Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

Here's where you get it wrong - words don't just mean what they fucking mean; their meaning changes with context. And changing meaning with changing context is not the same as redefinition.

Nope.

If a word evolves through changing contexts over hundreds of years, that's one thing. However, when you deliberately define a word AGAINST its salient features, in the course of maybe a single academic discussion or maybe a single generation (like Dennett), it introduces an equivocation that screws up the dialogue.

For example, if you define free will as "an awareness of brain function involving motivational mechanisms," then you are no longer answering the philosophical question about free will vs. determinism. You are begging the question, by defining will as PART of the deterministic process, and then saying "Aha! I knew it all along," as though some clever discovery has been made. You don't get to say that the scientific process is a new context, redefine philosophical terms in terms of a physical monism, and then equivocate on those new definitions. This is because whatever you call things, the philosophical issue is still there, and people need to be able to communicate about it by words "meaning what they fucking mean."

And I mean that.