The Folk Psychology of Free Will: Fits and Starts

According to agent‐causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise . This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent‐causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent‐causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.