Habermas, The Language Game of Responsible Agency and The Problem of Free Will

Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 10, No.
1, March 2007
THE LANGUAGE GAME OF RESPONSIBLE

AGENCY AND THE PROBLEM OF
FREE WILL
How can epistemic dualism be reconciled
with ontological monism?
Jürgen Habermas
Translated by Joel Anderson
In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the
neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by
situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and
holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the
attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents’ scientific
self-objectivation, limits that turn out to be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems
that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable
performative presuppositions belonging to agents’ participant perspective, I then take up the
difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives
with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist
solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying
problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive ‘view
from nowhere’ which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective
of the scientific observer from the investigators’ participant perspective of those engaged in
scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both
the observer’s encounter with the objective world and the participant’s involvement in shared
lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the
recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the
question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I
conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed.
KEYWORDS free will; compatibilism; physicalism; scientism; participant perspective;

performative presuppositions
ISSN 1386-9795 print/1741-5918 online/07/010013-38

# 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13869790601170128
14 JÜRGEN HABERMAS
In a journal with the programmatic title Gehirn und Geist (‘Brain and Mind’), eleven
leading neuroscientists have published an audacious manifesto that has attracted attention
even beyond the circle of those competing for scarce funding (Elger et al. 2004).1 The
authors announce that, ‘within the foreseeable future,’ it will be possible to explain and
predict psychological processes such as sensations, emotions, thoughts, and decisions
on the basis of physiochemical processes in the brain. And it is thus supposed to be impera-
tive to take up the free will problem already now as one of ‘the great questions of neuro-
science.’ The neurologists expect the results of their research to lead to a profound revision
in our self-understanding: ‘We stand at the threshold of seeing our image of ourselves con-
siderably shaken in the foreseeable future’ (Elger et al. 2004, 37).
It would be an entirely welcome result if neuroscientists were able to solve a problem
that has generated centuries of philosophical controversy; quarrelling over areas of competence
leads nowhere (Bennett and Hacker 2003). But the most recent staging of this dispute seems to
have taken an ironic turn: this problem has actually put the focus directly on the structure of all
existence and has thus pulled natural scientists into the undertow of philosophical speculation.
This ‘metaphysical seduction’ is explicable in terms of three powerful and competing
intuitions. First, as agents, we are convinced of the irreducible distinctiveness and causal
effectiveness of our minds. We are certain that we act of our own accord and can make
things happen in the world. Second, as knowing subjects we take for granted the epistemic
authority of the natural sciences, which attribute causal effectiveness to all and only those
states and events in the world that vary in a law-like manner. Finally, as scientifically enligh-
tened persons who reflect on their own position in the natural world, we are convinced that
the universe is unified and includes us as part of nature. Each of these intuitions rests on
convincing arguments that could be cited on behalf of the causal powers of the mind,
the nomological determination of all states and events in the world, and the monistic con-
stitution of the universe. It is in virtue of this third ontological thesis that we are keen to
avoid the dualism urged upon us by the tension between the first two theses. Splitting
the world dualistically into nature and mind is implausible, because the unconditional
freedom of a mind that could overdetermine events in the natural world (from the
outside, as it were) would be indistinguishable from chance.
No one disputes the phenomenon of free will. Depending on how the phenomenon in
question is best described, we will look for different sorts of explanations. So I shall begin by
having a look at free will where it appears, in the language game of responsible agency
(Section 1). From the perspective of everyday life, the problem of free will presents itself
as the question of whether the prospective progress in the neurosciences undermines
this language game. I would like to examine this in the case of forensic discourse regarding
the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts (Section 2). The practical limits on agents’
scientific self-objectivation are mirrored, from a philosophical perspective, in the conceptual
problems that plague reductionist strategies. On the other hand, dualism regarding episte-
mic perspectives does not sit well with the assumption of ontological monism (Section 3).
The philosophical response to this challenge has been multivocal. Naturalists insist on the
presupposition of a materialist, causally closed world and pursue one of two strategies.
Compatibilism (the topic of Section 4) attempts to deflate the free will problem by
showing that the language game of responsible agency can easily be reconciled with
the deterministic assumption that one could not have done otherwise. Non-eliminativist
and non-reductionist materialist approaches (taken up in Section 5) turn away from the
agent and toward the world. From the viewpoint of a mentalistic mind –body ontology,
LANGUAGE GAME OF RESPONSIBLE AGENCY 15
they try to do justice to the mind’s phenomenal distinctiveness, and even its causal effec-
tiveness as well. The major stumbling block for these scientistic solutions is the methodo-
logical fiction of an exclusive ‘view from nowhere,’ which relies on the problematic move of
disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the participant
perspective of those who engage in scientific practice. If there is, however, no way of
‘getting around’2 the requisite complementarity of both the observer’s encounter with
the objective world and participant’s involvement in shared lifeworld practices, then the
remaining option is to take an epistemological turn (Section 6). But even this reflection
on how scientific research domains are ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld
provides no reprieve from the unanswered question as to how the human mind can under-
stand itself as the product of natural evolution (Section 7).
1. The Phenomenon of Free Will

We attribute spontaneous behavior to animals, but it is not until we get to intentional
agents that we presume freedom of will. The content of this presupposition reveals itself when-
ever we ask someone to account for what he did: ‘Why did you buy a red sweater?’—’How
could you get so furious?’—’Why didn’t you help him out of the bind he was in?’ When we
are asked to give reasons for our actions, we become aware of something that was already
tacitly assumed when we were carrying out the action: we could have done something else;
and it was up to us to act in this way and not that. Both of these standardly distinguished
aspects are part of what is involved in the background sense of freedom that performatively
accompanies persons when they act: the more-or-less considered choosing between alterna-
tives and the more-or-less spontaneous seizing of the initiative.3 The possibility of acting other-
wise calls attention to the cognitive dimension of weighing reasons, whereas self-determination
calls attention to the volitional dimension of authoring or originating the action.
The presupposition of free will is necessary for attributing the ‘responsibility’ that agents
‘bear.’ Ordinarily, in the absence of explicit arrangements to the contrary—that is, outside the
legally guaranteed liberty to do as we please—we can be called to account for our actions. We
must then ‘stand and account for ourselves,’ that is, give reasons for why we acted this way
and not that. Free will is a presupposition of the language game of responsible agency. The
content of this presupposition reveals itself only to participants who, as speaker or hearer,
take up a performative attitude vis-à-vis ‘second persons’; it remains inaccessible for the obser-
ver, that is, from the viewpoint of the uninvolved third person.
The language game of responsible agency runs through everyday life as an integral
component of communicative action; by emphasizing one particular aspect of action—the
endorsing and rejecting of criticizable validity claims—this language game makes actors
aware that they are always already operating within a space of obligating reasons and
that they should let reasons influence them and make demands on them. The language
game renders explicit the implicit ‘ought’ that is contained within the very mode of
linking interactions through communication and agreement. The binding character of epis-
temic reasons is relevant for the coherence and validity of our beliefs (and that of practical
reasons, for the success and normative evaluation of our actions), even when we do some-
thing obvious without much thought, such as following our individual inclinations or social
routines. Then, too, we owe each other reasons and are exposed to praise and blame.
The strong—and, in many cases, counterfactual—content of the presuppostion of
free will becomes clear when moral expectations get disappointed: ‘How could you have
humiliated her like that?’ Only once we get to the pressure for justification exerted in terms
of moral accusations or personal scruples does it become clear what society expects from
any reflective exercise of free will:
. that the agent be aware that she finds herself within a culturally circumscribed ‘space of
reasons’ and that she is responsive to reasons pro and contra;
. that the agent make her practical judgment depend on the consideration of the relevant
reasons; and
. that the agent make the cognitively decisive reason her own as an agent as well.
These demanding conditions specify the strong sense of ‘free’ action: it should be
determined by insight into objective reasons, such that the manifest reasons are also
part of the actual motives for—or causes of—the action, rather than merely concealing
motives that remain unconscious.4 Each of these three conditions is linked to connotations
that are spelled out in philosophical concepts of freedom:
(a) Freedom depends on the capacity for reflection and self-reflection, the willingness to
pause and step back from oneself and the situation. Becoming aware of one’s motives and
circumstances relieves the pressure of immediacy. The ancient ethos of a consciously led
life is echoed in John Locke’s view of free will as grounded in delayed gratification and
deliberation about goods (1979 [1698], chap. XXI, ‘Of Power’). Freedom demands an
action-orientation that is reflective and reaches into the future.
(b) In the reflective exercise of free will, the weighing of reasons is linked to the awareness of
being able to act otherwise. Although the positions we take regarding criticizable validity
claims are rational (that is, motivated by the relative weight of reasons), they are not
brought about causally. In contexts of justification, reasons cannot operate in the strict
mode of natural causes, as is already clear from a certain indeterminacy that attends them.
Within the holistically constituted space of semantic relations reasons can be ranked only
transitively, according to better and worse arguments. There are hardly ever ‘knockdown’
arguments, usually only arguments that tip the balance. There is only the non-coercive
force of the better argument—and not always even that. Our sense of freedom is also
marked by the experience of indecision regarding two equally weighty reasons. This
intuition has led to various versions of indeterminism.
(c) Finally, the reflective agent must not only weigh considerations but also act for the
reasons he has made his own. The intuition that it’s ‘up to us’ to do this rather than that is
explained by the fact that an actor is free when he follows his reasoned convictions. He
could also have acted against his better judgment. Self-determination means having the
strength of will to ensure that, in acting, one is determined by precisely those reasons that one
has found convincing oneself. Someone who acts otherwise has a bad conscience, or at
least feels uneasy about it. (Kierkegaard attributes this Kantian view to his imaginary
opponent Socrates (Kierkegaard 1989 [1849], 120 – 28)).
These three dimensions of the concept of freedom of the will are difficult to separate
out. Each of them contributes something different to specifying the freedom that we
ascribe to intentional agents. First, the fact that agents stand in the ‘space of reasons’ illu-
minates the mode of causation of actions. In taking on the role of motives that are sufficient
to explain an action, reasons acquire a causal effectiveness that they initially, as semantic
content, lack. They become effective via
. the symbolic incorporation of reasons into what is transmitted culturally;

. the social anchoring of reasons in social institutions and behavioral expectations that are
supported by sanctions; as well as via
. the communicative processing of reasons within contexts of interaction that are
coordinated by the rationally motivating force of criticizable validity claims.
The reasons that circulate in culture and society acquire action-motivating force only
once they find a point of entry from this ‘objective mind’ [‘objectivem Geist’]5 into the sub-
jective mind, that is, into the consciousness of persons who, for their part, are prepared for
this by processes of socialization.6 However much human infants may also be ‘pre-pro-
grammed’ for this by their genetic endowment, they do not develop into persons until
they get ‘hooked up’ with the intersubjectively shared meanings of the cultural program.
Personhood stands out as the early ontogenetic socialization of cognition that then also
shapes the structure of action and the formation of motives.7
These connections should be kept in mind when we conceptualize the presupposi-
tion of free will as reflecting a certain mode of causation. In contrast to Kant, I would
prefer to characterize what he calls ‘causality through freedom’ along the lines of a
‘weak’ naturalism that integrates free will into the whole of nature.8 On this description,
‘free’ actions are in no way ‘unconditioned’ actions, that is, ex nihilo interventions in the
natural course of things. But the constellations of conditions that render actions intelligible
and explainable differ in kind, conceptually, from the constellations of events linked by laws
of nature. To the extent to which persons let their actions be guided by reasons, they
submit themselves to the logical-semantic and broadly ‘grammatical’ commitments of
intersubjectively shared systems of rules that are not up to them. At the same time, these
rules do not ‘compel’ in the same way that laws of nature do. The force of good reasons
depends on the resonance they elicit within a subjective mind, while the space of
reasons provides the milieu for validity claims that persons raise vis-à-vis each other in
taking Yes- or No-positions.
The agent cannot, at the same time, perceive his performance to be an event that is
brought about causally. The normative structure of the deliberative process, together with
the fallibility of its outcome, make it conceptually necessary for participants to assume, in
their practical reasoning, the availability of alternate possibilities. The rational motivation for
a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is a mix of the ‘pull’ of the call for good reasons and the ‘push’ that comes
from staking out a position and thereby committing oneself. The freedom to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to validity claims, and especially the freedom involved in processes of rational will-formation,
can be analyzed as the capacity to make commitments exclusively on the basis of insight.
Good intentions motivated by practical insights need to be translated into actions, if
we are to speak of ‘causality through freedom.’ Persons (the only beings who can perform
actions) are living, socialized beings of flesh and blood. Socialization brings highly devel-
oped organisms, equipped with complex brains, to the point where they are ripe for an
‘interface’ with the communications network by which a society ‘transmits’ its cultural
program. The interactions between mind and brain, culture and organism remain as yet
opaque. But socialization processes clearly do not guarantee seamless ‘interfaces.’ The
‘reflective use’ of free will is an idealization. Even if we ascribe free will to all persons as a
matter of principle, the degree of reflexivity and willpower does vary in each case, accord-
ing to endowment, character, and circumstances. We use ‘freedom’ as a comparative
concept. The scope of what is open to deliberation depends on the willingness, when
possible, to examine an upcoming decision in the light of available reasons. Moreover, a

