it’s a simple “luck” objection to LFW, that there is no way to distinguish the causal effect of an intentional from an unintentional act, well, yes, but then does the issue reduce to single events or relations between two such events, one mental, one physical?

Yes, if you’re familiar with Mele’s writings on luck and freedom I’m largely following him albeit with more of a theistic thrust.

The ultimate question though remains - how do we know? The problem isn’t just agency but rather what kinds of agency. After all someone who accepts something like event libertarianism still believes in agency. One can argue whether it fulfills properly our linguistic/intuitive uses. But here that’s not the question. Rather the question is whether we can distinguish them in some fashion in our knowledge.

When you say choice are you using it as a noun or a verb?

My argument is that if it is ordering of data then that can be done via some degree of randomness or by an “agent.” So I just don’t see how you’re avoiding my central question. Even if the synthetic unity is different, so what? That unity is the result and we can’t talk about how the unity came about except in terms of a metaphysical postulate that can’t be verified.

Blake I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what you are claiming. It seems you’re saying that a process is self-referential in knowledge. That is that to have the experience entails that one knows all about the experience in every detail. Is that correct?

I don’t think I’m conflating epistemology and metaphysics. It seems your metaphysics demands they be conflated if an ontological process demands that to have it that it be fully known.

It seems to me that all you are saying is that it is impossible to be free and not know it. Is that true?

If it is the case that you’re simply returning to a kind of Cartesian indubitable experience, only with free will, the question remains. Why should we believe that there are experiences like that? That is, what is the argument? It seems at best a very controversial metaphysical claim.

I guess Blake what I’m asking for is some defense of this basic structural stance you are taking. From my angle if there is an organization it needn’t have clues to what formed it. That is it could be due to determined laws, chance, or LFW and it’s only context that could possibly tell us that. You are saying that no, there is something in it itself that tells us that.

I recognize you believe this. But unless we can discuss why you believe this it seems dialog is at an end. No?

It just seems to me an amazingly controversial ontological claim that I just can’t see being possible. Although it is nice to at least finally get down to the core of our disagreement. Now we just need to go through the arguments. I’m more than willing to provide a counter argument using semiotics. But I’d like to understand your position better before I do that.

Prescinding from any theological issue, as to what God would intuit of causality,- (though that also involves the notion of intuition and what that would mean or how it might be conceived),- I don’t think the issue of agency, whether “free” or not, can be adequately addressed solely with reference to causality. (There are actually two issues intertwined here: 1) what exactly is or would be LFW, as some sort of unconditioned, causeless, or self-caused agency, together with the metaphysical projections that would be required to sustain a claim for it, and 2) whether LFW is required to sustain claims with respect to moral responsibility, which is different from the weaker claim that norms or values can not be predicated of an organism or agent that is not, in some sense, “free”. But it might be useful to keep the two issues separate, since to conflate the causal and moral issues is to beg the question and do neither justice.

At any rate, I don’t think that there is any clear, nor uniform consensus on these matters, whether in terms of common sense or linguistic convention, which would support LFW, but rather the actual state-of-affairs in those terms is contradictory or ambivalent.)

Blake, I take it, has already made the the move that the relation between a “free” intentional act and its causal basis can’t be a type-identity, but must only be a token-identity. But then the question is what is the basis of the token-identity on the causal side of the equation. The problem with a claim to a unique causal “signature” is that any claim to uniqueness, i.e incomparability, automatically provokes comparison, else how would we substantiate the claim to uniqueness. (This is slightly different from Clark’s externalist point about context).

Even under LFW, an agent’s acts can’t be “unique”, if only because its acts are conditioned by its own prior and potential future acts; comparison and identification among different alternatives are part of the package, and that can’t be derived “uniquely” from the agent itself. The agent passes over into the other in order to be an evaluative agent at all, while, at the same time, such an agent must have sufficient stability to compare and evaluate its alternatives. A completely internalist and intuitionist account of agency would abolish the “thing” itself. The counterfactuality involved in choice must depend on the factuality of the world that it does not of itself generate. But to identify agency with its factual causal conditions is self-stutifying. Whether that “justifies” or refutes LFW is less to the point than whether a causal account of agency suffices to frame the issue.

On the other hand, Clark seems to me to be raising and pressing an undecidability claim. But the point of an undecidability claim is that it calls forth or provokes a decision. What, if anything, would regulate such a decision is at issue.

Clark is not a phenomenal/physical determinist like Kant, who counts on that level as a thorough-going skeptic about LFW, even as he endorses LWF as the “noumenal” basis of morality. Still, it’s perplexing, at least to me, what would count as phenomenal evidence for agency, let alone any ground for LFW, in Clark’s book. Certainly, Clark does not want to consign the whole issue to the “noumenal”,- (which leads on to a ghostly afterlife of presuppositions, as to what the “noumenal” might contain)?

I’ll just lay a card face-up upon the table here, which may be an ace or a deuce. I don’t think the issue of agency, of whatever sort, can be adequately addressed without situating it in a framework of language/meaning, of which it is an “effect”. There are a number of implications that can be drawn from that claim. But I’ll simply state that causality and language/meaning occupy the same world without either being reducible to the other. I’d have any number of complaints/criticisms about how the problem/question of agency and its possible freedom are, at least implicitly, being set up here, purely philosophically, without regard to any theological issue to which I’m not a party. But I have trouble understanding what the purport of any moral/ethical claims might be, if they do not involve relations to others as entirely separate beings, rather than concerning the self-referential status of the agent concerned with certifying its own freedom. But then perhaps God would be the most entirely separate being of all, and the theological issue would not concern his intuition and organization of causality, but the “nature” of communication and communion with the divine.

[Edit: fixed formatting. CG]

John and Clark: I of course accept neither token, property nor type identity but material identity having a distinct signature.

Look at it this way. Assume that determinism is true and that God knows all of the states of the world and their causal entailments. By knowing the causal entailments, God knows what results from which causes and how the world must be given the prior states of the world at any given time.. Now assume that there are unique causal patterns to self-forming data that can arise only from the creative activity of an agent who organizes the data. By knowing that these unique causal patterns exists — a material reality — God knows that the organization of the data is the result of a creative act that is expressive of a unique identity. If an act is “self caused” then it bears a unique relationship to the self — it is expressive of the self in its momentary creation as the data of the previous moments are creatively synthesized into a new moment of experience that includes but is not fully explained by the mere causal inputs of the prior moments but requires an act of the agent to organize the data as an expression of the new self as it is creative in the new moment. The self is also itself reformed in the moment of decision so that instead of a stable substance we have a dynamic organism that gives the data of its prior existence to the new moment and then is partially reformed as a self in the moment by the decision that is made. So it is a dynamic and unique relationship of mutual and reciprocal causal influence. The process perspective really makes the assertion of token identity just a misunderstanding.

