Determinism Flashcards
Why did Locke conclude that free will is an illusion?
- Building upon prior works such as Aquinas’ cosmological argument, Locke believed that every action and event had their antecedent causes.
- Locke therefore found that humans could act in no way other than how they acted due to the causes that made them behave that way. Humanity can be compared to a train running along a pre established track. Free will is therefore an illusion.
How did Locke define concepts such as volition, the will and freedom.
- To Locke, a volition is a desire to perform an action. An act with volition is a voluntary act.
- Voluntary acts may feel free due to our ability to reason and decide upon a course of action. Locke called this ability to weigh up potential choices the will.
- Locke defined freedom as the ability act according to the determination of the mind alone. A free person may act however their mind chooses.
Interestingly, Locke believed that the very notion of a free will was unintelligible due to the fact that a power could not have a power. Therefore he asked the broader question of whether humanity is free.
Explain Locke’s man in the bedroom illustration.
- In Locke’s man in the bedroom illustration, a man is carried while being asleep into a room of his good friend’s house; he is then locked in.
- When he wakes up, seeing that he is in the company of a friend, he decides to stay in the room and sleep some more.
- The choice may appear to be free from the man’s perspective, and yet he has no choice other than to stay in the room because it is locked.
- The act is therefore voluntary and willed, but not free and could done nothing else but stay in the bedroom. Locke’s illustration therefore demonstrates the relationship between the will and freedom.
What is biological determinism? What has popularised the idea?
- Biological determinism is the view that our behaviour is determined by biological factors, particularly our genes.
- The discovery of DNA, the material in our body that contains genetic instructions, in 1953, and the Human Genome Project (1990- 2004), which mapped the genes in the human genome, have both popularised the idea of genetic determinism.
What is the idea of genetic fixity?
Genetic fixity is the belief that the genesis of a person’s parent inevitably determine the characteristics, health and even behaviour of the child.
What is Classical Conditioning? Who first discovered it? What school was founded around it?
- Classical Conditioning is when a subject is conditioned to associate a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus, often to elicit a reaction.
- Classical Conditioning was discovered by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov when experimenting on the digestion of dogs. The dogs began to associate the lab coats of his team with food, drooling whenever they saw them.
-Pavlov then tested whether he could teach dogs to associate the ringing of
a bell with food. The dogs soon began to salivate at the sound. So began the the school of behaviourism within psychology, which believed that behaviour was a result of conditioning from the environment or in the patient’s past, and can be explained without reference to internal mental states.
What experiment was performed on Little Albert? Who did it? How did this develop behaviourism and its relationship with determinism?
- John Watson and Rosalie Rayner later developed upon Pavlov’s classical conditioning by performing a similar experiment upon a human child.
- Watson and Rayner took a baby of nine months, known as Little Albert, and exposed him to several objects (a white rat, a rabbit and burning newspaper), all of which he had no reaction to.
- They then did the same, but this time they made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Albert began to cry.
- Eventually, Little Albert began to cry upon seeing the rat, along with other furry objects such as Santa Claus’ beard.
- The experiment seemed to prove that humans could be conditioned the same way that Pavlov’s dogs could; at this point some in the behaviourist school began to suggest that free will was an illusion and that our behaviour was entirely determined by conditioning.
What type of conditioning did the psychologist B. F. Skinner introduce? How did he weigh in on the free will debate?
- Skinner established a new form of conditioning from classical conditioning called operant conditioning.
- Operant conditioning states that people and animals are fated to repeat behaviours that are rewarded, and cease behaviours that are punished. This can be done by reinforcement (the adding of a positive stimulus or the removal of a negative one) or punishment (the addition of a negative stimulus or the removal of a positive one).
- Skinner believed that free will was a myth and that all human reactions came from operant conditioning.
How do soft determinists define freedom? What do they agree with hard determinists on?
- Soft determinists state that an action is free so long as that action is willed by the person, not caused by external coercion or interference. Freedom is defined by a person’s ability to choose to act and control the desired effect, even if that choice is determined.
- They do, however, agree that human actions are still the necessary result of a chain of cause and effect. Even if actions are free to a soft determinist, they are not free due to any notion of an uncaused free will.
Who was Thomas Hobbes? What were propose were the two types of causes?
- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher and supporter of the ill-fated royalists in the English Civil War.
- Despite being most well known for his work on political philosophy, Hobbes was also determinist and argued his case in a private correspondence with the Bishop of Derry, John Bramhall. This was later published and made into the book Of Liberty and Necessity.
- Hobbes made the distinction between internal and external causes. Internal causes refers to a desire and a volition to do an act, which is the actually performed. External causes are external forces that coerce a person into doing something against their desires.
- Hobbes’ conception of liberty meant that a choice was free if it was not influenced by external impediments.
- He compared people to a flowing river, stating that just as the river is at liberty to flow down a hill if there is no dam preventing its flow, so too are people free to follow their desires if there are no external causes coercing them. Nonetheless, both their actions are an inevitable result of a chain of causes.
Explain A.J. Ayer’s conception of caused and forced acts.
- A.J. Ayer made the distinction between caused and forced acts. Caused acts are free acts that were chosen by a person where they had the power to choose otherwise, but the choice was determined by past causes. Forced acts are ones where, due to external and internal restraints, a person could not have acted otherwise
- Ayer identified three conditions that could constrain an agent’s freedom. These are: Coercion, where a person is compelled by another to do an action, Habitual ascendancy, where a person has no say in the decision being made (such as a soldier operating under orders) and internal constraints, where a person’s ability to deliberate between choices is impaired such as cases of kleptomania.
- Ayer also identified three conditions that must be fulfilled in order for an action to be free, these are: The person could have acted otherwise had they chosen to do so, the person was not compelled by another person, the person’s action was voluntary and free from internal constraints.