person’s will seems stronger the better able she is to act on precisely the reasons that
are rationally decisive for her.
Of course, a high degree of reflexivity and willpower is necessary only under excep-
tional circumstances. The ex-centric expectation of a reflective exercise of free will fits
poorly with the background character of our ordinary, rather dim sense of freedom. The intui-
tive sense of having a free will mirrors a pragmatic presupposition of language games and
accompanies all of our actions, including those that we normally perform without any reflec-
tion. In everyday life, only retrospective demands for reasons tend to reveal the unclear feel-
ings, dispositions, preferences, and values that direct action pre-reflectively. These motives
can be traced to moods, preferences, inclinations, and character traits that often merely
express traditions, customs, and social norms. Interestingly, we can also be held accountable
for the consequences of acting unreflectively on such character-based or socially sedimen-
ted ‘reasons.’ We are liable for the results of negligent action too. For as long as ‘we’ are the
ones to whom the offense is to be attributed, even largely taken-for-granted motives—
those emotional reactions, attitudes, and habits that bypass the filter of explicit delibera-
tion—operate with our agreement. This implicit consent must at least be assumed if
there is to be an adequate basis for critique and remorse, for confessing mistakes and for
the corresponding consequences (requests for compensation, forgiveness, apologies, etc.).
It is only in situations of conflict that problematic reasons for action are shaken loose of
their conventional self-evidence and their anchoring in character traits. It is only in cases of
disrupted social integration that the language game of responsible agency leads to a mobil-
ization of reasons in discursive challenge and rejoinder. At that point, the logic of practical
discourse is engaged—and it is in that logic that we find the connection between reflexivity
and freedom that we were looking for. For practical discourses are subject to an order of jus-
tification, according to which ethical reasons trump pragmatic reasons, and moral reasons, in
turn, trump ethical reasons.9 And each change in perspective set in motion by a new category
of reasons demands a higher level of reflection, such that there is a dynamic built into the
discursive mobilization of reasons for action, continually raising the level of reflection.
Pragmatic reasons, based on current desires or given preferences, can become rela-
tivized by ethical reasons, which bring into play long-term interests. These can be trumped,
in turn, by moral reasons.10 Ethical reasons have a broader temporal scope than pragmatic
reasons but, like them, remain bound to the agent-relative perspective of what is good ‘for
me’ or ‘for us.’ Moral and rights-based reasons are the only reasons that are directed at a de-
centered perspective of what is equally good (or just) ‘for all.’ As ethical reasons win out
over pragmatic reasons, and moral reasons win out over ethical reasons, there is a continual
increase in the complexity of the deliberations and the level of the reflection. When long-
term ethical convictions collide with inclinations, or when fundamental moral beliefs run up
against personal values, one must engage in universalization. From the ethical point of
view, we take into account interests that vary over one’s life-history; the moral standpoint
asks for a generalization across conflicting societal or cultural interests.
This order of practical reasoning explains how it is that we can speak of ‘the employ-
ment of freedom’ in a comparative sense. It is, of course, context and situation that deter-
mine when a person can be expected to make a more or less reflective use of freedom. But
the internal connection between reflection and freedom is what explains why Kant reserves
the term ‘free will’ or ‘autonomy’ for the capacity to make and carry out morally reasonable
decisions. For him, an autonomous person is someone who subjects his will to norms that
he has adopted for himself from a moral standpoint. Only with this conception do we get a
full integration of the cognitive and volitional dimension of rationally grounded agency,
that is, recognizing what is morally required, on the one hand, and the commitment to
act accordingly, on the other. We should not follow Kant, however, in taking this specifically
moral conception of autonomy to mean the kind of ‘unconditioned, ex nihilo’ causation that
intervenes from the domain of the intelligible into the world of phenomena.
Within the grammatical framework of the language game of responsible agency, moral
freedom too appears only in the deflationary form of a conditioned freedom, embedded in the
context of reasons as they arise within the lifeworld. I understand freedom of the will, more
generally, as the mode of how one binds one’s own will on the basis of convincing reasons.
Freedom of the will characterizes a mode of being—the mode in which agents exist within
the space of reasons and are responsive to culturally transmitted and socially institutionalized
reasons. The language game of responsible agency opens up a horizon, stretching across the
whole spectrum of freedom of the will, from ‘free will’ to ‘mere choosing’ [Willkür]—from the
demanding, reflective employment of freedom of the will, to its normal and routine exercise. In
so doing, persons don’t think of themselves as pure minds [reine Geister] who are always motiv-
ated by good reasons in what they think and do. What we expect, rather, are fallible persons,
who often fail to consider the relevant circumstances and who are not always able to ensure
that their good reasons rhyme with their other motives. Indeed, that is so rarely the case that
the presupposition of free will adjusts for such deficits—be it with regard to weakness of will or
the scope of deliberation and decision-making.
We thus expose ourselves to criticism when we neglect our genuine, well-considered
interests in favor of spontaneous desires and impulses, or when we betray our long-term
goals in order to satisfy current wants, or when we enrich ourselves at the expense of
others or coldly turn our backs on suffering and injustice. In these cases of pragmatically
imprudent, ethically ill-considered, or morally callous behavior, criticisms appeal to the
free will of the accused person. We charge others (or ourselves) with failing to consider
the relevant reasons. Either there was no stopping to reflect at all, or the deliberation
was insufficient, or the decision was overhasty, or various motives overpowered well-con-
sidered intentions. From the perspective of the critic, the one being scolded failed to ‘bring
herself’ to make adequately reflective use of her freedom of the will. She can, for her part,
defend herself against unwarranted accusations. The person called to account for herself
can reject the ascription of responsibility, either because she didn’t do it or because,
despite being the author of the offending behavior, she can cite good excuses.11 Within
the language game that presupposes free will as a matter of principle, freedom of the
will is acknowledged to have limits.12
2. The Problem of Free Will in Criminal Law Discourse

The ‘problem of free will’—of the relationship between freedom and determinism—
emerges at the point where phenomenological investigations of free will arrive at the dis-
course about its limits. As long as we are merely talking about limitations of freedom—limit-
ations in willpower or in the scope of deliberation and decision-making—then that which is
being limited is still presupposed. This presupposition drops out only once the problema-
tized action gets traced directly back to a nomologically determined event, naturalistically
bypassing the propositional attitudes of the actor. Once a language game no longer has
any room for persons being influenced by reasons, free will gets transformed into a
mysterious phenomenon. Motivation by reasons is the only form of determination that is

compatible with free will. As soon as this is replaced with the causality of nomologically
determined events, the phenomenon disintegrates—even just on grammatical grounds.
In the manifesto I mentioned at the outset, the neuroscientists take the position that
all mental acts and experiences are not merely instantiated by brain processes but rather
are causally determined by brain states alone. If neurological research today already
holds the key, as is claimed, to soon explaining any given motivation or deliberation exclu-
sively on the basis of the nomologically determined interaction of neuronal processes, then
we would have to view free will as a fiction. For, from this perspective, we must no longer
presuppose that we could have acted differently, nor that it was up to us to act one way
rather than another. Indeed, within neurological descriptions, the reference to ‘us,’ as
agents, no longer makes any sense. Human behavior is then no longer decided by
persons but rather fixed by their brains: ‘Who or what is this “we” that inhabits the
brain? It is a commentator and interpreter with limited access to the actual machinery,
more along the lines of a press secretary than a president or boss’ (Dennett 2003, 244f.).
Consistent with this, Wolf Singer and the others consider it unavoidable that agents
will have to revise their self-understanding, particularly with regard to the assumption of
mental causation. If the complex causation of human behavior is to be found directly in
the brain’s activation-patterns, then it is outlandish to think that persons can alter the
state of the world by intervening intentionally. Then there is nothing like ‘downward cau-
sation’ from ‘mind’ to ‘brain.’ We would definitely seem to be deluding ourselves about the
connection between reflection and freedom. From a neurological standpoint, what is ironic
about the discourse of responsibility and justification is that the supposedly decisive argu-
ments within the hierarchy of reasons can only ratify, at any given level of reflection, what
has already long been decided in regions of the brain far from consciousness.13 In cases of
dissonance between the results of conscious and unconscious ‘deliberation,’ the uncon-
scious processes always have the upper hand, because they can deal with many more vari-
ables simultaneously (Singer 2005c). Without its two pillars—the presupposition of the
causal effectiveness of the mind and the connection between reflection and freedom—
the language game of responsible agency collapses.
To gradually come to see how this language game gets undermined, one need only
follow the discourse on determining guilt and punishment that is institutionalized in the
criminal law system. Via the medium of enforceable law, which both moderates and
renders more precise the demands of morality, this discourse is subjected to strict
rules.14 Codes of legal procedure translate the everyday logic of attributing responsibility
for committing a crime into formal procedures for examining the grounds for excusing
or exculpating. After the elements of a crime have been established (in common law
‘actus reus’), it must be determined whether the act can be attributed personally to the
accused (‘mens rea’), whether there are any excusing circumstances, and whether the offen-
der is even fit to be held responsible at all. Scientific explanations of behavior based on
physical, chemical, or biological causes remain a component of this legal discourse only
as long as they contribute to analyzing a deficit, and diagnosing a breakdown or lack of
the freedom of the will that is presupposed as a matter of principle. As soon as naturalism
extends this type of explanation to all behavior, this is no longer a matter of establishing
the limits of free will but rather of eliminating it. If the accused is unaccountable for his
actions not as an exception but as a rule, then the presupposition of free will drops out.
Prosecution no longer makes any sense—except for the purpose of protecting society.
The implosion of the language game of attributing responsibility is an extreme case

