The Folk Psychology of Free Will : Fits and Starts

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. The language of all mankind, and their ordinary conduct in life, demonstrate, that they have a conviction of some active power in themselves to produce certain motions in their own and in other bodies, and to regulate and direct their own thoughts. This conviction we have so early in life, that we have no remembrance when, or in what way we acquired it (Reid, 1969 [1788], p. 269). The problem of free will has its roots in commonsense. No scientific expertise is required to bring the problem to life for the uninitiated. For the notion of free will is a commonsense notion, a part of our folk psychology. Over the last quarter century, philosophical work on the notion of free will has flourished (see Kane, 2002 for state-of-the-art overviews). Much of this work is devoted to giving an analysis of the notion of free will that fits with the intuitions of philosophical grown-ups. While this analytic literature on free will has become wildly sophisticated, naturalistic philosophers and developmental psychologists have produced a highly developed literature on the child’s emerging capacity for predicting and explaining people’s behavior, ‘mindreading’ (see, e.g. Goldman, 1989; Gopnik and Wellman, 1994; Gordon, 1986; Harris, 1992; Nichols and Stich, 2003; Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990). Unfortunately, although the notion of free will is indisputably part of folk psychology, the notion of free will has been almost entirely neglected in this naturalistic literature on folk psychology in children. This is especially disappointing for those of us who regard the developmental work as a I would like to thank the teachers, parents, and children of the N.E. Miles Early Childhood Development Center at the College of Charleston. Thanks to Hilary Martin, Sara Martell, and Emily Askey for assistance in data collection. Many thanks to Trisha Folds-Bennett for help getting subjects and pilot data for experiment 2. I would also like to thank John Doris, Larry Krasnoff, Heidi Maibom, Eddy Nahmias, Philip Robbins, Eric Schwitzgebel, two anonymous referees and an editor at Mind & Language for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424, USA.  nichols@cofc.edu Mind & Language,   In this paper, I attempt to forge some links between these literatures. Since the issue has not been systematically joined previously, the paper will be rather exploratory and programmatic. I will argue that young children have a notion of agent-causation, according to which (i) actions are caused by agents and (ii) for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. In the first section, I’ll set out the notion of agent-causation as it has been developed in philosophy. Then I’ll briefly discuss the absence of this notion in standard accounts of the child’s understanding of decision making. In section 3, I’ll discuss some evidence and present some experimental results that support the claim that children exploit a notion of agent-causation. In section 4, I’ll set out the difficult question of acquisition. If children do have a notion of agent-causation, how do they acquire such a thing? I’ll describe and discuss several possible acquisition stories. Finally, in the fifth section, I’ll consider possible implications for the philosophical debate on free will. 1. The Philosophical Characterization of Agent-Causation In the philosophical literature on free will, agent-causal theories have a long, if somewhat irregular, history. One of the earliest accounts that is unequivocally agent-causal comes from Thomas Reid (1969 [1788]). According to William Rowe, the foremost contemporary exegete of Reid’s view, on Reid’s account you count as a true agent-cause of a change in the world when ‘you had the power to bring about that change, you exerted that power by acting, and finally, you had the power not to bring about that change’ (1989, p. 159). Such agent-causal theories are typically framed against the thesis of determinism, the claim that every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws. Historically, agent-causal theorists have had to fight on two very different fronts. On the one hand, agent-causal theorists are in combat with ‘compatibilists’ who claim that free will and determinism are perfectly consistent once one gets clear about the proper interpretation of ‘free will’. The proper understanding of ‘free will’, according to agent-causal theorists, is one that is thoroughly at odds with determinism. On the second front, agent-causal theorists resist ‘hard determinists’, who maintain that while free will is indeed at odds with determinism, that means that free will doesn’t exist, since determinism is true. Agent-causal theorists maintain rather that it is a fact that we have free will and that this entails that determinism is false, at least when it comes to agents. For most of the Twentieth century, agent-causation had little cachet in analytic philosophy. In the mid-Twentieth century, the view was bravely resurrected by 1 As a result, agent-causal theories count as ‘libertarian’ approaches to free will. However, some libertarian accounts reject agent-causation (e.g. Ginet, 1990; Kane, 1996). 474 S. Nichols # Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004 Roderick Chisholm (1966) and a few others, in the face of rather a good deal of abuse. But recently agent-causation has undergone a renaissance. There are a variety of agent-causal theories, and there has been a resurgence of work on these kinds of accounts (see, e.g. Clarke, 1993, 1996, 2003; Ekstrom, 2000; O’Connor, 1995, 2000; Rowe, 1989, 1991). Despite the important differences between different accounts of agent-causation, all agent-causal theorists agree on two points: 1. An agent is a causal factor in the production of an action. 2. For a given action of an agent, the agent could have not caused it. Roughly, the agent could have done otherwise. The first condition has it that the power to make the change, to produce the action, lies in the agent. The important feature here is that agent-causal theories quantify over agents, and they locate in the agent causal powers. However, this first condition alone will not rescue agents from the hegemony of determinism. The problem is that just because the agent caused something to happen doesn’t mean that the outcome wasn’t inevitable. It doesn’t mean that the agent could have refrained from the action. Rowe makes the point by adverting to an example of causal powers outside the realm of agency: Suppose a piece of zinc is dropped into some acid, and the acid dissolves the zinc. In this example, we might say that the acid has the power to bring about a certain change in the zinc. . . . But can we reasonably say that the acid had the power not to bring about this change? Clearly we cannot. The acid has no power to refrain from dissolving the zinc . . . The acid, therefore, is not an agent-cause of the zinc’s dissolving (Rowe, 1989, p. 159). The acid has the power to dissolve the zinc, but it does not have the power not to dissolve the zinc. One might similarly claim then that an agent was a causal factor in producing an action without maintaining that the agent could have done otherwise than produce the action. Hence, to capture the relevant anti-determinist notion of agent causation, we need to add the condition that the agent could have done otherwise, even while all the other factors were exactly the same. The interposed hyphen produces the technical term for this notion, agentcausation. Agent-causal theories attract skeptics of all sorts. Perhaps the deepest reservation is that agent-causation is unintelligible. For an agent-caused action is produced in a way that is not deterministic, but neither can the action be produced in a random fashion. And that, the worry goes, leaves us fresh out of possibilities. I will prescind 2 In this paper, I intend for the ‘could have done otherwise’ condition to be understood as indeterminist, unless otherwise noted. The Folk Psychology of Free Will 475 # Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004 from such questions about whether agent-causation has any remote plausibility. I should probably confess that I am deeply skeptical that we are agent-causes. But here I won’t assume or argue that agent-causal theories are wrong. I want to remain entirely neutral on the actual metaphysics of agency. Until section 5, my focus will be on two questions: i. Do children believe in agent-causation? ii. How might the belief in agent-causation be acquired? These questions would not be settled by determining whether or not agentcausation obtains. Children (and adults) believe in all sorts of crazy things, and they fail to believe in all sorts of true things. So we could hardly settle whether children believe in agent-causation by settling the actual metaphysics. Similarly, the belief in agent-causation would demand an acquisition story regardless of whether agent-causation is real or not. For even if it’s real, we need a story about how children come to recognize this. Even if we are agent-causes, that does not explain why young