John: “Even under LFW, an agent’s acts can’t be “unique”, if only because its acts are conditioned by its own prior and potential future acts; comparison and identification among different alternatives are part of the package, and that can’t be derived “uniquely” from the agent itself.”

This assertion just seems false to me because it fails to recognize that unique means that it is one and only without any other like it in the history of the world. An act is unique if only that particular agent at that moment could give rise to it and if the act has never before existed as this particular configuration of data expressive the agent. Just what grounds your assertion that an act cannot derive uniquely from an agent is opaque to me — but I can see no reason whatsoever to believe that such an assertion is true.

Blake:

A unique act or event would be one that is precisely unrecognizable or undetectable. An act or event must be repeated and related to a set of other acts or events in order to take on a distinct identification. It is often said that an historical sequence of acts/events is “unique” and unrepeatable, which is precisely what characterizes it as historical. But that’s just the work that historians do, attempting to distinctively identify and assess the significance of sequences of acts/events in terms of relating them to both the framework of their times and the framework of their subsequent historical effect or reputation.

Now an agent interacts with and intervenes in environmental chains of causal events over which it does not have complete disposal. (I have trouble with accounts such as Kant’s that require agency to operate completely free of any causality, such that any taint of causality renders it “pathological”, rather than understanding agency as interacting with and working through causal processes, upon which it remains at least partly dependent. Kant was phenomenally a strict determinist,- with respect to “inner sense”, as well,- so he left himself no “out”. But then it is as if agency would require a complete mastery and surmounting of causality to be at all operative, which, at least for finite worldly human agents, is not possible, nor remotely plausible, rendering attributions of agency, hence any sort of moral practices inoperable.) The further point is that the acts of an agent, in order for the agent to have any stable “identity” as an agent, must be related to and condition one another, though obviously without any perfect fore-sight. To be an agent is to develop a variable structure as an agent. I think I grasp your point that the acts of an agent bear self-formative implications, and an act by an agent can have self-transformative effects or implications for that agent. But an agent is never free from the structuring and conditioning effects of its own interrelated acts, if nothing else, and any self-transformative effects or implications could only operate by reacting with that set of interrelations. An agent that would ceaselessly transcend itself through its own self-transformative acts might not only risk breaching the constitutive constraints and inherence in an historical pathway by which it is an agent, but might in fact be subject unfreely to compulsions by which it would “prove” itself as a “free” agent through surmounting its own (conditions of) existence,- (cf. Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov as an extreme caricature). (As an aside, this might have theological implications for addressing topics such as repentance and forgiveness).

I do not want to intervene in any issues of confessional theology here, as neither my competence, nor my right. I’m only addressing the specifically philosophical underpinnings of your account. (Though this is the inter-tubes after all, and I’ve been following the disputation on these threads with interest both in the general topic of agency and in the specifically elaborated rational accounts that you offer). I did pick up early on that you were working with something like Whitehead’s process philosophy, though giving it, contra Whitehead, a markedly idealist twist. So when Clark mentioned Whitehead,- (and your mention of Hartshorne confirmed my reading),-, I rather clumsily sought to clarify, that, though Whitehead starts out from analysis of experience,- (in a way, he is a kind of empiricist, though more in the line of Burke’s customary political empiricism than Hume’s skeptical epistemic empiricism, but he conducts a non-standard analysis of experience, in contrast to the logical atomism that is the standard analysis of logical empiricism, which is precisely one of the main objects of his criticism),- he gives to the notion of “experience” an abstract and highly generalized and extended sense, with a realist and even physicalist thrust. I take Whitehead to be claiming that a) mental phenomena or events are just as much reals as physical ones, but b) they don’t exist separately from physical instantiation. (And to be real for Whitehead is to have some sort of causal efficacy, however minimal, which is not all that different from Peirce’s “making a difference” criterion). The “actual occasions of organic experience”, which are the temporalized version “actual entities” as the particular reals, which I interpret as a kind of monad, of which human beings would be an instance, -(though I’m not aware that Whitehead ever directly addressed the topic of human agency, since his concern was “natural cosmology”),- are interrelated with, inter-nested in, and variously responsive to other such monadic processes, (forming nexuses, some of which form “societies”, some of which have “traditions”, etc.), such that they are open to their environment of other processes as a condition for constituting their “privacy” as distinct “experiences”, which also means that they would “perceive” those other monadic processes from the perspective constituted by the very concresence of their “experience”. In other words, any perception on the part of such constituted experience is mediated by its own and other processes, and is never simply a direct intuition. Whitehead’s co-evolving God functions to stabilize and harmonize the infinity of monadic perspectives, (via sorting the provision of “eternal objects”), such that there is indeed an emergent and co-evolving objective truth to the world, instead of an infinite relativism of perspectives. But then such a co-evolving God, as a kind of supremely inclusive monad, must itself be subject to some of the same mediation, as, indeed, God must be receptive of the resultants of the concretion of actual occasions. And the actual occasions, while they must be in some degree open to and participant in the “creative evolution” of the universe from which they emerge and of which they form a part, are also encompassed by that same creatively evolving universe and pass over into it even as they emerge from it. All this is just a way of stating in another idiom that an agent can only be conceived as existing in relation to an environment, and it completely disposes over neither environmental, nor its own causal processes. What bothers me in your account of LFW is not just the internalism of your account of experience, which I think is somewhat self-defeating, but the punctual nominalism of your account of volition or agent causation. But to me, one of the virtues of Whitehead’s account of process philosophy is that it resolves and leaves behind with some success the old Scholastic dispute between nominalists and realists, and it does so precisely through an analysis of relations as constituent reals, the cross-dependencies of which can not be abrogated from the success of the account.

It is common to many confessional theologies to assert that God endowed human beings with some sort of freedom, else an omnipotent God in a deterministic universe would Himself be the “author” of sin and evil. But it might be argued that a granting of freedom as separate agency and independent existence sets up an alternative: God can know human agents as free precisely to the extent that they are causally opaque. The granting or gifting of freedom means that human beings are separated from God and depart from His ways. Freedom would then be set-to-work in the world, which means subjected to its conditions and the constraints of its causal processes. But such freedom would be a reciprocation and acknowledgement of its gifting, and God would know and judge of freedom less in terms of its causes than in terms of its works. But Clark, at any rate, is rejecting an account of a deterministic universe as a premise, which I take it would mean that the design of the universe at its basis would not allow for a completely determinate, because deterministic, knowledge of causality, even on the part of God. The question I would have, prescinding from any question of just what conception of agency would be theologically required by confessional commitments, is to what extent an account of LFW derives its “force” precisely by leveraging its opposite, determinism, and, once a completely deterministic physicalism is let go of, how does that affect the range of middle-ground alternatives between the terms of a strict binary opposition?

