Sentences that ascribe action are logically related, but it is not always obvious why. According to event semantics, implications and non-implications result from referential relations between unpronounced constituents. Taking as starting point examples including free relative clauses, this paper advances the alternative view that examples as such present logical relations as forms of predicative dependence indicated with pronounced constituents. To this end, I argue that Verbal Phrases and verbal traces follow the pattern of Verbal Phrase Anaphora and, more controversially, that (...) they can be semantically interpreted in terms of higher-order quantification that represent actions as properties, but neither as events nor event-kinds. (shrink)

¿Cómo puede la lógica representar expresiones indéxicas como “yo”, “aquí” y “ahora”? ¿Cómo no debe representarlas? Examino estas dos preguntas a partir de la Lógica de los Demostrativos (LD) de Kaplan y su impopular prohibición de operadores monstruosos. A pesar de algunos defectos de formulación, sostengo que dicha prohibición está guiada por una poderosa visión de las relaciones lógicas de validez entre oraciones con indéxicos que desafía la concepción tradicional de consecuencia lógica como preservación de la verdad y resalta el (...) papel fundamental de la información semántica en la construcción de sistemas formales concebidos como modelos de las lenguas naturales. (shrink)

Barrero, Tomás Andrés. “Aserción, expresión y acción. Una lectura de J. L. Austin.” Dianoia 60.74 (2015): 81-107.

Sentences that ascribe action are logically related, but it is not always obvious why. According to event semantics, implications and non-implications result from referential relations between unpronounced constituents. Taking as starting point examples including free relative clauses, this paper advances the alternative view that examples as such present logical relations as forms of predicative dependence indicated with pronounced constituents. To this end, I argue that Verbal Phrases and verbal traces follow the pattern of Verbal Phrase Anaphora and, more controversially, that (...) they can be semantically interpreted in terms of higher-order quantification that represent actions as properties, but neither as events nor event-kinds. (shrink)

En este breve comentario discuto algunos aspectos de la interpretación de la epistemología de Davidson que sugiere Willian Duica en su reciente libro. Luego de una presentación somera del libro me centro en tres asuntos centrales de la interpretación de Duica. En primer lugar, argumento que su lectura de la crítica de Davidson al dualismo esquema/contenido es muy restrictiva y deja abierta la posibilidad de un realismo directo empirista. En segundo lugar, argumento que en su lectura el propio Duica se (...) compromete inadvertidamente con un empirismo de este tipo y, de este modo, su interpretación entra en tensión con el coherentismo de Davidson. Finalmente, discuto algunos aspectos de la interpretación que hace Duica de la tesis davidsoniana de la triangulación. In this short comment I discuss some aspects of William Duica's interpretation of Davidson's epistemology in a recent book. After a brief review of the book, I focus on three central issues of Duica's interpretation. First, I argue that his reading of Davidson's criticism of the scheme/content dualism is too restrictive and leaves open the possibility of an empiricist direct realism. Second, I argue in his reading Duica inadvertently commits himself to an empiricism of this sort and, as a result, his interpretation is in tension with Davidson's own coherentism. Finally, I discuss some aspects of Duica's interpretation of Davidsonian triangulation. (shrink)

In this paper I asses Davidson’s analysis of action sentences stressing its quantificational structure and its views on prepositions and adverbial modification. Three arguments inspired by Grice’s ideas are deployed against it. First, I point to weird consequences of taking prepositions as defining predicates; second, I show some obstacles for Davidson’s view on adverbs; finally, I raise some doubts about his putative analysis of “negative actions”. From these, I hope that connections among actions, facts and events should be reconsidered in (...) action theory. (shrink)

By considering Davidson’s analysis of prepositions as defining individual events predicates, I argue against his semantics for action sentences and stress some logico-linguistic puzzles concerning both the interpretive pretension and the referential indifference of this proposal. Inspired by Evans as well as by Grice, I advance another interpretive semantics for those cases which does not take as assumption the individual character of events and argue for a constructivist approach to events in action discourse.

