The natural history of Grice

by JLS
for the GC

Why did Grice end up saying that 'freedom' is the most crucial idea in philosophy?

From the online version of the "Introduction", Harris writes:


-In this "Essay concerning humane [sic] understanding" (1690) -- chapter ‘Of Power’ -- Locke commits himself to neither the Libertarian nor the Necessitarian answer to the question of freewill. Locke’s project in ‘Of Power’ is, rather, to define "free" in such a way that it involves neither the indifference of the will nor the determination of choice by the understanding. Locke seems to have come to feel that in the first edition of the "Essay" he had recoiled too far from the liberty of indifference towards a doctrine of psychological determinism. His original position is that it is incoherent to predicate "free" of "the will". He later introduces a ‘power of suspension’. And in the fifth and final edition he allows that there is, after all,

‘a case wherein a Man is at Liberty of willing’.

We wouldn't call ourselves 'liberals' if that had not been the case.

What persuades Locke to change his view is in large part renewed attention to the experience of choice, and especially to the phenomenon of weakness of will.

This devotion to accurate analysis of volition left Locke’s contemporaries confused, and a representative sample can be given of eighteenth-century criticism of the chapter
‘Of Power’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of this apparently widespread dissatisfaction, Locke’s own contribution to the question of liberty and necessity does not play an important role in the eighteenth-century debate
charted in this study.

This should not be thought a reason to question the importance of Locke to those who came after him. Locke’s influence lay in his method, his style of philosophizing, rather than in his substantive
philosophical doctrines.

Locke’s method, however, did not take hold immediately. The next principal protagonists, CLARKE and COLLINS, in effect resume the debate between Bramhall and Hobbes.

And then there's the unusual deffiition of "free" presented by KING in "De Origine Mali."

King is a defender of the liberty of indifference: he believes that freedom is most purely realized in the exercise of a capacity to choose to act in a certain way regardless of the recommendations
of the understanding.

Clarke, like Locke, believes that to define "free" in this way is a serious mistake; and, following Bramhall, he seeks to negotiate a middle way between the indifference of the will, on the one hand, and the
literal determination of the will by motives, on the other.

The notion of ‘MORAL necessity’, as distinct from ‘literal’ or ‘physical’ necessity, is at the heart of Clarke’s theory of freedom.

It allows him to connect free choice with rationality (and goodness) without conceding that, at any one time, the influence of the understanding makes only one choice possible.

Clarke also argues that a motive is not the kind of thing that can be a cause, and also that an action cannot, on pain of contradiction, be caused by something exterior
to the agent.

Clarke had a significant influence on all later libertarians.

On the other hand, COLLINS's necessitarianism is identical to Hobbes’s.

Like Hobbes, he argues that libertarianism is defeated by a correct analysis of the concept of "cause".

But Collins also presents an extended analysis of what experience tells us about
the operations of perception, judgment, choice, and action.

Both Clarke and Collins rely a good deal on a priori metaphysical argumentation
of the kind that the characteristically eighteenth-century philosopher regards
with suspicion.

The first to approach the question of the nature of the
influence of motives wholly in the spirit of Lockean experimentalism is
Hume.

Hume describes himself as a reconciler. His ‘Reconciling project’ rests on the assumption that
Hume is serious in wanting to show there to be underlying agreement
between libertarians and necessitarians.

Unlike Hobbes and Collins, Hume
is not primarily concerned with showing it to be impossible that we might
choose and act otherwise than we do.

The key to understanding
Hume’s strategy is the distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ necessity
that libertarians such as Bramhall and Clarke attach so much importance to.

What Hume does is show that all the doctrine of necessity amounts to, when
properly understood, is something that the libertarian already concedes: that
there is certain motives are regularly followed by certain actions, such that
human action is largely uniform and so predictable.

We cannot settle the metaphysical disputes that have traditionally divided libertarians and necessitarians,
and so should give up on them, and focus upon experience; and
when we do focus upon the experience of action, libertarians and necessitarians
turn out to be in agreement.

There is, however, one important aspect of the experience of action that
Hume has explained away in order to get the result that he wants.

This is the
first-person perspective, the agent’s sense of not being determined by motives
at the time of choice and action, and of having been able to have acted
differently in retrospect.

On this issue, there's the attempt made by
another necessitarian, KAMES, to accommodate the agent’s own perspective.

There is a natural belief in necessity, he claims: Hume is correct
about that.

But there is in addition just as natural a belief that our choices
and actions are not determined before they are made.

Both practical,
prudential reasoning and the operations of conscience depend on our
believing the will to be free.

Kames writes that ‘man could not have been
man, had he not been furnished with a feeling of contingency’.

In order to
resolve the paradox of directly contradictory natural beliefs, Kames hypothesizes
that, though ‘deceitful’, the sense of freedom is an essential part of the
fabric of the mind, given us by God in order that we be properly active and
moral beings.

