Timothy O'Connor on why the prime mover must have free will

Timothy O'Connor distinguishes two stages of cosmological arguments for theism:

1. The establishment stage, in which the existence of a being of a special kind, usually an independently and necessarily existing 'prime mover', is established.

2. The identification stage: the being whose existence has been established in the previous stage is identified with the God of traditional theism, or at least as having some of the attributes possessed by the God of traditional theism.

The establishment stage gets most of the attention in the literature on cosmological arguments. It has taken the form of various different arguments, the most well-known typically being deductive arguments in which one of the premises is a kind of Leibnizian 'principle of sufficient reason' (e.g Rowe 1968). In my view, the most persuasive route to the kind of being at hand is a kind of inference to the best explanation. Very briefly: take a dependent being to be one that depends on something outside of itself for its existence, and an independent being to be one that doesn't. If there are only dependent beings, we are left with an infinite regress of dependence, since each being relies on another being for its existence, and so on ad infinitum. But then, while each individual member of the regress has an explanation for its existence, there is no explanation for why dependent beings exist at all. If, on the other hand, we introduce an independent being to our ontology, we can have an explanation for why dependent beings exist at all, if it we posit that the independent being has the power to bring about dependent beings. Hence, the hypothesis of an independent being is more explanatory than the hypothesis of an infinite regress of dependent beings (Here I follow Ross Cameron 2008 and Ricki Bliss 2013 in the claim that the 'viciousness' of infinite regresses has to do with a lack of explanatory power).

Anyway, enough about the establishment stage. I came across a passage from Timothy O'Connor a few months ago, in which he suggests reasons to believe that the independent being arrived at in the establishment stage is a "necessary" or a "voluntary agent". To put it simply, voluntary agents actualize their potentialities through an act of the will, while necessary agents do so 'mechanically'. A panadol pill has a potentiality to relieve my headache. This potentiality exists by virtue of the pill's chemical structure, and is actualized by external triggers after I have swallowed the pill. I doesn't relieve my headache voluntarily. In contrast, I have a potentiality to take the pill, and this potentiality is actualized by my voluntarily taking the pill, i.e. through an act of the will. The pill is a necessary agent, I am a voluntary agent.

O'Connor writes that "the only available model we have of a necessary agent is that of an agent whose activity is in each case triggered by surrounding circumstances, and as such, is always part of a chain of events". Necessary agents, as in the case of the panadol pill, always seem to actualize their potentialities as a result of some external trigger. But this cannot be true of the creative activity of the independent being, since there would be no other beings to somehow trigger its potentiality to create, or to sustain things into existence.

Voluntary agents, on the other hand, need not act in the foregoing manner, not at least if they are free agents. O'Connor writes elsewhere that to be act freely is to "be an ultimate source of my activity" (2008, 121). Though a free action may be influenced by external stimuli (e.g. perceived states of affairs), it cannot be fully or sufficiently caused by such stimuli. O'Connor is well-known for his advancement of this agent causalist conception of free will. He states in the passage under consideration that the hypothesis that the independent being is a free voluntary agent, rather than a necessary one, is much more plausible and intelligible.

O'Connor doesn't pursue this line of thought much further, but I think it could be developed into an explanatory argument for the hypothesis that the 'prime mover' arrived at through the establishment stage has free will. If the independent being is a necessary agent, we have no explanation as to how it can actualize its potentiality to create or sustain dependent beings without this being sufficiently caused by some kind of external stimulus. If on the other hand the independent being is a free voluntary agent, we do have an explanation as to how it does so, since it does so out of a free act of the will, which by definition cannot be sufficiently caused by some external stimulus. Hence, the hypothesis of a free voluntary independent being is more explanatory than that of one who is a necessary agent.

This would go some way to meeting the requirements of the identification stage of cosmological arguments for theism. Free will is one of the attributes that the God of traditional theism is said to have. Moreover, possessing free will would seem to entail having conscious states, or at the very least a mind, since acts of the will necessarily are acts of the mind (and, I would add, conscious ones). An independently existing, free conscious Self does start to look quite a bit like the 'God' that we are all familiar with, at least in the West.

Another agent causalist, Roderick Chisholm, had already noticed the connection between agent causal free will and theism:

" If we are responsible, and if what I have been trying to say is true, then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing — or no one — causes us to cause those events to happen."