from which the logic of the language game can be reconstructed. From the perspective of
criminal law doctrine, the question regarding individual cases at the limits of free will has to
do with the extent to which a person can be held personally accountable for a legal viola-
tion that she brought about. The search for mitigating, excusing, or exculpating reasons
[strafmindernde, entschuldigende oder Schuld ausschließende Gründe] requires switching per-
spectives from being the participant who accuses or justifies to being the observing analyst
who, upon considering the circumstances as well as internal and external constraints,
explains the behavior. The penal code is concerned with standardizing the most important
of such cases.15 The German federal penal code [‘StGB’] focuses on a few typical cases. In the
context of determining guilt, ‘excuses’ (in the sense of ‘guilt-reducing’ considerations)
include both (i) external circumstances that restrict freedom of action (that is, alternate pos-
sibilities), such as non-justifying16 emergencies (for example, sacrificing another’s life to
save one’s own) and (ii) inner compulsions that restrict freedom of the will (that is, the avail-
able range for deliberating and deciding)—such as states of mental imbalance (e.g. ‘shock
and confusion’ in extreme cases of self-defense). During sentencing, mitigating circum-
stance can be added to the scales, including a troubled personal history, social factors
(such as personal or economic circumstances), or certain psychological states (such as
‘homicidal rage’) that explain lack of insight or self-control.
These everyday rational explanations, which render actions intelligible in light of
exceptional situations, predicaments, and motivations, refer back to the agents’ normal
self-understanding as being guided by reasons. They ‘excuse’ violations on the
grounds that there were plausible reasons, at the time and place of the deed, for the
accused to deviate from an obligatory norm. Even the more ambitious explanations
from social science and psychology follow this pattern. It is only once an ‘insanity
defense’ [Schuldunfähigkeit] has been established that rational explanations (as in the
case of ‘unavoidable mistake of law’) are supplemented by other objectivating expla-
nations, such as ‘infancy’ [Strafunmündigkeit] or having impaired mental or physical func-
tions (‘mental aberrations’), as relevant grounds for acquittal. Whereas the case of
unwitting violations is not relevant to the present discussion, the other two cases are
all the more interesting: for they imply that free will is an unmet precondition for guilt.
On the basis of folk psychological assumptions and findings in developmental psy-
chology, society takes it for granted that children lack the ability to subject their will to
norms on the basis of practical reasoning until they have reached a normatively specified
age (in Germany, at the age of 14). In attempting to justify the required minimum age of
criminal liability, one can appeal to nomological explanations. But it is really only once we
get to medically certified severe impairments or illnesses, leading to temporary or chronic
loss of capacities for judgment and self-control, that explanations from the natural sciences
play a significant role. In these diagnoses, individuals are judged legally incompetent [nicht
schuldfähig] for reasons of lacking ‘imputability’ (Zurechnungsfähigkeit—a vague concept
that has now been dropped from the criminal law vocabulary in Germany). Aside from
the ontogenically based and socially defined threshold of being ‘of age,’ it is the core
area of illnesses and deficiencies at the ‘biological-psychiatric level’ that open the gates
to scientific explanations in the attribution-discourse of penal law.
The difference between exculpatory reasons of legal incompetence and excusing con-
ditions is often overlooked, since they sometimes have the same legal consequences: the
offender is not punished. There is, however, one part of German criminal law doctrine,
dealing more with systematic issues than with the purposes or functions of punishment, that
emphasizes the distinction between ‘excusing’ and ‘exculpatory’ reasons, despite their iden-
tical legal consequences (Jeschek and Weigend 1996, §43-II; Kühl 2005, §12, no. 1–12; oppos-
ing: Roxin 2005, §19, no. 56–57). Assuming that the offender is legally competent and knows
the difference between right and wrong in the sense of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ excusing conditions
justify reductions in guilt only by explaining why the accused person’s possibilities for either
acting or deliberating and choosing were restricted at the moment of acting. In these cases, it is
assumed that the capacity for orientation and commitment remains intact within this action
context (constrained as it is by external circumstances and internal compulsions), such that
the ‘excused’ offender acts not merely ‘unlawfully’ (in an objective sense) but also ‘culpably.’
The surviving charge of guilt is mitigated solely with regard to the legal consequences, that is,
there is no punishment.17 ‘Exculpatory’ reasons, by contrast, explain why the offender was
incapable of letting his action be guided by reasons. Since he lacked the ability for responsible
agency, he couldn’t be culpable.
Now, for our purposes, it is interesting that the corresponding scientific explanations
of behavior always imply the impossibility of guilt. For they are based on a deterministic
concept of event causation. As soon as actions are no longer explained on the basis of intel-
ligible motives and evaluated circumstances but only in light of natural laws—that is, by
changed organic states, chemical processes, or physical interventions—then ‘natural causa-
tion’ takes the place of the supposed rationality of action, however prejudiced and limited
the latter may be. Such explanations refer back to nomologically determined occurrences
that ‘reach right through’ deliberative processes, action-motivating reasons, and intentions
in the sense I discuss below.
Whereas folk psychological and social scientific explanations proposed in criminal
trials refer, in their basic concepts, to deficits that impair persons either in their freedom
of action or in the capacities for perception, judgment, and decision that are crucial for
their will-formation (and thus continue to be presupposed), natural scientific explanations
refer to demonstrable chemical influences (e.g., too much alcohol) or to neurological find-
ings (e.g., a brain tumor) or to genetic predispositions (of which clinical depression is a dis-
puted example)—in general, then, to causes that impinge physiologically (and thus directly)
on a person’s behavior. Since, for grammatical reasons, ‘persons’ and their intentional
actions cannot play any role at this level of description, natural scientific explanations
exclude any inference to causally effective propositional attitudes (beliefs or desires).
Rather, a person’s behavior, interpreted as action, is explained causally without any refer-
ence to the positions a person might take within the space of reasons. In such cases, it
makes no sense to make the normative imputation that the person could have deliberated
more carefully and made a different choice.18
From the perspective of this discourse over exculpatory reasons, the naturalistic
worldview—with its claim that reliable explanations of persons’ behavior will, in the
future, be the exclusive domain of the natural sciences—has had a real impact on the
public debate. Until now, in determining the limits of the accountability of the accused,
there has always been a choice between the one or the other explanatory model: in criminal
law discourse, naturalistic explanations were appealed to only once actions could no longer
be rendered intelligible on the basis of comprehensible motives. The exclusion from guilt
was the exception to the rule. But once scientific experts demand that the distinction
between these complementary patterns of explanation be withdrawn, the naturalistic
way of explaining deviant behavior loses its link to the norm of responsible agency.
Whereas, up to now, scientific explanation had the role of ascertaining the exceptions to
the rule of accountable action, in the future the exception would turn into the rule. As a
result, questions as to the limits of responsibility would no longer make any sense. On
the assumption that unconscious brain states do not merely temporarily impair or
suspend one’s presupposed capacity for mental causation but rather completely determine
all mental states, the language game of responsible agency—and, as a variant of it, any and
all legal discourse—collapses.19
A corresponding revision would involve reorienting criminal law entirely to the social
control of behavior, so that sanctions would be based not on the normatively assessed
extent of putative guilt but solely on the consequences of observed deviance (and
would be restricted to ‘measures for securing peace and security’ or at best to social-
therapeutic measures). On the assumption that neurology sees through the illusion of
freedom as responsible agency,20 the most we can expect is a retroactive harmonization
of conscious reasons with the junctures in unconscious processes. According to Wolf
Singer’s proposal, we should no longer speak of ‘freedom’ but use the term ‘maturity’
[‘Mündigkeit’] instead, and even then only in a peculiar sense of ‘articulability’ [‘Sagbarkeit’].
On his view, the ‘highly individually variable’ capacity to express in language or render
‘articulate’ the results of unconscious processes can still help to avoid troubling incoheren-
cies between conscious and unconscious processes. Faced with this type of newspeak, one
wonders what adapting dissonant thoughts to intuitions stemming from prior unconscious
processes has to do with ‘maturity.’21 Stipulative redefinition won’t do the job.
3. The Performative Limits of Self-objectification

Whether or not the neuroscientific debunking of our sense of freedom is correct, it is
easier to make the demand for a revision of agents’ self-understanding than to make good
on it. Can one adapt one’s normatively molded consciousness to an objectivating self-
description, according to which one’s own thoughts, intentions, and actions are not just
instantiated by brain processes, but completely determined by them? Or does this
attempt collide performatively (that is, in the execution of everyday or scientific practices)
with the limits of naturalistic self-objectification?22 The problem is, in the first instance,
conceptual.
In everyday life, we must assume that our knowledge in actu—the know-how by
which we are guided in the course of our performance—does not conflict with anything
we know about the world. This ‘must’ expresses a conceptual link: we cannot suppress
at will what we have ‘learned’ or what we think we ‘know.’ Unlearning and forgetting
happen but they cannot be goals that we strive for. We don’t have a ‘scissors in the
mind’ that can trim away dissonance at will, in an effort to isolate our knowledge in actu
from uncomfortable aspects of our knowledge of the world. The epistemic subject does
not simply encounter the world but also knows itself to be one entity among others in
the world. That is why knowledge of the world bites back at the knowing agent. The cumu-
lative expansion of our knowledge of the world cannot leave untouched the position that
epistemic subjects have to attribute to themselves as subjects who also act in the world.
This explains, incidentally, the internal connection between science and enlightenment:
‘Enlightenment is not so much scientific progress as the loss of naı̈veté.’23 We associate
the names of Newton and Darwin with advances in knowledge, which have propelled an
ongoing decentering of our self-understanding; they represent shifts that relativize the
place of humankind in the world but that are also experienced as shifts towards disillusion-
ment and liberation.
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious could also still be seen as empancipatory at the
time, because a successful analysis of unconsciously influential motives was supposed to
make it possible to expand one’s range of reflection and self-direction: ‘where id was,
there ego shall be.’ Neuroscientific enlightenment about the illusion of free will crosses
the conceptual border into self-objectification, as is clear from the opposite reaction that
it sets in motion. For this shift in the naturalization of the mind dissolves the perspective
from which alone an increase in knowledge could be experienced as emancipation from
constraints.24 The collapse of the fiction of the ‘self’ destroys the very referent, the ‘self’
of any revisionary self-description. This fiction gets replaced with the image of a conscious-
ness that hangs like a marionette from an inscrutable crisscross of strings: ‘We can’t possibly
know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our
behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine’ (Wegner 2002, 27).
Kant defined ‘maturity’ [‘Mündigkeit’] as the capacity to use one’s reason without the
guidance of others. We can view the ‘rational use’ of the understanding as the ability of a
person to let herself be influenced by reasons and to take positions on them. This ability
must obviously be rendered possible biologically; the action-guiding operations have to
be instantiated in brain states. But as soon as one gives up the assumption that it is possible
for this substrate to interact with the level of thoughts, intentions, and experiences that are
structured semantically, embodied symbolically, and communicated in accordance with
rules of grammar, and replaces it with a one-sided determination of the mind by the
brain—then the conceptual framework for the corresponding, socially generated points
of reference has been destroyed. Thoughts, intentions, and experiences can be attributed
only to persons, who themselves can develop as persons only in contexts of social inter-
action. It is in the course of their ontogenesis that children first learn to take up the prag-
matic roles of speaker, hearer, and observer and relate to oneself in the corresponding
ways.25
The conception of oneself as a person stands or falls conceptually with the distinction
between doing and occurring, where ‘doing’ is subject to a further distinction between
spontaneous behavior and intentional or ‘self-initiated’ action. The objectivating re-
description of persons and their behavior recommended to us by the neurosciences
abolishes these fundamental distinctions:
Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? From some fleeting
vantage points they seem to be pre-eminently voluntary moves in our lives, the instances
at which we exercise our agency to the fullest. But those same decisions can also be seen
to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide
something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from
we know not where. We do not witness it being made: we witness its arrival. This can
lead to the strange idea that Central Headquarters is not where we, as conscious inspec-
tors, are; it is somewhere deeper within us, and inaccessible to us (Dennett 1984, 78).
Assuming that it is a good illustration of the state of neuroscientific research, this

objectivating description could destroy an illusion but it could not contribute to enlighten-
ment, because what gets destroyed along with this illusion is the self-reference to a
subject who alone is in a position to lose its naı̈veté. Unless, of course, the subject of
this most recent advance of knowledge were to possess the paradoxical ability to dissolve
the conceptual link of identity between the two—the brain-researcher who definitely
solves the ‘mind–body problem’ and the same person, in the role of an agent, who now
allows himself to be enlightened about his illusionary self-understanding as a person.26
The limits of naturalistic self-objectification are trespassed when persons describe
themselves in such a way that they cannot recognize themselves as persons any more.
Natural scientific descriptions are based—at the levels of abstraction involved in theoretical
concept-formation—on spatiotemporally identifiable events that can, in principle, be
explained nomologically (that is, as deterministic events). As we have learned from
Husserl and Frege, it is just as impossible to redescribe the intentional attitudes of
persons in behaviorist terms as it is to translate the semantic contents of propositions
and thoughts into the extensional language of neurology. As Wittgenstein was never
tired of pointing out, semantic content is instantiated only in those symbolic expressions,
artifacts, and sign systems whose meaning remains inaccessible as long as we haven’t mas-
tered the generative rules of a corresponding grammar and instead merely describe the
physical substratum. How should we connect a monk’s meditation to the synchronously
observed stimulation patterns of the gamma oscillations in his cortex? How should we
interpret the links between religious experience and neural state established by electro-
encephalography? The difficulty consists in the fact that the language games, terminolo-
gies, and explanatory models that we have to employ in such cases cannot be reduced
to one another.27
Descriptions of persons and their thoughts or practices cannot be translated into
behaviorist or physicalist terms without losing or changing their meaning. Every attempt
at conceptual reduction fails in the face of the intersubjective constitution of a mind
that is intentionally oriented towards the world, communicates via propositional contents,
and is responsive to rules and standards of validity (Cramm 2003). This logical gap between
actions and events often gets glossed over with various metaphors. An example that is not
atypical for neuroscientific accounts is the rhetorical assimilation of reasons to causes—
equating, say, the ‘competition’ between unconscious influences that are accessible to
neurological observation and the pattern of competition between arguments that
express the positions persons take on validity claims. Competitions in which the best argu-
ment wins are judged according to logical-semantic rules and cannot be described as a
causal outcome of states of the limbic system:
The overlooked difference lies in the fact that, in the case of the back and forth of reasons,
the conflict can be described semantically, as a conflict between judgments as to what is
true and false (or right and wrong). A conflict of this sort is something quite different from
an interaction between bodily states, as they can’t contradict one another.28
Lutz Wingert has shown convincingly that, on the proposed neurological self-
description, persons become unintelligible as learners. The practice of research itself has
to be transformed for the participants into an opaque enterprise. According to the neuro-
logical self-description of a ‘dialogue of brains,’ the researchers would no longer be able to
understand what it means to correct theoretical hypotheses in light of better reasons, and
would thus be unable to improve the state of their knowledge or even to seek out new
knowledge. For knowledge and the growth of knowledge are irredeemably normative con-
cepts that resist all attempts at empiricist redescription (Kitcher 1992).
Note that what is putting up resistance here is not the subjectivity of conscious life,
which we attribute to animals as well. The conceptual objections to boundary-transgressing
attempts at self-objectification rest not in the first instance on the awkward ontological
status of subjective experiences, but rather on the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’
that is constitutive for our self-understanding. Certainly, experiences do represent an
unusual type of fact that can be assessed only subjectively. The qualitative aspect—
’what it feels like’ to be in a certain state—cannot in principle be expressed in a physicalist
language tailored to objects in the world (Nagel 1979). These experiential facts call atten-
tion to an irritating incompleteness in objectivating descriptions of the world. But by
setting the limits of self-objectification at the subjectivity of experience instead of at person-
hood, mentalism doesn’t go far enough. The paradigmatic favoring of experiences that
have little or no propositional content (such as pain or moods) can, in particular, seduce
one into objectivating the so-called ‘stream of experience,’ on analogy with observable
events in the world, as a succession of introspectively accessible ‘mental states.’
Attitudes that persons take towards facts or towards other persons are not experi-
ences that one can have or not have, but rather acts that are performed.29 This performative
character is explained by the fact that propositional attitudes and their contents are part of
rule-governed and jointly exercised practices that are oriented towards norms and that can
go wrong. Because they are subject to failure, judgments and statements, intentions and
actions must be able to ‘prove themselves.’ Since objectivating descriptions must, for con-
ceptual reasons, drop the difference between an operation’s success or failure and replace
it with the fact that it happens (‘that’s the way things are’), they make it impossible for a
person to recognize herself as a person.
How, for example, could someone who is trying to convince a skeptical opponent of
the truth of his claim be at the same time convinced that the totality ‘of human interactions,
including his own behavior, was already determined in advance’ (Nida-Rümelin 2005, 41)?
A sociological observer might describe a certain bit of rhetorical behavior as manipulating
or conditioning someone, but that is a description of an attempt to trigger the desired reac-
tion. Even if the target of the manipulation takes up the observer perspective herself, she
can still understand the manipulating person as someone who, under the pretense of being
oriented toward mutual understanding, wants to influence her, that is, to have a causal
influence on her. But she could not, in the same way, make a neurological description of
what happened her own, since the role of ‘causal mental influence’ has no place there.
This is because action-motivating reasons are just as irreducible to causally effective
events as are the corresponding vocabularies to which these concepts belong.
Naturalists won’t necessarily be discouraged by such arguments, which ultimately are
a matter of identifying a performative self-contradiction. As one would expect, philoso-
phers respond with many voices to the problem that I’ve just sketched. Against the prag-
matist defenders of common sense—for whom the resistance to revision of our
conceptually immunized sense of freedom is not something to be taken lightly—naturalists
can find powerful allies in the realist claims to scientific knowledge. The natural sciences
have established themselves within modern societies as the authority that adjudicates
fallible knowledge of the world. Given the naturalistic premise that what happens in the
world is thoroughly determined in accordance with laws of nature, there are two options.
The one side (discussed in the next section) looks for a conceptual route out of this
dead end, by denying that there is any problem with the alleged limits of self-objectifica-
tion. The other side (discussed in section 5) attempts to reserve an appropriate place for
mental states within the ontological framework of a world that is conceptualized in physic-
alist terms. In both cases, we run into the same problem: is it possible for the participant
perspective to be aligned with and subordinated under the observer perspective in such a
way that we can capture ourselves, in an objectivating manner [uns objectivierend einholen],
and observe ourselves from a fictitious view from nowhere—not just as acting and speak-
ing subjects, but also as epistemic subjects engaged in the act of investigating ‘ourselves’?
4. Three Compatibilist Arguments

