Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

There is a new objecton to the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism. I argue that the objection is more wide-ranging than originally thought. In particular:if it tells against the Consequence Argument, it tells against other arguments for incompahbilism too. I survey a few ways of dealing with this objection and show the costs of each. I then present an argument for incompatibilism that is immune to the objection and that enjoys other advantages.

It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.