[Vision2020] Philosophical question

[Joe Campbell]

I find it interesting that in the history of philosophy some terms
have undergone substantive change while others meet with resistance
and folks clammer for their expulsion. For instance, "knowledge" had
gone substantive change. Back in Descartes day it meant infallible
certainty but few understand it that way now. Before we made the move
from an infallible to a fallible conception of knowledge -- where
evidence no longer entailed that something was known, just made it
highly probable -- no one suggested that we jettison the term because
infallible knowledge was deemed improbable. We merely changed our
conception of knowledge, grew to adopt a better, more realistic
understanding of what knowledge really is.

Yet with other terms this is not so. For instance, everyone and his
brother is writing a book about the end of free will (see Sam Harris
for instance). But if you read closely it is pretty clear that they
straddle the term "free will" with a set of unobtainable qualities. In
order to have free will, the entire causal sequence must trace back to
the agent; determinism (or even universal causation) must be false;
influence must be entirely from within the agent, and have no causal
link to the outside world; a free act can't even have a proponderence
of reason in its favor, for reasons too have a compulsive feature to
them. How isn't this just has much of a pipe dream as the Cartesian
concept of knowledge?

Why in the one case do we keep the term and change our conception of
it yet in the latter we want to get rid of them both? And once we get
rid of the term "free will" what will we replace it with? What term
will we know use to try to distinguish those of us who have control
over our actions from those of us that don't? Surely this is a helpful
distinction.