In its pragmatic project, empirical psychology employs metaphors to interpret data and deliver descriptive explanations.[i] Insofar as it is a positivist project, empirical psychology pursues reductive explanations which have the semblance of taking phenomena designated by natural language to be composed of more ‘real’ elements. Reductive descriptions of complex systems …
How could we have alternative possibilities if the world was physically deterministic? I argue that physical determinism does not rule out indeterminism at the level of agency. The distinction between determinism and indeterminism is level-specific.
Realism about free will is warranted, because the picture of humans as choice-making agents is explanatorily indispensable in the human and social sciences.
This series of posts discusses some key ideas from Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019) by Christian List.
The next Neural Mechanisms webinar is Friday (22nd) 8-10 Greenwich Mean Time: Karen YAN (National Yang-Ming University) presents “Evaluating the Success of Causal Investigative Strategies in Neurophysiology”. Find out about the paper and how to join the webinar in this post.
Jaegwon Kim’s discussions of the problem of mental causation have been enormously influential, so it should come as no surprise that some critics have tried to apply his reasoning to the hylomorphic solution discussed in Part 1.
The problem of mental causation is a central problem in the metaphysics of mind, but hylomorphism implies an elegant solution to it.
