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Dickinson Sargeant Miller (October 7, 1868 – November 13, 1963) was an American philosopher best known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He worked with other philosophers including William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.Loyd Easton, Dickinson Miller: Philosophical Analysis and Human Welfare, Reidel, 1975

Biography

Miller received the A.B. degree in 1889 under George Fullerton at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied psychology under G. Stanley Hall at Clark University for a year, and then went to Harvard where he was a graduate student under William James, G. H. Palmer, Josiah Royce, and Santayana. He received the A.M. from Harvard in 1892.Loyd Easton, Dickinson Miller: Philosophical Analysis and Human Welfare, p.1He then spent a year in Germany studying at Berlin and Halle under Max Dessoir, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and Friedrich Paulsen, earning his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Das Wesen der Erkenntnis und des Irrthums, which was published as "The Meaning of Truth and Error" in The Philosophical Review in 1893.Easton, p.2This article led James to abandon Royce's solution of the knowledge problem in terms of an absolute mind. James recommended Miller to a post at Bryn Mawr College in 1893, where he was a close friend of Woodrow Wilson.Easton, p.2In 1899, Miller became a strong critic of James's famous arguments in The Will to Believe that the beneficial effects of a belief somehow increased its "truth." His critical article was "The Will to Believe and the Duty to Doubt."Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2, p.240Miller left Bryn Mawr that year to become an instructor of philosophy at Harvard, where he had a strong and productive collaboration with James.Easton, p.5 James referred to Miller as "my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy.""R. E. Hobart" on Information PhilosopherIn 1904, Miller left Harvard to be a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University and professor in 1911. There he worked with Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey.Easton, p.8Miller retired from academic work after two years at Smith College (1926-26) and went into a "European retirement."Easton, p.21 He visited Rome at first and then alternated between Florence and Vienna, where he made contact with the "Vienna Circle" of philosophers, including Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and others.Miller challenged a basic principle of the Circle that "no sentence can be admitted to philosophical thought as having a meaning unless it is verifiable in experience." Such a principle, he argued "cuts the ground from under its own feet" because a sentence has to already have meaning before you can apply the test.Easton, p.22In Vienna he met with Ludwig Wittgenstein who was then loosely associated with the Vienna Circle.

Free will as involving determination

In 1934, as Miller left to return for America, he published a landmark article in Mind under the pseudonym R. E. Hobart,.R. E. Hobart, Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It" Mind, Vol XLIII, No. 169, p.2He analyzed the relationship between "could" and "can" in the sense of choosing to do otherwise in the same circumstances and he claimed that the controversy of free will versus determinism was a waste of energy over a false antithesis. At least some determinism is not a problem for free will but a feature.Easton, p.23The article was titled "Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It," but it is widely misquoted as "Involving Determinism." His biographer, Loyd Easton, correctly describes it as "an acute example of 'soft determinism' or 'reconciliationism'."Easton, p.23The problem of "determinism" versus free will that William James was concerned about was the strict causal determinism that is better called predeterminism where every event is determined in a causal chain back to the beginning of time, and there is "but one possible future," as James put it.James, William. 1884. The Dilemma of Determinism, Unitarian Review, vol.XXII, p.193. Reprinted in The Will to Believe, Dover Publications, 1956, p.145Far from "reconciling" free will with this kind of determinism, as David Hume said that he had done in his "reconciling project,"David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, VIII, 1, § 72 James proposed the first two-stage model of free will that denies predeterminism and accepts absolute chance as necessary for the generation of alternative possibilities, which are the source of "ambiguous futures" selected by the determination, but not predetermination, of the will.Bob Doyle, "Jamesian Free Will: The Two-Stage Model of William James," William James Studies, April 2010Miller/Hobart dissents from James's new idea about free will, constructing a distinctive reconciling compatibilism that dispenses with any requirement for chance in the analysis of what persons' abilities to perform alternate acts. Rather than analyzing causality as Hume did, Hobart focuses on moral evaluation of acts and character.

The Mind article

Writing about six years after the discovery of quantum indeterminacy, Hobart explicitly does not endorse strict logical or physical determinism, and he explicitly does endorse the existence of alternative possibilities, i.e., that we can do otherwise in the same circumstances.WEB,weblink Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It, 24 March 2015, 24 March 2015, Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It, Hobart, R.E., PDF, 1934, January 1934, Hobart does not, however, attribute those possibilities to absolute chance.He says:

We can contrast Hobart with William James's claim that there are ambiguous futures. The second paragraph is not inconsistent with the two-stage model of free will – first "free" courses of action present themselves, then an adequately determined "will" chooses between them, in a temporal sequence. However, the first paragraph denies that any randomness in the decision process, including the presentation of options, adds to freedom.Hobart refers to G. E. Moore's idea that one could have done otherwise – "if" one had chosen otherwise. But Hobart views the "if" as redundant, and therefore licenses the claim that we could have done otherwise, full stop. Hobart finds fault with the indeterminist's position, but he gives the typical overstatement by a determinist critic, that any chance will be the direct cause of our actions, which of course would clearly be a loss of freedom and responsibility



Possibly Hobart has William James in mind as "the indeterminist." However, the only indeterminist philosopher named in the article is Eddington. James would not have denied that our will is an act of determination, consistent with, and in some sense "caused by" our character and values, our habits, and our current feelings and desires. He simply wanted chance to provide alternative possibilities for actions and a break in the causal chain of strict determinism.Hobart sees no need for such chance, and no addition to freedom to be had by it. The freedom we take ourselves to have is fully consistent with thorough-going determinism regarding human action.

References

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External links

• "Dickinson Miller" on Information Philosopher
• "R. E. Hobart" on Information Philosopher
• "Two-Stage Models of Free Will

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