(August 7, 2013 at 2:12 am)bennyboy Wrote: 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.
The fact you are ignoring is that it is NOT being defined against its salient features. Those salient defining features are very much intact. Free-will is not defined as "not-determinism". The determinism vs free-will question is not a part of the definition.
Simply put, you are putting the cart before the horse here. You don't start by considering "free-will" as some absolute philosophical position which by its nature is incompatible with determinism. You don't start by assuming "free will means your will's freedom from determinism". That would be begging the question. Here you have defined free-will as something incompatible with determinism and thus conclude that it could not possibly be compatible with determinism.
If you honestly wish to consider the philosophical issue of free-will, then consider it on its own merits - without any reference to determinism. Figure out what the term "human will" means within the context of your chosen philosophical premises - whether it us substance dualism or monism. Figure out how it plays out and which aspects can be rationally considered free. And then try to decide whether this conceptualization of free-will is compatible/incompatible/partially compatible with determinism. Don't start by assuming that free-will by definition means not-determined will and then go from there.
