Top-down mereology and the special and general composition questions

Van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question:

• (GCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the xs to compose y?

from the Special Composition Question:

• (SCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the xs to compose something?

He thinks that the GCQ is probably unanswerable, but attempts to give an answer to the SCQ. Note that an answer to the GCQ immediately yields an answer to the SCQ by existential quantification over y.

There are two main families of mereological theories:

• Bottom-Up: The proper parts explain the whole.

• Top-Down: The whole explains the proper parts.

Van Inwagen generally eschews talk of explanation, but the spirit of his work is in the bottom-up camp.

It’s interesting to ask how the GCQ and SCQ look to theorists in the top-down camp. On top-down theories, the xs that compose y are explained by or identical to y. It seems unlikely to suppose that in all cases there would be some relation among the xs that does not involve y which marks the xs out as all parts of one whole. That would be like thinking there is a necessary and sufficient condition for Alice, Bob and Carl to be siblings that makes no reference to a parent. Therefore, it is likely that any top-down answer to the SCQ must make reference to the whole that is composed of the xs. But if we can give such an answer, then it is very likely that we can also give an answer to the GCQ.

If my plausible reasoning is right, then on top-down theories either:

1. An answer can be given to the GCQ, or

2. No answer can be given to the SCQ.

Distant collaboration

Suppose mereological universalism is true, and that I make a pizza and an alien a long time ago in galaxy far, far away (or even in another universe) makes a sandwich. Then I and the alien have engaged in an amazing collaboration spanning time and space, and maybe even across universes, and produced a fusion of a pizza and a sandwich. Surely I cannot so very easily collaborate in the production of things with beings so far off!

Substantial change and simultaneous causation

Some philosophers hold that all fundamental instances of causal relations are simultaneous. Many of these philosophers are Aristotelians, though presentism provides a plausible route to this simultaneity doctrine independently of (other) Aristotelian considerations. I think the phenomenon of substantial change shows that this simultaneity doctrine is false.

When a horse changes into a carcass (or an electron-positron pair changes into a pair of photons) we have substantial change. Clearly, in such a case, the horse is the cause of the carcass.

Notice, however, that there is never a time at which both the horse and the carcass exists. This means that substantial change involves properly diachronic rather than simultaneous causation. And while there is a way of building a diachronic causal explanation out of simultaneous causation and persistence, I don’t see any way of doing that here. The trick in that way was to use the persistence of one or both of the relata of simultaneous causation to extend the relationship temporally. But here adding the earlier persistence of the horse or the later persistence of the carcass does not help, because it is still not the case that the horse and carcass have any moment of co-existence.

I think that this is where an Aristotelian will try to bring in matter. The horse has matter. When the horse perishes, its matter persists and comes to make up a carcass. We have a simultaneous relation between the horse and its matter, and then we have a simultaneous relation between the matter and the carcass.

But this doesn’t solve the problem. For the horse doesn’t just cause a heap of matter—it causes a carcass of a particular sort, made up of substances other than the substance of the horse. What persists in substantial change, on a classic Aristotelian view, is at most the prime matter. And the prime matter does not explain the form had by the carcass (or the parts of the carcass, if the carcass counts as a heap of substances).

We can even see the problem at the level of the accidents. Take the horse’s shape S_h and the carcass’s very similar shape S_c. Then, clearly, S_h causes S_c. One can see this empirically: if one rearranges the legs of the dying horse, the carcass’s shape changes correspondingly. But the only relevant thing that on the Aristotelian story persists across the change from horse to carcass is the matter: S_h does not persist, nor does anything that grounds S_h.

On reflection, the last line of thought shows that there could be a problem even for accidental change. For it seems likely to the case that a substance has an accident A which partially causes itself to be replaced by an accident B incompatible with itself. For instance, consider my current shape S₁. In a moment, my body will shift into a new shape S₂. The shape S₁ partially causes the shape S₂. Yet there is never a moment where I have both shapes. Indeed, at any time where I have shape S₁, that’s the only shape I have. So, the shape S₁ cannot cause any different future shape of me, assuming causation is always simultaneous.

