J. David Velleman
J. David Velleman argues for a concept of "epistemic freedom" which is related but not reducible to the determinist/compatibilist idea that we are free because we do not know what the future holds for us.
Velleman thinks we can "correctly" describe alternative futures that would be consistent with what he calls the "central evidence" of how things are causally related. "Correctly" means that if we decided to choose one of the alternatives, we can predict (describe) the consequences accurately.
This appears to be a multiple-alternatives example of G. E. Moore's argument that we
could do otherwise if we choose to do otherwise. Of course, if determinism is true, we cannot choose to do otherwise. But Velleman accepts the significance of Moore's point. If we could choose to do otherwise, the world would simply have been in a different causal sequence.
In his 1989 essay
Epistemic Freedom (later chapter 2 of his 2000 book
The Possibility of Practical Reason), Velleman says
Epistemic freedom is the freedom to affirm any one of several incompatible propositions without risk of being wrong. We sometimes have this freedom, strange as it seems, and our having it sheds some light on the topic of free will and determinism.
I think that there are two equally important reasons why we seek an alternative to determinism as an account of how our actions come about. One reason is phenomenological: we just feel free. Determinism seems incompatible, in the first instance, with what it's like to be an agent. Our other reason for seeking an alternative to determinism is conceptual. We fear that if determinism is true, then we shall have no grounds for applying concepts such as responsibility and desert to ourselves and our fellows.
The conceptual reason for worrying about determinism has tended to take precedence in the writings of philosophers, but I think that the phenomenological reason deserves equal attention. My own view is that explaining what it's like to be an agent is just as interesting, philosophically, as finding room in the world for punishment and blame. And even those who disagree with me on this score should consider that the experience of freedom serves, in some philosophical theories, as a datum from which conceptual consequences are derived. The conceptual problem of freedom thus becomes intertwined with the phenomenological problem.
The experience that I shall explain is often described, in particular, as the experience of openness in our future. Whenever we face a decision, we feel that our future is partly undetermined and thus leaves something for us to decide. This feeling seems to be a perception of real indeterminacy in the course of future events; how much indeterminacy is a difficult question. One might think that our sense of deciding an aspect of the future intimates that there is no antecedent fact of the matter as to how that aspect will turn out. Alternatively, one might think that our sense of deciding an aspect of the future doesn't intimate that there is no fact about it but only that any such fact isn't causally determined by the present state of the world. Under either interpretation, the experience is taken to contain a denial of determinism, the first denial being considerably stronger than the second.
My thesis is that under either interpretation, the experience is an understandable illusion. Our sense of an open future is occasioned by a genuine indeterminacy, I believe, but the indeterminacy that occasions it is not the metaphysical indeterminacy that the experience represents to us. Our future is undetermined, I shall argue, in a way that explains our feeling of freedom without conflicting with determinism.
Of course, to say that indeterminacy doesn't conflict with determinism sounds like a stark contradiction. The reason why it isn't a contradiction is that talk of indeterminacy is ambiguous. There is a sense in which the indeterminacy of the future would falsify determinism, and then there is a sense in which it doesn't. These senses seem inseparable, but they can in fact come apart.
Here are the two different senses in which our future might be undetermined. On the one hand, there may be no particular way that the future is going to turn out—or at least, no way that's necessitated, under the laws of nature, by the present state of the world. In that case, the future would be metaphysically or causally open. On the other hand, there may be no particular way that we must describe the future as turning out, in order to describe it correctly--or at least, no way that's necessitated, under the laws of nature, by a correct description of the present state of the world. In that case, the future would be, as I put it, epistemically open. So formulated, these two kinds of indeterminacy seem inextricably linked. We naturally assume that if there is a way that the future will turn out, then that's the way we must describe it as turning out, in order to give a true description of it; and we assume that if the present will determine the future, under the laws of nature, then a true description of the present will determine, under the same laws, how we must describe the future in order to describe it correctly.
I shall argue that these assumptions, however plausible, are false. For in some cases, even if the future is going to turn out in a particular way, we don't have to describe it as turning out that way in order to describe it correctly, since there are several other, incompatible ways in which we would be equally correct to describe it as turning out. Similarly, even if the present determines how the future will be, a correct description of the present needn't dictate how we must describe the future as being in order to describe it correctly.
Velleman gives us an example of telling a waiter what you will have for lunch. There are many correct answers (within reason - things you actually like, on the menu, etc.). If you say any of those reasonable items, you will indeed have it for lunch.
If you said something other than that which is
predetermined, which of course you cannot do...