Right, well I’ve read that Lewis paper on breaking laws. If anyone else is interested I can send you the article to look at, or find it yourself, its called ‘Are We Free To Break the Laws’, and its by David Lewis.
I gotta say it was good to read some really precise, logically argued philosophy. Everything follows like it should. I would really appreciate it if you could send me some more similar stuff, its frustrating to look online cos most places don’t let you in if you’re not currently at university. I do think there are some problems with his argument though.
I get that raising my hand couldn’t cause the divergence miracle, that doesn’t make much sense. But I find his rejection of the idea that raising my hand could just be the divergence miracle very unsatisfactory. I mean, he basically says that its because I didn’t actually raise my hand, therefore raising my hand isn’t in the actual course of events. But miracles, in virtue of being miracles, aren’t necessarily informed by the actual course of events - thats what miracles are, things that seemingly come from nowhere. So why couldn’t the divergence miracle just be a miraculous ability to raise my hand when the laws and history determined that I should keep it on the table? A miraculous ability seems as good a miracle as any. The real problem here is that nowhere does Lewis tell us what a divergence miracle actually is. Does he talk about this anywhere else?
I find his general characterisation of Compatibilism a little bit off. I don’t get why a Compatibilist needs to think in terms of our actions being such that we are able to do otherwise at all. I mean, ok, if the world were different I would be able to raise my hand instead of keep in on the table. But the world isn’t different, therefore I am not able to raise my hand at all. Its plain impossible.
To my mind, the crucial point of Compatibilism is this. We accept determinism, so everything that we do is determined by the prior state of affairs. But we want to make a distinction between types of determining causes. Say I’m the prisoner kept in chains and I can’t move. My action of staying still isn’t in any sense free, I am determined to stay still by causes that aren’t mental states, or whatever. Say the prisoner is released but still stays still. Now, while his action is every bit as determined as when he was in chains, the determining causes are now mental states, so what is making him stay still is just some facts about his psychological make-up. We, as Compatibilists, want to call this ‘free will’, not because our action is in any sense undetermined by a prior state of affairs, but just because the action is an expression of our character. We don’t ‘freely’ choose our character, but it is ours.
As such, there is no need to even think that when we keep our hand down we were able to raise it. We were never able to raise it. I am not able to do any action, such that if I were to do it, a law would be broken.
I think it’s all about him trying to define “law”. Pretty much everything he writes is like this. Just straightforward and logical. There’s a little humor occasionally too. I’ve got a whole lot of his stuff, and some other analytic dude’s stuff in .pdf. If there’s something you’re interested in I’d be glad to just email it right along.
Not currently at uni, so is the article floating around the interweb for free anywhere?
On another note, is this THE David Lewis, as in the one who champions possible worlds theories? I wasn’t aware he’d published anything on laws, although being tightly and logically argued does sound like him…
David Kellogg Lewis. If you want I’ll just start sending you articles. He did a book “on the plurality of worlds”, and most his other stuff is wrapped up in three or four other collections most of which I’ve scanned. There are some on ethics and social philosophy, some on metaphysics and epistemology. There are a few that are really long and could take years to fully comprehend (for me at least). But if you like philosophy just for the sake of philosophy, reading David Lewis is like going to disneyworld or something. I’m a big fan.
Yeah, I read some of ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ when I studied metaphysics, a few years ago, whilst I am a fan of him as a brilliant thinker, I think that the temporal parts idea of identity is… dreadful, to say the least. That is assuming I have the right thinker, I must confess that at the moment I cannot recall any of his particular arguments in detail, but I believe he argued for both the equally real existence of infinite possible worlds and a temporal parts theory of objects stretched existence through time, isn’t that right?
I have a fair number of his articles on metaphysics bound up in various anthologies, but what are his other works like, his ideas on ethics and social philosophy?
Maybe I’m just stoned, but I think the answer to the question, “are we free to break the laws?” is, “it depends on what kind of law”. We can break the laws of society with very little effort. But physical laws don’t break so easily. I seem to remember some comversation about how if something is said to be a physical law, and someone breaks it, then it’s not really a matter of them having broken a physical law, but just a matter of us having mislabeled something as a physical law which wasn’t, and the breaking of it just serves to show us that it wasn’t really a law in the first place. I dunno man. What do you think?