This problem may be less serious than for substantial change, however, because one might say that S₁ does not cause S₂, but there is some deeper persisting accident that first causes me to have S₁ and then causes me to have S₂, so that there is no more a causal relationship between S₁ and S₂ than between a shadow of a moving person first appearing in one place and then in another. I think it is implausible to think that all cases where an accident A partially causes its immediate replacement by an accident B can be accounted by positing A and B to be mere epiphenomena, but I am not sure I have as good an argument against this as I do against the substantial change case.

I conclude from all this that while simultaneous causation is possible, it is not the case that all diachronic causation reduces to simultaneous causation.

Monotheism and anthropomorphism

Xenophanes famously lambasted Greek religion for its anthropomorphism:

if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own-horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

Two and a half millenia later, accusations of anthropomorphism continue to be made against monotheistic religions, typically by naturalists.

I was thinking about this, and had an odd thought. According to monotheism, the root of all explanation is the activity of God. According to standard naturalism, the root of all explanation is the activity of the fundamental physical entities, either particles or fields. But humans are more like fundamental physical entities than like the God of the monotheistic religions. The difference between us and the fundamental physical entities is merely finite. The difference between us and God is infinite. Thus, in an important sense, it is standard naturalism that is more anthropomorphic in its fundamental explanatory agents than monotheism.

If we do not feel this—if we feel ourselves more God-like than electron-like—then we are infinitely elevating ourselves or infinitely demoting God or both.

That said, the three Western monotheistic religions do think that the physical universe is made for us. Thus, while the religions are not anthropomorphic, they do have an anthropocentric view of our physical universe. Interestingly, though, to some (albeit lesser) extent so does the most plausible current naturalist view, namely a multiverse theory together with the weak anthropic principle.

Two theories of divine conservation

Here are two theories of divine conservation, tendentiously labeled:

• Occasionalist conservation: That a creature that previously existed continues to exist is solely explained by God’s power.

• Concurrentist conservation: That a creature that previously existed continues to exist is explained by God’s power concurring with creaturely causal powers (typically, the creature’s power to continue to exist).

It is usual in classical theism to say that divine conservation is very similar to divine creation. This comparison might seen to favor occasionalist conservation. However, that is not so clear once we realize that classical theism holds that all finite things are created by God, and hence creation itself comes in two varieties:

• Creation ex nihilo: God creates something by the sole exercise of his power.

• Concurrentist creation: God creates things by concurring with a creaturely cause.

Most of the objects familiar to us are the product of concurrentist creation. Thus, an acorn is produced by God in concurrence with an oak tree, and a car inconcurrence with a factory. (The human soul is an exception according to Catholic tradition.)

Because of this, even if we opt for concurrentist conservation, we can still save the comparison between conservation and creation, as long as we remember that often creation is concurrentist creation.

Which of the two theories of conservation should we prefer?

On general principles, I think we have some reason to prefer concurrentist conservation, simply because it preserves the explanatory connections within the natural world better.

However, if we insist on presentism, then we may be stuck with occasionalist conservation, because presentism makes cross-time causal relations problematic.

[Edited Nov. 4 2020 to replace "cooperation" with the more usual term "concurrence".]

Leibniz on the PSR

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), every contingent fact has a sufficient reason. What does “sufficient” mean here? A natural thought is that it means that the reason is logically sufficient for the fact. My own work on the PSR rejects this natural thought. I say that a sufficient reason is one that suffices to explain the fact, not necessarily one that suffices for the fact to be true. I occasionally worry that this is too wimpy a take on the PSR, indeed a kind of bait-and-switch.

When I worry about this, it helps me to come back to Leibniz, whom nobody considers a wimp with respect to the PSR. How does Leibniz understand “sufficient”?

In the Principles of Nature and Grace, Leibniz talks of the

grand principe … qui porte que rien ne se fait sans raison suffisante; c’est-à-dire que rien n’arrive sans qu’il soit possible à celui qui connaîtrait assez les choses de rendre une raison qui suffise pour déterminer pourquoi il en est ainsi, et non pas autrement [great principle … which holds that nothing happens without sufficient reason; that is to say, that nothing happens without its being possible for someone who knows enough about how things are to give a reason that suffices to determine why it is so and not otherwise]. (my italics)

Leibniz does not say that the reason is sufficient to determine the fact. Rather, Leibniz carefully says that the reason is sufficient to determine why the fact occurred. You can read off the explanation, the answer to the why question, from the reason, but no claim is made that you can read the explained fact off from it.