I understood you to be making a token-identity move in an earlier comment, referencing among other things, the functionalist problematic of “multiple realization”. Evidently I read that in to the effort to construe your point. But I don’t understand what you would mean by “material identity”, if it’s not the (undesirable) type-identity move. How exactly does the move to processes over substances, (which I’m sympathetic to), obviate any need to specify the link between physical and mental events and agent’s reasons and their causal conditions? If they are to simply be merged, then that would to me still imply a token-to-token relation, else you’re implausibly claiming that the mental and the “space” of reasons are transparently reducible to physical and causal processes or vice versa?

Clark:

Just to get back to your question as to what the issue of language/meaning would have to do with the problem of agency, it goes to my dissatisfaction with how the whole problem of agency is being set up here, at least implicitly, solely in terms of causality, since, obviously, agents are supposed to have causal effects or “powers”. I;m not coming at the issue from Davidson, but rather from Wittgenstein, (though it might be the case that it’s my own private Wittgenstein). But Davidson’s “anomalous monism” was a response to the claim, ostensibly attributed to Wittgenstein, that reasons could not be causes, (though, IIRC, the claim is actually attributable to Anscombe, whereas Wittgenstein simply distinguished between the two and warned proleptically against the consequences of confusing the two, with respect to Freud, among other instances and issues). But I’m O.K. with Davidson’s account of “anomalous monism” taken as a synoptic philosopher’s account, (whereas the real work on the issue belongs to neuro-physiologists). But my complaint/criticism doesn’t concern the reconciliation of reasons with causes, so much as how the issue of agency emerges into relevance and salience, such that it might be usefully or “productively” dealt with.

I take you to be taking a highly abstracted and distantiated, though highly elaborated, view of causality, from a third-person, objectivistic perspective. There is nothing per se wrong with that, but how it would address agency as an emergent phenomenon is not clear. I’m going to skip over any objections about how such an elaborated account of causality comes about and how it is re-imposed upon its sources. I take it,- (though I must apologize for lacking any advanced training in natural sciences, and hence having only a dim grasp of the detailed issues),- that a) at the most basic micro-physical level, modern physics understands causal events in indeterministic, stochastic terms, such that strict determinism can not be stated as a fundamental account of the universe, but b) at a macro-physical level deterministic processes as described in classical mechanics take hold, but without any “center” organizing physical systems of events, and c) far-from-equilibrium and turbulent thermodynamics constitute at once a condition, enablement, and opposing threat to life on this earth, which is a somewhat different account of stochastic processes from a). But in that bird’s-eye view of causal processes, there is no account of specifically organismic causality. Organisms “constitute” themselves by delimiting themselves from their environments, whereby they maintain themselves as a specific causal organizations by intervening variously in causal chains and states-of-affairs in their environments, as modally specified by the way the organism relates to its environment/maintains its mode of causal organization. Obviously, there is a gradient with a wide range of different modes and grades, but we are concerned here, eco-systemic and co-evolutionary dependencies aside, with highly complex animal organisms with some degree of more-or-less differentiated, emergent mental properties or capacities. That “topography” is at least the minimal level, with respect to which issues of agency could emerge into causal relevance. (That such organisms could be styled “teleonomic systems”, which are in some degree “open” and variously goal-seeking, strikes me as obvious. I’ll just offer the following link to a review of a recent Analytic book that makes that same point, which, whatever the specific flaws of the account might be, makes me wonder what species of Analytic functionalism might have missed the point: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13465 , you’d have to cut-and-paste, since I don’t know-how to embed the link, but it’s the July issue of the Notre Dame Review). But such organismic causal organization is precisely not agency. Animal organisms interact behaviorally with their environments, and intervene in environmental states-of-affairs/causal chains, and do so in part on the basis of primary-perceptual consciousness or mental organization,- (though not only is there much more to perception than intentionality or focal consciousness, which involve more organization of mental processes than their factitious immediacy, let alone neuro-physiological processes which are immune from conscious perception, since they generate it, but behavioral interaction with the environment also conditions and contributes to perceptual processes and “inflects” them: perception is, at least in part, an embodied know-how, rather than just a mental event).

But the fore-going is just an account of animal motility, in which mental-perceptual processes might play a part, at once integrating and enabling it. Animals might intervene in environmental states-of-affairs/causal processes, but they can only respond to environmental events or cycles of events. They live enclosed within a specious present. (Wittgenstein: it might make sense to say that a dog expects its “master” home this afternoon, but it makes no sense to say that a dog expects him home in a fortnight). Agency is “something” that is built up from, or perhaps “supervenes upon”, such animal motility. Which is where the issue of language/meaning/symbolic thinking enters into the “picture”. Primitively, only with the reduplication of the world in such terms is it possible to interpret environmental states-of-affairs counterfactually in terms of their possibilities, and select from such alternatives a specific causal intervention with respect to futural state-of-affairs and their possibilities. Obviously, there is much more to be said, with further complexities and many complications, beyond such a primitive root, even if ignoring that unanswerable question about the “origin” of language, (though I could readily produce a naturalistic fairy-tale on that matter, even if it would have no epistemic value and scarcely convince). Suffice it to say, that language/meaning already involves a relation to an other, not just as the addressee of speech, but as that which would invoke,- (solicit, provoke, impel, demand, etc.),- speech, and hence the issue can’t be separated from communicative interaction with others. But one can’t “really” begin to discuss the issue or problem or question of agency outside of the context of meaning that I’ve tried to build up and specify here. Or rather in terms of the cross-implication between meaning and causality.

