Dylan can, and has, written the sorts of conventional, schmaltzy songs that Mercer, Berlin, and the other contributors to the Great American Songbook wrote. But could they have written songs like the above? And they are only a small sample.
This is partial justification of last week's claim that Dylan is America's greatest writer of popular songs. Bar none. Might there be some generational chauvinism at work here?
Do you prefer the term 'facts' to 'states of affairs'? I take it you do — you certainly used the former most. But why, actually, did you use the latter in your Nous article?
Personally, I used 'facts' in my Ph.D. dissertation, but afterwards started using 'state of affairs', very much to be in the spirit of Armstrong, so to speak. But it is quite inconvenient and a little disagreeable-sounding. And one can — as demonstrated by important philosophers in the area, like you — perfectly well use 'facts' for worldly entities, as opposed to true propositions. One can also use it for both, in one and the same text, as in Arianna Betti's book, Against Facts (though that might give rise to some problems.)
So I wonder if I should return to using the term 'fact' for my book, which is derived from my dissertation. In my case, it's a terminological question only, so in principle I guess I can postpone deciding on this till later.
In the Nous article I used 'states of affairs' because I was drawing heavily from Armstrong. I now use 'fact' and 'state of affairs' interchangeably, but favor 'fact' on account of its brevity. If facts are truth-makers, however, then we cannot mean by 'fact' what Frege means by Tatsache, namely, a true proposition, where a proposition or thought (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a context-free declarative sentence (Satz). (Frege 1976, 50) Propositions are either true or false, but no fact is either true or false. A proposition is a truth-bearer, but a fact is a truth-maker. Propositions are bivalent, but there is no corresponding bivalence with respect to facts on the concretist conception. It is not as if some facts obtain and others do not: a fact cannot exist without obtaining.
By my count there are at least three correct uses of 'fact.'
Logical: A fact is a true proposition.
Epistemological: A fact is a proposition either known to be the case or believed on good evidence to be the case.
Ontological: A fact is not a proposition, but a proposition-like entity in external reality that can serve as truth-maker for declarative sentences and the propositions they express. For example, Al's being fat is a fact in the ontological sense, a complex having as primary constituents Al and the property of being fat. This fact in the ontological sense makes true the fact in the logical sense expressed by 'Al is fat.' The fact that Al is fat is made true by the fact ofAl's being fat.
I use 'fact' in the ontological sense. But what reason do we have to posit facts in this ontological sense?
There is more to the truth of a contingent sentence than the sentence that is true. 'Al is fat' is a true contingent declarative sentence. By my lights it cannot just be true: there has to be something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true, that 'grounds' its being true. This external something cannot be another sentence or someone's say-so. This external something is something 'in the world,' i.e., in reality outside mind and language. What's more, this external something cannot be Al construed as an individual. It must be a proposition-like entity, Al's being fat. This is what Armstrong calls a state of affairs and what I call a fact (and sometimes a state of affairs). It is not a proposition though it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. Clarity is served if we refer to such truth-making facts as concrete facts to distinguish them from abstract facts and a abstract states of affairs. As concrete, the fact of Al's being fat is spatially located.
This truth-maker principle goes beyond what we could call the veritas-sequitur-esse principle. The latter says merely that every true contingent sentence/proposition is about something that exists. It says that there are no truths about nonexistent items, contra Meinong. The VSE principle is satisfied by 'Al is fat' if just Al exists in reality or just Al and fatness. The TM principle takes it a step further. It requires Al, fatness, and their togetherness in the fact of Al's being fat.
Weiche dem Größeren, aber verachte nicht den Kleineren! Yield to the greater, but scorn not the lesser!
When I first glanced at this graphic I read it as: While I concede the major (premise), I do not scorn the minor! But that would be Maiori cedo, sed non contemno minorem. Or at least I think that's right: I am no Latinist, though I sometimes play one in the blogosphere. Image credit.
The Trump phenomenon provides excellent fodder for the study of political reasoning. Herewith, some thoughts on the cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' defense for voting for Trump. I'll start with some assumptions.
A1. We are conservatives.
