The Mad Scientist Meets the Robot Cats: Compatibilism, Kinds, and Counterexamples

摘要

In 1962 Hilary Putnam forced us to face the possibility of robot cats.' More than twenty years later Daniel Dennett found himself doing battle with mad scientists and other bogeymen.2 Though these two examples are employed in different philosophical arena, there is an important connection between them that has not been emphasized. Separating the concept associated with a kind term from the extension of that term, as Putnam and others3 have urged, raises the possibility of accepting counterexamples to compatibilistic analyses without rejecting compatibilism. Even if no compatibilist analysis of our concept of free action is acceptable, a compatibilist account of the essential nature of free action may be. Putnam has suggested that, in general, conceptual analysis is not the same as discovering a kind's essential properties. He asks us to consider the possibility of our discovering that all the things that we have been calling cats are automata controlled by mischievous Martians. Given such a discovery, would we have discovered that there really are no cats (there are only fake-cats) or that cats are really robots? The objects in question, being completely mechanical and controlled by creatures on another planet, do not fit our concept of cat. If we hold (mistakenly, according to Putnam) that the concept determines the extension, then we should conclude that there really are no cats. However, Putnam encourages us to accept instead that the extension is determined by paradigm cases, so that a cat is anything that is of the same kind