Now, I take it that meaning is a set of non-causal relations and a non-causal medium. But that means that not only is meaning susceptible to generating myths of its own, but also that extended, elaborated accounts of causality are themselves dependent on meaning-interpretations. On the other hand, meaning is situated and “constituted” or interactively generated within really embedded, practically oriented contexts, in which causal processes hold sway. (Please note, by way of retrospective reflection on the prior accounting, that the problem of agency does not concern how, when my mind/brain intends my arm to move, it causes it to move. That is a question about animal motility, and, as a philosophical question, is rather silly to be paralyzed upon. The answer would be, roughly, the same way in which a cat falling from a tree branch would land on its feet. Which causal processes are not accessible to introspection or self-intuition, but which “reliably” contribute to any such conscious experience). I’ll readily own up to anyone who would charge me with holding on to a minimal dualism between causality and meaning. But actually I think it’s an aporetic dilemma. And I think that any account of agency and its possible freedom that doesn’t take account of both the emergent “topography” that I’ve outlined and that aporia lacks relevant application. (Which is also why I think the type/token distinction becomes unavoidable, between the causal particularity of any act and the cross-contextual generalization and identification of any meaningful intention, though I don’t think intentions can be identified without the “game” of exchanging them with others). I’d previously addressed the issue in terms of structured, rule-governed behavior, since I think that’s the borderland between causality and meaning. But, just to try to be clear, though I think that both language/meaning and agency are such structured phenomena, they are not the same or to be conflated; rather they are cross-implicated, and I draw the connection between the two partly by overlap, partly by analogy.

Well, all that just goes to trying to answer your query as to why I think the issue of language/meaning is “essential” to the issue of causal agency. For the rest, I can only apologize for the unparagraphed density of my screeds, together with their syntactical tortuousness and parenthetical promiscuousness. I’m just trying to pick proteins from my brain and assemble them in such wise that they resemble organized, sensible thoughts. Feel free to edit them as you will for readability, (as others have). But then inter-tube comments are not even first drafts, as witness the ratio of typos to sense. Though I’ve noticed that the genius of software has fairly recently taken to redlining the problem, excluding from the language not only some, but not all proper names, and words like “proleptic”, but also “se”, but not “per”. Perhaps the telecoms have hired some of those unemployed Arabic translators, or am I just being paranoid?

It was caught in the spam filter for some reason.

I think that the issue Blake misses is the issue of difference and repetition. This is not a small matter. It’s been my main focus of study the last 10 years in the context of Peirce, Heidegger and Derrida. (I have some Deleuze waiting to be read as well) I’m not sure I’ve made much progress on it though - mainly in terms of the question what gets replicated in the type-token relationship. (This may be a place where Peirce and Derrida differ although neither is explicit enough there for me to have come to a firm decision yet)

I should add that I don’t think I’m taking a “third person” account of causality. I’ll admit I’m skeptical about the very notion of causality as such. Not for Humean reasons but more just that after doing so much Quantum Mechanics where you talk about the evolution of the wave function and don’t talk causality as such it seems that it’s often a disposable concept. Often in advanced physics some formulations it’s almost impossible to figure out what causality would even mean, beyond some limits on information flow. That’s not to say it might not be real. Just that I get wary when it is put in too key a roll. If there is causality I think it must occur in a holistic fashion which makes most traditional uses of “cause” problematic.

I do think “causes” are best found as reasons in a certain kind of linguistic framework. Even if it turns out they are a “natural kind” I think their main role is as reasons. Which is why I brought up Davidson since I’m very persuaded by his Anomalous Monism. (And Peirce had a similar view) I think that means I see causes very much in a first person and not third person view. I think that the way we use the terms ends up tied to a kind of vague narrowing of determinations. So I can say my bat caused the ball to go away. But this is a kind of narrow and vague description of what happened. Inevitably when I talk causes I am always excluding many causes - even in science. In Newtonian forms of mechanics (as opposed to the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian formulations) we talk causes. We talk about the gravity from point masses and so forth interacting with other masses. But the way we do this is odd and I think is perhaps clarified especially by the Hamiltonian. (Which of course became the Schrodinger equation when commutivity issues get introduced in QM)

Much the rest of what you say I agree with though. However I would say that I think some of the problems between meaning and causes can be avoided by talking about indices rather than causes. Or how an object determines a sign which determines an interpretant. This is one place where I think Peirce ends up doing a better job than Davidson. (Although the Davidson experts who come in an critique me regularly may disagree)

Clark:

Pondering your last response, I think I can make out for the most part what you are saying, and why you would say that you’re taking a first-person view of causality. Which is, that on the basis of both Peircean semiotics and the perplexities of quantum mechanics, you are addressing the epistemic question of how,- (and to what extent),- we can know causes and construe notions of causality of various kinds. However, I take it that causes are reals, regardless of whether or what we know of them, which is to say, (though, given the issues we are dealing with on this thread, we should be a bit wary of question begging), that they are in some degree mind-independent. The old logical principle that from a specified cause an effect necessarily results is not really of much use here; to me, what it means is that we frame the categories of our causal explanations in such a way that they result in a logical entailment, and treat such “closure” as a mark of explanatory adequacy, though that often takes the format of a mathematical formalism, and, of course, a stochastic explanatory account can only specify probability distributions and informational constraints, that can’t yield strict predictions; but that means we can’t and shouldn’t hypostatize causes in terms of some obscure notion of metaphysical “necessity”. I’m also not particularly concerned with ontological relativism or the relativity of ontological posits to the theories that would make them. A claim that, say, the only reals are physical objects and the causal effects that stem from from their extensional relations, to me, falters on the fact that there is no perfect generality that nonetheless specifies to “objects” and/or “causes”. To me, modern scientific explanation in terms of “efficient” causes alone is, broadly speaking, “economic” in nature, but only serially systematic and evolving, and does not reduce to any single unified system or unique set of ontological posits or terms, which would be futile.