Indeed, the only necessitation in the paragraph is hypothetical:

De plus, supposé que des choses doivent exister, il faut qu’on puisse rendre raison pourquoi elles doivent exister ainsi, et non autrement. [Further, supposing things must exist, it has to be possible to give a reason why they must exist so and not otherwise.] (my italics)

I wish Leibniz had this weaker picture of sufficient reason consistently. Sadly for me, he does not. In a 1716 letter to Bourguet he writes:

Mr. Clark … n’a pas bien compris la force de cette maxime, que rien n’arrive sans une raison suffisante pour le determiner. [Mr. Clark … has not understood well the force of the maxim that nothing happens without a reason sufficing to determine it.]

Oh well.

I comfort myself, however, that my philosophical hero does, after all, have two kinds of necessity, and hopefully the determination in the PSR involves the weaker one.

Divine conservation, existential inertia, presentism and simultaneous causation

As a four-dimensionalist, I have been puzzled both by the arguments that divine conservation is necessary secure the persistence of substances and the idea of existential inertia as a metaphysical principle.

Temporal extent seems little different metaphysically to me from spatial thickness, the “problem of persistence” seems to me to be a pseudo-problem, and both solutions to this pseudo-problem seem to me to be confused.

On the existential inertia side, a metaphysical principle that objects continue to exist unless their existence is interrupted by some other cause seems as ridiculous to me as a principle that objects are maximally thick (and long and deep) unless and until their thickness (or length or depth) is stopped by other causes. And divine action is needed to secure persistence only to the extent that it is needed to secure thickness (and length or depth). That said, I do think divine action is needed to secure thickness, as well as all other accidents of a thing, because substances are in some sense causes of their accidents, but all creaturely causation requires divine cooperation. But that, I think, is a slightly different line of argument from the arguments for persistence of substances (in particular, I don’t have a good argument for it that doesn’t already presuppose theism, while the arguments for conservation are supposed to provide reasons for accepting theism).

However, I now see how it is that presentism yields a real problem of persistence. Here’s the line of thought. First, note that contrary to the protestations of some presentists, it is very plausible that:

1. Presentism implies that all causation is simultaneous.

For something that exists, at least at the time at which it is caused, cannot have as its cause something that doesn’t exist. But given presentism, only something present exists. So at a time at which E is caused, if the cause of E did not exist, we would have the exercise of a non-existent causal power, which is absurd.

But even if all causation is simultaneous, nonetheless:

2. There is diachronic causal explanation.

Setting the alarm at night explains why it goes off in the morning, even if by the simultaneity thesis (1), setting the alarm cannot be the cause of the alarm going off. Diachronic causal explanation cannot simply be causation. So what is it? Here is the best presentist story I know (and it’s not original to me).

First, we can get some temporal extension by the following trick. Imagine a thing A persists over an interval of time from t₁ to t₂. At t₂ is causes a thing B that persists over an interval of time from t₂ to t₃. The existence of A at t₁ then causally explains the existence of B at t₃. Note, however, that the existence of A at t₁ does not cause the existence of B at t₃. Causation happens at t₂ (or perhaps over an interval of times—thus, A might persist until some time t_2.5 < t₃, and be causing B over all of the interval from t₂ to t_2.5), but not at any earlier time, since at earlier times A doesn’t exist. Thus, by supplementing the simultaneous causal relation between A and B at t₂ with the persistence of A before t₂ and/or the persistence of B after t₂, we have, we can extend the relation into what one might call a fundamental instance of diachronic causal explanation.

Thus, a fundamental link in diachronic causal explanation consists of an instance of causation preceded and/or followed by an instance of persistence of the causing thing and/or the caused thing respectively. And a non-fundamental instance of diachronic causal explanation is a chain of fundamental links of diachronic causal explanations. (It may be that these diachronic causal explanations are very close to what Aquinas calls per accidens causal sequences.)

