Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Keith Lehrer

Keith Lehrer is perhaps best known in the free will debates for his 1966 article An Empirical Disproof of Determinism.

The argument is very simple. Set up a simple experiment with a subject. Repeat the experiment with conditions as nearly identical as possible. It is of course impossible to have exactly the same conditions.

Instruct the subject to either do or not do some simple action, like raising his arm.

Collect a reasonable number of both raising and not raising the arm. Now argue that, since he showed that it was possible for him to have done or not done the action, retrospectively in any individual case he could have done otherwise.

Excerpts from An Empirical Disproof of Determinism
(from Freedom and Determinism, ed. K. Lehrer, Random House, New York, 1966, p. 175)
According to certain philosophers, the statement that a person could have done what he did not do lacks the proper epistemic credentials. The reason why this statement has been the bone of philosophical contention is its connection with the problem of free will and determinism. It is usually held that a person acts of his own free will only if he could have acted otherwise. However, both libertarians and determinists have had their doubts about the epistemic qualifications of such statements. For example, Ledger Wood, a determinist, maintains that the statement that a person could have done otherwise is empirically meaningless. He says,
a careful analysis of the import of the retrospective judgement, "I could have acted otherwise than I did," will, I believe, disclose it to be an empirically meaningless statement.
From the other side of the issue, William James, a libertarian, argues that science, and our knowledge of what has actually happened, cannot give us the least grain of information about what it was possible for a person to have done. He says:
Science professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of information as to whether another thing might or might not have happened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
Thus, both Wood and James, as well as others, think that it is impossible to know empirically that a person could have done other than he did do. I wish to show that this position is mistaken — that is, that it is possible to know empirically that a person could have done otherwise. I shall attempt to establish this, first by considering n general how we know what a person can do, and then by showing that skeptical doubt concerning our knowledge of what people can do is no better grounded than skeptical doubt concerning our knowledge of the color properties of unobserved objects. Finally, I wish to consider the implications of the possibility of such empirical knowledge for the problem of free will and determinism. I shall argue that it follows from the possibility of such knowledge that, if free will and determinism are not logically consistent, then we can know empirically that the principle of determinism is false. Subsequently, I shall consider the question of the consistency of free will and determinism.

I now wish to argue that we can know empirically that a person could have done otherwise.* A person could have done otherwise if he could have done what he did not do. Moreover, if it is true at the present time that a person can now do what he is not now doing, then, later, it will be true that he could have done something at this time which he did not do. This, of course, follows from the fact that "could" is sometimes merely the past indicative of "can." ** What I now want to argue is that we do sometimes know empirically that a person can do at a certain time what he is not then doing, and, consequently, that he could have done at that time what he did not then do. Moreover, we can obtain empirical evidence in such a way that our methods will satisfy the most rigorous standards of scientific procedure.

I shall attempt to show that we can know empirically that a person could have done what he did not do by first considering the more general question of how we ever know what people can do. It is, I suppose, obvious that there is no problem of how we know a person can do something when we see him do it. In this case, the evidence that we have for the hypothesis that a person can do something entails the hypothesis. But all that is entailed by the evidence is that the person can do what we see him do at the time we see him do it. It is at least logically possible that he cannot do it at any other time. Thus, when we project the hypothesis that a person can do something at some time when we do not see him do it, the empirical evidence that we have for the hypothesis will not entail the hypothesis. The problem of our knowledge of what people can do is, therefore, primarily the problem of showing how we know that people can do certain things at those times at which we do not see them do the things in question. The solution to the problem depends upon the recognition of the fact that one fundamental way (there are others) in which we know that a person can do something at some time when we do not see him do it is by seeing him do, it at some other time. However, it is not merely a matter of seeing him do something at some other time that would justify our claim to know that he can do it at the time at which we do not see him do it, but of seeing him do it when certain other epistemic conditions are also satisfied. I shall discuss four such conditions, which seem to me to be the most important. I shall call them the conditions of temporal propinquity, circumstantial variety, agent similarity, and simple frequency.