A2. It is Trump versus Hillary in the general: Sanders will not get the Democrat Party nod, nor will there be a conservative third-party candidate. (To be be blunt, Bill Kristol's ruminations on the latter possibility strike me as delusional.)
A3. Donald Trump is a deeply-flawed candidate who in more normal circumstances could not be considered fit for the presidency.
A4. Hillary Clinton is at least as deeply-flawed, character-wise, as Trump but also a disaster policy-wise: she will continue and augment the destructive leftist tendencies of Barack Hussein Obama. Hillary, then, is worse than Trump. For while Trump is in some ways not conservative, it is likely he will actually get some conservative things done, unlike the typical Republican who will talk endlessly about illegal immigration, etc., but never actually accomplish anything conservative.
With ordinary Republicans it is always only talk, followed by concession after concession. They lack courage, they love their power and perquisites, and they do not understand that we are in the age of post-consensus politics, an age in which politics is more like war than like gentlemanly debate on the common ground of shared principles.
My Challenge to the NeverTrump Crowd
To quote from an earlier entry:
In this age of post-consensus politics we need fighters not gentlemen. We need people who will use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them. Civility is for the civil, not for destructive leftists who will employ any means to their end of a "fundamental transformation of America." For 'fundamental transformation' read: destruction.
It's a war, and no war is civil, especially not a civil war. To prosecute a war you need warriors. Trump is all we have. Time to face reality, you so-called conservatives. Time to man up, come clean, and get behind the 'presumptive nominee.'
Don't write another article telling us what a sorry specimen he is. We already know that. We are a nation in decline and our choices are lousy ones. Hillary is worse, far worse.
Consider just three issues: The Supreme Court, gun rights, and the southern border. We know where Hillary stands. We also know where Trump stands. Suppose he accomplishes only one thing: he nominates conservatives for SCOTUS. (You are aware, of course, that he has gone to the trouble of compiling a list of conservative candidates. That is a good indication that he is serious.) The appointment of even one conservative would retroactively justify your support for him over the destructive and crooked Hillary.
[. . .]
The alternative [to voting for Trump] is to aid and abet Hillary.
The False Priests are the columnists, media pundits, public intellectuals, and politicians who have presented themselves as principled conservatives or libertarians but now have announced they will vote for a man who, by multiple measures, represents the opposite of the beliefs they have been espousing throughout their careers. We’ve already heard you say “Hillary is even worse.” Tell us, please, without using the words “Hillary Clinton” even once, your assessment of Donald Trump, using as a template your published or broadcast positions about right policy and requisite character for a president of the United States. Put yourself on the record: Are you voting for a man whom your principles require you to despise, or have you modified your principles? In what ways were you wrong before? We require explanation beyond “Hillary is even worse.”
Now one thing that is unclear is whether Murray would accept (A4), in particular, the bit about Hillary being worse. He doesn't clearly state that they are equally bad. He says, "I am saying that Clinton may be unfit to be president, but she’s unfit within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unfit outside normal parameters." Unfortunately, it is not clear what this comes to; Murray promises a book on the topic.
Well, if you think Trump and Hillary are equally bad, then you reject (A4) and we have a different discussion. So let me now evaluate the above Murray quotation on the assumption that (A4) is true.
The Underlying Issue: Principles Versus Pragmatism
It is good to be principled, but not good to be doctrinaire. At what point do the principled become doctrinaire? It's not clear! Some say that principles are like farts: one holds on to them as long as possible, but 'in the end' one lets them go. The kernel of truth in this crude saying is that in the collision of principles with the data of experience sometimes principles need to be modified or set aside for a time. One must consider changing circumstances and the particularities of the precise situation one is in. In fact, attention to empirical details and conceptually recalcitrant facts is a deeply conservative attitude.