However, I do have the sense that we stumble about in and bump up against the “furniture” of the universe, which is the sort of experience that feeds into our causal attribution. I already made the claim the the connection between our practical engagement with and our experience of the world is always already “back behind” us in more-or-less ramified ways, (though that is not a transcendental claim entailing categorical “necessities”, since those ways of ramifying are not invariant, by are susceptible to change and evolve), and, of course, such experience and interaction with the world is already linguistically mediated, hence involves relations and interactions with others across the world, (though I dislike the word “intersubjectivity”, as question-begging). Nonetheless, I think our causal attributions are understood by us as involving reference to the real, and our constructions of them are undertaken from a third-person, observational, objectivistic stance. That is not a claim that our elaborated accounts of causal processes are complete or carry any guarantee of completeness, and it is definitely not a claim that our causal accounts could underwrite any claims about the metaphysical “necessity” of the world. But insofar as we understand our selves as participant in a real world, we understand ourselves as encompassed by it, hence in some way subject to the same sorts of causal processes that we attribute to it. That is a somewhat different matter than the epistemic one of how we detect and construe causal processes, and the roles and limits of causal talk in our various “language-games”. It is more a presentational matter of how we find ourselves situated in the world, and the various stances we can take to our understandings in and of it. (I am ignorantly dubious, for example, of subjectivistic-instrumentalistic interpretations of quantum mechanics. I would take the Heisenberg Principle to be raising an objective claim about how it “stands” in the QM “world”, and not as concerning just our measurement practices of it.) Perhaps I could best put the matter in terms of “follow through” as determinative of the sense/implications of our notions. Even an indeterministic, stochastic causal process results in events that in turn go on to have causal effects in subsequent events, even if only as an “input” to a further indeterministic, stochastic process. The notion of causality needn’t entail predictability, but it does entail our attributions and expectations with respect to external observable events correlate with our inferential practices. (I get irritated by the common claim that successful hypothetical experimental predictions “prove” scientific theories; not only are negative results often as important as successful predictions, but the value of successful predictions is not just that they provide confirming support, but also that they enrich our understanding of the implicature of our explanatory theories, which also, of course, might lead on to the framing of further productive hypotheses). I’ll try putting it this way: it’s not just that we interact with the world, but that the world impacts upon and interacts with us that provokes an objectivistic observational stance, and, together with it, not just an intention toward objective truth, but also toward epistemic applicability, (since the value of our accounts is their cross-applicability across a range of contexts, in terms of which they become reconfigured with respect to one another, though I think a claim of “super-assertability” goes too far). That our observation of external reality is already public has been shown by Wittgenstein, who rules out any possibility of a purely subjectivistic relativism. But it’s not a matter of surmounting, mastering or controlling the external world through prediction and technical manipulation that the intention toward objective “truth” aims at, any more than we can successfully so do with respect to the existences of others. Rather it’s a matter of living together with and within the world by coming-to-terms with it.

I just don’t see how the foregoing could be captured in a “first person” stance, nor that an causal account of the universe that is basically indeterministic would require such talk. Nor do I see that causality is primarily a matter of causal talk, since meaning and physical causality are irreducible to one another, and we “know” that causal processes extend far beyond our knowledge of them and our meaning implications. As I said already, our causal attributions with respect to external events and our meaning-implications must correlate, even and especially when we don’t or can’t possibly know the causal “origins” of a phenomenon, whence our meanings should hold themselves open to that possibility and refrain from covering over such “gaps”. And I don’t know that causes and reasons are readily convertible terms, though I can see how they readily abut upon each other and how causes can function in our “games” of giving reasons. (Davidson’s “radical interpretation”, which I see, pardon me, as on a fairly successful recovery program from Quine’s reductionism, strikes me as an odd combination of first and third person perspectives with via triangulation. But I come at these issues from Wittgenstein and Levinas, who I think have lots of points of contact despite their different provenance, and the second person stance of the relation to the other, whereby self and other already “interpenetrate”, the self only comes into being through its interactions with the other, or the self only “folds” into the interiority of being a self-related self through the priority of the exteriority of its relation to the other, granted the difficulty of assessing the sense of that “priority”. But then this issue of the second person stance does not concern knowledge of the other, since, qua utterly separate, the other can not be known, nor the “identity” of meanings, which can’t quite be guaranteed, but rather the generation of meaning-relations in the first place, without any causal attributions. It is only after a world of meaning-relations opens up, in the “space” between self and other, that the relative priority of the world of causality can come into view. All three views are anti-Cartesian and reasonably physicalist, but what I miss in Davidson is any sense of why we feel any need to interpret the other, of the needfulness of the matter, of how the other is not simply my counterpart, confirming me on the matter of truth-conditions). I’m tempted to say that causes are just as much unreasoning, as reasons are causeless. But then the issue of the relation between the two comes together when considering the (causal?) status of the mental.

Where I do agree with you, if I’m interpreting you correctly, is on the multiplicity and holism of causal processes, which I just what I get from Whitehead. I take it what Whitehead,- (who was working from general relativity and early quantum theory, since the full-fledge quantum mechanics was first being broached as he was writing P&R, so your physics would be more advanced than his, and he doesn’t address some of its perplexities),- was claiming was that, when we bore down into the most fundamental constituent elements of the universe, what we find is that those most elemental atoms or bits are not simples, but rather already relational complexes or composites. He then inflates that account to treat macro-physical “entities” and the causal processes that generate them as such phased “quanta”, which, in turn, he thinks allows him to include mental experience as part of and included in the same causal universe, analyzed in comparable terms, under the “doctrine” of “neutral monism”. The result is a broad anti-reductionist realism/physicalism that he wants at once to support the rationality of the new science,- (compare to Husserl, who was to declare that modern science was becoming irrational),- while criticizing proleptically, in terms of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, the dangers to human practices and understandings he espied in reductionist-instrumentalist tendencies and interpretations. (That he was Quine’s dissertation supervisor is ironic in the light of his criticism of the latter’s “austere physicalism” avant la lettre). Be that as it may, among the virtues of his account, is not only that it provides a notion of the mental as emergent from, but not simply reducible to, physical causality, while having a mode of causal efficacy within the former, but also that it suggests ascribing “identity” to entities in terms of the relational causality of the processes that give rise to them, that escapes from fixed substantial “essences” and the old nominalist/realist dispute,- (though Duns Scotus’ “nominal essence” sounds like it),- while allowing for the temporal evolution of any “natural kinds”. At any rate, what interests me here is that emergent evolution of mental experiences, properties, or capacities from an account of physical causality. I did already discuss the causal organization of organisms and animal motility and how agency would be built up over it. But a further point that I didn’t get to is that I think it likely that the neural processes that give rise to the mental are themselves highly stochastic/indeterministic in nature, such that it might not make any sense to posit any isomorphic correspondences between specific mental states and underlying neural causal processes. A very large number of neural pathways might lead to the formation of the “same” mental state, and the same mental state might effect a selection through a large number of neural pathways. (Such redundancies and round-aboutness contribute to the robustness of an evolved system, since a brain can not afford to just post an error-message and shut down like a computer. I like the example of a cat falling from a tree and landing on its feet, since, when you think about the large number of variables involved, you realize that there is no “unique” solution in terms of differential equations, but rather highly distributed neural processes make partial adjustments rapidly feeding into one another through re-entrant connections resulting in an overall solution without any unique, nor centralized coordination. That is a motile performance of a reflex or instinctual nature, but under the premise of neutral monism, neurally embedded consciousness might work in very similar ways). Further, since there is no prior code to evolutionary processes, brains must largely be generating the very “information” that they are processing. It is less the discrete causal effect of neural events than their patterning that would generate “information”, (since I take it that brains are primarily analog pattern-matching devices). The wave analogy is all too tempting, though it’s just an analogy. Firings of neuronal groups might be analogized generators of wave patterns which would intersect with other wave patterns, generating interference patterns, the nodal points of which might form the “bits” of information, with such interference patterns intersecting with further patterns forming still more nodes, etc, and in turn, neural “decisions” being effected by matchings of such patterns. (Though it’s possible wave functions could be relevant physically: neural pulses could be frequency modulated, for example). And I’ve earlier argued or perhaps just dogmatized that the “point” of the emergent evolution of mental properties or capacities, under initially purely physical and physiological selection pressures, was to allow for the selection and salience of unexpected, unforeseeable novel environmental events and the development of novel behavioral responses to them, in which case an openness and variability in the “design” of the system is what is to be “expected”, since only such a stochastically indeterminate system could match the stochastically unforeseen patterns of events in the environment, which matching is how I would understand the notion of “adaption”. But leaving these useless speculations aside, my basic point here is that there remains an explanatory gap between mental phenomena and their causal physical basis, but that gap doesn’t imply any absence of causality. No doubt, much further empirical advance will be made in narrowing that gap, (by which a closed reductive physicalism would be defeated by its very successes), but there remains a logical limit, in that the explanation of the causal basis of a *capacity* is precisely not an account of its causal determination, even though it might delimit structural constraints and limits on that capacity. But the explanatory gap between the specification of causes and the acquisition of reasons, (which come from, because responsive to, the other), remains, and the “game” of attribution of causes between agents is different from the “game” of attribution of causes of agents. (I’m not sure of how the treating of causes as indices effects the issue or which side of the “equation”, in juggling causes and reasons, it should be set down to. Mental states would amount to semiotic “slices”, which could detect or discern causes, without being able to account for their own causal basis. It seems to belong on the causal talk side of the “equation”, as a reason for attribution of causes between agents. But, then again, a semiotic account of perception/intuition amounts to an account of the self-affection of the causal basis of agency. I suppose I’m pretty dubious about an account of semiosis as generating meaning, as opposed to some sort of interactively generated “meaning” subtending into the generation and picking out of signs. But then how could there be any interactive generation of meaning without the mediation of signs. Oh no, another chicken/egg dilemma!) The upshot, then, is that the issue/problem/question of agency is riddled with an explanatory gaps and opacity, all but inevitably, since it would involve causal efficacy, both “internally” and in the environment, mental experience and intentionality, and the generation of meaning and of frames of attribution of both causality and meaning-interpretation between self and other. That is not to say that the issue is necessarily irresolvable, but just that any adequate account of agency and its possible freedom would have to be causally operative, practicable (to the self-understanding of agents), attributable (between agents), and applicable (across cases), while fully taking into account the explanatory gaps and opacities endemic to the matter, as well as, the existential separateness of agents, and how those would inflect the issues. And, of course, that “possible freedom” raises further issues in the moral and extra-moral sense. Juggling reasons and causes is not so easy! Especially when they are involved in so much entanglement.