El presente artículo ofrece una interpretación original del trabajo de Austin sobre la aserción y los adverbios y deriva de ella una semántica expresivista para las oraciones de acción. En primer lugar, el análisis austiniano de la aserción con su idea de fuerzas asertivas específicas se conecta sistemáticamente con sus observaciones sobre la modificación adverbial para obtener esquemas de aserción para oraciones de acción. En segundo lugar, se interpretan esos esquemas en términos de la expresión de los compromisos inferenciales propios (...) de prácticas argumentativas exculpatorias, justificativas y ejemplarizantes en las que se explota la contrariedad lógica a la par de la contradicción. This paper offers a new interpretation of John Austin's views both on assertion and on adverbs, as result of which an expressivist thesis concerning the semantics for action sentences is advanced. First, Austin's analysis of assertion based on various, specific assertive forces and his remarks on adverbs are systematically connected in order to obtain assertive schemata for action sentences. Finally, those schemata are put to work as the expression of inferential commitments implicit in argumentative practices of different sorts in the deployment of which both logical contrariety and contradiction are exploited. (shrink)

¿Cómo puede la lógica representar expresiones indéxicas como “yo”, “aquí” y “ahora”? ¿Cómo no debe representarlas? Examino estas dos preguntas a partir de la Lógica de los Demostrativos (LD) de Kaplan y su impopular prohibición de operadores monstruosos. A pesar de algunos defectos de formulación, sostengo que dicha prohibición está guiada por una poderosa visión de las relaciones lógicas de validez entre oraciones con indéxicos que desafía la concepción tradicional de consecuencia lógica como preservación de la verdad y resalta el (...) papel fundamental de la información semántica en la construcción de sistemas formales concebidos como modelos de las lenguas naturales. (shrink)

This paper develops some of Austin’s ideas on excuses, stressing their “dimensional” character and relating it to Searle’s distinction between intention-in-action and previous intention, in order to show that the original speech-act shaped distinction between weakness of the will and moral weakness can be embedded in a quite different theoretical framework such as Davidson’s, while Austin’s dimensional classification of actions cannot. Finally, the article analyzes how Grice’s critique of Davidson’s views on akrasia is more faithful to Austin and more radical (...) in its conclusions concerning the justificatory aspect of reasons and the rational features of action. (shrink)

This work studies some problems connected to the role of negation in logic, treating the positive fragments of propositional calculus in order to deal with two main questions: the proof of the completeness theorems in systems lacking negation, and the puzzle raised by positive paradoxes like the well-known argument of Haskel Curry. We study the constructive com- pleteness method proposed by Leon Henkin for classical fragments endowed with implication, and advance some reasons explaining what makes difficult to extend this constructive (...) method to non-classical fragments equipped with weaker implications (that avoid Curry's objection). This is the case, for example, of Jan Lukasiewicz's n-valued logics and Wilhelm Ackermann's logic of restricted implication. Besides such problems, both Henkin's method and the triviality phenomenon enable us to propose a new positive tableau proof system which uses only positive meta-linguistic resources, and to mo- tivate a new discussion concerning the role of negation in logic proposing the concept of paratriviality. In this way, some relations between positive reasoning and infinity, the possibilities to obtain a ¯first-order positive logic as well as the philosophical connection between truth and meaning are dis- cussed from a conceptual point of view. (shrink)

Motivated by H. Curry’s well-known objection and by a proposal of L. Henkin, this article introduces the positive tableaux, a form of tableau calculus without refutation based upon the idea of implicational triviality. The completeness of the method is proven, which establishes a new decision procedure for the (classical) positive propositional logic. We also introduce the concept of paratriviality in order to contribute to the question of paradoxes and limitations imposed by the behavior of classical implication.

In this work I argue for the thesis that Grice’s intentional-cooperative analysis of assertion works at three levels: the logical, the epistemological and the normative. I use “conventional implicature” as example. First part shows that other approaches to assertion can’t give an accurate description of semantic content. I point to a general, twofold conclusion: the truth-conditional approach fails by neglecting intentional acts to be the meaning blocks; the rule-oriented approach misses its target by disregarding that all communicative acts are intentional, (...) but many are not conventional. Assertion includes some features of intentional action, the main theme in second part. As rational justification is the basis of intention, the solution of some remaining problems connected to assertion may rest in the justificatory structures underlying intention. Judgment, the epistemic variety of rational acceptability, determines, on one hand, the infelicity in conventional implicature cancellation and, on the other, shows why convention is just a minor component in the theory of meaning. Justification deems a special methodology in which causal explanations of meaning and representation can be replaced by justifications, teleological in character. The rationalist background of Grice’s proposal is thus stressed, as well as his conception of rationality as the body of capacities in charge of identifying and attributing value. Following this interpretation, other problems on meaning and communication, for example the relations between the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims, can be dealt with. (shrink)

A partir de una discusión de la gramática lógica de Davidson para oraciones de acción, propongo una caracterización funcional de la predicación y la referencia como estructuras semánticas. En contradicción con Davidson y apoyado por sugerencias de Strawson, Evans y Chomsky sostendré que la distinción entre oraciones de acción y otras oraciones no reside en la introducción de un nuevo tipo de objetos de referencia que permitan la aplicación de predicados especiales. Dichas oraciones, sostendré, son casos paradigmáticos de una nueva (...) clase de predicación aplicada a los objetos a los que nos referimos cotidianamente. De acuerdo con esta nueva concepción, los fenómenos de referencia y predicación están indisolublemente asociados con patrones de inferencia y no con valores semánticos obtenidos por aplicación de secuencias de satisfacción. (shrink)

Kripke, Saul A. Reference and Existence. The John Locke Lectures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 170 pp.

