Elbow Room

by Daniel C. Dennett

• ISBN13: 9780262540421
• ISBN10: 0262540428
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1984-11-21
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Anyone who has wondered if free will is just an illusion or has asked "could I have chosen otherwise?" after performing some rash deed will find this book an absorbing discussion of an endlessly fascinating subject. Daniel Dennett, whose previous books include Brainstormsand (with Douglas Hofstadter) The Mind's I,tackles the free will problem in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of several fields usually ignored by philosophers; not just physics and evolutionary biology, but engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. In Elbow Room,Dennett shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" they get enmeshed in-imaginary agents, bogeymen, and dire prospects that seem to threaten our freedom. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. Elbow Roombegins by showing how we can be "moved by reasons" without being exempt from physical causation. It goes on to analyze concepts of control and self-control-concepts often skimped by philosophers but which are central to the questions of free will and determinism. A chapter on "self-made selves" discusses the idea of self or agent to see how it can be kept from disappearing under the onslaught of science. Dennett then sees what can be made of the notion of acting under the idea of freedom-does the elbow room we think we have really exist? What is an opportunity, and how can anything in our futures be "up to us"? He investigates the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise," and asks why we want free will in the first place. We are wise, Dennett notes, to want free will, but that in itself raises a host of questions about responsibility. In a final chapter, he takes up the problem of how anyone can ever be guilty, and what the rationale is for holding people responsible and even, on occasion, punishing them. Elbow Room is an expanded version of the John Locke Lectures, which Dennett gave at Oxford University in 1983. A Bradford Book.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Please Don't Feed the Bugbears	1	(19)
The Perennial, Gripping Problem	1	(6)
The Bogeymen	7	(3)
Sphexishness and Other Worries	10	(7)
Overview	17	(3)
Making Reason Practical	20	(30)
Where Do Reasons Come From?	20	(6)
Semantic Engines, Perpetual Motion Machines, and a Defective Intuition Pump	26	(8)
Reflection, Language, and Consciousness	34	(9)
Community, Communication, and Transcendence	43	(7)
Control and Self-Control	50	(24)
``Due to Circumstances Beyond our Control''	50	(2)
Simple Control and Simple Self-Control	52	(5)
Agentless Control and Our Concept of Causation	57	(4)
Agents in Competition	61	(5)
The Uses of Disorder	66	(4)
``Let Yourself Go''	70	(4)
Self-Made Selves	74	(27)
The Problem of the Disappearing Self	74	(7)
The Art of Self-Definition	81	(11)
Trying Our Luck	92	(8)
Overview	100	(1)
Acting Under the Idea of Freedom	101	(30)
How Can You Go On Deliberating at a Time Like This?	101	(6)
Designing the Perfect Deliberator	107	(8)
Real Opportunities	115	(8)
``Avoid,'' ``Avoidable,'' ``Inevitable''	123	(8)
``Could Have Done Otherwise''	131	(22)
Do We Care Whether We Could Have Done Otherwise?	131	(8)
What We Care About	139	(5)
The Can of Worms	144	(9)
Why Do We Want Free Will?	153	(20)
Nihilism Neglected	153	(3)
Diminished Responsibility and the Specter of Creeping Exculpation	156	(9)
The Dread Secret Denied	165	(8)
Bibliography	173	(12)
Index	185