I’m finally back from a long trip away. It involved going via the APA and surviving “the fire”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/01/05/apa-hotel-fire/, but mostly I spent the time in Minneapolis. Happily, I didn’t travel anywhere I had to “learn a new language”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/01/01/australia.slang.reut/index.html. Unhappily, I have about a million emails, papers, etc to get to now I’m back. But before all that, I wanted to mention a story that bears on my arguments for doxastic voluntarism.

When I got back to the carpark at the airport, I went to open my car with the remote key. I was standing right next to the car (indeed, I had already put my bags in the boot) but nothing happened. So naturally I did what any sane person would do and pointed the key very directly at the car, and clicked it several more times. No reaction whatsoever.

So I immediately concluded that the battery in the key was dead. I guessed it must have been pressing against something while I was away, and sending a signal out repeatedly had drained the battery. Fortunately, it’s got a removable battery, and while I never had to replace it I figured that it would be a regular kind of watch battery, so it wouldn’t be too hard to get. (Even in Ithaca, there’s a pretty good supply of consumer goods.) So I wasn’t too worried about the dead key battery that I believed I had.

I remembered that I could get into my car without the remote key working so I (for I think the first time) did that, and went to start the car. And, as you might expect if you’d been reading closely, got no reaction whatsoever. The car battery was totally dead. And of course that was the real explanation for why the remote entry wouldn’t work, since it draws on the car battery. So I had to organise a jump start, and wait a while until I could be set ashore at Ithaca.

Now I must say, looking back, that it certainly didn’t _feel_ like I was compelled to believe that my key battery was dead. There were two explanations I knew of for the data I had. I immediately believed the first one that came to mind, but as it turned out (and really as was more probable all along) the other was correct. Had I exercised a small fraction of my capacity for rational thought, I would have either believed the correct explanation, or withheld judgment until I’d run some more tests. (I.e. tried and failed to start the car.) I think that when I do something I have the capacity not to do, and that I wouldn’t have done had I been thinking more clearly, that thing is a voluntary action. It certainly is a _free_ action, and one I’m responsible for, provided my capacity for clear thought hasn’t been temporarily removed.

I do like being an example of my philosophical theories, though when the theory is of the kind of rationality that is possible, this is somewhat less happy.