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Though philosophers have invested great amounts of time and energy probing the dimensions of freedom as it relates to the human situation, psychologists have tended to avoid the topic. However, the relevance of freedom to the empirical investigations of psychology does not reside in an extension of its philosophical roots. The pertinent aspect of freedom for psychology is the freedom a person perceives himself and others to possess. Thus, it is the perception of freedom, be it valid or invalid, and how it influences behavior, that is relevant to psychology.

I sketch a more-or-less compatibilist solution to the free will/determinism problem, defining free will as that which an agent must exhibit in order to be legitimately held accountable for his/her actions. Based on this definition it would seem that, judging by fairly widespread social conventions, free will consists in a series of capacities, such as the ability to respond rationally to information. I argue that these capacities are not undermined by the potential truth of universal determinism, but I would like. not to settle for a compatibilism that stops at the recognition of that fact. After all, why should we feel obliged to reconcile our free will with metaphysical determinism? I argue that the deterministic character of the universe is not so much a discovery that has been made by scientists as it is a methodological presupposition that is mandatory for doing science in the first place. With that in mind, determinism is, at its core, an epistemic notion and not an ontological one. My guiding idea is that free will exists insofar as it is a category mistake to conceive of the futures of intentional systems (like human beings) as facts of nature. I take "nature" to be that which is the subject of scientific research and therefore necessarily objective, where a fact's being objective consists in it being the way it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it. The future of any individual does not meet these criteria (that is, it is not a fact of nature) because one's future (unlike, say, the chemical composition of water) is not something that is the way it is regardless of what one thinks about it. We form different attitudes toward different futures and these attitudes contribute to our behavior. Since "deterministic" is a property predicated of events in nature, it is a category mistake to apply the term outside of that domain.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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Bibliography: leaves 180-181.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown State College. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2831. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaves. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-120).

Thesis--Giessen. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 188-193).

Thesis--Halle-Wittenberg. / Includes bibliographical references.