Abstract

The traditional problem of free will and determinism is ostensibly about settling the relationship between free will and determinism. According to the standard narrative, this problem boils down to settling whether free will stands in a compatibility or incompatibility relation with determinism. Similarly, there is traditional debate over whether a compatibility or an incompatibility relationship holds between free will and indeterminism. Since indeterminism is simply the negation of determinism, anyone who holds that human free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism seems to be committed to free-will impossibilism, i.e. the view that free will is metaphysically impossible. We might summarize this constructive dilemma argument as follows: The Standard Dilemma Argument 1. Necessarily, either determinism or its negation, i.e. indeterminism, is true. 2. Necessarily, determinism is incompatible with free will. 3. Necessarily, indeterminism is incompatible with free will. 4. Therefore, free will is metaphysically impossible; impossibilism is true. In this essay, I argue that the term “incompatible” used in this argument is ambiguous. Since there are two fundamentally different ways to disamabiguate the term “incompatible”, there are at least four substantively different ways to disambiguate the Standard Dilemma Argument. Because these four arguments are typically conflated, the philosophically interesting differences between these four instances of the Standard Dilemma Argument are generally ignored.