The Bishop on truth

The Bishop can only wonder how Daniel Dennett has made it in the world of philosophy. His most significant ideas come in only three forms: those that he doesn’t understand, those that are obvious, and those that are wrong. It is the latter two sorts that are at issue in Dennett’s latest on the free will problem, Freedom Evolves.

Ostensibly a layman’s summary of Dennett’s thoughts on the subject, the book does however promise something new; but the first half sees little more than Dennett re-repackaging his tired old arguments. As any bright twelve year old will tell you, free will doesn’t exist, and probably never could. Dennett, undetered though, soldiers on, comfortable with his tenured place in the What I Would Like To Be True school of philosophy. He begins by assuring us his argument is no mere linguistic trick, then spends the next 100 pages attempting to pull a rabbit out of it and saw it in half. Whatever hair-thin delineation Dennett intuits between the words ‘determined’ and ‘inevitable’ is not in any dictionary the Bishop is acquainted with.

One can usually deduce the relative merits of a philosophical argument by the amount of space it takes up, and there are no prizes for guessing which length is preferred. While the better proofs against free will (for there are more than one, all more-or-less equally valid) take up less space than this book’s copyright notice, Dennett’s musings dither all over the place, in an attempt to distract the reader’s – and perhaps Dennett’s own – attention from the gaping paucity of his position. In a manner that seems to have been nicked from Plato, Dennett sets up a counter-interlocutor ('Conrad'): literally a straw man, intended to offer the arguments of Dennett’s opponents, the better for him to counter. Disappointing, then, that not only are those arguments rather obviously and deliberately flawed – and not the standard arguments against free will – but that Dennett fails to address them successfully, too. And in a final desperate bid to salvage his jigsaw of logic, Dennett undermines the position of free will libertarians,* who he supposes more wrong even than his determinist opponents. But this is silly. If you think two plus two is five, and I think two plus two is six, the fact that I am even further off has little bearing on the fact that two plus two equals four.

For the book’s second half, which the Bishop declined to read out of general boredom, Dennett proposes that free will is something that evolved. (The clue is in the title.) This is a no brainer. If we have free will, or anything like it, of course it evolved. How else would it get there?

But at the end of the day, the worst thing about this book is that it is intellectually dishonest. It is almost certainly true that Dennett doesn’t believe in free will himself, and really just wants to show that the illusion thereof is good enough. Only an idiot could hold to the contrary, and Dennett, despite the clumsiness of this particular diatribe, is probably not that thick.

*Those that believe that free will is real because the universe is indeterministic; as opposed to Dennett, who believes (or claims to believe) the universe is deterministic but that free will exists all the same. (Go figure.)