Free Will and the Folk: Responses to Commentators ∗ Shaun Nichols Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Experimental research on folk intuitions concerning free will is still in its infancy. So it is especially helpful to have such an excellent set of commentaries, and I greatly appreciate the work of the commentators in advancing the project. Because of space limitations, I can’t respond to all of the comments. I will focus on just a few issues that emerge from the comments that I think are especially promising for illumination. 1. Conditional analyses In my contribution, I maintain that people regard choice as indeterminist. This is partly based on the work that Joshua Knobe and I have done on lay intuitions concerning determinism. We presented subjects with descriptions of two universes, one of which is deterministic about everything, the other of which is determinist about everything except human decision making. We found that the vast majority of subjects responded that the latter universe is most like ours. Knobe and I interpret this as evidence that people in our culture have indeterminist intuitions about choice. Eddy Nahmias challenges our interpretation by pointing out that, given how we describe the universes, our interpretation depends on presupposing that the lay notion of “could have done otherwise” expresses something incompatible with determinism. However, as Nahmias notes, the compatibilist tradition offers a different account of the expression “could have done otherwise.” This tradition offers conditional analyses of that expression. The idea is that when someone says that an agent could have done otherwise, what this really means is that if the conditions (or laws) had been different, the agent would have done otherwise. In light of various counterexamples, conditional analyses are widely rejected in the contemporary free will literature (for review, see Kane 1996, 52-8). I find the counterexamples compelling, but I’ve learned (e.g., from Knobe 2003) not to assume lightly that my own intuitions are representative of the folk. One might, however, explore the conditional analyses empirically. I recently conducted a pilot study on the topic. 1 75 undergraduates at the University of Utah were given the following vignette: On 4/13/2005, Bill filled out his tax form. At precisely 10:30 AM, he decides to lie about his income. But of course he didn’t have to make this decision. Bill could have decided to be honest. The subjects were then asked to judge whether a sentence sounded right or wrong (on a scale from 3 to –3). One group got the following sentence, modeled on conditional analyses: ∗ Thanks to Joshua Knobe, Eddy Nahmias, Paulo Sousa, and Manuel Vargas for discussion of some of the issues in this reply. 1 The basic method used here is borrowed from Knobe (2004).