Este trabajo analiza los patrones de desambiguación de presuposiciones que se pueden considerar anafóricas y son generadas por partículas indexicales. En contraste con teorías recientes sobre la presuposición que privilegian la información lexical proponemos un análisis perspectivo de la presuposición según el cual la inferencia por defecto sobre este tipo de información hace uso de la perspectiva de los hablantes. En dos estudios exploramos el patrón de desambiguación de oraciones que contienen la palabra ‘también’ en contextos donde se usa el (...) indéxico ‘yo’. Los resultados confirman nuestra hipótesis y se discuten a la luz las principales ideas sobre presuposición y anáfora. A partir de estos resultados sugerimos algunas direcciones futuras de investigación. (shrink)

A más de cien años de su nacimiento y casi treinta de su muerte, Paul Grice sigue siendo uno de los filósofos más citados, discutidos e incomprendidos del siglo xx. Innovador, desafiante e inconforme intelectualmente, parece haber llevado a cabo uno de los anhelos más profundos de la filosofía oxoniense del lenguaje ordinario: transformar la reflexión sobre el lenguaje en una reflexión sobre la acción humana. El libro argumenta a favor de esta tesis señalando cómo algunos problemas específicos de la (...) filosofía del lenguaje de Grice sólo pueden ser tratados en el contexto de sus reflexiones más maduras sobre acción, racionalidad y valor. Defiende también la posición de que muchas explicaciones de significado son lógicamente análogas a las explicaciones de la acción. Pero la evaluación de la acción en términos de las razones involucra al menos dos tipos de restricciones racionales: aquellas internas al hablante (lo que resulta racional para él) y otras externas (lo que el hablante debe hacer desde el punto de vista de los demás). Con su celebrado análisis del significado del hablante, Grice enfatiza rasgos del primer tipo; con su famosa teoría de la conversación, identifica rasgos del segundo. Y ambos tipos de restricciones solo tienen sentido si se reconoce que el significado de una palabra o de una conducta no es una cosa ni una entidad mental sino la conformidad del símbolo o la acción con un criterio normativo. La conclusión general de Grice resuena más allá de sus contribuciones precursoras en filosofía del lenguaje y permite articular una posición metafísica. En un mundo sin seres capaces de evaluar, de dar y reconocer valor, la pregunta por el significado carecería de objeto. (shrink)

Olympic combat sports are unconventional physical activity strategies to train middle-aged and older people with and without health problems. This systematic review aimed to assess the available body of published peer-reviewed articles related to the effects of Olympic combat sports interventions on health-related quality of life in adults aged 45 and older. The search was carried out in five generic databases until July 2021 and the protocol was registered in PROSPERO. The PRISMA guidelines were followed and the Downs and Black (...) checklist was used to assessed the methodological quality of the studies. After reviewing 1,151 records, only seven studies met the inclusion criteria, adding 212 participants with a mean age of 63.7 years. Six studies provided data to calculate the effect size in the Olympic combat sports groups. Three studies reported beneficial changes with a small ES for the total score of the health-related quality of life. Two studies reported a beneficial change with a small ES and strong ES for physical health. One study reported improvements with a small ES for emotional and functional well-being. In conclusion, interventions based on Olympic combat sports produce beneficial effects with a small and moderate ES on health-related quality of life in male and female aged 45 and older who are healthy participants, participants with Parkinson's disease, and participants with breast cancer.Systematic Review Registration:https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, PROSPERO: CRD42021244161. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments (...) for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man. (shrink)

Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese (...) and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge. (shrink)

‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘first­person authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and (...) confusions in Ashley’s paper. (shrink)

We argue that prediction success maximization is a basic objective of cognition and cortex, that it is compatible with but distinct from prediction error minimization, that neither objective requires subtractive coding, that there is clear neurobiological evidence for the amplification of predicted signals, and that we are unconvinced by evidence proposed in support of subtractive coding. We outline recent discoveries showing that pyramidal cells on which our cognitive capabilities depend usually transmit information about input to their basal dendrites and amplify (...) that transmission when input to their distal apical dendrites provides a context that agrees with the feedforward basal input in that both are depolarizing, i.e., both are excitatory rather than inhibitory. Though these intracellular discoveries require a level of technical expertise that is beyond the current abilities of most neuroscience labs, they are not controversial and acclaimed as groundbreaking. We note that this cellular cooperative context-sensitivity greatly enhances the cognitive capabilities of the mammalian neocortex, and that much remains to be discovered concerning its evolution, development, and pathology. (shrink)