(Resuming after a long break).

Resuming the thread of my foregoing rigamorole, I think it goes to the point of my dissatisfaction with treating of agency solely in terms of causality, (and not just LFW), in terms of the causal organization of agents, the causal efficacy of agents in environmental events, and just how an agent would so affect both its own and the environment’s causality so as to selectively effect an intention, which is that it is riddled with so gaps and uncertainties as to lead to sheer “ontological” perplexity. (When you specified above that the question concerned how do we know of agency and its freedom, that was, of course, posed in Peircean terms of a discriminating sign. But I was tempted to respond in Wittgenstein’s terms, that the demanded sense of how do we Know is the skeptical/perfectionist sense of Know, that not only is never actually at stake or used in any of our actual cognitive or other practices, but is itself nonsensical, deriving from the very sorts of confusions to which we are liable, while seeking to immunize itself from them impossibly. At any rate, since agency must involve some degree of under-determination, if not complete indeterminacy, a fair amount of uncertainty belongs to its consideration, aside from the fact that knowledge is never actually “grounded” in certainty. On the other hand, I dislike the complacency of the performative contradiction in the sort of compatibilism that says, “even though I know I am not free, I shall act as if I am”, which can easily be amended by, “even though I don’t know that I am free, I shall act as if I am”. But to me the problem does not just concern my agency, but also that of others, which are inextricably cross-implicated, and such general compatibilism does not get at the casuistry of cases, which I think forms a considerable part of what motivates the question.) But the fact of the matter is that we do treat of agents and form expectations of and make attributions to agents of various kinds, let alone exercize our own discretion, and in ways distinct from who we treat of non-agent entities or causal organizations, and the uncertainties of the matter do not prevent of paralyze such practices, though that is not to say that we can not be badly mistaken in such matters. I am not going to make any transcendental move, that agency and its freedom form a necessary presupposition for our practical orientations, that must be assumed and attributed. But the question is primarily a practical matter, belonging to practical reason and not to scientific theory. And if I am right that the question of agency is inextricably tied to the cross-implication of the relation between self and other, the question is not only normative as well as factual, but forthwith abuts upon the ethical, in that ethics concerns actions and material and symbolic exchanges with respect to relations to others qua other. But all this is prefatory to explaining why I think the question of agency and its stakes can not remotely be posed adequately without situating it squarely in terms of language and meaning, which also cross-implicate my agency with that of others, (so that I am not free, if the other is not free, and the intuition of my own agency is not separable from the attribution of the others).

The intuition that agency must contain a non-causal component, free of causal entailments or determinations, and that unless such uncaused “freedom” can be made out, the notion of agency is incoherent in the light of causal determinism, (even of an indeterministic kind), can be vindicated, once one recognizes that language is a non-causal set of relations and medium. At bottom, the rules generating a natural language, (which operate implicitly, largely outside consciousness), must be constitutive in nature: no such rules, no such language. One can say a great deal in a language, but only by operating with and through the rules constituting the language, subject to their structuring constraints, which render it possible. On the other hand, language is a medium of communication with others across the world, from which it acquires its contents. But the crucial point here is that a communicative act or event, communicative processes or interactions, do not cause anything. Communication is not a neutral transmission of pre-constituted information contained in one mind to another mind. Not only is any such information already in-formed by language, but communication always occurs across a relationship that inflects it. The effect of a communicative event is the transmission of an illocutionary “force”, which accompanies any information transmitted, but does not per se cause the state of mind of the one receiving the message, other than perhaps to bring to awareness or add on some bit of information. But the receiver of a communication must interpret it on its own, in its own terms. A communicative event does not effect causal states-of-affairs, but rather brings about a modal shift in the relationship between two organisms, which inflects the transmission of the message in the first place. Neither organism can force itself upon the relational stance or state-of-mind of the other organism, hence cause the behavior of the other organism. Rather in processes of communicative interaction, in really embedded, practically oriented conditions, a relationship between organisms is established and variously shifted and negotiated without either party have complete disposal over it and causing the behavior of the other. A “spark” of meaning is thus generated non-causally, which language at once renders possible and derives from. In turn, much of what we are wont to intuit or attribute as our own mind, including our self-consciousness and differentiated sense of self, is an “effect” of language, an internalization of processes of communicative interaction across the world. Our processes of thematic and discursive reasoning, understanding, and deliberation occur largely in term of internalized language, even if language and symbolic thinking, a chicken and egg question, are not simply identical. Hence, we are capable of interpreting environmental states-of-affairs meaningfully in terms of their counterfactual possibilities and selecting for an intervention in environmental causal chains, as desirable and foreseen, on the basis of our already established and practiced motility. Needless to say, reflexive self-monitoring and monitoring by others contributes to the reliability of our actions and their consequential follow-through. The moment of decision involved in agency is not notably different than the moment of decision involved in meaning-interpretations in our understanding.