Temporal propinquity. The amount of time that has elapsed between the time at which we see a person perform an action and the time at which it is claimed that he can perform the action is of considerable importance. For example, if I saw a man perform forty push-ups twenty years ago and have not seen him do it since, that would hardly justify my claim to know that he can do it now. On the other hand, if I saw him do it yesterday, my claim would have much greater merit. The less time that elapses between the time at which we see a person perform an action and the time at which we claim to know that he can perform it, the more justified our claim. This condition requires one qualification Certain actions - for example, running a four-minute mile — require unusual endurance; consequently, if we have just seen a person do such a thing, it is a good guess that, being tired, he cannot do it now. The condition is relevant even in the case of such actions, but we must add the qualification that sufficient time has elapsed between the time at which we saw the person perform the action and the time at which it is claimed that he could have performed the action, so that the effects of fatigue would not prevent or hinder the person from performing it.

Circumstantial variety. The greater the variety of circumstances under which we have seen the person perform an action, the more justified we are in claiming to know that he can perform it. There is also a qualification needed here. Sometimes, though we have not seen a person perform an action in a very great variety of circumstances, we have seen him perform the action under circumstances very similar to the circumstances he is in when it is claimed that he can perform it. In this case, the greater the similarity of the circumstances, the better the evidence.

Agent similarity. If the condition of the agent changes radically, from the time at which we see him perform an action to the time at which it is claimed that he can perform it, then our evidence that he can perform the action may be greatly weakened. For example, if we see a man lift a two-hundred-pound weight, and he subsequently breaks his arm, our having seen him lift the weight is surely not very good evidence that he can do it now that his arm is broken. Thus, the greater the similarity of the condition of the agent, at the time when we see him perform the action, to the condition of the agent at the time at which we claim that he can perform it, the greater the justification of our claim. To some extent this condition, like the preceding one, may be formulated as a condition of variety rather than as a condition of similarity. That is, if we have seen the agent perform an action at times when his condition has varied greatly, then, even though the condition of the agent at the time at which it is claimed that he can perform the action is quite different from what it was when we saw him perform it, the claim might, nevertheless, be fairly well justified. However, it seems to me that with respect to the circumstances, variety is more important, while, with respect to the condition of the agent, similarity is more important. The reason for this is that great changes in circumstances are often unimportant, while small changes in the condition of the agent may often be crucial.

Simple frequency. Other conditions aside, the more frequently we have seen a person perform an action, the more justified we are in claiming to know that he can perform the action when we do not see him perform it.

These conditions are related in various ways. For example, temporal propinquity tends to produce agent similarity, because generally people change less in a shorter time than in a longer time. Of course, circumstantial variety contributes to simple frequency, and vice versa. Thus, these conditions, which are simple canons of inductive evidence for a certain sort of hypothesis, are inductively interdependent.

Moreover, the importance of the various conditions depends to a considerable extent upon the kind of action involved. With respect to actions that one usually retains the ability to perform for a long time, such as wiggling one's ears, the condition of temporal propinquity is less important, whereas with respect to actions that one quickly loses the ability to perform, such as running a four-minute mile, the condition of temporal propinquity is much more important.

However, if all of these conditions are very well satisfied with respect to any action, we possess sufficient empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a person can perform the action when we do not see him perform it, and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we are certainly justified in claiming to know that the hypothesis is true. Indeed, these conditions are typical of the usual canons of inductive evidence; if they are satisfied, then, by the usual canons of inductive evidence, our evidence is excellent.

It will not be difficult to imagine an experiment, which we could quite easily carry out, that would enable us to obtain such evidence. To avoid unnecessary complications, we shall concern ourselves with one very simple action, the lifting of an arm. Now let us imagine that we find a subject who is normal in every way, and fabricate an experiment to investigate when our subject can, and when he cannot, perform this very simple action. For example, we might first instruct him to lift his arm whenever we tell him to, and see that he does this. We might then instruct him to lift his arm whenever we tell him not to, and see that he does this. We might then tell him to heed or not to heed our instructions, as he wishes, and see that he sometimes lifts his arm when we tell him to, and sometimes does not, and that he sometimes lifts his arm when we tell him not to, and sometimes does not. We might then run this same experiment under a variety of circumstances, indoors and outdoors, under stress and under relaxed conditions, with a weight attached to his arm and without impediments, etc. Moreover, we might keep careful records of the condition of the subject throughout all our experiments, and, finally, we might vary the condition of the subject by the use of drugs, hypnotism, etc.

