ABSTRACT
It is traditional to distinguish two kinds of conditions that an agent must satisfy in order to qualify as acting with free will: a control condition and an epistemic condition. The control condition has attracted the bulk of philosophers’ attention, largely because the debate has centered around the question whether free will is compatible with causal determinism (or, in a version now less central, with God’s foreknowledge). Causal determinism (and foreknowledge) seem much more plausibly a threat to control than to the epistemic dimensions of freedom; while it might be plausible to think that I lack some kind of control over my behavior if how I will act is in some sense already settled prior to my making up my mind, it is much less plausible to think that my beliefs concerning the circumstances in which I act are undermined or altered by determinism or foreknowledge.
