Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.52685/cjp.21.63.2
Arguing about Free Will: Lewis and the Consequence Argument
Danilo Šuster
orcid.org/0000-0002-3894-1805
; University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia
Abstract
I explore some issues in the logics and dialectics of practical modalities connected with the Consequence Argument (CA) considered as the best argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to Lewis (1981) in one of the possible senses of (in)ability, the argument is not valid; however, understood in the other of its possible senses, the argument is not sound. This verdict is based on the assessment of the modal version of the argument, where the crucial notion is power necessity (“no choice” operator), while Lewis analyses the version where the central notion is the locution “cannot render false.”Lewis accepts closure of the relevant (in)ability operator under entailment but not closure under implication. His strategy has a seemingly strange corollary: a free predetermined agent is able (in a strong, causal sense) to falsity the conjunction of history and law. I compare a Moorean position with respect to radical skepticism and knowledge closure with ability closure and propose to explain Lewis’s strategy in the framework of his Moorean stance.
Keywords
The consequence argument; compatibilism; (in)ability; closure; radical scepticism; Moorean stance.
Hrčak ID:
269215
URI
Publication date:
27.12.2021.
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