For example, would I support Trump if he were running against Joe Lieberman? No, I would support Lieberman. There are any number of moderate or 'conservative' Democrats that I would support over Trump. But the vile and destructive Hillary is the candidate to beat! And only Trump can do the dirty job. This is the exact situation we are in. If you are a doctrinaire conservative, say a neocon like Bill Kristol, then, holding fast to all of your principles — and being held fast by them in turn — you will deduce therefrom the refusal to support either Trump or Hillary. Like Kristol you may sally forth on a quixotic quest for a third conservative candidate. Just as one can be muscle-bound to the detriment of flexible and free movement, one can be principle-bound to the detriment of dealing correctly and flexibly with reality as it presents itself here and now in all its recalcitrant and gnarly details.
Conclusion: The 'Hillary is Worse' Defense is Cogent
Part of being a conservative is being skeptical about high-flying principles. Our system is the best the world has seen and it works for us. It has made us the greatest nation on the face of the earth — which is why almost everyone wants to come here, and why we need walls to keep them out while commie shit holes like East Germany needed walls to keep them in. (The intelligent, industrious Germans were kept in poverty and misery by a political system when their countrymen to the west prospered and enjoyed the fabled Wirtschaftswunder. Think about that!) But from the fact that our system works for us, it does not follow that it will work for backward Muslims riven by ancient tribal hatreds and infected with a violent, inferior religion. The neocon principle of nation-building collides with gnarly reality and needs adjustment.
Murray's point seems to be that no principled conservative could possibly vote for Trump, and this regardless of how bad Hillary is. His reasoning is based on a false assumption, namely, that blind adherence to principles is to be preferred to the truly conservative attitude of adjusting principles to reality. Murray's view is a foolish one: he is prepared to see the country further led down the path to "fundamental transformation," i.e., destruction, as long as his precious principles remain unsullied.
Our behavior ought to be guided by principles; but that is not to say that it ought to be dictated by them.
Rather than say that principles are like farts as my old colleague Xavier Monasterio used to say, I will try this comparison: principles are like your lunch; keep it down if you can, but if it makes you sick, heave it up.
A reader claims that "to affirm that there are contingent beings just is to affirm that they have that whereby they are, namely, a cause." This implies that one can straightaway infer 'x has a cause' from 'x is contingent.' My reader would agree with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who, taking the traditional Thomist position, maintains the following Principle of Causality (PC):
. . . every contingent thing, even if it should be ab aeterno, depends on a cause which exists of itself. (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. Patrick Cummins, O. S. B., Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 62)
So even if the physical universe always existed, and therefore never came into existence, it would nonetheless require a cause of its existence simply in virtue of its being contingent. I find myself questioning both my reader and Garrigou-Lagrange. For it seems to me to be conceivable that an item be contingent but have no cause or ground of its existence. This is precisely what Garrigou-Lagrange denies: "contingent existence . . . can simply not be conceived without origin, without cause . . . ." (p. 63)
But it all depends on what we mean by 'conceivable' and 'contingent.' Here are my definitions:
D1. An individual or state of affairs x is conceivable =df x is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction.
Examples. It is conceivable that there be a mountain of gold and a tire iron that floats in (pure or near-pure) water. It is conceivable that I jump straight out of my chair, turn a somersault in the air, and then return to my chair and finish this blog post. It is inconceivable that I light a cigar and not light a cigar at exactly the same time. As for formal-logical contradiction, here is an example: Some cats are not cats. But Some bachelors are married is not a formal-logical contradiction. Why not? Because its logical form has both true and false substitution instances.
D2. An individual or state of affairs x is contingent =df x is possibly nonexistent/nonobtaining if it exists/obtains, and possibly existent/obtaining if it does not exist/obtain.
The contingent is that which has a certain modal status: it is neither necessary nor impossible. For example, me and my cigar are both contingent beings: neither is necessary and neither is impossible. My smoking the cigar now is an example of a contingent state of affairs: it is neither necessary nor impossible that I smoke a cigar now. The type of modality we are concerned with is broadly logical, not nomological.