Now, though agency is in a sense rendered possible by language, and though I would claim it is a structured phenomenon, like language, they are obviously not identical, and agency notably has causal effects in the way speaking/understanding a language does not. Hence the behavioral rules implicitly underlying agency would include skills and know-hows, as well as, cognitive, semantic, relational components and the like, which require developmental training. But the implicit behavioral rules would have similarly constitutive status, as rendering the performances of an agent possible, which is why I would tend to characterize “freedom” as a status of optimal constraint, with too little as too much constraint, dissolution as oppression, entailing “unfreedom”, at least relative to kinds of agents and their relevant competences. Furthermore, the intentional component of agency is not the only matter to be treated of or considered, since obviously intentions can fail and acts have consequences other than intended and are conditioned both by external circumstances and internal needs and desires. I would understand intention as a distinction within a related complex of distinctions deployed in language-games dealing with acts and agents, rather than some sort of discrete atomic item clothed in flesh. (Similarly, I would reject the ascription of speech-acts to some prior pre-linguistic mental intention, since not only would the interpretive identification of such an intention be just another interpretive performance added on to that of understanding the speech-act in the first-place, but any speech-act already occurs as implicitly responsive to a situation of linguistic interaction with others which it interprets). But I think an intention can be partly reduced, while saving the phenomenon, by understanding it as a kind of nodal gathering of implicit rules in an extended underlying complex of behavioral rules, which would be much more extensive, but also more impoverished, than the intensive and meaning-rich intention in focal consciousness. That at least would serve to explain why and how an intention can have a sort of “reality” without relying on the incorrigibility of immediate first-person experience of intentions in focal consciousness. But my most fundamental point here is that agency can not meaningfully be considered, let alone coherently understood, outside of the relation to the other and others, wherein the “game” of exchanging acts and intentions occurs, (which concerns, as well, agents’ efforts and needs to sustain their sense of self and personal “identity”), and the issue of juggling causes and reasons arises into question. Only with that recognition, I think, is it possible to get down to brass tacks and particular cases, concerning identifications and attributions of acts, intentions, causes, consequences, responsibilities, excuses, etc.

I doubt that Blake would care much for the externalism both with respect to our own causal endowments and the external environment, and with respect to the other, by which I would broach and construct an account of agency: he might even consider it extreme. But I think it does get at the sense of “freedom” that we intuit of or attribute to agency, without the agent in some sense completely disposing over itself and its environment, let alone over the other. That it is a constitutively limited and finite “freedom”, a mite of freedom, does not render it negligible, nor preclude accountability, nor prevent any possibility of transformation in the relations between self, other, and world. In fact, my intuition is that ethics and moral responsibility do not require LFW. To say that we are only responsible for what we have intentionally done is to take little responsibility, indeed. And it can readily be shown that the extreme moral rigorism of Kant’s duty ethics can result in moral claims that are cruel, if not outright immoral, (though that extreme moral rigorism is partly an exacerbated result of Kant’s own phenomenal skepticism about agency, and it can also be shown that there is actually no other in his moral scheme). We exist in a world which is not simply our doing, in which we do not completely dispose over our selves, our environment and others, in which the finitude, contingency, and vulnerability of human existence in a world, which exceeds the human, sets the parameters of understanding and experience. But that is precisely the world, in which and for which we come into responsibility, and which gives its peculiar “force” and urgency to the ethical and to moral responsibility. That our responsibility exceeds our freedom does not thereby abolish responsibility, but rather indicates its project, that our freedom is given over to something much larger than itself, and our freedom lies largely in choosing its project.

I’m used to dealing with matters philosophically in the secular/agnostic terms set by the post-Kantian strictures, based on a critique of the limits of our knowledge and reason. Hence appeals to the mind or knowledge of God and the contents thereof are ruled out of court, as inaccessible to worldly experience and inscrutable to reason alone. That does not rule out theological thinking, so long as the enterprise or project is recognized as different from philosophical argument based on the public claims of reason alone. Theology would be concerned with explicating doctrines and belief commitments, whether of a particular confession or more generally. That certainly does not exclude considerable elements of rational thought in the enterprise, but from the standpoint of reason alone, it involves extra stipulations, and seeks to be persuasive in projecting belief commitments that are beyond the limits of reason alone. (That is not necessarily a disqualifying proposition, since, arguably, we all do make such projections of belief commitments beyond the public limits of reason in one way or another). I can readily see how a process theology might have appeal in explicating Mormonism, since it doesn’t doctrinally adhere to creation ex nihilo, and a co-evolving God might more readily make sense without that difficulty. I’m also guessing that Mormonism involves a voluntaristic-perfectionistic conception of individual salvation, which is part of Blake’s insistence on LFW and the atomistic and internalist form, which he gives to it, while also he needs to reconcile LFW with doctrinal commitments to God’s foreknowledge. This much I can make out, and my own attempt to rationally account for agency would not be consonant with his views. But insofar as he has made a rational presentation of and argument for his views, I can comment on its rational claims from the outside. Blake has be claiming that the free act of an agent is a creative synthesis of prior data with a unique causal signature that bears its “material identity”. God then could intuit the causal process by which it was brought into being, which must effectively mean replicate it in his own mind, and recognize it by its unique causal signature in its “material identity” as free, (though I confess I don’t know what “material identity” would mean, - identical to what?-, since it can’t be to itself,- “Socrates is identical” doesn’t signify anything about Socrates,- and the self-identity of a substance can’t be what is meant). But then wouldn’t God’s replication of the causal basis of the act itself be another free act different from the one replicated, and hence God would know a different act from the agent’s but in the same way of self-intuition as the agent? There is something a bit contradictory there. God could know the causal basis of the act or he could know it as free. The identity of God and the identity of the agent can’t be the same and God’s knowledge would follow after the agent’s act of which it would be the fore-knowledge. I tried to reformulate the point that I thought Clark was making in terms of the Peircean sign in terms of Whitehead’s processes. The problem is this: any appeal to direct immediate intuition between separate beings can not be sustained, because any adequate concept of such intuition would itself already be mediated. Perhaps the notions of freedom and knowledge can not be reconciled into an identity. We can be free, but we can’t know that we are; the moment that we would come to such knowledge, that knowledge would displace that freedom. But still, it does seem right to me that there is some link between our capacity for understanding and our availability to freedom.