If we have the relevant kind of free will, we are like little prime movers, causing events without being sufficiently caused to do so by things outside of ourselves, even if such things can influence our free actions, and hence perhaps be said to partially cause such actions.

It is important to note, though, that one doesn't need to believe that we actually have this sort of free for the above argument to work. Nor does one need to believe that having agent causal free will is the only meaningful sense in which an agent can be said to be free. All that it needed is for the idea of agent causal free will to be a coherent one. In that case, it will be open for someone who denies that we have agent causal free will (and perhaps affirms that we have a more diminished, say, compatibilist free will) to nevertheless agree that if the prime mover has agent causal free will, this would explain why it is capable of doing its job.

Chisholm, R. (1965). Human Freedom and the Self.

O'Connor, T. (1995). From First Efficient Cause to God: Scotus on the Identification Stage of the Cosmological Argument.

'Science, unlike metaphysics, doesn't rely on basic common sense'

In this fourth entry on James Ladyman and Don Ross' Every Thing Must Go, I address the relationship between science and common-sense. One of the key motivations for rejecting metaphysics as it is generally practiced in contemporary philosophy is what Ladyman and Ross perceive to be a crucial methodological difference between said metaphysics and natural science -- namely, that the former relies on unfounded, common-sense intuitions about the world while the latter does not. The authors draw out this point by quoting scientists such as Lewis Wolpert, who contends that

" both the ideas that science generates and the way in which science is carried out are entirely counter-intuitive and against common sense"

...and goes as far as to tentatively suggest that

"if something fits with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science" (1992, quoted on p.12)

They also quote the famed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who bemoans that while scientists rightly regard counterintuitive results as highly valuable since they compel to revisit unwarranted assumptions, metaphysicians of mind take violations of common-sense intuition to constitute grounds for refutation (2005, quoted on p. 15).

Metaphysicians do indeed typically rely on common-sense intuitions to evaluate metaphysical theories. For example, if a metaphysical theory implies that there are entities that can be fully present in different locations, metaphysicians will regard it with great suspicion, as it violates our intuitions about what it means to be a single entity. Hence, D. M. Armstrong's view that a property is a concrete entity, fully present in the objects that have them, will need to have some serious explanatory benefits in order to make up for its disregard for intuition.

On the other hand, scientists have often come up with theories that challenge deeply entrenched common-sense beliefs. To give just one example, Young's famous 'double slit experiment' showed that subatomic particles behave radically differently depending on whether or not they are being observed, which contradicts the intuition that the behavior of material (and lifeless) things is more or less unaffected by observation.

There is an important difference between the two intuitions just mentioned. This difference has to do with the source of the intuitiveness of the beliefs in question. The belief that a single entity can't be fully present in two different locations logically follows from our concept of a single entity, which entails that a single entity cannot possess mutually incompatible properties (if location x is distinct from location y, being fully present in location x is clearly incompatible with being fully present in location y). Hence it seems that the intuitiveness of this belief is due to its truth being a logical consequence of our concepts. In contrast, the belief that material, lifeless things don't radically change their behavior when we stop observing them is only intuitive because the material, lifeless objects we encounter in our everyday lives behave more or less the same whether or not we observe them.

Thus it would be illegitimate for critics of traditional metaphysics to say that, because intuitions of the second kind tend to get swept away by increased scientific knowledge, metaphysicians should disregard intuitions of the first kind. Intuitions of the second kind involve the tacit assumption that everyday objects are very similar to remote ones, and this is obviously suspect. Intuitions of the second kind just flow from our concepts, and these seem much safer.

Traditional metaphysicians, however, can't get off the hook so easily, because not all common-sense intuitions they typically rely on are conceptually true. Some are held by metaphysicians because it is thought that, without them, metaphysical inquiry itself would be impossible. For example, arguably, metaphysicians need to presuppose the intuition that our concepts aren't radically misleading, so that they somehow reflect objects and structures 'out there' in the world, and aren't just arbitrary ways of sorting things into conceptual 'boxes'. Otherwise, it would seem that much of metaphysics, while pretending to be about the world, is really just about our language (though a few metaphysicians are perfectly happy with this severely downgraded, linguistic metaphysics).