But for this to be genuine explanation, the persistence of the cause and/or effect needs to have an explanation. Divine conservation provides a very neat explanation: God necessarily exists eternally, and is simultaneous with everything (there may be some complications, though, with a timeless being given presentism), so God can cause A to persist from t₁ to t₂ and B to persist from t₂ to t₃. Thus, fundamental links in diachronic causal explanations depend on divine conservation.

An existential inertia view also gives a solution, but a far inferior one. For existential inertia requires the earlier existence of A, together with the metaphysical principle of existential inertia, to explain the later existence of A. But such a cross-time explanatory relation seems too much like the already rejected idea of cross-time causation. For it’s looking like A qua existing at t₁ explains A existing at t₂. But at t₂, according to presentism A qua existing at t₁ is in the unreal past, and it is absurd to suppose that what is in the unreal past can explain something real now.

In summary, given presentism, all fundamental explanatory relations need to be simultaneous. But it is an evident fact that there are diachronic causal explanatory relations. The only way to build those out of simultaneous explanatory relations is by supposing a being that can be simultaneous with things that exist at more than one time—a timelessly eternal being—whose causal efficacy provides the diachronic aspects of the explanatory linkage.

That said, I think there are two serious weaknesses in this story. The first is that it’s a close cousin of occasionalism. For there is no purely non-divine explanatory chain from the setting of the alarm at night to the alarm going off in the morning—divine action explains the persistences that make the chain diachronic.

A second problem is the puzzle of what explains why A causes B at t₂ rather than as soon as A comes into existence. Why does A “wait” until t₂ to cause B? Crucial to the story is that A is the whole cause, which then persists from t₁ to t₂. But why doesn’t it cause B right away, with B then causing whatever effect it has right away, and with everything in the whole causal history of the universe happening at once? Again, one might give this an occasionalist solution—A causes B only because God cooperates with creaturely causation, and God might hold off his cooperation until t₂. But this makes the story even more occasionalist, by making God involved in the timing of causation.

Shuffling infinitely many cards

Imagine there is an infinite stack of cards labeled with the natural numbers (so each card has a different number, and every natural number is the number of some card). In the year 2021 − n, you perfectly shuffled the bottom n cards in the stack.

Now you draw the bottom card from the deck. Whatever card you see, you are nearly certain that the next card will have a bigger number. Why? Well, let’s say that the card you drew has the number N on it. Next consider the next M cards in the deck for some number M much bigger than N. At most N − 1 of these have numbers smaller than N on them. Since these bottom M cards were perfectly shuffled during the year 2021 − (M + 1), the probability that the number you draw is bigger than N is at most (N − 1)/M. And since M can be made arbitrarily large, it follows that the probability that the number you draw is bigger than N is infinitesimal. And the same reasoning applies to the next card and so on. Thus, after each card you draw, you are nearly certain that the next card will have a bigger number.

And, yet, here’s something you can be pretty confident of: The bottom 100 cards are not in ascending order, since they got perfectly shuffled in 1921, and after that you’ve shuffled smaller subsets of the bottom 100 cards, which would not make the bottom 100 cards any less than perfectly shuffled. So you can be quite confident that your reasoning in the previous paragraph will fail. Indeed, intuitively, you expect it to fail about half the time. And yet you can’t rationally resist engaging in this reasoning!

The best explanation of what went wrong is, I think, causal finitism: you cannot have a causal process that has infinitely many causal antecedents.

Determinism and thought

Occasionally, people have thought that one can refute determinism as follows:

1. If determinism is true, then all our thinking is determined.

2. If our thinking is determined, then it is irrational to trust its conclusions.

3. It is not irrational to trust the conclusions of our thinking.

4. So, determinism is not true.

But now notice that, plausibly, even if we have indeterministic free will, other animals don’t. And yet it seems at least as reasonable to trust a dog’s epistemic judgment—say, as to the presence of an intruder—as a human’s. Nor would learning that a dog’s thinking is determined or not determined make any difference to our trust in its reliability.

One might respond that things are different in a first-person case. But I don’t see why.

Evidentialism and epistemic utilities

Epistemic value is the value of true belief and disvalue of false belief.

Let p be the proposition that there is such a thing as epistemic value.