Following the intuition ‘not to scratch where it doesn’t itch,’ compatibilism wants to
deflate the supposedly ill-conceived problem of free will.30 This position is spelled out in at
least three typical variations: (i) Since the presence of alternate possibilities is irrelevant for
the attribution of responsibility, the language game of responsible agency is compatible
with the image of a world as a causally closed, materialistic system. (ii) This argument is
strengthened by the further thought that the endlessly extendable causal chains in the
etiology of reasons play no role in contexts of justification. (iii) Lastly, the fact that knowl-
edge of the world’s deterministic character need not affect agents’ self-understanding is
explained on the basis of the bounded horizon of agents, who must choose between
alternatives under conditions of incomplete knowledge.
(i) In the tradition of G. E. Moore’s classic discussion (Moore 1912, chap. 6), it is sup-
posed to be possible for the agent to square a voluntaristic understanding of his choice
with the fact that the process by which the corresponding act of will came about is entirely
determined in accordance with laws of nature. For even in a causally closed universe, a
person can say that she could have acted differently. ‘Could,’ of course, in the sense that
she ‘would’ have, if she had wanted to (Nida-Rümelin 2005, 19ff.). An agent who wills an
act exclusively on the basis of her own practical judgment is going to attribute it to
herself, no matter how that willing is caused. Those who act on the basis of reason feel
(and are) responsible for their actions, even when they could not have acted otherwise.
Harry Frankfurt employs a variety of science-fiction examples to support the funda-
mental idea that our sense of freedom is compatible with determinism because the attribu-
tion of responsibility does not depend on the presence of alternate possibilities (Frankfurt
1969):
In a Frankfurt case, the agent is not able to do otherwise because in the alternate
sequence a fail-safe mechanism kicks in. But the operative causes are such that this mech-
anism actually never intervenes. The intuition Frankfurt cases appeal to is that this feature
of the alternate sequence is irrelevant. An actual-sequence condition sufficient for blame
can be met, even if the alternate-sequence ability-to-do-otherwise condition is not.
(Hurley 2003, 61f.)
Susan Hurley liberates this thesis from certain weaknesses associated with artificial
thought experiments. Taking the ordinary case of a person who departs from her ‘best
intentions’ because of a certain weakness of will, she asks rhetorically whether the
person can’t be held responsible for her action in this case, regardless whether she could
have acted differently, objectively speaking.
Examples of this sort have a certain plausibility, because they blur the transition from
the participant perspective to the observer perspective. An observer trying to assess the
behavior of another person must first determine what that person can be held responsible
for at all. He investigates the reasons for which the person acted. In attributing
responsibility, it doesn’t matter whether the observer is a determinist or not: the observer is
not concerned with whether the person could have acted differently. But it is quite relevant
for the agent. For her, it would have made no sense to deliberate about options if she had
to reckon with there being only one avenue open to her, which she would have taken
anyway, as the result of a predetermined evaluation process.31 That is why Frankfurt’s
examples are constructed in such a way that the agent has no knowledge of this fact.32
She is allowed to give in to the illusion that she can act otherwise.
The compatibility of determinism and a sense of freedom thus remains at best a com-
patibilist truth about agents. If this is to become a truth for the agents themselves, it is
essential to pay attention to the character and role of those premises that are ultimately
decisive from the participant perspective. We can lay out the pattern of justifications for
practical judgments in such a way that the actor starts out from accidental preferences
and, via values or higher-order desires, reexamines them in the light of those ‘personal pre-
ferences’ that are ultimately constitutive for his personal identity. And so, if those value-
orientations that take the role of first premises in the rational formation of a specific will
are anchored in one’s own identity, the agent will have the sense of having chosen
himself, independently of whether the emergence of the guiding premises—and thereby
the emergence of the ultimately decisive motives for acting—has to be understood, for
its part, as a chain of causally linked events.
On the basis of this line of thought, Michael Pauen offers the following definition of
freedom: ‘On this conception, a person acts freely when he chooses X instead of Y in a
certain situation just in case the decision in favor of X and against Y can be traced to his
personal preferences’ (Pauen 2004, 96). This suggestion also aims to disengage the
genesis from practically decisive reasons from their validity, but this time in such a
way that, should there be a deterministic account of the motivating reasons, it need
not affect the self-understanding of the reasoning and choosing person. The mistake
here can be traced, once again, to the failure to give due consideration to the switch
of perspectives, from which we describe identity-defining value-orientations either as
the semantic content of premises or as a mental state arising from a causally explicable
process. For the agent, replacing the one description with the other is not without
consequences.
Reasons stand in semantic relations to other reasons. They are fundamentally amen-
able to critique from opposing reasons, whereas causally explicable mental states or epi-
sodes cannot contradict one another. Despite this, compatibilistic arguments presuppose
that agents can act on reasons that they, on closer examination, identify with causally
explicable effects. But under that objectivating description, reasons are transformed into
something that is no longer within reach of any further arguments. And the agent’s
sense of freedom cannot but suffer damage, if he is no longer able to move without restric-
tions in the space of reasons and can no longer put any premise into question. Deliberating
agents also encounter identity-defining values not as mental events but rather as implicitly
endorsed value-judgments.33
Even character is something for which (adult) persons can be held responsible. One is
assumed to have, along with free will, the ability to engage critically with one’s own biogra-
phy. It is the ‘critical appropriation’ of one’s life-history that decides which of one’s forma-
tive traditions one consciously continues or rejects. Even the mere absence of the kind of
critical caesura (which is typical of adolescence) can be seen as an implicit choice for undis-
turbed continuity.34
(ii) In many ways, this compatibilist argument finds its extension in the thought that
we do not consider the same set of causes from an action’s ‘causal ancestry’ to be relevant
in contexts of justification as in contexts of explanation.35 Free will—the ability, that is, to
make self-binding decisions on the basis of practical judgments—is something that we pre-
suppose in justificatory contexts. Here, reasons for choice count as possible motives for
action, and they are also sufficient for ascribing responsibility. In such contexts, expla-
nations that require a switch from the participant perspective to the observer perspective
can, of course, play a role. But as we have seen, in this context causal explanations serve
only to set the limits beyond which a person can no longer be held (fully) responsible
for her actions. There is no room for dissonance between freedom and determinism here
either, since questions regarding the ascription of responsibility only make sense on the
assumption that persons generally act of their own free will.
Including explanations in the context of justification changes nothing in the illocu-
tionary meaning of the broader context, where persons need not be concerned about
the causal chains leading further back. According to the argument under discussion, the
reassuring separation of the (otherwise unsettling) etiology of an act of will from the validity
of the corresponding justificatory reasons is wholly a matter of the context-specific rel-
evance of the question that is being posed. It is not until we move from contexts in which
participants require one another to account for themselves to contexts in which actions
and action-complexes are explained that their interest shifts to long-term causal
connections.
The weakness of this argument lies in the imprecise use of the concept of ‘causal
explanation.’ For what is at issue, of course, is how agents’ intuitive sense of freedom is
affected by a naturalistic worldview that considers valid only nomological behavioral expla-
nations and thus suppresses the explanatory role of intelligible motives for action. In foren-
sic discussions, excusing and exculpatory reasons do rely on causal explanations that
represent, from an observer perspective, the set of conditions for deviant behavior. Rational
and naturalistic explanations take on different roles there, however, and they influence
agents’ self-understanding in different ways, as we have seen.
In cases of rationally comprehensible action explanations, the compatibility of causa-
tion and freedom is obvious, because reasons play analogous roles in explanations and in
justifications. An ‘emergency’ can serve as an excuse in contexts of justification only if those
reasons can also count in explanatory contexts as the cause of a crime—that means, only
if the person involved violated the norm for that reason. But as soon as the exculpatory
reasons for eliminating guilt (such as excessive alcohol or a severe psychiatric condition)
come to be based on nomological explanations, the attribution of free will is ruled out
by the causal connections. If there was no connection, at the moment of acting,
between the causes of the action and the possible reasons for the action, then the
accused couldn’t have acted differently. As a result, the language game of responsible
agency implodes as soon as the generalization of naturalistic explanations withdraws the
premise of free will from circulation.
At best, the contextualist argument gains its initial plausibility from the fact that it
considers only one type of explanation. In fact, however, it is not the context of justification
that leaves the sense of freedom intact but rather the type of non-naturalistic explanation
that must make reference to the range of agents’ deliberation and choice. Unlike event-
causation, which applies to physical connections between organisms and their environ-
ment or to networks within an organism, the semantically mediated causality of reasons
affects perceptions and feelings, deliberative processes and motives for action by way of
cultural traditions, socialization processes, and social norms and thus does not undermine
agents’ understanding of themselves as persons. This holds for complex historical and
social scientific or even economic explanations no less than for simple narratives and
folk psychological explanations.36
(iii) Compatibilist arguments aim to show that knowledge of the causal closure of
the universe is irrelevant for our sense of responsible agency. One position that fits this
pattern is Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it makes no difference to us as risk-conscious, intel-
ligent animals whether we consider freedom to be an illusion or not: ‘There are those who
don’t believe in free will and thereby don’t have free will, and there are those who do
believe in free will and thereby actually have free will’ (Dennett 2003, 13). That doesn’t
mean that the naturalistic worldview is supposed to be false; as a philosopher, Dennett
is a staunch advocate of determinism. Though we do not yet know (nor ever will know)
all natural laws, we already have good reasons to think of the universe from the perspective
of a Laplacean demon, according to which there is, at any given moment, only one possible
course of future states of the world. Accordingly, it is impossible for there to be two differ-
ent worlds stemming from the same initial state. If any given pair of possible worlds has just
one state of the world in common, then each of the two worlds will satisfy the true descrip-
tions of all states of the world following from that state. But for a living being who has been
equipped by evolution with bounded rationality and is thus fated to act intelligently under
conditions of uncertainty, it makes no difference in practice whether or not we conceive of
the world materialistically and view it as causally closed.
It is also clear from the perspective of the scientific observer that the notion of a
deterministic universe need not lead to the disabling consequence of all events being
‘inevitable.’ Rather, in a biological world that has given rise to designs for avoiding risks
and warding off threats, there is a difference between avoidable and unavoidable events.
The more intelligent a creature, the more effective the corresponding protective mechan-
isms—and the less plausible it is to accept that a deterministic conception could keep us
from thinking about how to choose the best option from the available range of alternatives
so as to advance our own interests by choosing prudently: ‘This proves that “evitability” can
be achieved in a deterministic world’ (Dennett 2003, 62) and ‘it follows that the truth or
falsity of determinism should not affect our belief that certain unrealized events were never-
theless “possible,” in an important everyday sense of the word’ (Dennett 2003, 77).
The restriction of the claim to the everyday sense of modal expressions, emphasized
by Dennett himself, already calls attention to the tacit shift in perspective that compatibilist
arguments exploit again and again. The danger that appears avoidable for an agent (who
doesn’t know better) and the goal that appears attainable from the perspective of the agent
is what the scientist conceptualizes from the perspective of an observer as states of the world
that are ‘intrinsically’ [‘an sich’] predetermined. The talk of ‘options’ and ‘avoidable risks’ is
only meaningful with reference to the perspective taken up by intelligent but needy and
vulnerable persons, as they try to read situations on the basis of limited information and
fallible expectations, so as to cope (in light of their interests) with contingencies that
they cannot anticipate. To dispel the contradiction between a naturalist worldview and
agents’ self-understanding, it is thus not enough to notice from the bird’s-eye point of
view of the scientist that such alternatives and degrees of freedom can exist only from
the perspective of the participants. For despite the finite character of the situated rationality
which enables them to forecast the future only within narrow limits, those agents are
identical to the persons who watch the world, as it were, from outside or above. What
the one knows, the other cannot simply ignore.
Here again, we encounter a failure to be sensitive to how deep-seated the participant
perspective is, and this can be traced to the basic scientistic assumption that the objectivat-
ing perspective of the natural sciences has priority over the participating perspective. It is
precisely from the standpoint of evolutionary theory taken up by Daniel Dennett (and
developed beyond the borders of evolutionary biology) that this scientism ceases to be
self-evident. The finitude of an evolved and embedded mind speaks rather against the
unquestioned subordination of the participant perspective (from which the objective
world confronts us in our practical dealings with uncontrollable contingencies) to a
transcendent standpoint beyond the world, that must not be a mere ‘standpoint’:
It is precisely the idea of a transcendent, final, ultimate description of ‘the universe’ that is
inconsistent. It is the fiction, on the basis of which—and only on the basis of which—our
sense of freedom becomes, as viewed from the outside, a fiction. As soon as one sees that
the capacity for participating in justificatory practices is essential for all knowledge—
and for every intelligible conception of knowledge—this construction collapses.
(Seel 2005, 151)37
5. Naturalistic Explanations of Epistemic Dualism