Can scientists and naturalistically-minded philosophers like Ladyman and Ross therefore accuse traditional metaphysics of naively relying on common-sense intuitive beliefs? Not without accusing themselves in the process -- or so I will argue.

In Scientific realism and basic common sense (2014), philosopher of science Howard Sankey begins by asking whether " the advance of science lead to the overthrow of common sense by scientific theory". He ends with the opposite conclusion that common-sense is the "bedrock" on which science rests. This is in part because scientific methodology, as an absolute minimum, requires scientific theories to conform with observable evidence, which is why scientific theories are rejected or modified when their predictions turn out to be false. But it would be difficult to make sense of this requirement if our senses were utterly misleading, and that the mid-sized physical objects presented to us in perception did not really exist. Why bother to try and make your theory fit with the observations if observation isn't reliable anyway? Thus, Sankey tells us that common-sense gives science its "ontological" basis, since any scientific theory worth its salt must cohere with the ontology of common-sense (i.e. the objects that our common-sense intuitions say exist). Here, Ladyman and Ross could protest that the natures of the basic objects of perception as revealed by the sciences are very different to what we expect them to be based on intuition alone (a table, counterintuitively enough, is mostly empty space). Still, the sciences must presuppose, in line with common-sense, that the objects of perception exist mind-independently -- scientific inquiry couldn't get off the ground if our perceptions were the result of mad scientists stimulating our brains.

In any case, there is another way in which science must rely on common-sense, i.e. by relying on the same kinds of belief-forming methods that we use in our everyday lives. Scientific theories are formed by inference to the best explanation, whereby one thinks up explanations for some piece of evidence, identifies the one that best explains the evidence, and infers that the best explanation is in fact true. We use this mode of inference in ordinary contexts, when faced with surprising states of affairs, like my wife coming home later than usual on a Friday night. The best explanation is that she went to the pub with her colleagues, I hence infer that it is true. This correspondence between the methods of science and common-sense leads Elliot Sober, another philosopher of science, to the claim that

“scientific modes of reasoning (…) are continuous with forms of reasoning that are used in everyday life” (2015, 2).

This, I think, is what Sankey is talking about when he says that common-sense also gives science its "epistemic" base (2014). Note, importantly, that scientists therefore must hold the common-sense intuition that inference to the best explanation is a reliable method.

Ladyman and Ross (ibid, p.7) argue that, whatever principles science must ultimately rest on, these are vindicated by the incredible predictive success of the sciences. In other words, if science does ultimately rest on common-sense intuitions, it has earned the 'right' to do so by virtue of its success. Metaphysics, in contrast, can claim no such success, and thus can claim no such right. But as we have seen in a previous entry, such a response is ineffective, due to being viciously circular.

Ladyman, J. and Ross, D. (2007). Every Thing must go. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Sankey, H. (2014). Scientific Realism and Basic Common Sense.

Sober, E. (2015). Ockham's razors: A User's Manual. Cambridge University Press.

Is positivism more 'pragmatic'?

This is the third entry on Ladyman and Ross' Every Thing Must Go (2007), though the scope of the argument here will also extend to positions distinct from (though related to) the one advocated in the latter.

Once again, the project undertaken in the foregoing book is the rejection of metaphysics as it is generally practiced in contemporary philosophy, which aims to give us an account of the most general features of reality more or less independently of the sciences, in favor of a much more modest kind of metaphysics that does nothing beyond showing how different scientific subfields, like physics and biology, connect to each other.

One thing we have not yet seen is that at the heart of the book's proposal lies a "verificationism", which (partly) consists in the claim that

"no hypothesis that the approximately consensual current scientific picture declares to be beyond our capacity to investigate should be taken seriously" (p.29)

The authors make it clear that "investigate" here refers specifically to scientific investigation. Indeed, if it follows from our scientific theories that a certain question cannot be answered by the methods of science, we should refrain from "[looking] to an institution other than science to answer such questions" and instead "forget about the questions" (p.30). The hypothesis that God caused the Big Bang, because it cannot even in principle be confirmed scientifically, should therefore not be affirmed or denied, but simply ignored. Thus, the "verificationism" of Everything Must Go entails that claims outside the reach of science are not worth our time.

