The Indeterminist Intuition: Source and Status

AbstractEvidence from experimental philosophy indicates that people think that their choices are not determined. What remains unclear is why people think this. Denying determinism is rather presumptuous given people's general ignorance about the nature of the universe. In this paper, i'll argue that the belief in indeterminism depends on a default presumption that we know the factors that influence our decision making. That presumption was reasonable at earlier points in intellectual history. But in light of work in cognitive science, we are no longerjustified in sustaining the presupposition that we know what influences our choices. As a result, i'll suggest, our belief in indeterminist choice is unjustified.11. The Indeterminist IntuitionA diverse body of evidence indicates that people have the intuition that choice isn't determined. The evidence comes from interviews with children, vignette tasks, and phenomenological studies. Let's start with the children. Young children are fluent with the idea that a person often could have done otherwise than she did. In one study, the child observed an experimenter reach into a box and touch the bottom; the experimenter then asked the child, "did I have to touch the bottom or could I have done something else instead?" Children overwhelmingly said that the person could have done something else (Nichols 2004; Kushnir et al. 2009). Children did not, however, say the same thing after observing a physical event like a ball rolling into the box. Rather, in that case, children denied that the ball could have done something else.Of course, one might wonder whether the notion of could have done otherwise that the child is deploying is really inconsistent with determinism. In a subsequent experiment, children were presented with scenarios of physical events and moral choices. In one of the moral choice scenarios, Mary chooses to steal a candy bar. After correctly answering some comprehension questions about the situation that immediately preceded Mary's choice, children were presented with a kind of roll-back question: "Okay, now imagine that all of that was exactly the same and that what Mary wanted was exactly the same. If everything in the world was the same right up until she chose to steal, did Mary have to choose to steal?" In a physical event scenario, a pot of water was put on a stove and boils. Again, after comprehension questions about the situation immediately prior to the boiling, the children were asked "Okay, now imagine that all of that was exactly the same. If everything in the world was the same right up until the water boiled, did the water have to boil?" In this study, children were more likely to say that the water had to boil than that Mary had to choose to steal (Nichols 2004).It is hard to be sure that children really understand the roll-back set up here, so I conducted a similar study on adults. Adults were presented with the water-boiling scenario and asked to imagine the moment right before the water boiled. They were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed with this statement: "If everything was exactly the same up until the moment the water boiled, then the water had to boil at that moment." Adults tended to give high ratings of agreement for this case. By contrast, they gave significantly lower ratings for a theft-scenario in which they were ask to indicate agreement with this statement: "If everything was exactly the same up until the moment the man chose to steal the CD, then the man had to choose to steal the CD at that moment."2 In addition, many of the participants who gave different answers for the two cases explicitly invoked the nature of choice in explaining their responses. Here are a few examples:I think that it's most LIKELY that the people will not change what actions they take, but I think it's possible, whereas water doesn't choose to boil.For the water boiling scenario, all things the same, water will boil in the same amount of time, each and every time. …