Even if compatibilism fails, naturalists needn’t concede defeat. Why should one give
up the claim that neurology will one day be able to fully explain mental states, just because
that knowledge could never be reconciled practically (that is, in the course of realizing an
intention) with agents describing themselves as persons? The potential success of this
program won’t depend on the implications that it has ‘for us’ in the lifeworld. The naturalist
is thus well advised to give up the epistemic approach, tied to the consciousness of actors,
and to consider instead ontological accounts of the place of mental states in a causally
closed, materialistic world.
(i) The approaches within non-eliminativist or non-reductionist materialism aim to

do justice to the phenomenal distinctiveness (even causal efficacy) of the mind without
sacrificing the naturalistic assumption that the structure of the world is to be described
in terms of natural science and, ultimately, physicalism. There is no question about the
world’s causally closed character and the feasibility of a materialist account of the elements
from which the world is constructed. The conceptions differ from one another, however,
according to how they understand the irreducible ‘distinctiveness’ of the mind and how
they explain ‘mental causation.’ The preferred version, which is seen as unproblematic
within the naturalist camp, settles for characterizing the mind’s levels of complexity in
terms of ‘emergent’ properties, in a weak sense.
Properties of reproduction (such as self-organization, growth, evolution, metabolism,
procreation, etc.) arise at the level of organismic life, whereas properties of subjectivity
(such as sensations, spontaneous movement, perception, etc.) emerge with more highly
organized living beings (Toepfer 2005). But emergent properties appear even in inorganic
nature. In general, these are properties that first emerge at the level of a system but not yet
at the level of its components; they are generated by novel constellations of the com-
ponent parts. The aspect of novelty can be further specified from the diachronic viewpoint
of evolution. We call properties ‘emergent’ that arise out of new constellations and also
could not have been predicted before they were first exemplified (Stephan 2005). If prop-
erties of persons, such as intentionality and linguistic competence, could be understood
and causally explained as ‘emergent’ in a manner similar to that of the biological properties
just mentioned, then mind would fit into the causally closed, materialistic world.
Here too, of course, it must be possible to decompose what happens at the systems
level into its parts and, with the help of a theoretical model, to describe it in such a way that
it is possible, at least in principle, to explain how events at the systems level arise from the
law-governed interaction of these elements. For any (in a weak sense) emergent property,
this way of proceeding means that ‘living or minded systems—whether natural or
artificial—must be comprised of the same basic building blocks as the inanimate things
in nature’ (Stephan 2005, 91).
Let’s assume for the moment that the neurosciences were able to naturalize the mind
in this methodological sense. They could then recognize the distinctive features of intentions
and subjective experiences to the extent to which these phenomena fit the account of
emergent properties, without thereby attributing to ‘the mental’ an ontological status
different from that of ‘the physical.’ Of course, this ‘phenomenal distinctiveness’ would
not yet be sufficient to grant mental properties ‘causal efficacy.’ Since the law-like physical
regularities governing the interaction of the elemental building blocks reach right through
all levels of emergence, there is no room in such a universe for mental causation.
Against this, Donald Davidson insists on explaining the puzzling intuition that he
illustrates once more with a dry example: ‘Thus for example if someone sank the
Bismark, then various mental events such as perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements,
decisions, intentional actions, and changes of beliefs played a causal role in the sinking of
the Bismark’ (Davidson 1980, 208). Like many other analytic philosophers, Davidson
assumes that mental events cannot be reduced to physical events either via psycho-
physical laws or definitions, i.e. via conceptual relations between different theoretical
levels. Yet he also rejects the idea of an interaction between mental and physical events
and thus the idea of some kind of downward causation. He employs the notion of property
supervenience to explain the experience of mental causation in a purely ontological
manner: all events are physical in nature, but some of these events ‘bear,’ in a certain
sense, not only physical but also mental properties. Whenever they have the physical
property Kx, they evidence the mental property Gx.
Insofar as the goal of the argument here is to reserve space for mental activity within
a world that is explained entirely in physicalist terms, this ‘anomalous monism’ is also
unconvincing. For it is superfluous to postulate the existence of a special sort of property,
if ‘it does no causal work’38 in a materialistically conceived world, in which only events can
influence one another. Davidson’s attempt to save the mind from reduction seems to lead
unintentionally to its elimination. At this point, I don’t need to go any further into Jaegwon
Kim’s criticisms. If one still wants to hang on to the same argumentative goal, the only
surviving option is to expand or supplement the conception of natural causation. More
recent approaches drop the idea of mental events being realized according to natural
laws in a causally closed world of physical events. They either presuppose the underdeter-
mination of higher emergent levels by physicalist laws (Nida-Rümelin 2005, 74ff.)39 or they
grant causal powers to properties and configurations of properties (Detel 2004).
(ii) The plausibility of the explanatory attempts discussed thus far is generally ham-
pered by a mentalistic definition of the phenomena in need of explanation. If ‘mind’ [‘Geist’]
is in each case to be exhausted by the set of mental events generated by the brain activities
of a single human organism, then the kind of mind that is instantiated via symbols within
the communicative context of culture and society shrinks to an epiphenomenon. The dis-
solution of this, as I am calling it, ‘objective mind’ into mental events (that is, events loca-
lized within consciousness) is meant to deny the difference between subjective mind and
the particular milieu, within which it first develops. The result is an oversimplified concep-
tualization of mind –brain relations. Let’s assume a neurologist with the right theory suc-
ceeded in describing segments of his own conscious life. Would the human mind then
have caught up to and appropriated its own genealogy epistemically—would it have in
a sense ‘comprehended’ itself?
Wolfgang Prinz sees psychology as having good prospects for closing the gap
between subjective and objective mind that arise in physicalist research programs, and
thereby doing justice more fully to the phenomenon of free will (Prinz 1996). Taking off
from psychological constructivism, he draws on the insights that Wittgenstein reached in
his analysis of first-person sentences and uses them to develop a convincing critique of
the supposedly introspective access to one’s own experiences.40 The content of subjective
experiences is only the result of interpretations that ‘process input information according to
their own categories and with their own means of presentation.’41 It is not entirely clear
here to whom or what the contents owe their categorical form—to the language of
the interpreter, perhaps? As we shall see later, it had better not be the grammatical
‘means of presentation’ of an intersubjectively shared language.
In the following step, Prinz explains choices of actions on the basis of preferences,
practical know-how and situation assessments. An anonymous process of interacting
psychological variables is presented as giving rise to decisions, ‘without there being
anyone there to make them.’ Actions do, however, get attributed to persons, who under-
stand themselves as persons, that is, as selves. Thus, the ‘knowledge structures that bear
the “self” must be built up together with the knowledge structures for the preferences,
practical know-how, and situation assessments’ (Prinz 2001, 203).
The decisive step is the explanation of the self’s genesis as the result of social inter-
action, in which the actors attribute to one another authorship and the capacity for choice.
The self-relation of persons is supposed to arise out of answering expectations in a ‘discur-
sive situation’ that ‘provides’ every actor with a ‘self-fitting role.’ The model for this learning
situation—in which one acquires a self-image in the course of finding oneself ‘mirrored’ in
the view of the other—is obviously the acquisition of one’s native language, whose system
of personal pronouns provides the requisite categories (Prinz 2005). Children learn to apply
the system of ‘I,’ ‘you,’ and ‘he’ or ‘she’ correctly just insofar as they mature into the recipro-
cally exchangeable communicative roles of speaker and hearer and then reflexively turn the
attitude of a first person vis-à-vis a second person back on themselves, so as to finally
connect both perspectives with the observer perspective of a third person.42
Prinz conceptualizes ‘a person’ and ‘a self’ in this sense as ‘institutions.’ They fulfill the
function of ascribing responsibility and thereby make possible the self-organization of
societies. For only once decisions about how to act are localized in the ‘person’ is there
an addressee for potential punishments or rewards. This analysis seems to fit seamlessly
with the conception of free will as a necessary presupposition for the language game of
responsible agency: ‘Institutions give rise to intuitions . . . Intuitions regarding freedom
develop within socially regulated discourses and then contribute to their own stabilization’
(Prinz 2001, 204). Proponents of free will could be entirely satisfied: as a social construction,
free will is, of course, an ‘artifact.’ All of the symbolic forms in which culture and society exist
constitute an artificially created reality, which maintains itself only in the medium of human
communication.
On the other hand, the answer to the question of whether humans have free will or
not remains unclear—’actually no, but practically yes.’ The word ‘artifact’ starts to sound like
something from a fantasy world, when Prinz begins his treatise with the following sentence:
‘Discussing free will from the perspective of psychology is like discussing unicorns from the
perspective of zoology: one is discussing something that is not actually provided for in the
ontology of the discipline’ (Prinz 2001, 198). Here, the psychologist is speaking as a natural
scientist, who takes it for granted a priori that whatever happens in the causally closed
world is determined by laws of nature. That is why psychological constructivism, which
is to explain the distinctive features of the objective mind, has to be brought in line with
a neurobiological materialism, which insists on reduction and denies causal efficacy to
what emerges in culture and society. Prinz holds open the door for a neurological reduction
of higher-level phenomena: the practical know-how and personal self-understanding can
emerge only ‘on the foundation of subpersonal processes’ (Prinz 2001, 204). Conscious
deliberation contributes at most to elaborating the processes of decision-making that
occur unconsciously but can, for their part, be traced back to brain processes with the
help of psycho-physical laws.
This step returns us, however, to the problem of transition from one language-game to
the other: how do we get from the description of neural ‘events’ to the description of con-
structive ‘accomplishments’ without covertly presupposing the meaning of ‘construction’
and ‘mutual attribution’? The account of the ‘social construction of the self’ gets its plausi-
bility by tacitly presupposing a form of interaction, whose development out of subpersonal
processes actually has yet to be explained. What is presupposed is the ability to communicate
in a language that provides grammatically prestructured blanks that the growing child fills in
as the result of mirroring and attribution. But children can learn this only if there is already a
competent speaker present who can undertake attributions. Even a mentalistic theory of
attribution (that is, a theory restricted to the observer perspective)43 is unable to explain
how linguistic forms of interaction can emerge out of anonymous, selfless, pre-personal
knowledge structures; for they always already presuppose participants in interaction.
This attempt to explain the ‘self’ naturalistically, as an instance of mutual ascription of
responsibility, has the advantage of taking seriously the communicatively generated con-
nection between the subjective and the objective mind. The attempt fails because the
social constitution of the human mind, which unfolds within interpersonal relationships,
can be made accessible only from the perspective of participants and cannot be captured
from the perspective of an observer who objectivates everything into an event in the world.
What again proves to be problematic is the scientistic presupposition of an exclusive ‘view
from nowhere.’ That is already betrayed by the involuntary humor in the title of a well-
known German book (Roth 2003): ‘From the Perspective of the Brain,’ there is nothing
whatsoever to be perceived, since the term ‘brain’ stands for nothing more than slices of
observable events.
Hilary Putnam developed his notion of an ‘internal realism’ from his epistemological
critique of the ‘God’s eye point of view.’ Without sacrificing the universalistic claim to truth,
he accounts for the trivial fact that ‘we’—subjects who are situated in the world and
capable of speech and action—are the ones who seek out, from within the horizon of our
own lifeworld, the best possible cognitive access to the objective world.44 The resistance to
a naturalistic self-description stemming from our self-understanding as persons is explained
by the fact that there is no getting around a dualism of epistemic perspectives that must
interlock in order to make it possible for the mind, situated as it is within the world, to get
an orienting overview of its own situation. Even the gaze of a purportedly absolute obser-
ver cannot sever the ties to one standpoint in particular, namely that of a counterfactually
extended argumentation community.45
6. The Epistemological Turn and the Impossibility of Getting Around