Suppose p is true. Then, plausibly, the higher your credence in p, the more epistemic value your credence has. The closer your credence is to certainty, the closer to truth your representation is. Let t_p(r) be the value of having credence r in p when in fact p is true. Then t_p(r) is a strictly increasing function of r.

Suppose p is false. Then whatever credence you have in p, the epistemic value of that credence is zero.

Now suppose you are not sure about p, so your credence in p is an r such that 0 < r < 1. Consider now the idea of setting your credence to some other value r′. What is the expected epistemic value of doing so? Well, if p is false, there will be no epistemic value, and if p is true, you will have epistemic value t_p(r′). Your current probability for p is r. So your expected epistemic value is

• rt_p(r′) + (1 − r)⋅0 = rt_p(r′).

Thus, to maximize your expected epistemic value, you should set r′=1. In other words, no matter that your evidence may not support p, you should still have credence one in p, if you should maximize expected epistemic value.

What do we learn from this?

First, either evidentialism (the view that your degree of belief should be proportioned to the evidence) is false or else expected epistemic utility maximization is the wrong way to think about epistemic normativity.

Second, there are cases where the right epistemic scoring rule is improper. For given a proper epistemic scoring rule and a consistent credence assignment, we never get a recommendation of a change of credence. The scoring rule underlying the above epistemic value assignments is clearly improper, and yet is also clearly right.

Symmetric qualitative (and other) probabilities

I recently worked out the precise conditions under which one can have Popper functions, hyperreal probabilities or qualitative probabilities that are invariant under some group of symmetries and are regular in the sense that they assign a bigger probability to non-empty sets than to the empty set.

But what if we don’t require regularity? Then the following is mainly a matter of putting together known theorems:

Proposition. Suppose G is a group acting on set Ω^* ⊇ Ω where Ω is non-empty. Then the following are equivalent:

1. There is a finitely additive G-invariant real-valued probability measure on the powerset of Ω

2. There is a finitely additive G-invariant hyperreal probability measure on the powerset of Ω

3. There is a finitely additive approximately G-invariant hyperreal probability measure on the powerset of Ω

4. There is a strongly G-invariant total qualitative probability ⪅ on the powerset of Ω such that ⌀ < Ω

5. There is a strongly G-invariant partial qualitative probability ⪅ on the powerset of Ω such that ⌀ < Ω

6. The set Ω is not G-paradoxical.

The definitions are in the paper I linked to at the top, except that approximate G-invariance only requires that P(A)−P(gA) be infinitesimal rather than requiring that it be zero.

Proof: Trivially, (a) implies (b) which implies (c). The standard part of a finitely additive approximately G-invariant hyperreal probability measure will be a finitely additive G-invariant real-valued probability measure, so (c) implies (a). Thus, (a)–(c) are equivalent.

Condition (a) implies condition (d): just define A ⪅ B iff P(A)≤P(B) where P is the measure in (a). And (d) implies (e) trivially.

Now we show that not-(f) implies not-(e). Suppose Ω is G-paradoxical, so Ω has disjoint subsets A and B with partitions A₁, ..., A_m and B₁, ..., B_n respectively, and there are elements g₁, ..., g_m and h₁, ..., h_n of G such that g₁A₁, ..., g_mA_m and h₁B₁, ..., h_nB_n are each a partition of Ω. Then by a standard result on qualitative probabilities (use the proof of Krantz, et al., Lemma 5.3.1.2):

1. A = A₁ ∪ ... ∪ A_m ≈ g₁A₁ ∪ ... ∪ g_mA_m = Ω

2. B = B₁ ∪ ... ∪ B_n ≈ h₁B₁ ∪ ... ∪ h_nB_n = Ω.

Since ⌀ < Ω, we have ⌀ < A by (1). By the proof of Corollary 5.3.1.2 in Krantz, et al., we have B < Ω iff ⌀ < Ω − B. But A ⊆ Ω − B, and ⌀ < A, so indeed we must have B < Ω, which contradicts (2).

Finally, Tarski’s Theorem says that (f) implies (a). □

Note 1: The two results from Krantz et al. are given for total qualitative probabilities, but the proofs do not use totality. (In the linked paper, I didn’t notice that Krantz et al. are working with total qualitative probabilities, but fortunately all works out.)

