I suppose if there truly were free will I wouldn't be writing this. I certainly feel compelled to add to this discussion. My point, we're coloring outside the lines.
Roy Baumeister wrote his posting as a reaction to "the dramatic debate about free will at the keynote session of the big annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in Tampa earlier this month." It was interesting for me to see this post. Although I didn't attend SPSP, I heard about this debate from a colleague who just returned. It left quite an impression on everyone it seems.
Joachim Krueger has now replied with "Free Will: Can I have one." The debate continues. My question is why?
I think Krueger ends up in the same place in his post when he concludes, "Empirically working scientists may want to leave pragmatism to laypeople and to those philosophers whose temperament inclines them to it." I agree, but it's not just an issue of a "temperament" that inclines one to these arguments, it's that the doing of social science simply doesn't address this issue. In fact, issues of determinism or free will are the assumptions upon which we base research, not something that we actually test in the research. Where Krueger questions whether we want to abandon hope and take Feyerabend's anarchistic "anything goes" attitude, I question whether we want to oversimplify our understanding of science to Popper's notion of "naïve falsification?"
I like how Krueger revisited the early history of psychology reminding us how we admonished the notion of will in our clamor to be a science. Even a quick read of social psychology in the 1920's reveals this strong position by such founding figures as Floyd Allport, and that pales in comparison to behaviorism in its various flavors. Will was simply not open to scientific study. Psychology became the study of behavior, but we know that this paradigm had its limits and a more conative revolution has followed the cognitive revolution in psychology. We are interested in people's goal pursuits, real or imagined I suppose.
In visiting psychology's past, Krueger also quoted William James, who by the way wrote specifically and openly about will and obstructed will. In fact, James poetically addressed the failure of will with such things as,
"Men [people] do not differ so much in their mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued from their differing fates. No class of them have better sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the ‘dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect.
No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do . . . and yet their moral knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the background . . . never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor key into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its hands."
(James, 1908; Vol 2, p. 547)
James concludes, "The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action . . ." (James, 1908; Vol 2, p. 547).
It is clear as Krueger notes about James, that James' first act of free will was to believe in it. He defined moral action as an act of will, as "taking the helm into our hands." It was his belief, an assumption, a starting point for thinking about the human condition; A starting point for his science (at least some of it).
That's the point, I think. Free will, no free will, is a belief, an assumption upon which we base our arguments, our hypotheses and what we count as data. We don't, as Krueger makes clear in the work of Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler (Psychological Science, 2008) create research findings that say anything about the existence of free will. Our findings can't do that, because our science is premised on the existence of free will (Baumeister's research on self-regulation) or not (Bargh's investigation of unconscious processes).
We're doing (social) science. It is one approach to creating knowledge claims, and some questions are simply outside the lines of our practice. I think we have to be careful to color inside the lines. Our science will not resolve the issue.
In the end, I return to a favorite writer, Parker Palmer, whose thoughts on paradoxes speak to this tension between determinism and free will. He writes, "In certain circumstances, truth is a paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, and if we want to know that truth, we must learn to embrace those opposites as one" (Palmer, 1998; p. 63). I think any endeavor to understand the human condition must embrace opposites.
References
Palmer, P. (1998). The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Vohs, K. D., & Schooler, J. W. (2008). The value of believing in free will. Psychological Science, 19(1), 49-54.
