I just came across this book "Experimental Philosophy"
http://books.google.com/books?id=hfUeuA ... t#PPA86,M1
It is an interesting read, I would've copy/pasted but its a book preview and won't allow it (or I couldn't figure out how).
I was intrigued by section 3 TESTING WHETHER INCOMPATIBILISM IS INTUITIVE
The experimental data provided does suggest that compatibilism is the intuitive position of most people who have not studied the subject of free-will and determinism.
This of course does not mean that either is correct, but I had thought that people were intuitively incompatibilist.
One of the authors Shaun Nichols also hosts The Great Philosophical Debate: Free-Will and Determinism (on DVD for a whopping $260!)
Nichols also authored the following:
Shaun Nichols, Folk Intuitions on Free Will
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwNichols.html
Shaun Nichols & Joshua Kobe, Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwNicholsKnobe.html
And hosted the following youtube series called "Free Will and Determinism The Basic Debate" (An Introduction to the Great Philosophical Debate DVD)
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=A0bizRv6NJo
Experimental Philosophy
Re: Experimental Philosophy
Introduction to Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions
by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe
The debate between these two positions has invoked many different resources, including quantum mechanics, social psychology, and basic metaphysics. But recent discussions have relied heavily on arguments that draw on people’s intuitions about particular cases. Some philosophers have claimed that people have incompatibilist intuitions (e.g., Kane 1999, 218; Strawson 1986, 30; Vargas forthcoming); others have challenged this claim and suggested that people’s intuitions actually fit with compatibilism (Lycan 2003:, Nahmias et al. forthcoming). But although philosophers have constructed increasingly sophisticated arguments about the implications of people’s intuitions, there has been remarkably little discussion about why people have the intuitions they do. That is to say, relatively little has been said about the specific psychological processes that generate or sustain people’s intuitions. And yet, it seems clear that questions about the sources of people’s intuitions could have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism. There is an obvious sense in which it is important to figure out whether people’s intuitions are being produced by a process that is generally reliable or whether they are distorted by a process that generally leads people astray.
Our aim here is to present and defend a hypothesis about the processes that generate people’s intuitions concerning moral responsibility. Our hypothesis is that people subscribe to an incompatibilist theory [2] of moral responsibility but that other subsystems within their minds can lead them to arrive at compatibilist judgments in certain contexts. To support this hypothesis, we report new experimental data. These data show that people’s responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated. When asked questions that call for a more abstract, theoretical sort of cognition, people give overwhelmingly incompatibilist answers. But when asked questions that trigger emotions, their answers become far more compatibilist.
Swiped from -- The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website edited by Ted Honderich --
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwNicholsKnobe.html
Not so surprising for the "QRS" group I imagine. Still it is valuable to have experimental data supporting our prose.
by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe
The debate between these two positions has invoked many different resources, including quantum mechanics, social psychology, and basic metaphysics. But recent discussions have relied heavily on arguments that draw on people’s intuitions about particular cases. Some philosophers have claimed that people have incompatibilist intuitions (e.g., Kane 1999, 218; Strawson 1986, 30; Vargas forthcoming); others have challenged this claim and suggested that people’s intuitions actually fit with compatibilism (Lycan 2003:, Nahmias et al. forthcoming). But although philosophers have constructed increasingly sophisticated arguments about the implications of people’s intuitions, there has been remarkably little discussion about why people have the intuitions they do. That is to say, relatively little has been said about the specific psychological processes that generate or sustain people’s intuitions. And yet, it seems clear that questions about the sources of people’s intuitions could have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism. There is an obvious sense in which it is important to figure out whether people’s intuitions are being produced by a process that is generally reliable or whether they are distorted by a process that generally leads people astray.
Our aim here is to present and defend a hypothesis about the processes that generate people’s intuitions concerning moral responsibility. Our hypothesis is that people subscribe to an incompatibilist theory [2] of moral responsibility but that other subsystems within their minds can lead them to arrive at compatibilist judgments in certain contexts. To support this hypothesis, we report new experimental data. These data show that people’s responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated. When asked questions that call for a more abstract, theoretical sort of cognition, people give overwhelmingly incompatibilist answers. But when asked questions that trigger emotions, their answers become far more compatibilist.
Swiped from -- The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website edited by Ted Honderich --
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwNicholsKnobe.html
Not so surprising for the "QRS" group I imagine. Still it is valuable to have experimental data supporting our prose.
Re: Experimental Philosophy
The wiki page on this topic suggests to me that compatibilism or incompatibilism is just a matter of how you define "free will" :
So, is there a common, intuitive notion of exactly what is meant by "free will" ? It seems pretty slippery to me.A compatibilist, or soft determinist, in contrast, will define a free act in a way that does not hinge on the presence or absence of prior causes. For example, one could define a free act as one that involves no compulsion by another person. Since the physical universe and the laws of nature are not persons, actions which are caused by the laws of nature, would still be free acts, and therefore it is wrong to conclude that universal determinism would mean we are never free.
Re: Experimental Philosophy
Definitely DHodges, the compatibilist brand of free-will is an equivocation. It identifies philosophical free-will with political free-will.