Now is it conceivable that something exist contingently without a cause? It seems so! The nonexistence of the physical universe is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction. The physical universe is contingent: it exists, but not necessarily. Its nonexistence is possible. Do I encounter a formal-logical contradiction when I think of the universe as existing without a cause or explanation? No. An uncaused universe is nothing like a non-triangular triangle, or a round square, or a married bachelor, or an uncaused effect. Necessarily, if x is an effect, then x has a cause. It is an analytic truth that every effect has a cause. The negation of this proposition is: Some effects do not have causes. While this is not a formal-logical contradiction, it can be reduced to one by substituting synonyms for synonyms. Thus, Some caused events are not caused.
Contrary to what Garrigou-Lagrange maintains, it is conceivable that the universe exist uncaused, despite its contingency. If one could not conceive the uncaused existing of the universe, then one could not conceive of the universe's being a brute fact. And 'surely' one can conceive of the latter. That is not to say that it is possible. There is a logical gap between the conceivable and the possible. My point is merely that the 'brutality' of the universe's existence is conceivable in the sense of (D1). To put it another way, my point is that one cannot gain a a priori insight into the necessity of the universe's having a cause of its existence. And this is because the Principle of Causality, if true, is not analytically true but synthetically true.
Of course, if one defines 'contingency' in terms of 'existential dependence on a cause' then a thing's being contingent straightaway implies its being caused. But then one has packed causal dependency into the notion of contingency when contingency means only what (D2) says it means. That has all the benefits of theft over honest toil as Russell remarked in a different connection.
Garrigou-Lagrange thinks that one violates the Law of Non-Contradiction if one says of a contingent thing that it is both contingent and uncaused. He thinks this is equivalent to saying:
A thing may exist of itself and simultaneously not exist of itself. Existence of itself would belong to it, both necessarily and impossibly. Existence would be an inseparable predicate of a being which can be separated from existence. All this is absurd, unintelligible. (p. 65)
Suppose that a contingent existent is one that is caused to exist by a self-existent existent. If one then went on to say that such an existent is both contingent and uncaused, then one would embrace a logical contradiction. But this presupposes that contingency implies causal dependency.
And therein lies the rub. That the universe is contingent I grant. But how does one get from contingency in the sense defined by (D2) supra to the universe's causal dependence on a causa prima? If one simply packs dependency into contingency then one begs the question. What is contingent needn't be contingent upon anything.
At any given time I am reading a half-dozen or so books on a wide variety of topics. I'll mention three I am reading at the moment.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius Press, 2004, trs. J.T. Foster and Michael J. Miller. German original first published in 1968. Outstanding. Ratzinger has a good probing philosophical head. The book is essentially a deep meditation on the Apostles' Creed. Amazingly rich. I thank my young theological friend Steven Nemes for recommending it to me.
Paul Roubiczek, Thinking Towards Religion, Nabu Public Domain Reprints, no date, but original first published by Darwen Finlayson Ltd., London, February 1957. Everything I have read by Roubiczek is worth the effort even if it is in German.
Peter Lessler, Shooter's Guide to Handgun Marksmanship, F + W Media, 2013. This book has proven to be very helpful in my quest for greater proficiency with the 1911 model .45 semi-automatic pistol. I was having some trouble with this powerful weapon. The book clearly exposed all my mistakes. The book also covers 'wheel guns,' i.e., revolvers.
The practice of political incorrectness is as important, perhaps more important, than the theory of political incorrectness. Same with religion: you must practice one to understand it. Ethics too: it is not merely theoretical, but oriented toward action; so you must try to act ethically if you would understand ethics.
Some liberal-left idiot is arguing that 'again' in Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' is a racist 'dog whistle.' The suggestion is that Trump wants to bring back slavery and Jim Crow. Yet another proof that there is nothing so vile and contemptible and fundamentally stupid that some liberal won't embrace it. If you think I go too far when I refer to contemporary liberals as moral scum, it is incidents like this that are part of my justification.
Mark Steyn supplies some other 'dog whistles' for your delectation:
On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use "Chicago" as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O'Donnell pronounced "golf" a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was "working to earn a spot on the PGA tour," O'Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word "golf" is subliminally associated with "Tiger Woods," and the word "Tiger" is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word "golf" you're sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.
I must reiterate my principle of the Political Burden of Proof:
As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.
