Free Will, Language, and the Causal Exclusion Problem

Abstract

The starting point of the present paper is the rather commonsensical idea that mental causation qua mental – that is, at the very least, some minimal degree of irreducible mental causation – is a necessary condition, though perhaps not a sufficient one, for free will (see e.g. List & Menzies 2017). In other words, it is the thought that one can only feel entitled to consider human actions as being freely willed insofar as, among other things, their ultimate origin – what ultimately caused them – is not wholly microphysical in nature (on the model of, let’s say, a bunch of interrelated neurons firing). Much has been said in recent literature about how exactly to make sense of such a thought, essentially by addressing the question of how mentality could be said to be causally potent in spite of its undeniable dependence on a neural basis.1 Here we venture into a different kind of exploration, more specifically related to the question of what irreducible mental causation can be or, more particularly, where it could come from. In this perspective, the particular question we would like to address is the following: could it be the case that what makes mental causation apparently so special or unique is that it is deeply rooted in complex forms – perhaps only to be found in human communication – of language? Put differently, could some form of irreducible linguistic causation be at the basis of the kind of mental causation that would be appropriate, among other things, for having free will? Here is how we plan to deal with such a question. First, we briefly introduce the causal exclusion argument, essentially as an excuse to allow for mapping the space of the possible ways in which linguistic causation could in principle