Abstract
This is a reply to discussions by Robert Kane, Kelly McCormick, and Manuel Vargas of Shaun Nichols, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility.
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Notes
In Bound, I reserve the term “revisionism” for the connotational revisionist, who uses a liberal reference convention. Vargas points out that on his taxonomy, one can also be a denotational revisionist, who maintains that there is a strict reference convention, but we can replace the empty notion of free will with a revised one. Indeed, Vargas notes that his account doesn’t exclude the possibility of a revisionist theory that doesn’t specify the revision. (p. 5, n4). It’s also true that in various formulations of revisionism, it includes eliminativism (e.g., 2005, p. 408), and the most recent characterization does not explicitly exclude eliminativism (Vargas 2013, 85). Vargas deserves an enormous amount of credit for setting out the revisionist program so systematically. But the general notion of revisionism seems quite expansive, and my interest is primarily in distinctions within this capacious set. Given the number of possibilities, I find it more efficient to use distinct labels for the positions. But one might also simply label them all “revisionist” with appropriate subscripts (e.g., revisionismconnotational, revisionismeliminativist, revisionismunspecified-replacement) since they might all count as revisionist under Vargas’ characterization.
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Angel Pinillos and Heather Battaly for comments on an earlier draft of these comments. Thanks also to Dan Speak for organizing the symposium.
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Nichols, S. Replies to Kane, McCormick, and Vargas. Philos Stud 174, 2511–2523 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0742-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0742-z