Knowing Our Abilities

Kadri Vihvelin (University of Southern California)

I am excited to announce that Kadri Vihvelin (USC, Philosophy) will be giving the next ARRG talk on September 12th at 7:00pm (EST). Here is the link: https://cofc.zoom.us/j/96487021713

Title: "Knowing Our Abilities"

Abstract: 

Abilities are philosophically puzzling. No one denies that, somehow understood, we have abilities, including the kinds of abilities that provide us with some measure of control over our immediate surroundings and our lives. We have abilities to move our bodies voluntarily and intentionally in ways that help us achieve our desired ends. And we have abilities to move our minds in ways that help us form the intentions that cause the voluntary body movements that facilitate control over our lives: abilities to stop and think before we act,  abilities to figure out the best means for achieving our desired ends, and abilities to – somehow – deliberate about our ends.  And since abilities don’t automatically cease to exist whenever they aren’t exercised, it seems that it must also be true that we often have abilities to do things that we don’t actually do: we have abilities to do otherwise. 

Our daily experience of choice reinforces this belief:  when we choose to do one thing A rather than another thing B, we believe, and arguably can’t help believing, that we are able to do A and also able to do B. But we also know that we are embedded in a physical universe and subject to the same laws of cause and effect as everything else. And when we reflect on this, it is hard to resist the thought that we are no more able to do otherwise than a falling rock is able to stop falling. 

It seems, then, that our commonsense beliefs about our abilities are in conflict with what philosophical reflection tells us. Incompatibilists say that the conflict is real and, depending on how the science comes out, it may turn out to be true that we don’t have the choices we think we have, that we are never able to do otherwise. Contemporary discussions of ability – whether in the free will/determinism literature or in the literature on the semantics of ability ascriptions – have done little to support the commonsense view. I defend commonsense by providing a systematic account of our abilities, an account that explains what other accounts do not: how we have the knowledge of our abilities that we actually have.

Biography:

Kadri Vihvelin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. She has a longstanding interest in puzzles about free will and freedom of action and has defended controversial claims about both. About free will, she argues that the victim of Frankfurt’s counterfactual intervener retains free will despite his counterfactual shackles. About freedom of action, she argues that common sense is right and philosophical orthodoxy wrong: Lewis’s time traveling Tim really cannot kill Grandfather. Her book, Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn't Matter, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Her work on topics at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics, including causation, counterfactuals, dispositions, abilities, and the doing/allowing distinction, has appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Canadian Journal of Philosophy, among others.