God has to deceive us into thinking that we are free to ensure
that we do not slip into sloth and fatalism.

We should, therefore, be grateful
that it is only in philosophical and reflective moments that we see through
the deception.

*************************************************************************
The idea that God might have to deceive us in order to realize
his purposes was too much for Kames’s contemporaries to take.
*************************************************************************
Having given
a brief account of the controversy generated by the hypothesis of a deceitful
sense of freedom, Kames alters his view in later
editions of his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion.

In a pamphlet written in defence of Kames, EDWARDS is invoked
as proof of the fact that it is possible to be both a Christian and an opponent
of the freedom of the will.

In his case for necessitarianism, Edwards claims not to have read Hobbes before he wrote his
"Careful and Strict Inquiry into . . . Freedom of Will," but he takes up the dilemma
Hobbes had constructed for the libertarian, and gives it added sharpness.

Either the believer in the liberty of the will in fact contradicts himself, by
allowing the influence of motives on choice; or he is saying that free choices
are undetermined and purely arbitrary. So Edwards argues.

Edwards attacks the
libertarian picture of self-determination with great dialectical ingenuity.

------------------------------
Hobbes and Locke had both dismissed the notion of the freedom of the
will as involving an infinite regress of volitions.

Edwards develops this line of
argument, and shows that the notion, as he puts it, ‘destroys itself’.

Unlike
Hobbes, however, Edwards finds use for the distinction between moral and
physical necessity.

The distinction is central to his claim that necessity as he
understands it does not rule out human freedom and moral responsibility.

Behind Edwards’s necessitarianism is a view that he regards as a matter of
everyday experience: that every event in nature, and every event in the
minds of men, is directly the result of divine activity.

The Inquiry was for the most
part ignored by later opponents of the doctrine of necessity in Britain, and
where it was not ignored, it was not taken very seriously. This is unfortunate,
for it has a claim to being the eighteenth century’s most powerful attack on
the notion of the freedom of the will.

A reason why Edwards was for the most part ignored by British believers in
the freedom of the will is perhaps to be expected. The introspective evidence of the
freedom of the will, and of the falsity of necessitarianism, is so plain and
strong that arguments which purport to identify contradictions and confusions
in statements of the libertarian position can safely be disregarded.

Johnson’s dictum that ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all
experience for it’ sums up this view very well. Others who adopt much the
same approach to the question include Butler, Berkeley, and Richard Price.

The liberty of the will, these men believe, is not only evident in experience,
but is also the foundation of morality and religion.

It is inconceivable,
therefore, that there could be good reasons to doubt it.

In Scotland this
view manifests itself in the writings of two, at least, of the philosophers of
common sense.

One is James Oswald’s treatment of the will, and then there's the discussion of liberty and necessity
found in James Beattie’s Essay on Truth.

According to Beattie, necessitarianism
is a form of ‘modern scepticism’.

In other words, necessitarianism is meant to
corrode and destroy the ordinary beliefs—particularly, again, the moral and
religious beliefs—of ordinary people. It is Beattie’s sense of the
dangerousness of necessitarianism, and of the importance of belief in liberty,
that explains the extraordinary violence of his attack on proponents of the
doctrine of necessity—and on Hume in particular.

Beattie is generally dismissed today as, in Hume’s words, a ‘bigotted silly Fellow’, but in his own
day he was enormously popular.

What explains this is that many, if not most,
of Beattie’s contemporaries shared his sense of the importance of belief in
liberty, and of the needlessness of engaging seriously with the arguments of
necessitarians.

The success of the Essay on Truth prompted a broadside attack on the
philosophy of common sense, not from a proponent of the scepticism Beattie
denounces, but instead from Joseph Priestley, a philosopher peculiarly
insensitive to the force of sceptical arguments of any kind.

In his Examination
of Reid, Beattie, and Oswald, Priestley charges the Scots with reinstating
innate ideas with their talk of principles of common sense, and with
generally abandoning the model of a science of the mind as laid out in
Locke’s Essay.

What was essential to the Lockean project, according to Priestley,
was the tracing of ideas to their source in sensation; and in David
Hartley’s Observations on Man showed how this was to be done.

The association
of ideas, in other words, was the central concept of any properly scientific
account of the mind. The necessitarian arguments of
Hartley and Priestley were well taken, and associationalism plays
an important role in them. The theory of the will developed by
another Hartleyan philosopher, Abraham Tucker, in his enormous The Light
of Nature Pursued is also worth considering.

Tucker is principally concerned to show that freedom and
providence are not in fact at odds with each other. It is in this connection
that he differs most markedly from Hartley and Priestley, for both Hartley
and Priestley believe that the doctrine of necessity entails that God is directly
responsible for every human action.

What, then, to do about the apparent
prevalence of evil in the world?