Now, suppose that we instruct our subject to heed or not heed our instructions as he wishes, and insure that the condition of the subject, as well as the circumstances in which he is placed, are those we have found to be most propitious for arm-lifting. Moreover, suppose that we watch him lift his arm, then avert our eyes for a moment, and, subsequently, see him lift his arm again. In this case, the conditions of temporal propinquity, circumstantial variety, agent similarity, and simple frequency would certainly be satisfied.

Consequently, we would then have sufficient empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that the agent could have lifted his arm during that brief period when we did not see him lift his arm, and, consequently, we would be justified in claiming to know that the hypothesis is true.

Furthermore, this claim would be justified whether or not the agent lifted his arm at the time in question, and, indeed, would be justified even if we knew that he did not lift it. In fact, even if we do not avert our eyes but see that he does not move his arm at the time in question, this in no way detracts from the value of our evidence. Under the conditions we have imagined, the fact that our subject does not lift his arm need provide no evidence whatever to support the hypothesis that he cannot lift it.

The latter claim is surely the crux of the matter. To see that it is justified, let us suppose that we know from what the agent tells us that he did not try or make any attempt to lift his arm. The relevance of such knowledge is this. If the agent tried and failed, that would be evidence that he could not perform the action, but there is a great difference between failing when one has tried and mere nonperformance. If we are able to rule out the hypothesis that the agent tried and failed, and if the condition of the agent as well as the circumstances in which he is placed are those we have found to be most favorable for arm-lifting, then the mere fact that he does not lift his arm would not support the hypothesis that he cannot lift it.

An analogy should help to clarify this point. Suppose that a car is tuned and checked so that it is in perfect operating condition and is then placed in circumstances that must favor good performance. If someone tries to start the car, turns the key, sets the choke, etc., and the car fails to start, that is evidence that it cannot start. On the other band, if no attempt is made to start the car, then the mere fact that the car does not start in no way supports the hypothesis that it cannot start.

Therefore, if we know from our experiment: (i) that the condition of the agent and the circumstances in which we have placed him are ideal for arm-lifting, and (ii) that his not lifting his arm provides no evidence that he cannot lift it, then our experimental empirical evidence is sufficient to justify our claim to know that the agent could have lifted his arm at a time when he did not lift it.

Since there is no impossibility, of any sort involved in our imaginary experiment, there being no logical difficulty involved in actually carrying it out, it follows that it is possible to know empirically that a person could have done otherwise. It seems altogether reasonable to suppose that, were the experiment actually carried out, the results would be approximately what we have imagined them to be. Moreover, the uncontrolled but abundant evidence of everyday life also clearly provides us with empirical evidence sufficient to justify our claim to know empirically that a person could have done otherwise. Indeed, the experiment I have asked you to imagine is not necessary for the attainment of such knowledge, but it is sufficient, and that is the point at issue.

At this point, I wish to consider several objections that might be raised against the preceding argument. In the first place, it might be objected that the empirical evidence that we would obtain from our imaginary experiment would not establish categorically that the agent could have done otherwise, but would rather establish hypothetically only that the agent could have done otherwise, if certain conditions had been different .6 However the experiment would establish both that, at certain times, the subject could have done otherwise, if certain conditions had been different, and that, at other times, the subject could have done otherwise, had the conditions been precisely as they were. It is most important not to obliterate this distinction. For example, we might discover that, when our subject is hypnotized and given certain instructions, he can lift his arm only when he is told to. In such a case, if he does not lift his arm, we would only be justified in asserting hypothetically that he could have lifted his arm if we had told him to. Or, suppose that we instruct him, again under hypnotic control, to lift his arm only if he has decided to do so five minutes earlier. In this situation, if the subject does not lift his arm, we would only be justified in asserting hypothetically that he could have lifted his arm, if he had decided to five minutes earlier. However, if we have just seen him lift his arm under the most favorable circumstances, and, without the conditions being altered in any way, he does not lift his arm now, we would be justified in asserting categorically that he could have lifted his arm — and no ifs about it.

For Teachers
For Scholars

Chapter 1.4 - The Philosophy Chapter 1.6 - The Scientists
Home Part Two - Knowledge
Normal | Teacher | Scholar