I’ve belabored the difficulties in identifying an adequate concept of agency and its possible freedom quite a bit here, which brings out how riddled with uncertainty the whole matter is. Among the points I’ve tried to insist on is that an indeterministic causal process does not amount to an absence of causality, and that “freedom” can’t be identified with indeterminism alone. On the other hand, some sort of indeterminism must lie at its causal basis, since only that would allow for the openness to alternatives that it would involve. But that very indeterminateness riddles the issue with uncertainties. And when one adds in, as I do, the role of the other, as a completely separate being, who can’t be reduced to the terms of our knowledge, then the uncertainty is “complete”, and “freedom” amounts to a condition of uncertainty, if not utter anxiety, or complete doubtfulness. But then the issue of agency is a practical matter and belongs to practical reason, as I’ve said. (An aporetic question: does our action generate knowledge, or does knowledge guide our action?) Hence it is not a question of general knowledge, which could be “solved” theoretically. Rather its uncertainties can only be resolved practically, in specific situations, with regard to particular cases and their peculiar “stakes”. But that requires a willingness to be open to the possible freedom of others and what they might tell us. Which doesn’t mean that either we or they might turn out to be utterly wrong. But that’s just where responsibility comes in.

Regarding your latter points. I think freedom and responsibility as commonly used are tied to a realm of discourse designed for common matters. These are wrapped up with a certain kind of practical comportment with the world. Move beyond that realm and you in effect get a category error. Like talking about painting in the discourse of quantum mechanics. It’s more than just complex (the quantum mechanical description of painting). It’s just completely inappropriate.

Moving to Davidson’s use of Tarski I think we have to ask for these kinds of description when they are held to be true and from that talk about interpretation. What philosophers have done, even recent experimental philosophy, is ask people when they are true in an inappropriate realm. This is taken to tell us something about that realm when the question of appropriate discourses is just never raised.

Now this might be seen as a controversial point but it is why I think the question of agency is wrapped up with a close questioning of what language is.

Pretty well everything has been fields since Maxwell. Relativity is a field theory and once we got past the Dirac equations we quickly developed quantum field theory.

As I said though even in terms of classical physical mechanics there’s still problem with the notion of causality. I’ll see if I can’t do a post on that soon.

Regarding language I think it’s kind of nebulous label. I mentioned last week the problem of talking about the same lanugage. But even language as such seems somewhat problematic. I like Heidegger’s use of Rede which included pre-linguistic articulation or Peirce’s move to semiotics rather than language. On the other hand it’s useful to talk about predication.

Regarding interpretations I think we can talk about stable interpretations but not in any actual sense talk of final intepretations. (Althouhg the notion of a final interpretation always to come is useful as a regulative idea)

I don’t think I’m doing the Quine move of coming at things via epistemology. I’ve done that in this discussion since the ultimate issue is freedom and responsibility in a religious context and whether we know we have them. So it’s almost impossible to avoid talking about knowledge. Since, in my view, the strongest argument for libertarian free will in an LDS context is the argument that our religion entails responsibility which entails freedom attacking whether God could know we are responsible in this way seemed an obvious one.

Regarding Peirce and causes I think his point is more that causes are tied to descriptions. I think this is Davidson’s position as well although I’m less sure there. Peirce ends up saying causality can only be understood in terms of the semiotics of symbols. (This is in EP 2 around 315 or so) Symbols to Peirce are real and can act on things so one way of considering his position is a kind of quasi-panpsychism or universal idealism ala Schelling. But it’s a special kind. His point though is that the way causes are talked about (especially in J. S. Mill who he is usually attacking) is just wrong.

I don’t feel confident speaking on Whitehead and nature. I suspect though he moves to a sense of nature more ala the neoPlatonists. (Emerson makes a big deal of this, for instance)

Blake:

Briefly,- (since I’ve already gone on at way too much tedious length here),- if reals are particulars, then they are numerically unique and “free” of all such other particulars,- (and yes, that “freedom” of beings in the universe is part of what Whitehead is getting at),- and that means that in some sense they must decide themselves, though, to do so, they must already be relational or composite. The point I made was, in order for such a numerically unique particular to be at all detected, let alone identified, it must enter into some sort of relation to another such particular and its set of relations, and thereby be replicated. (That is not the same as saying that reals are not particular/numerically unique, but rather that such an assertion transmits no “information” about them). So the specific “bone of contention” here was: what is the concept of direct intuition that you are assigning to God in your account, and whether any such concept of intuition, to be adequate, must not already be mediated or involved in mediation. I tried to formulate that in Whitehead’s process terms, whereas,- though I can’t speak for him,- I thought Clark was making roughly the same point in Peircean semiotic terms. In other words, what conception of intuition between separate beings,- (and I confess that I obviously don’t know what the Mormon requirements and stipulations would be here, and whether a finite, mortal Mormon adherent, undergoing his/her process of personal salvation, should be considered separate from God or not),- would allow for a relation of knowledge between them,- (and specifically a knowledge of “freedom”). That, at least as I take it, is the point that is being pressed with respect to your elaborated account.

(I did suggest, somewhere way above in this thread, that, if Clark is pressing an undecidability claim, and if the point of such a claim is to “force” a decision, then the “tables” might be reversed in asking what, if anything, would regulate such a decision. But Clark has begun to answer in terms of his “revisionist” account of responsibility, vis-a-vis LFW.)

I’m not always the best of readers,- ( I tend to take “into my head” what I read, in order to think about it),- but I think I did pick up fairly early on a reasonable account of what you were saying. I certainly can understand the vexatiousness involved in the sense of being mis-understood, which is similar to the vexatiousness of trying to understand an other, by means of one’s peculiar equipment, especially if it might be in response to something that oneself has said. But I t