25 things you might want to know know about Dylan. Excellent, except for the introductory claim that he is "rock's greatest songwriter." A better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none. We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples. Maybe this Saturday night. His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre. I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.
These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart. No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here.Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin':
North Country Blues. Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.
D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back. I saw it in '67 when it first came out. I just had to see it, just as I had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic. No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
May he die with his boots on. It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there.
Whatever you say about Donald Trump he did us all a great service by dispatching low-energy Jeb! early on. Jeb Bush and the rest of his family are decent people. His brother and father are gentlemen. No one could confuse Trump with a gentleman.
Unfortunately, in this age of post-consensus politics we need fighters not gentlemen. We need people who will use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them. Civility is for the civil, not for destructive leftists who will employ any means to their end of a "fundamental transformation of America." For 'fundamental transformation' read: destruction.
It's a war, and no war is civil, especially not a civil war. To prosecute a war you need warriors. Trump is all we have. Time to face reality, you so-called conservatives. Time to man up, come clean, and get behind the 'presumptive nominee.'
Don't write another article telling us what a sorry specimen he is. We already know that. We are a nation in decline and our choices are lousy ones. Hillary is worse, far worse.
Consider just three issues: The Supreme Court, gun rights, and the southern border. We know where Hillary stands. We also know where Trump stands. Suppose he accomplishes only one thing: he nominates conservatives for SCOTUS. (You are aware, of course, that he has gone to the trouble of compiling a list of conservative candidates. That is a good indication that he is serious.) The appointment of even one conservative would retroactively justify your support for him over the destructive and crooked Hillary.
Jonah Goldberg recently made the point that his vote doesn't matter. True. Each of our individual votes is vanishingly insignificant. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether conservatives as a group should support Trump. The answer is obvious: of course.
Stephen Moore lays into Michael Gerson here as I did here.
In other 'enabling' news, French concert organizers ban Eagles of Death Metal.
If you want to know how lost Europe is, how thoroughly it has abandoned freedom of speech, get this: two French music festivals have banned Eagles of Death Metal, the American rock band whose gig at the Bataclan was turned into a bloodbath by Isis last November, after the lead singer said some dodgy things about Muslims.
Dodgy? What the Spectator piece reports the lead singer as saying looks to be simply true.
Political correctness is amazingly insidious. It infects even those who are supposedly conservative and freedom-loving.
In graduate school I was friends for a time with a New York Jew who for the purposes of this memoir I will refer to as 'Saul Peckstein.' A red diaper baby, he was brought up on Communism the way I was brought up on Roman Catholicism. Invited up to his room one day, I was taken aback by three huge posters on his wall, of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
There is a distinctive quality of personal warmth that many Jews display, the quality conveyed when we say of so-and-so that he or she is a mensch. It is a sort of humanity, hard to describe, in my experience not as prevalent among goyim. Peckstein had it. But he was nonetheless able to live comfortably under the gaze of a mass murderer and their philosophical progenitors.
One day we were walking across campus when he said to me, "Don't you think we could run this place?" He was venting the utopian dream of a classless society, a locus classicus of which is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):
. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
The silly utopianism seeps out of "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? Pee Wee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Woody Allen a bronco buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon? And if Marx has actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.
On another occasion Peckstein asked, "After the Revolution, what will we do with all the churches?" Like so many other commies he cherished the naive expectation that 'the revolution is right around the corner' in a phrase much bandied-about in CPUSA circles. And in tandem with that naivete, the foolish notion that religion would just wither away when material wants were satisfied and social oppression eliminated, a notion that betrays the deep superficiality of the materialist vision of man and his world.
One night we ate at an expensive restaurant, Anthony's Pier Four at the Boston harbor. Peckstein paid with a bad check. After all, it was an 'exploitative' capitalist enterprise and the owners deserved to be stiffed. But he left a substantial tip in cash for the servers. As I said, he was a mensch.
A few of us graduate students had been meeting to discuss Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One day I announced that the topic for the next meeting would be the Table of Categories. Peckstein quipped, "Is that table you can eat on?" The materialist crudity of the remark annoyed me.