Our Epistemic Dualism
The two epistemic perspectives of observer and participant can be traced to ‘world
perspectives’ that originate simultaneously from our form of linguistic communication.
When persons reach an understanding about something, their view is directed at objects
and events in the objective world, while they participate in joint practices within their inter-
subjectively shared lifeworld. It is not the subjectivity of our conscious life that distinguishes
humans from other creatures but the intentional stance and the interlocking of the inter-
subjective relations between persons with an objectivating attitude to something in the
world. The linguistic socialization of consciousness and the intentional relation to the
world are mutually constitutive in the circular sense that each presupposes the other
conceptually.
The pragmatic universals of ordinary language endow the speaker and the hearer—
who use language to communicate with each other about something—with a double refer-
ence: in relating to each other as first and second persons, participants within the horizon of
a shared lifeworld simultaneously refer, in the objectivating attitude of a third person, to
objects in the world about which something can be said. Participants in such a practice
of coming to an understanding view themselves as persons who owe one another
reasons for their utterances. These properties, which are familiar from performative con-
texts, are also attributed to persons when they are described and observed, together
with their practices, as ‘occurrences within the world.’ That explains why the intentionalist
predicates with which a vocabulary must be equipped (if it is to be suitable for describing
persons and their utterances) can be learned only performatively, through being practiced
by agents who relate to each other in interaction as second persons.
Let me recapitulate the line of reasoning that Wilfrid Sellars took in a famous essay
(Sellars 1963). Starting from a stereotypical image of the archaic beginnings in the
history of our species, it seems to have been common to include nature (that is, what
occurs in the objective world) within the social relations of the intersubjectively shared
lifeworld—say, by personifying strange natural forces. To the extent that humans had to
deal with the risks of an unpredictable nature the internal logic of such problems required
increasingly de-socialized accounts. A language of objects and events (which is suited to
observable and ultimately to physically measurable states of the world) thus emerged, as
part of a process of differentiation that brought with it distinctions among basic categories
(such as natural law and social norm, is and ought, cause and motive) and among the
corresponding explanatory patterns. It is at this point that the cognitive potential could
be realized that is built into the participant and observer world-perspectives, which have
been interlocking from the outset. It is this rationalization of experience and know-how
found in everyday life (and in professions and craft traditions) that eventually gave rise to
scientific disciplines.
This development took place along several tracks, each of which was connected with
a specific form of dealing with the world: objects and events could be manipulated and
manufactured or controlled; plants and animals were cultivated, tended, or bred; and, in
the case of other persons, one was engaged communicatively in shared practices, experi-
ences, and histories (Janich 2006). But, in the end, the development of modern sciences
ended up with the two options of ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ [‘Erklären’ und ‘Verste-
hen’] as prevailing methods (Apel 1978). In the natural sciences—despite some remaining
problems within the life sciences—theoretical strategies are directed towards discovering
deterministic or probabilistic laws and towards nomological explanations of physically
measurable processes; in the humanities and social sciences, theoretical strategies are
directed towards explicating and interpreting semantic and empirical connections
among hermeneutically disclosed data.46 Even though theory development in these
‘soft’ disciplines remains dependent on intentionalist concepts, owing to the interpretive
access to the object domain, here too investigations strive for the same ideal of scientific
objectivity.
For its part, philosophy sustains itself on the conceptual analysis of intuitive knowl-
edge that (as in the hermeneutical disciplines) can be accessed only from the participant
perspective. And metaphysics, as long as it has been trying to explain humankind’s place
in nature as a whole, took its basis concepts unquestioningly from within the perspective
of the lifeworld. It was not until the 17th century that it was confronted with the question as
to what it means for humankind to understand itself in the context of scientifically objecti-
vated nature. Naturalism has radicalized this challenge, asking for an ever more thorough
self-objectification of human mind and behavior. With this call to replace the ‘manifest
image of man’ (proposed from a lifeworld perspective) with a scientific self-description
of man, a conflict broke out between the epistemic perspectives, which are normally inter-
connected within a division of labor. Once science started to advance into the research
domain of psychology, and once the operations and accomplishments of a normatively
constituted and culturally embedded mind could no longer simply be presupposed as back-
ground and resource for research practices—but were, instead, themselves reduced to
genetically rooted neural processes—the question arose as to the priority of the objectivat-
ing perspective over the participant perspective. Up to that point, the distinctive ways of
exploiting the rational potential found in both dimensions of our dealings with the
world—on the one hand, our dealings with what we encounter only within the objective
world; on the other hand, our dealings with what is also (if only intitially) available to us
in a performative mode, within the lifeworld—seemed to run in parallel, that is, to
express the same rationalization of everyday knowledge.
In his essay, Sellars examines what the naturalization of mind means for persons who,
up to that point, have understood themselves unquestioningly, from within their familiar
world, to be persons. Remarkably, Sellars doesn’t present the contrast between the ‘scien-
tific’ and the ‘manifest image of man’ as a conflict that could be decided in favor of the pri-
ority of one or the other perspective. Sellars is convinced that the double perspective as
such belongs to the correct self-understanding of humankind, because morality (under-
stood along Kantian lines) must not be sacrificed to the scientific image:
To say that a certain person desired to do A, though it is his duty to do B but was forced to
do C, is not to describe him as one might describe a scientific specimen. One does, indeed,
describe him, but one does something more. And it is this ‘something more’ which is the
irreducible core of the framework of persons . . . From this point of view, the irreducibility
of the personal is the irreducibility of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is.’ (Sellars 1963, 39)
One can understand Sellars here as saying that humankind’s attempts at scientific
self-objectification run up against the firmly established limits of a personalistic self-under-
standing that we could not want to see dissolved in revisionistic descriptions. But one can
also understand Sellars’s thesis in a stronger sense, as asserting that we are incapable of
getting around the interlocking perspectives rooted in our cultural forms of communi-
cation and branching out into the scientific and manifest images of humankind: we
cannot abandon the participant perspective, for ‘there is no observation without at least
virtual participation’ (Seel 2005, 145). This insight does not, of course, settle the ontological
question of what the nature of the universe is supposed to be. But given that the natura-
listic option runs up against stiff resistance from an unavoidable perspectival dualism, a
third option suggests itself: to take Kant’s transcendental turn seriously and to reflect on
the pragmatic preconditions for our cognitive access to the world.
The impossibility of getting around this epistemic dualism invites a transcendental
approach, according to which naturalism confuses the nature discussed in the natural
sciences with the universe that includes humankind as part of nature. But a transcendental
idealism that removes from the natural sciences the spur of a realist claim to knowledge has
little plausibility today. Even if the complementary interlocking of epistemic perspectives is
part of the constitution of socio-cultural forms of life, everything speaks for the assumption
that our forms of life, like other animal forms of life, are the result of natural evolution. In any
event, there is no reason to transpose symbolic meanings and cognitive operations to an
intelligible realm, and to relocate the ‘intelligible’ beyond space and time.
This is the source of the widespread skepticism against epistemological arguments
for restricting the range of the ‘scientific image of the world.’ On the other hand, non-
reductive materialism also faces difficulties that raise the question as to how the natural
sciences model their object domains in the quest for nomological knowledge. It is hard
to dismiss reflections upon the foundations of scientific object domains in the lifeworld.
But can epistemology push aside the ontological question as to the constitution of a uni-
verse that includes humankind as part of nature? The epistemological turn should not have
the strong transcendental point of immunizing the intersubjective conditions for a scientific
objectivation of nature against further empirical research. That turn should rather open the
door to a detranscendentalizing natural history, in which ‘nature’ has been liberated from
the corset of a physicalist ontology.
Certainly, the history of science reminds us of the amazing success of reductionist
research strategies in explaining ever more complex and higher-level phenomena on the
basis of the nomological interaction of their physical and biochemical components. The
scientific worldview envisions a path from atomic particles and molecules, via gases,
fluids, solid bodies, and inorganic substances to genes, whole organisms, and species.
But we can at best only wager that the same nomological pattern of explanations, exper-
imental methods, and measurement techniques will also open up the path from neurons to
consciousness and culture (Clayton 2004, 31f.).
In deciding how much to put on the table, we should consider two factors that speak
against such a wager. First, owing to the dualism of epistemic perspectives, this level of
emergence lacks one of the necessary conditions for successful reduction, namely a
unified terminology for both mental operations and brain states. One way to put this is as
follows: ‘The assertion that consciousness consists in neurons, synapses, and neurotransmit-
ters is meaningless’ (Falkenberg 2006, 67). It is entirely unclear what the language would be
in which psycho-physical regularities could be formulated. In the second place, the sugges-
tive image of a well-ordered hierarchy of scientific theories, in which each theory connects
up with the next, is misleading. There are huge explanatory gaps even just within physics,
and most definitely in the transition to biology:
Modeling natural processes on physical, chemical and biological laws is dis-unitary and
gappy. Those who [think] . . . that the domain of physics or of the physical is closed
should reconsider. At this point, in any case, there can be no talk of the causally closed
character of scientific explanations. Worse yet: it is neither clear nor unified what the
term ‘causal’ is actually supposed to mean in that assertion, given current physicalist the-
ories. (Falkenberg 2006, 53)
If nature itself does not yet fit completely into causal models, then it makes sense to
look carefully at the link between theory formation and the constructive accomplishments
of research practice. Research communities constitute domains of inquiry by setting the
framing categories and working out how phenomena ought to be described and how
data ought to be collected. In the footsteps of Kant and Husserl—and of Peirce and
Dewey—there have been attempts to develop a transcendental-pragmatic interpretation
of research practices.47 On this reading, the conceptual constitution of domains of
inquiry, the construction of designs and measurements, and the experimental production
of data are all rooted in pre-scientific practices.48 Such a recourse to lifeworld bases of scien-
tific practice in no way requires a departure from realist interpretations of scientific knowl-
edge (Habermas 2003b). But the shift in the level of argumentation—from purportedly
representing the ontological constitution of the world to reflecting on the preconditions
for our cognitive access to that world—is not a trivial move. In the present context, two
implications are especially important.
First, we forego the basic scientistic assumption that ‘nature,’ as it is conceived in
nomological science, extends to the whole of what we encounter, in one way or the
other, as nature (Danto 1961, 448– 50). For the deconstruction of naturalism, a decisive
role is played by the interventionist conception of causation that goes back to Kant and
Peirce49 and was further developed by Georg Henrik von Wright (1971). If law-like general-
izations, allowing for counterfactual conditional statements, are conceptually dependent
on the idea of instrumental action (in the sense of intentionally producing effects in the
world), then the ‘nature’ of the natural sciences covers everything that can be objectivated
under the aspect of potential technical control—but only that. It coincides with what can
be disclosed from the viewpoint of possible causal explanations, qualified predictions, and
controlled interventions. This restriction would explain why research practices cannot,
without remainder, be brought over to the object side and described completely as causally
determined processes.50 The intersubjective preconditions for the objectivating mode of
any scientific access to the world escape this objectivating outlook.
Second, the epistemological turn saves us from reducing what we mean by ‘mind’ to
the level of ‘mental events.’ If we look for ‘the mental’ where it belongs, namely in the
grammatical rules and semantic contents of everyday communicative practices, it becomes

