The Level-Based Category Mistake
I’ve had several residual thoughts about Christian List’s philosophy since finishing my thesis on his theory of free will—too many to name, honestly—but I thought I might take a moment to sketch at least one of them out. It has to do with List’s use of levels and how that use takes advantage of an unidentified species of category mistake. List is aware of it; he is aware, for example, that radical materialists commit some kind of category mistake when they explain intentional processes away in terms of physical processes, but he doesn’t identify the category mistake outright. [1] I thought I might try to spell it out here. I call it the “level-based category mistake.”
Of course, it might be helpful first to state what a category mistake is generally. A category mistake is a kind of informal fallacy, an error of reasoning, one that occurs often enough to warrant its own name. This error of reasoning happens, unsurprisingly, when you mistake the category of one thing for the category of another. For example, if I were to say, “The number two is blue!” I would be committing a category mistake. After all, numbers aren’t physical objects, they’re mental concepts (right?), so they cannot have physical attributes like, say, a ball can. Pretty straightforward, though category mistakes can get more complicated, as you will see below.
Based on my own cursory research, the category mistake was first formally recognized by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949), surprisingly late in the history of philosophy. [2] Ryle developed the concept of the category mistake to challenge René Descartes’ infamous mind–body problem. Ryle argues that Descartes errs when he describes the concept of mind with terms used to describe the concept of body, such as “‘thing,’ ‘stuff,’ ‘attribute,’ ‘state,’ ‘process,’ ‘change,’ ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” [3] His point is that the mind, unlike the body, is not a physical thing, so it is fallacious to describe it in physical terms; and if Ryle is correct, then Descartes’ mind–body problem is nothing more than “a philosopher’s myth.” [4] Similar to Ryle, List develops the level-based category mistake to challenge those who hold that free will is to be found “at the level of the human brain and body,” [5] not at the level of psychology, but before I can spell that out, I need to briefly touch on what exactly a “level” is.
Trying to pinpoint what a level is can be notoriously difficult, but for simplicity we can say that a level, or a system of levels, is a turn of phrase philosophers and natural scientists use to conceptualize how reality is structured. The idea, more or less, is that reality is best understood as being stratified into layers (to use a geological metaphor), or levels, such as the chemical level, for example, which accounts for molecules and their reactions, the lower quantum-physical level, which accounts for quantum particles and their interactions, or even the much higher economic level, which accounts for trade and its many transactions. Importantly, while these many levels are certainly related to each other in intricate ways, they are also quite distinct from one another, as are the many theories used to describe each level. [6]
As you may now be able to guess, a level-based category mistake happens when you erroneously describe something at one level of reality in terms used to describe something at another level. So, to give two examples, it would be silly to describe the US GDP in chemical terms, or quantum entanglement in terms of cell division. This is not to say that the chemical level and the economic level, or the quantum-physical level and the cellular level, are not related—they are—but it is to say that the best and most expedient explanation for something is to be found at the level at which it occurs, not at another.
So what I’m suggesting is that List’s core strategy for defending free will from its many detractors is to charge them with committing a level-based category mistake. Free will is a higher-level phenomenon, he argues, one that occurs at the psychological level, not at the neurophysical level or any other such lower level, so to reason about free will in terms of neural firing patterns or causal interactions between bodies and objects is simply to reason poorly, to commit a category mistake. [7] Instead, it is best to explain free will in psychological terms.
Now I must confess a certain bias I hold about philosophy: I wholeheartedly believe that it can, and is often meant to, improve the quality of our lives in some way or another. So I naturally also believe that understanding informal fallacies like the category mistake, and specifically the level-based category mistake, can improve our lives too. The trick after learning what a specific informal fallacy entails is to practice identifying when it occurs in your own day-to-day life. Once you’ve done that, then you can take steps to lessen the ill-effects erroneous reasoning produces. To help you in that process, I thought I might share two instances in which I noticed the level-based category mistake occurring in my own life. The first instance is in regard to a friend, the second in regard to myself.
I was talking recently with a friend who told me she was upset with herself for the amount of time she spent scrolling on her phone. The explanation she gave me was that her brain didn’t produce enough dopamine, and scrolling was an unfortunate way to mitigate that lack. But if anything I’ve said above is correct, then my friend has made a mistake: she has offered a neurophysical-level explanation for a psychological-level occurrence. Harmless enough, though, right? After all, we often account for psychological dissatisfaction in terms of brain chemistry today; “my brain made me do it,” we say. [8] But maybe this prevents her from identifying, and ultimately mitigating, the more expedient reason for her subdued mood. For example, perhaps she’s simply experiencing burnout in her profession and taking a few extra days off (if she can) would increase her wellbeing more sustainably than resigning herself to her brain chemistry or Meta’s algorithms—or maybe not, but it’s certainly worth exploring. It seems to me, at least, that the level-based category mistake she’s committed may be robbing her of her agency to some degree.
Now, with regard to myself, I was recently talking to my mom on the phone about how much of a tramp I am, and she told me, “Well, you come by it naturally. Your great uncle used to be a train hopper, so it’s in your genes.” What she meant was that my genetic code best explains my wanderlust—a favorite way of reasoning for older generations, I’ve found. To be sure, what she said made me feel good: it strengthened my sense of identity as well as my connection to long-gone family. But it also passes over the fact that we moved a lot, every few years or so, when I was a child, or that I live in a country where housing is treated as a commodity, not a basic need, so I’m forced to move as soon as I’m priced out of my current apartment. Both of these reasons, I think, better explain my transient behavior; as for my genes, I don’t have much to say about that.
Anyway, these are the thoughts I’ve been entertaining about List’s use of levels the past several months. Hopefully it’s been clarifying—and helpful!—to identify the specific form of category mistake List leverages in his defense of free will, the level-based category mistake.
- For List’s account of the challenge radical materialism poses for intentionality, see Christian List, Why Free Will Is Real (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 31–38.
- Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 60th anniversary ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 5–8.
- Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 9.
- Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 6.
- List, Why Free Will Is Real, 150.
- For an excellent introduction to the concept of levels, see Carl Craver, “Levels,” in Open MIND, edited by Thomas K. Metzinger and Jennifer M. Wendt (Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 2015): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.15502/9783958570498. For a more technical overview of levels, see Christian List, “Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, Ontological,” Noûs 53, no. 4 (2019): 852– 883. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12241.
- List effectively states this; see List, Why Free Will Is Real, 150.
- For a more in-depth look at how we use this phrase and what may be wrong with it, see Christian List and Peter Menzies, “My Brain Made Me Do It: The Exclusion Argument against Free Will, and What’s Wrong with It,” in Making a Difference: Essays in the Philosophy of Causation, ed. by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Huw Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 269–285, or Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard, and Shane Reuter, “It’s OK if ‘My Brain Made Me Do It’: People’s Intuitions about Free Will and Neuroscientific Prediction,” Cognition 133, no. 2: 502–516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.07.009.