And then there was the time he wondered why people thank God before a meal rather than the farmers.
We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary non-intellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So the tendency is for one intellectual to view an ideologically divergent other intellectual as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing.
Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one's eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one 'gets it right' doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you'd better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant 'for their own good.'
The typical intellectual nowadays is a secularist who believes in nothing that transcends the human horizon. But he takes into his secularism that old-time fervor, that old-time zeal to suppress dissent and punish apostates. It is called political correctness.
And as you have heard me say more than once: P.C. comes from the C. P.
Bought by corporate American for 21 million semolians. Here:
Mandatory financial disclosures released this month show that, in just the two years from April 2013 to March 2015, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state collected $21,667,000 in “speaking fees,” not to mention the cool $5 mil she corralled as an advance for her 2014 flop book, “Hard Choices.”
Throw in the additional $26,630,000 her ex-president husband hoovered up in personal-appearance “honoraria,” and the nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the former first couple — who, according to Hillary, were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001 with some of the furniture in tow — can finally make ends meet.
Given the vacuous pablum that Hillary serves up in her speeches, you know that the emolument stands in no rational relation to their content.
In a recent article, Libet writes: "it is only the final ‘act now’ process that produces the voluntary act. That ‘act now’ process begins in the brain about 550 msec before the act, and it begins unconsciously" (2001, p. 61).10 "There is," he says, "an unconscious gap of about 400 msec between the onset of the cerebral process and when the person becomes consciously aware of his/her decision or wish or intention to act." (Incidentally, a page later, he identifies what the agent becomes aware of as "the intention/wish/urge to act" [p. 62].) Libet adds: "If the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it."
I have already explained that Libet has not shown that a decision to flex is made or an intention to flex acquired at -550 ms. But even if the intention emerges much later, that is compatible with an "act now" process having begun at -550 ms. One might say that "the ‘act now’ process" in Libet’s spontaneous subjects begins with the formation or acquisition of a proximal intention to flex, much closer to the onset of muscle motion than -550 ms, or that it begins earlier, with the beginning of a process that issues in the intention.11 We can be flexible about that (just as we can be flexible about whether the process of my baking my frozen pizza began when I turned my oven on to pre-heat it, when I opened the oven door five minutes later to put the pizza in, when I placed the pizza on the center rack, or at some other time). Suppose we say that "the ‘act now’ process" begins with the unconscious emergence of an urge to flex – or with a pretty reliable relatively proximal causal contributor to urges to flex – at about -550 ms and that the urge plays a significant role in producing a proximal intention to flex many milliseconds later. We can then agree with Libet that, given that the "process is initiated unconsciously, . . . conscious free will is not doing it" – that is, is not initiating "the ‘act now’ process." But who would have thought that conscious free will has the job of producing urges? In the philosophical literature, free will’s primary locus of operation is typically identified as deciding (or choosing); and for all Libet has shown, if his subjects decide (or choose) to flex "now," they do so consciously.
What Libet et al. want to show is that the notion that conscious willing plays a genuine role in the etiology of a behavior such as flexing a finger is illusory. Their evidence for this is that the process in the brain that initiates the action begins some 550 milliseconds before the action and is unconscious. Only 400 msecs later does the subject become aware of his wish or urge or intention or decision to act. This is supposed to show that the conscious intention is not causally efficacious and that conscious will is an illusion.
Mele rebuts this argument by showing that it trades on a confusion of decisions/intentions on the one hand and wishes and urges on the other. To want to do X is not the same as to decide to do X. Phil may want another Fat Tire Ale but decide not to drink another because he has already decimated Bill's supply and doesn't want to presume on his host. So even if the wanting to do action A begins in the brain a half a second before the doing of A, and is unconscious, it doesn't follow that the decision to do A begins in the brain a half second before the doing of A and is unconscious. Free will is displayed in decisions and choosings, not in wants and urges.
Basically, what Mele does quite skillfully in this article is show the indispensability of accurate conceptual analysis and phenomenology for the proper interpretation of empirical findings. The real illusion here is the supposition that the empirical findings of neuroscience can by themselves shed any light.