clear that the ‘subjective’ mind of intentions and experiences cannot be separated from
the symbolic forms of the ‘objective’ mind. We must not allow what we express in first-
person sentences to be cut loose from the pragmatic context of expressive communication
(von Savigny and Schulz 1995) and objectified as mental episodes that can be depicted
(Schneider 2005). Phenomena of conscious life such as experiences, beliefs, and intentions
depend on the complex structure combining linguistic competence with an intentional atti-
tude towards the world and reciprocal perspective-taking. The ‘mind’ depends on these emer-
gent properties, which are at the same time constitutive for socio-cultural forms of life.
7. The Project of Radical Detranscendentalization: The Mind as Part

of Natural History
An epistemological turn of this sort takes account of the epistemic dualism, but
moves us farther away from an ontological monism that would solve the puzzle of how
a mind that has this perspectival structure is situated in nature. Interestingly, there is an
obscure passage in Kant, where he cryptically refers to the a posteriori regarding the ‘orig-
inal acquisition’ of a priori forms of intuition and concepts of the understanding: ‘There
must indeed be a ground for it in the subject, however, which makes it possible that
these representations can arise in this and no other manner, and be related to objects
which are not yet given, and this ground at least is innate’ (Kant 2002 [1790], 312 [Ak
8:221]). One must read Kant here against his own systematic intentions, as saying that
even the ‘innate’ has its origin within time. But don’t we lose cognitive footing as soon
as we start probing beyond a nomological conception of nature that is restricted to the
aspect of how anything could be put at our disposal? Nevertheless, from other modes of
encountering nature, we do get other concepts, for example, the concepts of natural evol-
ution and natural history (Quante 2006). Today, Kant needs to be reconciled not with
Newton but with Darwin (Habermas 2004)—something Helmut Plessner already called
for. I would like to warn, however, against a premature answer to the question of how
the ‘nature’ of natural history, broadly understood, differs from the nature of the natural
sciences.
The very meaning of the ontological question changes once we start focusing on
natural history in order to detranscendentalize the necessary intersubjective preconditions
for objectivating the observable processes of both external nature and our own inner
nature. Since we cannot escape the epistemic priority of the linguistically articulated
horizon of the lifeworld, the ontological priority of language-independent reality can
make itself heard in our learning processes only by imposing constraints on our practices
and by indirectly steering us via the interplay of construction and experience. In that
case, however, the pictorial notion of ‘representing’ reality is the wrong model for the
sort of knowledge that is possible for us; there are no proper ontological questions in
which the suggestive power of the metaphor of the ‘mirror of nature’ gets repaid.51
The world consists in everything to which we can refer in true propositions. There’s
not much more to say than that. In speaking of the totality of the objects of possible true
propositions, we refer to all those constraints that challenge us to learn something
about the world; whereas in speaking of the totality of facts, we anticipate what we
might have learned, at the end of time, from those challenges about the world. What for
us gains the quality of something worth knowing depends not merely on the world but
just as much on our position in the world. That is why ‘the world’ is a limit concept or an
‘idea’ (in the Kantian sense): the world consists in all the objects of possible references, not
in the language-dependent facts that we come to assert regarding these referents.
After the linguistic turn, we are left with a realism without representation (Habermas
2003b, 40ff.). Facts do, of course, say something about the world—but ‘we’ are the ones for
whom they say something. Even though facts can provide guidance only to ‘us,’ as evolved,
linguistic creatures that stand in certain relations to the world, that need not diminish at all
the truth and realist content of our propositions. On the other hand, there are no voices
from off-stage, no propositional contents, stripped of any place and origin in the world,
nor any ‘thoughts’ of the sort that populate Frege’s and Popper’s third world, waiting to
be discovered by either common-sense or science. Propositions must be assertable, and
assertions [Behauptungen] have their place in space and time. This is why it is distinctive
of ontological propositions that they cannot reflect anything but the grammatical form
of the language in which they (along with the speaker’s form of life) are expressed. The
only ontology that one is still willing to admit becomes uninteresting, whereas the more
interesting ontology that takes the form of a philosophy of nature doesn’t meet with
much confidence anymore.
It’s not as if there aren’t any reasons for speculating on the lines of causal influence
within one and the same thermodynamic system [Energiehaushalt], running not only
bottom-up (from physical and biological, to psychological and socio-cultural levels) but
also top-down (from higher to lower levels of complexity) (Clayton 2004). For example,
the increasing complexity of self-organization that we observe in the course of the evol-
ution of the species invites people to consider a layered ontology of ‘strongly’ emergent
properties at each ‘higher’ level of development. I, too, suspect that grammatical speech
and mental operations instantiated in brain processes will have to be explained in terms
of a ‘collaboration’ of cultural programs and neuronal processes, that is, in a non-
reductionist manner (Habermas 2004). But this metaphor doesn’t really tell us anything,
as long as we lack a concept for the ‘interaction’ between processes that get described,
at different levels of description, in terms of different categories of ‘causation’ [and as
long as we also lack a satisfactory solution for the subsequent problem of the compatibility
of downward causation with the principle of the conservation of energy (Flohr 2005;
Putnam 1999, 78f.)]. The tradition of the romantic philosophy of nature cannot simply be
continued, given American Pragmatism’s extension of the Young-Hegelians’ deflation of
German Idealism’s overambitious epistemic claims.52
However much we might be encouraged by the diversity of the types of explanations
in physics, biology, and psychology to break with the naturalistic worldview (which forms
the basis for non-reductionistic versions of materialism as well; Dupré 2004), it is at least as
difficult for a philosophy of nature that strives intentione recta (that is, in an ontological
orientation towards all that exists) for a synthesis of various disciplines to remain at eye-
level with postmetaphysical thinking.53 With regard to the supposed priority of the obser-
ver perspective over the participant perspective, philosophy of nature is just as insensitive
as naturalism is; it’s merely that there is a change in what is occupying the ‘God’s eye point
of view’: in place of the subpersonal brain, we get some successor to the absolute Spirit
[Geist] (however it may be disguised).
Against this, the attempt at detranscendentalization, based on natural history, of our
‘species-specific knowledge a priori’ has to take into account the impossibility of getting
around the complementarily interlocking epistemic perspectives. We cannot understand
culture and society as a context of communication from the ‘perspective of the brain,’
because there is no ‘view from nowhere’—no observation independent of prior partici-
pation in some kind of communication. Nor can we infinitely expand the finite dimensions
of our mind so as to reconstruct, from the standpoint of an absolute observer, natural evol-
ution as the prehistory of the mind. Trivially, we have to make do with the resources of
organized research that we have developed in the course of our cultural and scientific
history, if we want to explain how the genetically steered processes of evolution were
switched from the mechanisms of mutation and selection to the conditions of cultural
learning (with the resulting exponential acceleration of development).
This explanatory attempt starts out from the meta-theoretical assumption: ‘our’ learn-
ing processes, which depend on the framework of sociocultural forms of life, are in a sense
the continuation of prior ‘evolutionary learning processes’ that gave rise to ‘our’ forms of
life. For then the structures that form the intersubjective conditions of the possibility of
acquiring knowledge turn out to be the result of less complex, natural learning-processes;
this explains why they themselves possess their tried and tested cognitive content: namely
owing to their emergence from cognitively relevant processes of selection and adaptation.
The ‘continuation’ of learning processes at a higher level must be understood, however, in
the sense of a weak naturalism that makes no reductionist claims. Obviously, the ability to
take the perspective of the other (Tomasello 1999) and the mastery of a propositionally dif-
ferentiated language mark a deep evolutionary break. With the transition from the
organism –environment (or subject –environment) relations to the intentional stance
vis-á-vis an objective world and to the reflexive self-relations of persons who share a life-
world with other persons, the cooperation of con-specifics gets restructured on the basis
of a ‘socialized’ intelligence. Since we always already make use of and intuitively master
rather complex forms of intentionality and intersubjectivity, we can analyze and reconstruct
‘from the inside,’ as it were, the necessary conditions for the possibility of cultural learning.
But we will be able to conceive of the genesis of those enabling conditions only once we
have understood natural evolution itself as a ‘learning process’ in a non-metaphorical and
yet postmetaphysical way. Only once we have succeeded in properly naturalizing the mind,
will we also have gained an appropriate interpretation of the kind of ‘reason’ that is already
at work in subhuman nature—and will have learned to explain the provisionally employed
conception of ‘natural history.’
However this may be, I would look for the unity of the universe, to which humans
belong as natural creatures, in the continuity of an ‘inclusive’ natural history, of which
(on analogy with neo-Darwinism) we can have some speculative idea even if we don’t
yet have a satisfactory account. These days, we can pull together scattered evidence—
inter alia, from physical anthropology, from developmental biology and psychology,
from comparisons between the ontogenesis of children and of chimpanzees, and from lin-
guistics, cultural history, and archeology—to tell various stories of how our socio-cultural
forms of life came about. In the case of these meta-narratives, it is very tempting to take
the explanatory mechanisms that have proven themselves in one research domain and
then generalize them as applying to the whole. For example, with the help of evolutionary
game theory, Daniel Dennett transposes the ‘Darwinian algorithm’ from mutations in the
gene pool to shifts in cultural traditions, in order to explain moral and scientific innovations
on analogy with the emergence of species (Dennett 2003, chaps. 6 –7).
Whether grand narratives can be replaced by empirical theories in this way is an open
question, of course. But if, one day, promising candidates emerge for a theory with which
the mind could capture [einholen] its own genealogy, there will probably still be some top-
down concepts involved in its construction. The synthetic theory of evolution already has to
operate with non-physicalistic key concepts such as ‘self-preservation,’ ‘fitness,’ and ‘adap-
tation.’ These concepts are nourished by both the self-experience of a being that knows
what it is like to be embodied [ein Leib zu sein], and by the culturally acquired knowledge
of how to raise, nurture, and breed plants and animals (Gutmann 2005, 400– 17; Janich and
Weingarten 1999). I intend this example to serve merely as a reminder of the critical per-
spective found in a reconstructive history of science that rationally reconstructs the shift
in conceptual levels associated with the transition from physicalist to biological (or from
neurological to psychological and sociological) systems of description. Such a history of
science aims to decipher the experiential content distilled in the concept-generating pro-
ductivity of our advances in knowledge.54
The synthetic knowledge found in each of these higher-level and increasingly
complex distinctions can be seen as deposits that have accumulated in a process
whereby our constructive attempts to grasp what is relevant and accessible to us are
tested against what we take to be objective reality. The natural genealogy of the mind is
a self-referential project; the human mind tries to capture itself [sich einholen] in compre-
hending itself as a product of nature. If that enterprise is not to fall back into metaphysics,
it must remain uncompromising in its orientation to empirical science; but empirical find-
ings will contribute something to this project only if we interpret them at the same time in
the historical context of how we came to learn about them.
For it is only in light of the circumstances and practices in which we acquire knowl-
edge that the facts we have learned about the world (and about ourselves as entities in the
world) can tell us something about the genesis of the learning mind itself—something that
is crucial for our self-understanding as members of our species.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For helpful objections and critical suggestions, I would like to thank Joel Anderson, Philip
Clayton, Tilmann Habermas, and Lutz Wingert.
NOTES
1. A reply from several leading psychologists can be found in Fiedler et al. (2005).
2. Translator’s note: The German term here is ‘nicht-hintergehbar,’ which means both that
something is unavoidable and also that it is impossible even to take up a position from
which to examine it without already presupposing it. It is translated throughout in
terms of the impossibility of ‘getting around’ something.
3. On the phenomenology of free will, see Bieri (2001).
4. This reflective sense of free will corresponds to a ‘strong’ sense of responsibility; cf. Hurley
(2003, 56): ‘Tight responsiveness to objective reasons provides a condition of responsibil-
ity that is maximal in two dimensions,’ namely, with regard to the dimensions of con-
sidered judgements and strength of will.
5. Translator’s note: Throughout this translation, ‘mind’ translates ‘Geist.’ The notion of
‘objective mind’ (which stems from Hegel, where it is often translated as ‘objective
spirit’) is used to refer to social institutions, customs, shared practices, science, culture,
language, and so on-those entirely real parts of the human world that are neither held
within one individual’s mind nor physically instantiated independently from humans. In
this sense, then, recent discussions within philosophy of mind and cognitive science
regarding ‘situated cognition’ or the ‘extended mind’ are also about the ‘objective mind.’
6. Regarding this conception, see Habermas (1987, 119-52).
7. Cf. Tomasello’s (1999) thesis (based on data from comparative research on primates and
infants) regarding the early childhood development of social cognition. Regarding the
theory of social cognition, see also Habermas (1990, 116-94).
8. See Section 7.
9. Regarding the specific sense in which I am using these terms, see Habermas (1993, 1 – 17).
10. For a discussion of this point within legal theory, see Dworkin (1997).
11. See Note 14.
12. It is, of course, a matter of social expectations as to when and where compelling circum-
stances or the failings of someone’s cognitive, psychological, and bodily constitution
count as sufficient grounds for saying his action was overhasty, his deliberation insuffi-
cient, or his resolve impaired.
13. Roth (2005, 699f.) layers the causal dependence of behavior according to the participation
of sub-cortical and cortical brain regions: at the lowest level are the vegetatively steered
affective states; at the mid-level, ego-centric emotions, preferences, and beliefs; and at the
level closest to consciousness, moral and communicatively mediated reasons. He pro-
poses a suggestive image of discursive justification having a ‘retrospective’ or post hoc
character. See also Roth (2001).
14. For a reconstruction of criminal law, on the basis of principles of constitutional democracy,
in which the point of holding people criminally liable lies not in political goals (of preven-
tion and social control) but rather in the act of rendering citizens and moral persons
responsible in their capacity as democratic co-legislators, see the excellent study by
Günther (2005b).
15. I would like to thank Klaus Günther for instructing me on the current literature (and for
suggesting detailed improvements). See also Günther (2005a).
16. Klaus Günther has called my attention to the fact that in the context of criminal law the
expression ‘justify’ has the specialized sense of eliminating unlawfulness in a specific
case, that is, of establishing the congruence with the legal order as a matter of exception.
The narrower terminology does not affect the general role played by ‘excuses’ in the dis-
course about justifying actions in the broad sense. Unless otherwise indicated, I shall con-
tinue to use the expression ‘justify’ in the ordinary sense.
17. This accommodates the ambivalent meaning that ‘excuses’ have in everyday life; see
Gardner (1998, 588): ‘In one sense, being responsible for what was done means bearing
the adverse normative consequences of its having been done. Many people who make
excuses, for example those who make them in a criminal court, are denying that they
should bear responsibility in this sense. But they are not denying their responsibility in
a second sense which is normally ... a precondition of responsibility in the first sense.
By making excuses people are, on the contrary asserting their responsibility in this
sense. Being responsible for our actions is none other than being in that condition in
which our actions are amenable, in principle, to justification and excuse.’ From a
Kantian standpoint, it is interesting to see the implications for legal doctrine that
Gardner draws from this distinction in criticizing empiricist theories of criminal law: ‘Crim-
inal lawyers tend to be fixated with responsibility in the first sense I mentioned, and tend
to take it for granted that any doctrine that serves to acquit the accused, and therefore to
avert the adverse normative consequences for her action, is as good as any other so far as
the accused is concerned. I have always found this an astonishing assumption which
implies that nobody who is tried in the criminal courts has, or even deserves to have,
any self-respect’ (1998, 590).
18. ‘The focus on making sense of people’s actions in the light of their reasons rightly brings
to the surface the important point that those whose reasoning can’t be made sense of in
this way, whether because of profound mental illness or infancy or sleepwalking or (on
some interpretation of it) post-hypnotic suggestion, are not responsible for their
actions and therefore need no excuses for what they do’ (Gardner 1998, 589).
19. This is the conclusion that Singer draws: ‘In criminal law, it is indeed claimed that the
degree of punishment should follow personal guilt, which is often supposed to be estab-
lished by expert testimony. In my view, forensic psychiatrists are hopelessly in over their
heads in trying to establish criminal competence. They grant diminished criminal compe-
tence when they discover a brain tumor, because it impairs “normal” brain function. As
neurobiologists, however, we know that genetically conditioned faulty synapses, early
imprinting, or degenerative diseases can lead to the same impairments or alterations of
deliberative processes as a visible tumor. It’s just that we can’t ascertain them, at least
not yet. And here I see a terrible inconsistency. If we cannot really render matters objective
here through measurement, then we ought to find another conception. We should not
base things on the causal chains “personal guilt determines punishment” and “personal
guilt is proportionate to freedom”’(Singer 2005a, 86). See also Singer (2005b, 537).
20. This is Daniel Wegner’s position as well: ‘The unique human convenience of conscious
thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause
what we do. In fact, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious
thought about action and the action, and also produce a sense of will we experience
by perceiving the thought as the cause of the action. So, while our thoughts may have
deep, important, and unconscious causal connections in our actions, the experience of
conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the con-
nections themselves’ (Wegner 2002, 98).
21. This is Singer’s proposal (in Singer 2005b, 712f.). Klaus Günther (2005a, 31) highlights the
tension between current conclusions of some neurologists regarding crime policy and the
familiar reform efforts of self-critical criminal legal scholars. Both agree on the humanistic
premise ‘that it is unjust to persist in making accusations of guilt and in punishing accord-
ingly if a human being no longer had the relevant freedom at the moment of acting. The
“enlightenment humanists within brain research” go beyond this, however: this belief itself
comes into question. The ways part here ... Were the image of human freedom itself to be
sacrificed, we could never punish anymore. Were punishment no longer to be based on
guilt, then the only purpose for punishment would be the protection of the community.’
22. Lutz Wingert (2006) addresses this question.
23. See the lucid commentary on this sentence of Max Horkheimer’s in Martens and Schnädel-
bach (1985, 31– 35).
24. This is illustrated by recommendations of neuroscientists for reforming criminal law; see
Günther’s argument in Note 16.
25. On George Herbert Mead’s related theory of the development of the self, see Joas (1985)
and Habermas (1987, 3 – 42).
26. Regarding this compatibilist account see Section 4.
27. The functionalist interpretation of correlations between brain states and the content of
representations that Roth (2005, 694f.) adopts merely postpones the problem; on this,
see Wingert (2006, 244f.)
28. Here and for the following: Wingert (2006).
29. ‘Experiences’ also often have only a rudimentary content. But we ‘find ourselves’ in such
states and don’t ‘form’ them, as we do thoughts and intentions. That does not, on the
other hand, mean that intentions can be adequately described without any reference
to their experiential substratum. For a discussion of the failure of the most well-known
naturalistic attempts to explain intentionality exclusively on the basis of its functional
effects, see Sturma (2005, 86ff.).
30. A note here on the term ‘compatibilism’: since I want to suggest an affirmative answer to
the question that I raised in the title, I am also a ‘compatibilist’ of sorts. The human mind,
with its complementary, interlocking epistemic perspectives, is part of the universe of
nature. Where I depart from the compatibilist mainstream, however, is in rejecting the
scientistic thesis that this universe is adequately characterized as the object domain of
the established nomological sciences (on the model of contemporary physics).
31. The same goes for any determinist, once he no longer assesses the responsibility of a third
person from the neutral role of an observer but rather attributes responsibility, as a par-
ticipant in the language game of responsible agency, to a second person who can
respond. For in that situation, he has to be open to accusations, confession, and
excuses, which would lose their character as contestable positions if the participants
were to assume that the agent has no alternatives anyway.
32. Compare Hurley (2003, 66): ‘unbeknownst to her.’
33. See also J. Nida-Rümelin’s reply to Michael Pauen (Nida-Rümelin 2006).
34. I understand Kierkegaard’s account of the ‘ethical stage’ as saying that one’s critically
achieved ethical self-understanding expresses precisely that character for which one
wishes to be recognized by others. One thereby also implicitly endorses the reservoir of
reasons available in the endorsed characteristics. See Habermas (2003b, 5 – 11).
35. For the following discussion, see Willaschek (2005) with regard to the discussion between
Hawthorne (2001) and Feldman (2004). My thanks to M. Willaschek for meta-critical objec-
tions and clarifying commentary.
36. The causal constellations spelled out not only in social-scientific and economic expla-
nations, but also in historical accounts and in most psychological explanations, do not
evoke much debate over freedom and determinism, because the language in which
they are expressed allows talk about communications, interactions, customs, institutions,
and social situations, as well as about interpretations and beliefs, interests and desires, dis-
positions and emotions. As a result, the connection is maintained with persons who take
positions within the space of reasons. Outside biology, even systems theory cannot get by
without relying on the basic concept of communicated meanings. In order to compensate
for the shortcomings of rational explanations, empirical assumptions about structures and
other constraining conditions must provide additional evidence for the causal effective-
ness of prima facie intelligible or reasonable motivations for acting.
37. In his well-known book The view from nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel starts out from the
similar problem of ‘how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world
with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included’; and he
develops, within the domain of ethics, a similar critique of what he calls ‘excess objectiv-
ity’: ‘If we push the claims of objective detachment to their logical conclusion, and survey
the world from a standpoint completely detached from all interests, we discover that
there is nothing-no values left of any kind: things can be said to matter at all only to indi-
viduals within the world’ (Nagel 1986, 146). Since Nagel sticks to the mentalist opposition
of first- and third-person perspectives, I won’t go into his otherwise quite compelling cri-
tique of objectivism.
38. See Kim (1994, 246): ‘What does no causal work does no explanatory work either; it may as
well not be there.’
39. See also Nida-Rümelin (2006).
40. Compare Tugendhat (1986, lectures 5 and 6).
41. Prinz (2001, 200): ‘Whatever we think we know about psychological processes from
introspection—this knowledge is always the product of selective representation, substan-
tive focusing [inhaltlicher Fokussierung], and categorical restructuring.’
42. This has been studied in the Kohlbergian tradition under the rubric of the acquisition of
social perspectives.
43. Cf. the critique from Wingert (2006, 252ff.)
44. Putnam (1983, 1990). On Putnam, see also Müller (2001). I address the related conception
of a Kantian pragmatism in Habermas (2003a).
45. G. H. Mead took the transcendental concept of an idealized, or completely inclusive, com-
munity of inquirers that was introduced by Charles Sander Peirce (see Apel 1981) and, as it
were, detranscendentalized it into the comparative idea of an ‘ever wider community.’
Regarding the controversies over how to appropriate these provocative pragmatistic
ideas, see the debate between Richard Rorty and me in Brandom (2000, 1– 64).
46. Compare John Dupré’s critique of attempts to establish the unity of science, in Dupré
(2004).
47. In this connection, the constructivism inspired by Paul Lorenzen played a prominent role;
compare Janich (1996) and Janich (1997).
48. Aside from Putnam’s internal realism, analytic philosophy of science has concerned itself
with connections of this sort, as far as I can see, only with regard to quantum theoretic inde-
terminacy. On the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, see Von Weizsäcker (1971, 223ff.).
49. On Kant and Peirce, respectively, see Kambartel (1968) and Habermas (1972, 113 – 39).
50. Drawing on the interplay between concept and intuition, construction and discovery,
interpretation and experience, Lutz Wingert analyzed how there is no getting around
the interlocking of perspectives in processes of scientific progress (Wingert 2003). Cf.
also Keil and Schnädelbach (2000, 7 –46).
51. I share the critique, if not the contextualist implications, of Rorty (1979).
52. Philip Clayton is very much aware of this danger when he sets out on this path: ‘The hier-
archy of the sciences itself offers evidence of principles that are increasingly divergent
from bottom-up physicalist explanation. Functionalist explanations play a role in the bio-
logical sciences (from cell structures through neural systems to eco-studies) that is differ-
ent from the structure of explanation in fundamental physics, just as intentional
explanations play a role in explaining human behavior that is without analogy at lower
levels. An emergentist view of the person is thus not an argument against science but
rather consistent with the pattern that we find emerging in the natural hierarchy of
sciences’ (Clayton 2000, 639).
53. Regarding this usage, see Habermas (1992, 28-53).
54. In this connection, see the impressive study by Ros (2005), which sorts through concep-
tually an enormous amount of material from the history of science.
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Jürgen Habermas, Ringstraße 8b, 82319 Starnberg, Germany

