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7 The success view applied – Two rough sketches

As laid out in the introduction, I view this book, in part, as groundwork for the more systematic and informed exploration of various philosophical questions. To give you a flavor of how this may go, I want to close by sketching, very roughly, two applications of the success view to well-taken philosophical problems. One is the grandfather paradox, as it arises in connection with time travel. The other is the free will problem. Why am I choosing those two problems and not any other? After all, several other philosophical problems seem to be just as well-suited to be re-considered in the light of the insights that the success view provides about abilities. We know that virtue epistemologists, such as Greco (2007) and Sosa (2015) analyze knowledge in terms of intellectual abilities. Certainly, it would be quite interesting to look at those abilities more closely against the background of the success view. The same goes for other theories which feature the notion of abilities at center stage, such as Millikan’s theory of substance concepts (2000), Mayr’s theory of action (2011), and various views of conceivability (Yablo 1993; Menzies 1998), to name but a few. Why focus on time travel and free will? First, of course, because I have to make some choice. Secondly, I take it that time travel and freedom are particularly interesting to look at. The time travel topic is interesting because the standard solution to the grandfather paradox appeals to possibilism – a view I have discussed in great detail (→ 3). It is therefore easily accessible against the background of this book and gives me the opportunity to take up a few threads that have been running through the previous chapters. The reason for talking about free will in the outlook is that the debate about free will seems to me to be among the debates which have been the most strongly affected by a prevailing lack of understanding of abilities. That is because the debate has been dominated, in large part, by the idea that freedom requires agents to have the ability to act otherwise (Frankfurt 1969), but no one seems to know how to understand this requirement. Even worse, some of the most established players in the debate seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that there could be open questions about the understanding of that requirement. Van Inwagen writes the following in response to the idea that compatibilists and incompatibilists about freedom and determinism may perhaps be talking past each other when fighting about whether or not the ability to act otherwise is or is nor compatible with determinism: