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5.3: Reply to Nadelhoffer and Vargas
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I am grateful to Thomas Nadelhoffer and Manuel Vargas for their thoughtful reactions to my chapter. Nadelhoffer reports on a new study that bears on one of the central questions in my chapter—whether, as the majority of nonspecialists conceive of free will, having free will depends on having a nonphysical soul (or nonphysical mind). And Vargas guides me toward a possible line of scientific argumentation for the nonexistence of free will that I have not discussed in the various things I have written on scientific challenges to free will. Their contributions to this volume merit attention not only as responses to my chapter but also in their own right. Response to Nadelhoffer Thomas Nadelhoffer is right to distinguish the following two questions: 1. What percentage of people believe in the existence of nonphysical souls or nonphysical minds? 2. What percentage of people believe that having free will depends on having a nonphysical soul or nonphysical mind? In my chapter, I reported on some studies I conducted to get evidence about the second question. I am confident that most of the participants in my studies believe in nonphysical souls. However, I did not ask them about that. As I observed (in note 4), it is possible to believe in nonphysical souls without believing that having such a soul (or mind) is required for having free will. And, in fact, Nadelhoffer provides evidence that a healthy percentage of people who do believe in nonphysical souls do not believe that having free will depends on having such a soul. In the vignette of mine in which the nonexistence of anything nonphysical was made most salient, almost three quarters of the participants responded in a way that coheres with the belief that having free will does 5.3 Reply to Nadelhoffer and Vargas Alfred R. Mele 228 Alfred R. Mele not depend on having a nonphysical soul (or mind). This is evidence that people who argue for the nonexistence of free will on the grounds that there are no nonphysical souls or minds are attacking the existence of something that goes beyond what most people deem sufficient for free will. In my chapter, I also mentioned other evidence of this—for example, Monroe and Malle’s (2010) finding that when their 180 participants were asked to “explain in a few lines” what they “think it means to have free will” (p. 214), “no assumptions of substance dualism … were expressed” (p. 216). Nadelhoffer asked participants to react to the following statement: “If it turned out that people lacked non-physical (or immaterial) souls, then they would lack free will.” He reported that 36% disagree, 32% neither agree nor disagree, and 30% agree. Thus only 30% are agreeing with the scientists who claim that having free will depends on having a soul. Even so, the differences in the three different studies I have mentioned are interesting. When Monroe and Malle ask their open-ended question about free will, no one expresses a belief that having free will depends on having a nonphysical soul; when Nadelhoffer asks specifically about souls, his respondents divide roughly into thirds; and when people respond to my vignette about a wholly physical agent in a wholly physical universe, 73% say that he has free will. What might account for these differences? The argument of my chapter does not depend on my providing an answer to this question. Even so, it certainly is an interesting question, and I will offer a brief response. The differences may be accounted for partly by differences in the subject pools. However, I suspect that more is going on, and I will concentrate on that. Nadelhoffer distinguishes between theories and intuitions. I draw a related distinction between theories and concepts (Mele, 2001). Let theories be understood as Nadelhoffer understands them, and think of concepts as sorting mechanisms. For example, think of your concept of dog as a mechanism for sorting things into dogs and nondogs. In my opinion, a good way to get evidence about people’s concepts (understood as sorting mechanisms) in the sphere of action is to present people with vignettes in which agents perform specific actions and see how they sort things. A way to get at people’s theories is to ask them theoretical questions. The questions may be open-ended: What does it mean to have free will? Or they may be specific: If we don’t have souls, then we don’t have free will; true or false? If we explain...