Habermas, The Language Game of Responsible Agency and The Problem of Free Will

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Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 10, No.

THE LANGUAGE GAME OF RESPONSIBLE

Translated by Joel Anderson

KEYWORDS free will; compatibilism; physicalism; scientism; participant perspective;

ISSN 1386-9795 print/1741-5918 online/07/010013-38

1. The Phenomenon of Free Will

. the symbolic incorporation of reasons into what is transmitted culturally;

possible, to examine an upcoming decision in the light of available reasons. Moreover, a

2. The Problem of Free Will in Criminal Law Discourse

mysterious phenomenon. Motivation by reasons is the only form of determination that is

The implosion of the language game of attributing responsibility is an extreme case

3. The Performative Limits of Self-objectification

Assuming that it is a good illustration of the state of neuroscientific research, this

4. Three Compatibilist Arguments

5. Naturalistic Explanations of Epistemic Dualism

(i) The approaches within non-eliminativist or non-reductionist materialism aim to

6. The Epistemological Turn and the Impossibility of Getting Around

grammatical rules and semantic contents of everyday communicative practices, it becomes

7. The Project of Radical Detranscendentalization: The Mind as Part

———. 1992. Themes in postmetaphysical thinking. In Postmetaphysical thinking: Philosophical

———. 2006. Grenzen der naturalistischen Selbstobjektivierung. In Philosophie und Neurowis-

Jürgen Habermas, Ringstraße 8b, 82319 Starnberg, Germany

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