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. _Kitsch and Art _seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes (...) that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation. (shrink)

According to informal logic, the possibilities of deductive logic as a tool for analysing and evaluating ordinary arguments are very limited. While I agree with this claim in general, I question it in the case of the argument from cause to effect. In this paper I first show, on the basis of carefully chosen examples, that we usually react differently to falsification of the conclusion of the argument from cause to effect than we do to the falsification of the conclusion (...) of other defeasible arguments. I then identify general conditions and assumptions under which the causal argument from cause to effect can be reconstructed as deductive. Finally, I compare the causal argument with the expert argument, which is a typical example of a defeasible argument in the narrower sense. (shrink)

In this work three recent proposal of analysis of the concept of ‘religion’ are discussed. There is a strong convergence between these three proposals in several points: all of them maintain that a religion should be the belief of something –a set of propositions, the object of a propositional attitude like a belief–, all of them maintain that the object of the belief should be a theory about the good, and all of them maintain that a religion should have important (...) normative and practical consequences. It is argued here that there are at least two problems with the general conception that results from these analyses. In the first place, attributing to a religion the conditions of identity of an act of belief leads to absurd consequences. In the second place, it seems much better to analyze a religion as a theory about God or some gods. (shrink)

In this article we investigate infinitary propositional logics from the perspective of their completeness properties in abstract algebraic logic. It is well-known that every finitary logic is complete with respect to its relatively subdirectly irreducible models. We identify two syntactical notions formulated in terms of intersection-prime theories that follow from finitarity and are sufficient conditions for the aforementioned completeness properties. We construct all the necessary counterexamples to show that all these properties define pairwise different classes of logics. Consequently, we obtain (...) a new hierarchy of logics going beyond the scope of finitarity. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo tenta revelar o significado da disseminação contemporânea das teorias da conspiração, seguindo a sugestão de Frederic Jameson de que as teorias da conspiração são sintomas de um “mapeamento cognitivo” empobrecido. Para isso, transpõe-se o problema do mapeamento cognitivo para uma questão mais ampla de narratividade, em diálogo com o florescente campo da ética narrativa, interpretando-o por meio das lentes da teoria crítica e da psicanálise. Resumidamente, afirma-se que as teorias da conspiração são narrativas substitutivas para lidar com (...) a opacidade das sociedades contemporâneas e a consequente deficiência na narratividade pessoal. (shrink)

The article explores the idea that Lucretius’s theory of simulacra contributes to Deleuze’s development of a new image of thought based on immanence. This is related to the importance Deleuze places on speed in his reading of Lucretius and how it affects the operation of thought concerning sensitivity. The approach will be framed in a materialist reading of Deleuze, consistent with the emphasis on naturalism in his work Logic of Sense (1969).

Od poloviny dvacátého století se nejrůznější společenskovědní disciplíny obzvláště důkladně zabývají otázkou subjektu, jeho povahy a vymezitelnosti. Koncept subjektu se ukazuje jako obtížně uchopitelný a celkově problematický. Na pozadí krátkých rozborů textů zvolených ze škály oborů od historie filozofie přes psychoanalýzu a sociologii až po teorii jazyka a filozofii vědy se v našem pojednání snažíme konstruovat mozaiku několika víceméně aktuálních pohledů na subjekt, na jejímž základě pak poukazujeme na vnitřní rozporuplnost samotného procesu, jímž je subjekt konstituován.Since the middle of the (...) twentieth century, the notion of the subject and the possibilities of delineating its nature have been the focus of particular attention within a number of humanities disciplines. The concept of the subject has proved difficult to tackle, and wholly problematic in general. Briefly analysing selected texts by authors involved in various fields of study, ranging from history of philosophy by psychoanalysis and sociology to theory of language and philosophy of science, we endeavour to construct a mosaic of several more or less contemporary views of the subject, on the basis of which we then point to the instability of the process itself by means of which the subject is constituted. (shrink)

