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In Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Steven Horst addresses the apparent
dissonance between the picture of the natural world tht arises from the sciences and
our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act. If the mind and the
world are entirely governed by natural laws, there seems to be no room left for free
will to operate. Moreover, although the laws of physical science are clear and
verifiable, the sciences of the mind seem to yield only rough generalizations rather
than universal laws of nature. Horst argues that these two familiar problems in
philosophy--the apparent tension between free will and natural law and the absence
of "strict" laws in the sciences of the mind--are artifacts of a
particular philosophical thesis about the nature of laws: that laws make claims
about how objects actually behave. Horst argues against this Empiricist orthodoxy
and proposes an alternative account of laws--an account rooted in a cognitivist
approach to philosophy of science. Horst argues that once we abandon the Empiricist
misunderstandings of the nature of laws there is no contrast between "strict" laws
and generalizations about the mind ("ceteris paribus" laws, laws hedged by the
caveat "other things being equal"), and that a commitment to laws is compatible with
a commitment to the existence of free will. Horst's alternative account, which he
calls "cognitive Pluralism," vindicates the truth of psychological laws and resolves
the tension between human freedom and the sciences.
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