A Dialogue on Free Will and Science

by Alfred R. Mele

In A Dialogue on Free Will and Science, renowned philosopher Alfred Mele explores the experiments in neuroscience and psychology that have been said to pose the greatest challenges to free will. He uses an imagined dialogue among several characters to make what is typically a complex topic more accessible and engaging for students. Guided by the question "How much power do these scientific challenges have?", the characters first consider what having free will means and then react to well-known experiments that question its existence, including work by Libet and Milgram and the bystander, dime, and Stanford prison experiments. Their discussions show how useful philosophical methods can be in assessing and interpreting scientific findings, thereby revealing certain weaknesses in these scientific challenges.

Ideal for courses in free will, introduction to philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, A Dialogue on Free Will and Science encourages students to form their own opinions on the validity and strength of the major scientific challenges to free will.

Genres: Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher. He has been the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University since 2000. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mele attended Wayne State University, and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1979. He took a position at Davidson College in 1979 as a visiting professor, which led to a tenured position at Davidson, where he remained for 21 years until accepting his position with Florida State.

Mele explores the concepts of autonomy or self-rule and the concept of self-control. as they relate to terms like "free will."

Without committing himself to the idea that human autonomy is compatible with determinism or incompatible (a position held by both libertarians and incompatibilists), Mele provides arguments in support of autonomous agents for both positions. He is, as he says, "officially agnostic about the truth of compatibilism" and describes his position as "agnostic autonomism."

Mele proposed a two-stage model of "Modest Libertarianism" that follows Daniel Dennett's 1978 "Valerian" model for decision making. Like Dennett, Mele requires that the indeterminism should come early in the overall process. He describes the latter - decision - part of the process as compatibilist (effectively determinist).

Reviews

[LowlyLuke · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a good introduction to the concepts, but maybe a little too simplified. It also doesn’t seem to take non-materialist perspectives very seriously, and has a lot of strange points that go uncontested. Like the idea that deep openness is similar to flipping a coin.

[Taylor Cyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very accessible summary of recent challenges to free will from neuroscience and social psychology as well as of Mele’s responses to those challenges.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the dialogue as a form of philosophical text, and so this had intrinsic appeal to me from the get-go. Mele wrote about three different texts on this single subject: one for academics, another for a general public, and this, which is meant mostly for students. It offers some introductory information on free will and then dives right into the challenges, which are dismantled in a relatively intuitive way. Great one for dipping you toes into, and if you have any trouble digesting the material there are plenty of supplementary lectures online from the man himself.

[Iván Garza Bermea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good brief, and targeted introduction to the contemporary debate of free will, and its relational opposition to science.

[Tyler Sturm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most encompassing but digestible way to dive into the free will debate

[dwpage · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dialogue is clear and easy to understand. Mele does a good job covering a lot of scientific studies/experiments and showing how they're relevant for discussions of free will. In general, though, I think Mele lets his own view come through the character's a little too much. Rather than forcing the reader to think critically and arrive at conclusions him/herself, Mele tends to guide the reader to the conclusions that (presumably) he thinks are correct. In some ways this is helpful, but not if the goal is to let the readers arrive at conclusions him/herself.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dialogue was unnatural, but that's actually what added a sense of humor to the whole debate. It was pretty easy to understand too.