Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, I: Determinism

Session I: Freedom and Determinism in the Twenty-first Century: Prolegomena to the Rewriting of History [Discussion Included]

5 S E S S I O N I Freedom and Determinism in the Twenty-first Century: Prolegomena to the Rewriting of History Steve Fuller I T H E C O M P L E M E N T A R I T Y O F F R E E D O M A N D D E T E R M I N I S M I N T H E M O D E R N S C I E N T I F I C W O R L D V I E W There is a strong but seriously misleading tendency to suppose that determinism is opposed to freedom. On the contrary, some kind of determinism is presupposed by most accounts of freedom. My aim here is to outline the case for a still stronger position—that the sphere of rational action is composed by placing freedom and determinism in some normatively appropriate, empirically informed relationship of complementarity. The reader will see that I address the topic from many different angles without pretending to have resolved them all into a coherent perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that the considerations raised here constitute a worthy project for any discipline that calls itself a science, not least social science. Here is the guiding intuition: It doesn’t make much sense to say people are free to do what they want, unless the options at their disposal are likely to result in meaningfully different outcomes that can be more or less anticipated. The only kind of determinism that is clearly opposed to freedom is the one that William James targeted in his famous 1897 essay, The Will to Believe. What James attacks as determinism is the belief that unactualized possibilities are illusions, which in Kantian fashion he held to undermine at once our ability to make causal inferences and assign moral responsibility. I stand with James in opposing this 6 form of determinism. However, and perhaps more relevant to our own times, I am also launching a second-order attack on those who would deconstruct by strictly mathematical or purely literary means the freedom/determinism binary as a relic of a woebegone scientific modernism. However, the deconstructionists are right about one thing: The fates of freedom and determinism as intelligible concepts hang together not separately. Because there is a tendency for postmodern sophisticates to associate determinism with some aspect of the modern scientific worldview, I should stress that what James originally attacked was a pervasive pre-scientific sensibility that the spread of the modern scientific worldview was supposed to correct. This sensibility holds that whatever happens had to happen. Such a sensibility implies nothing about the presence of overarching laws of nature, nor does the presence of overarching laws of nature imply the fatalistic attitude to the world that passes in the pre-scientific mind for determinism.1 In contrast, two versions of the problem of “freedom and determinism” are posed by modern science. The first is associated with the mechanical worldview and the second with the evolutionary worldview. The former’s intellectual center of gravity lies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the latter’s in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 A good way to epitomize the difference between the two worldviews is that the mechanical worldview attempts to derive freedom from determinism, whereas the evolutionary worldview attempts the reverse. Figure 1.1 projects the hopes and fears of these two worldviews. I shall make more Mechanical Evolutionary Worldview Worldview Hope Derive freedom from Derive determinism determinism from freedom (Overdeterminism) (Underdeterminism) Fear Determinism divorced Freedom divorced from from freedom determinism (Fatalism) (Chaos) FIGURE 1.1 THE TWO MODERN WORLDVIEWS 7 of this distinction in the next section but let me start by focusing on the mechanical version of the problem, with which contemporary philosophers are more familiar. It turns on a distinction drawn by Newton’s self-described “underlabourer,” John Locke, between freedom of will and freedom to will (Berofsky 1973). Locke adopted a position that has become standard among naturalistic philosophers, popularized nowadays by Daniel Dennett (1984, 2003)—that freedom to will is the only freedom worth having. Freedom to will implies possession of the means by which an effect can be reliably produced, even if the means is not a creation of its possessor. This was the hopeful message for humanity inscribed in Newton’s subsumption of all movement...