Tento článek analyzuje problém normativity morálky. Argumentuji, že morálka nás normativně omezuje ve veřejném prostoru důvodů. Některá jednání jsou v dané společenské praxi poskytování a požadování morálních důvodů neobhajitelná. Morální zdůvodňování je zdůvodňováním v pojmech obecných principů s ideou férové nestrannosti k zájmům všech dotčených osob. Morální svědomí nemá nezávislý normativní význam. Normativní síla svědomí je odvozená od presumované způsobilosti morálních principů na jeho pozadí být ospravedlněné v (hypoteticky ideálním) veřejném prostoru důvodů.This paper analyses the problem of normativity of morality. (...) I argue that morality restricts us normatively in the public space of reasons. Some actions are indefensible in the social praxis of giving and asking for moral reasons. Moral reasoning is a reasoning in terms of general principles with the idea of fair impartiality to interests of all affected persons. The moral conscience has not an independent normative significance. The normative force of moral conscience is derivatedly related to the presumptive capability of the moral principles in its background to be justified in the (hypothetically ideal) public space of reasons. (shrink)

[Materialism and Hylomorphism] The author disputes the view, expressed recently by Tomáš Machula a David Peroutka, that materialism, dominant in contemporary philosophy of mind, should be substituted by Thomist hylomorphism. The critique focuses on two aspects of Machula and Peroutka’s argument. Firstly, on their assumption that the contemporary preference for materialism is the result of chance (ignorance of the fact that in addition to materialism and dualism the position of hylomorphism is also available). This assumption fails to take into account (...) the fact that dualism was already the subject of criticism in the 17th century, but materialism only became properly established in the mid-twentieth century. Secondly, the author argues that Thomist hylomorphism can be updated in a more fruitful way than that proposed by Machula and Peroutka. This updating requires us, however, to sacrifice certain metaphysically unsustainable ideas – in particular the idea that the soul is a non-material substance independent of the body. (shrink)

Apresenta-se nesse texto as repercussões do Concílio Vaticano II na Igreja particular de Goiás. A fidelidade ao Concílio produziu efetiva participação de todos – presbíteros, religiosas e religiosos, leigos e leigas. Tomando como referências a vivência e experiência de pastor nessa diocese (1967-1998) e diversos estudos, Dom Tomás mostra os aspectos mais relevantes dessa história: as assembléias diocesanas, com participação de leitos (1968); as CEBs e a concretização da opção pelos pobres; as Escolas Bíblicas; a defesa da posse da (...) terra, a Comissão Pastoral da Terra - CPT e o enfrentamento da ditadura militar; a causa indígena; o ecumenismo; o exercício da colegialidade; a articulação dos bispos comprometidos com as CEBs na CNBB; o problema da Visita Apóstólica na diocese; apresenta ainda um balanço de erros e conflitos; e finalmente, relata o Sínodo diocesano (1995) e seus objetivos: 1) Avaliar a situação concreta do povo, seus sofrimentos e suas lutas, para se ter uma visão mais clara da realidade; 2) Julgar à luz da Palavra de Deus;. 3) Desenvolver com mais clareza a missão da nossa Igreja dentro dessa mesma realidade. Palavras-chave : Concílio Vaticano II. Diocese de Goiás-Brasil. Participação. Colegialidade. Abstrat This article written by Archbishop Tomás Balduíno presents the impact of Vatican II in the particular Church of Goiás, emphasizing that the loyalty to the Council produced effective participation of priests, religious and lay people. Given his experience as a pastor in this diocese (1967-1998) and several studies, Bishop Thomas shows the most relevant aspects of this story: the diocesan assemblies, with the participation of lay people (1968); the CEBs and realization of the option for the poor; the Bible Schools; the defense of land tenure, the Pastoral Land Commission - CPT and the facing of the military dictatorship; the indigenous cause; ecumenism; the exercise of collegiality; the articulation of the bishops committed to the CEBs in CNBB; the problem of apostolic visit in the diocese. The article also presents a balance of errors and conflicts, and finally reports the diocesan Synod (1995) and its objectives: 1) Evaluate the concrete situation of the people, their sufferings and their struggles to get a clear picture of reality; 2) To make the judgment of reality in light of the word of God; Develop more clearly the mission of our Church in this reality Keywords : Vatican II. Diocese of Goiás-Brazil. Participation. Collegiality. - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2011v9n24p1341. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists about the compatibility of free will with determinism is merely verbal, since although one side of the dispute claims that free will is compatible with determinism while the other denies it, they actually ascribe a different meaning to the term "free will". One can therefore accept both the compatibilist thesis and the incompatibilist thesis, since the two are not contradictory. My method is to analyse the (...) meaning of the phrase "being an ability to do otherwise" as a property of abilities and the meaning of the phrase "having an ability to do otherwise" as a property of agents. The result of this analysis allows me to make an unbiased comparison of the necessary conditions that compatibilists and incompatibilists expect to hold if agents are to have the ability to do otherwise. It is shown, as expected, that these conditions are not the same. (shrink)