It is in providing an answer to this question
that the association of ideas shows itself to be central to the solutions Hartley
and Priestley give to the free will problem. Our current ideas about the
nature of evil are the product of an inadequate understanding of the divine
plan. In time, human beings will overcome their present ways of thinking,
and associate all that happens with God’s providential plan.

Like Priestley, if not more so, Thomas Reid is self-conscious in his
presentation of himself as an ‘experimental’ reasoner.

Reid believes that it is
Hartleyan associationalism, and not the philosophy of common sense, that is
at odds with the spirit of inductive inquiry into the operations of the mind.

It is good to supplement recent discussions of Reid’s
theory of action with an account of its place in Reid’s reply to scepticism.

Reid’s account of freedom rests on a detailed analysis of the capacities that
power over the will affords us: the capacities of mental attention, deliberation,
and the making of resolutions.

The centrality of belief in the freedom
of the will to the practical life establishes it as a natural belief, a belief not the
result of education or any other form of inculcation: as, in other words, a
principle of common sense.

The necessitarian can, of course, accept that the
belief is natural, and argue that it is nevertheless false.

Reid’s response to the
necessitarian is not, in the manner of Beattie, to point out the dangerous
consequences of giving the belief up, and to attack the character of those
who would have us do so. Nor is it to provide a direct argument for the
belief’s truth. It is, rather, to examine all the arguments which purport to
demonstrate the truth of necessitarianism, and to show them to be wanting.

Reid gives particular attention to arguments for necessity from the observable
fact of the influence of motives on choice. He wants to show that there is
nothing ‘scientific’, as we would say now, about belief in necessitarianism.
According to Reid, the empirical evidence, properly understood, speaks
rather for the liberty of the will.

The clash between Priestley and Reid over the freedom of the will is in a
sense the climax of the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy.

For the next forty years, at least, necessitarians tended explicitly to
align themselves with Priestley, and libertarians with Reid.

Necessitarianism thrived after Priestley, and the focus is usually however upon the
libertarian arguments of James Gregory and Dugald Stewart.

Both Gregory
and Stewart were personal friends of Reid’s, and were significantly infuenced
in their approach to the free will problem by the Essays on the Active Powers.
Nevertheless, they differed from Reid in interesting ways.

Gregory thinks he
can prove once and for all that the infuence of motives upon human actions
is not, as the necessitarian characteristically claims, the same as the infuence
of ‘physical’ causes upon their effects. His strategy is a reductio ad absurdum of the
necessitarian view.

Stewart, in contrast with both Gregory and Reid, appears
not to think that the arguments of the necessitarian merit serious examination.
He betrays something of Beattie’s impatience with the idea that there is
a substantive issue to be discussed in connection with the operations of the
will. His principal discussion of liberty and necessity is to be found in an
Appendix to The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man.

Stewart states
that the only question which can be ‘philosophically stated’ on the subject of
the will is whether or not ‘the evidence of consciousness’ is in favour of the
scheme of free will or of the scheme of necessity.

Stewart could not be
regarded as a philosopher unaware of the explanatory scope of science, and
of the science of the mind in particular.

We see, therefore, that at the end of
the ‘long’ eighteenth century, it is not by any means
obvious to all that there is a problem combining belief in the freedom of the
will with a serious concern with the development of a science of the human
mind.

Indeed, an ‘experimental’ debate between
libertarians and necessitarians continues throughout the nineteenth century,
and suggest that it is only in the early twentieth century that the terms
of the free will debate change signifcantly.

The Lockean turn of eighteenth-century British philosophy thus fails to
produce consensus as to the nature of the influence of motives upon the will.

Libertarians and necessitarians were just as far apart at the end of the century
as Bramhall and Hobbes had been 150 years earlier.

One reason for this is
that underlying general consensus as to the importance of experience to
philosophy was profound disagreement about what exactly it meant, in
Hume’s phrase, ‘to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into
moral subjects’.

On one side of this question were associationists like Hume,
Hartley, Tucker, and Priestley; on the other were ‘faculty psychologists’ such
as Kames, Beattie, Reid, and Stewart.

It is not quite true to say that every
associationist was a necessitarian, and every faculty psychologist was a
libertarian.

Nor is it true to say that every necessitarian was an associationist,
and every libertarian a faculty psychologist.

Nevertheless, it does seem to be
true that, in the eighteenth century, and perhaps in the nineteenth century
as well, one’s stance with regard to the will and its freedom was to a
significant extent shaped by one’s understanding of what an empirical
science of the mind should look like.

Associationists tended to be necessitarians because the determination of choice by motives fits with the picture of the mind as a repetition-driven machine. Faculty psychologists tended to be
libertarians because the autonomy of the will, its independence from the
understanding, follows naturally from a view of the mind as a set of distinct
and mutually irreducible functions or processes.

It is a striking fact that both
schools claim Locke’s paternity for their version of the application of
experimentalism to the mind.

Locke invented the game, but left the rules
so vague that it was never clear how the result was to be determined.

--- and then there's Grice!