Note 2: There is a pleasing direct construction of a partial qualitative probability satisfying (d). For each A ⊆ Ω, let [A] be the corresponding member of the equidecomposability type semigroup. Then define A ⪅ B providing there is a c in the semigroup such that [A]+c ≤ [B]+c. It turns out that the condition ⌀ < Ω is then equivalent to 2[Ω]≠[Ω], i.e., is equivalent to the non-paradoxicality of Ω under G.

More on attempted murder and attempted theft

In an old post, I observe the curious phenomenon that a typical attempted murder is not an attempt to murder and a typical attempted theft is not not attempt to steal. For one only attempts to do something that one intends to do. But that the killing or the taking in fact constitutes a murder or a theft is, in typical cases, irrelevant to the criminal’s ends. For instance, in typical cases of theft, if it were to turn out that the object is in fact abandoned property, the thief’s ends would be just as well served by taking the object. Hence, the thief’s end is to take the object, and whether the object is owned by someone, and hence whether the taking constitutes theft, is irrelevant to the thief’s ends, and hence is not intended.

I then attempted to come up with an account of “attempted M” for a broad spectrum of misdeeds M. The idea was that “M” is a thick and morally loaded description, such as “murder” or “theft”, while there is thin and morally unloaded description “N”, such as “killing” or “taking”. Then I suggested that:

1. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N in circumstances in which success at N would constitute M.

But I wasn’t happy with (1) in light of a weird counterexample of trying to shoot someone with a smart raygun that, unbeknownst to the shooter, only shoots people whom it is just to kill, and doing so in a case where the killing would in fact be unjust. This seems a clear case of attempted murder (only attempted, because the raygun recognized that the killing would be unjust and refused to fire). I said that the problem with (1) is that in these circumstances success at killing would not constitute murder, since the raygun would only succeed if the killing weren’t a case of murder.

My analysis of the counterexample needs a bit of work to spell out. The actual circumstances include two kinds of facts:

1. the facts in virtue of which killing the victim would be murder (the victim’s innocence, etc.), and

2. the fact that the raygun cannot be used to commit murder.

When we ask whether success at killing would constitute murder, we are asking a counterfactual question, and we now need to be clear on whether we keep fixed (a) and drop (b) or keep (b) fixed and drop (a). To have a counterexample to (1), we need to ensure that the right way to evaluate the counterfactual about success at killing involves fixing (b) and dropping (a). I think we can ensure this. We can presumably set things up so that the raygun refuses to commit murder at all nearby worlds, but at some nearby world the victim is an aggressor whom it is permissible to kill. But this should have been stated.

So, it does seem we have a counterexample to (1). One might attempt to fully subjectivize (1) as follows instead:

2. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N and believes that success at N would constitute M.

But this is mistaken. An SS officer might have convinced himself that the killing of innocents that he is attempting is not in fact a murder, but that doesn’t make it not be a murder (whether the convincing reduces culpability is a separate question).

I think what we actually want to do is keep the moral standards objective while subjectivizing everything else. Roughly, we want something like this:

3. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N and were the moral standards fixed as they actually are and were the rest of the circumstances as the agent believes them to be, then the success at N would constitute M.

I doubt this captures all the cases, but it makes some progress over (1) I think. I suspect that our concept of an attempted murder or an attempted theft is rather messy and gerrymandered.

Note that (3) does not fit with the legal doctrine of “impossible attempts” on which an attempt that “couldn’t succeed” doesn’t count. Thus, attempting to kill with magic spells does not legally count as attempted murder, even though (3) says it is attempted murder. In this case, I am inclined to just say that the legal doctrine is false to the phrase “attempted murder”, but there is good reason not to prosecute such impossible attempts (say, because doing so leads to prosecution of “thought crimes”). If we want to build in a doctrine of impossible attempts, we can add to (3) the claim that there is an epistemically nearby world where the circumstances other than moral standards are as the agent believes them to be, where the epistemic nearness is measured by the standards of a reasonable person rather than perhaps the agent.

Are free actions a counterexample to the PSR?

