"The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism Be Reconciled with Ontological Monism." in Philosophical Explorations 10.1 (2007): 13-50.

In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the
neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by
situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and
holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the
attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents’ scientific
self-objectivation, limits that turn out to be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems
that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable
performative presuppositions belonging to agents’ participant perspective, I then take up the
difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives
with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist
solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying
problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive ‘view
from nowhere’ which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective
of the scientific observer from the investigators’ participant perspective of those engaged in
scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both
the observer’s encounter with the objective world and the participant’s involvement in shared
lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the
recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the
question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I
conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed.

Online:
Taylor and Francis Online [pdf]