The term verificationism is an explicit tribute to logical positivism, on which the authors openly model their approach. Of course, the verificationism of the logical positivists was significantly different, though similar in spirit, to the one advanced here. The members of the Vienna Circle famously (or infamously) argued that scientifically unverifiable statements (unless true by definition) are meaningless. Ladyman and Ross make the comparably weaker claim that scientifically unverifiable statements should be ignored.

As is well known, the logical positivists faced the damning objection that their own principle undermined itself: there is no way to scientifically verify the claim that scientifically unverifiable statements are meaningless (unless true by definition), meaning that their verificationism was meaningless by its own lights. It is less well known that Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure of logical positivism, produced a sophisticated answer to this problem in his The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). The verificationist principle, he argued, only applies to propositions, claims capable of being true or false. But the principle itself is not a proposition, but a kind of prescription, something like 'regard as meaningless any proposition that is neither scientifically verifiable or true by definition'. Such a sentence couldn't possibly be true or false, and thus is not excluded by the verificationist principle (i.e. by itself). Carnap argued that whether or not we choose to follow the verificationist prescription is a pragmatic matter. Of course, he contended that there were many pragmatic benefits to be gained from following the principle, not least that it avoids us getting bogged down by trivial metaphysical debates, allowing to focus on the far more fruitful endeavors of scientific investigation.

Interestingly, the verificationism of Everything Must Go also seems to take the form of a prescription (notice the "should" in the above quote), in which case it too evades putative accusations of incoherence and self-undermining. Moreover, it is also partly (though not exclusively) justified on pragmatic grounds, as the authors make clear that "identification of the nature of justifiable metaphysics, is pragmatic in character" (p.28) where "justifiable metaphysics" is the kind of modest metaphysics that merely draws out the connections between the different sciences, as opposed to the more traditional 'beefy' metaphysics that seeks to plug the holes that science cannot fill. The modest metaphysics is pragmatically beneficial, because it gives us (or aims to give us) a more unified picture of the world, in which the various claims of different sciences mutually support one another, rather than "stranded" hypotheses which, unless connected to a nework of hypotheses, remains "a mystery", and we sure don't like mysteries. It is more pragmatic for metaphysicians to engage in this task, because scientists need to be highly specialized in order to be efficient.

But is it really 'pragmatic' to accept one version or another of verificationism? I take it that it is 'pragmatic' to follow a prescription if it is somehow in our interests to do so, e.g. if it secures some good that we desire. And here it seems that verificationism, both in its positivist and revised forms, is decidedly unpragmatic. Human beings are interested in all sorts of subject matters that are beyond the reach of natural science. They care about questions of right and wrong, of what constitutes a good or well-lived life, of whether there is any sense in which they have free will, whether there is a God, and so forth. And yet the prescriptions of verificationism tells them to dismiss such questions, either because they are meaningless, or because they are just not worth our time. Defenders of either variety of verificationism could respond that, even if it is true that human beings in interested in matters beyond the reach of natural science, it is nonetheless more pragmatic to ignore the questions pertaining to these matters, since (1) they simply cannot be answered with any significant degree of certainty, or (2) because we can never agree on them. The claim that one cannot answer an unscientific question without any significant degree of certainty would have to rely on the authors' arguments for the unreliability of nonscientific (in this case, metaphysical) methods, some of which have been addressed in the previous two entries. But even if we accept (1), it still doesn't follow that it is in our best interests to dismiss scientifically intractable questions. Lacking in certainty as to the answer to an important question may be psychologically unsatisfying, but perhaps still less unsatisfying than the outright dismissal of the question. Likewise for the unsatisfyingness of not being able to agree on important nonscientific questions ( (2) ).

Let me emphasize that pragmatism is not the only consideration that Ladyman and Ross raise in support of their brand of verificationism, though it seems to do most of the work in Carnap's earlier brand. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the moment one raises pragmatic benefits as a reason to support a theory, one must be prepared to answer for all the ways in which said theory is unpragmatic. I take this to be the most serious weakness of positivism and its descendants, far more serious than the self-undermining issue: positivist theories pride themselves in the pragmatist spirit by which they reject 'fruitless' metaphysics, but, because they ultimately disregard human interests beyond scientific explanation and prediction, themselves turn out to be woefully unpragmatic, if not positively dehumanizing.

Carnap, R. (1934). Logical Syntax of Language.

Ladyman, J. and Ross, D. (2007). Every Thing must go. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.