ARC Colloquium: Free Will, Language and Neurosciences

This colloquium is being organised as part of a five-year ARC research project entitled “Free Will and Causality,” and we intend to publish the best papers of the colloquium in a collection to come out in 2018. The project has as its aim the resolution of questions about the causal efficacy of the human will in light of neuroscientific knowledge about the determinants and mechanisms of action. We suggest that free will cannot be understood using a purely reductionist approach and that the combinatorial possibilities offered by language and linguaform structures play a significant role in offering alternatives leading to free decisions. With this orientation in mind, we are interested in papers that address the following or related questions, from the perspective of philosophy, neuroscience, law, and allied disciplines:

• What can neuroscientific experiment contribute to traditional philosophical debates on free will?
• Are there extant neuroscientific results that shed doubt on the notion that we are in control of—and therefore responsible for—our actions?
• What neuropsychological abilities are required for an agent to exercise freely-willed action?
• Does the appearance of free will as a philosophical problem have roots in our ordinary linguistic practices regarding the concepts of free will and determinism? What are these practices?
• Is the ability to use language necessary for rational deliberation?
• How could the role of language in free will be experimentally investigated?
• How is the conceptual analysis of action related to the neuroscientific study of volition?
• What is the relationship between consciousness and the kind of control that is required for moral responsibility?
• How do mental states produce action? Can mental states be causally efficacious in this way?

The plenary speakers for this colloquium will be Alfred Mele, Eddy Nahmias (TBC) and Peter Ulrich Tse.