"Free for lunch": Grice on freedom

In "Alcohol free" I submitted some notes on Grice on 'free'. In "Free will scandal" I failed to specify the causal link, 'believing-that-p', willing-that-p. For Grice it seems essential that it's the BELIEVING that causes the willing, and so on. Finally, some fragments from Grice, "Actions and events", closing section:

"Actions and events" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986).

"Finally, it is essential [that I should give] proper attention to the place occupied by ... freedom in any satisfactory account of action." (p. 33).

Features such as "agency", as it involves "activity and purpose (or intention) are ... "best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development" of freedom. Grice distinguishes four stages:

First stage: "transeunt" causation: in inanimate objects. Hume's realm -- the atomists's realm. This is "external or 'transeunt' casuation," "when an object is affected by processes in other objects."

Second stage: 'internal' or "immanent" causation: where a process in an object is "the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body."

Third stage: "Internal causation of living beings" (Huggins will like that -- also Lucy): "in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are NOT earlier stages of the same change ... but independent
items, the function (or finality) of which is ... to provide for THE GOOD of the creature in question."

Fourth stage: "a culminating stage at which the conception of a certain mode by a human .... of something as being for that creature's good is SUFFICIENT to *initiate*
the doing of that thing." Grice expands on this interesting last stage: "At this stage, it is ... the case that the creature is LIBERATED ... from all
factive causes."

Grice's shopping list: "Attention to ... freedom calls for formidably difficult ... undertakings" including the search for a justification for the adoption (or abandonment) of an (ultimate) end. The point is to secure that freedom does not 'dissolve into compulsion or chance' (p. 34).

Grice proposes four items for the shopping list. The motivation:

POINT I: "full action calls for 'strong' freedom".

POINT II: The desire-belief characterisation of action has to accomodate for the fact
that we need freedom which is strong. "Strong freedom ensures that some actions are represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also FREELY ADOPTED or pursued by me." (Speranza's marginal note: "Not in "Raise your arm!"").

POINT III: "Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of
(a) CHANCE or
(b) causal INDETERMINATION
---- will only infuriate the scientist" ---- note the ones D. Frederick knows who are all Heisenbergians -- "without aiding the moral philosopher" -- or even the immoral one, as I prefer!

POINT IV: "The precise nature of 'strong' freedom ..." turns out to consist, we hope, in 'the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation'. This strong valuation "would include the rational selection [as per rational decision theory --] of ultimate ENDS."

What Grice elsewhere calls outweighed or extrinsically weighed rationality. It's the end that is rational, not the means towards the end. There is a different line, which Grice also pursues: "Action (full human action) calls for the presence ... of reasons ... which require that the actions for which they account
shoud be the outcome of strong rational valuation."

Both lines, Grice notes, "suggest that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation."

How to adapt the desire-belief psychology to reach these goals: "In the case of ultimate ends," Grice writes (p. 35), "justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their FULFILMENT but rather of their PRESENCE-AS-ENDS."

A second point involves: "My having such and such an end, E1, or such and such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having thi send, ... will exhibit some desirable feature (... that the combo will be harmonious -- [for how can one combine one's desire to smoke with one's desire to lead a healthy life?]".

A third point: "the desire-belief psychology" is "back in business at a higher level". "The suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to HIGHER-ORDER ends which would be realised by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends lie within reach of the desire-belief pscyhology."

A caveat: "The higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress ... might well turn out to be vicious". Talk of moral philosophers...

Grice concludes: "So, attention to the idea of freedom" -- and Doyle's free-will scandal, "may lead us to the need to resolve OR DISSOLVE the most important unsolved problem of philosophy".

"Namely: how we can be at the same time members" as Kant and Grouch Marx wanted us, "both of the phenomenal and the noumenal world". "Or, "to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature -- the SCIENTIFIC part which [pace Danny Frederick] calls or seems to call for the universal reign of deterministic law [cfr. D. Frederick's research with N. Cartwright] and the OTHER part which insists that not merely MORAL RESPONSIBILITY [Doyle's topic] but EVERY variety of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign."

On a funnier level, Albritton concluded his talk on free-will for the A. P. A. (presidential). "I will have to stop now. Thank you."