I’ve argued somewhat as follows in the past:

1. Necessarily, no one is responsible for a brute fact—an unexplained contingent fact.

2. Necessarily, someone is responsible for every free decision or free action.

3. So, it is impossible for a free decision or free action to be a brute fact.

But then:

4. Necessarily, a counterexample to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is a brute fact.

5. So, no free decision or free action can be a counterexample to the PSR.

One may imagine someone, however, arguing that although a free decision or a free action cannot be a counterexample to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a contrastive report, such as that x freely chose to do A rather than B, could be a counterexample to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. But notice that if x freely chose to do A rather than B, then x is responsible for choosing to do A rather than B. Similarly if x freely chose to do A for reason R rather than B for S, then x is responsible for doing so. Freedom implies responsibility. But no one is responsible for a brute fact, so such contrastive reports cannot be reports of a brute fact.

Objection 1: Incompatibilism is true, and on incompatibilism it is obvious that no possible explanation can be given for why x freely chose to do A for R rather than B for S. Hence the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false.

Response: Given that no one is responsible for what has no explanation, if the “no possible explanation” claim is correct, then free will is impossible. Thus, rather than showing that the PSR is false, the argument would show that if incompatibilism is true, free will is impossible. As a libertarian, I think free will is possible (and actual). But it is important to keep clear on what it is that is really endangered by the argument: it is free will and not the PSR.

Objection 2: Freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for responsibility.

Response: I am not sure about this. When I think about what other conditions we need to add to freedom to yield responsibility, the only one I can think of is something like knowledge of what is at stake. But it is arguable that without knowledge of what is at stake, a choice is not free. Moreover, even if one does not know what is at stake with A and B beyond what is contained in the respective reasons R and S, one will still be responsible for choosing A for R rather than B for S if one chooses freely for these reasons. One just won’t be responsible for the further aspects, beyond those captured by R and S, that one does not know.

But let’s grant for the sake of argument that other conditions need to be added to freedom to yield responsibility. If so, then the claim has to be that free but non-responsible decisions or actions or contrastive reports thereof are a counterexample to the PSR although free and responsible ones are not. In other words, one has to hold that the alleged additional conditions that need to be added to freedom to yield responsibility are what secures explicability. But given that the most plausible candidate for the other conditions is knowledge of what is at stake, this is implausible. For a free action based on mistaken or limited knowledge is no less explicable than an action based on full knowledge, once one takes into account the agent’s epistemic deficiency.

Risability

Aristotle says that a necessary accident of the human being is risability—the capability for laughter. As far as I can tell, necessary accidents are supposed to derive from the essence of a thing. So, how do we derive risability from the essence of the human being?

Here’s an idea. The essence is to be a rational animal. A rational being reflects on itself. But to have an animal that is simultaneously rational—that’s objectively funny. Thus, a rational being that is an animal is always in a position to discover something objectively funny, namely itself. And it just wouldn’t be rational not to laugh at that funny thing!

Can one lie without asserting a proposition?

I am starting to think that one can lie without asserting a proposition.

Let’s say that a counterintelligence agent tells an enemy spy that a new weapons technology has just been deployed, in order to dissuade the enemy from invading. The description of the technology contains nonsensical technobabble. This seems to be a lie. If it is, my argument is complete, because nonsense does not express a proposition.

But suppose we say it’s mere BS. Let’s now complicate the case. The counterintelligence agent passes to the enemy spy a fake classified document saying “We have just built a weapon that shoots three simultaneous hyperquark beams.” The spy is taken in by the BS, but also wishes to deter war. And thus the spy reports to her government: “The enemy has just built a weapon that shoots ten simultaneous hyperquark beams.” It is clear that the spy is not merely engaging in BS. The spy sure seems to be lying. But the spy is no more asserting a proposition than the counterintelligence agent did.

If we say that the counterintelligence agent is lying, then we have to allow that one can lie without even taking oneself to assert a proposition.

If we think that the counterintelligence agent is only BSing, but that in my more complicated case the enemy spy is lying to her government, then we should say that to lie one needs to take oneself to be asserting a false proposition, but one need not be actually asserting a proposition, true or false.

In either case, one can lie without asserting a proposition.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps what the spy does in the more complicated case is neither BS nor a lie, but engaging in a verbal deceit we don’t have a good name for.