It will be interesting to see if it happens. The trouble with this last shooting - besides the basic horror - is that now folks like Kirk can be assassinated, not just politicians. But they don't have the resources to get the kind of protection politicians get; they're worse than Trump in PA.

Thanks!

The Passion of the Christ ends with the resurrection. It will be interesting to see how they top that.

Warranting some counterfactuals.

Thanks! Free will folk seem reluctant to use the word 'explain' and cognates. So there is more claims like, given determinism, actions are determined by factors beyond our control, or caused by such factors, or the actions are because of such factors.

This seems like a common assumption. Do you know of examples where incompatibilists say this in print? I guess it need not be in the context of the manipulation argument, but I was thinking these assumptions about explanation play a role in your reason for endorsing incompatibilism.

I'm interested in the use of assumptions about explanations in incompatibility arguments, like the manipulation argument. People assume given determinism there is an explanation of each action, for instance. Does this play a role in the manipulation argument? Is it warranted by explanation theory?

Another easier, preliminary question is does the principle play a role in the manipulation argument? It seems to play a role in the consequence argument.

Consider this common assumption about explanation. Does any theory of explanation warrant it?

Given determinism, every human action has an explanation in terms of factors beyond the agent’s control - e.g. propositions about the pre-human past and the laws of nature (see Fischer 1994, 40–41).

Right, but theories about scientific explanation. There is Salmon's causal theory, Hempel's covering law model, and van Franssen's pragmatic theory - for instance.

Thanks.

That's right. But what do we make of our debates then? If one says there is God, another says there is the Universe - leaving alone the many variations of each - given the vastness of God and the vastness of the Universe, who is to even say if their thoughts differ? Manufactured disagreements.

This is not good.

I guess we just need to start showing more interest in the things we don't hear about.

I'm not saying people should drop their supernatural beliefs. But I can't see how they are things that could ever be settled. Still maybe we need them for our own personal development. If that is the case, we should be careful what we say in such debates. Why take away what is working?

And a second point is that since the story is non-mechanistic there is no reason to think that your supernatural explanation should match mine. It is difficult to distinguish or compare them. So we have debates with no way to settle the debates, which makes them seem manufactured and unnecessary.

Here is what I think. It is a simpler story than the supernatural story since it doesn't have any supernatural aspect. But here is the problem with supernaturalism. There are models but no mechanisms. Mechanistic explanations must appeal to the physical. Any supernatural story one tells is possible.

Good advice. This is especially true when the disagreement can't be effectively resolved in a short conversation.