title: Trumpism

text: Conservative culture commentator David Brooks observes that under Trump, this post-truth mindset heavily reliant on conspiracy themes came to dominate Republican identity, providing its believers a sense of superiority since such insiders possess important information most people do not have. This results in an empowering sense of agency with the liberation, entitlement and group duty to reject "experts" and the influence of hidden cabals seeking to dominate them. Social media amplify the power of members to promote and expand their connections with like minded believers in insular alternate reality echo chambers. Social psychology and cognitive science research shows that individuals seek information and communities that confirm their views and that even those with critical thinking skills sufficient to identify false claims with non political material cannot do so when interpreting factual material that does not conform to political beliefs. While such media-enabled departures from shared, fact-based reality dates at least as far back as 1439 with the appearance of the Gutenberg press, what is new about social media is the personal bond created through direct and instantaneous communications from the leader, and the constant opportunity to repeat the messages and participate in the group identity signaling behavior. Prior to 2015, Trump already had firmly established this kind of parasocial bond with a substantial base of followers due to his repeated television and media appearances. For those sharing political views similar to his, Trump's use of Twitter to share his conspiratorial views caused those emotional bonds to intensify, causing his supporters to feel a deepened empathetic bond as with a friend—sharing his anger, sharing his moral outrage, taking pride in his successes, sharing in his denial of failures and his oftentimes conspiratorial views.


title: Trumpism

text: Given their effectiveness as an emotional tool, Brooks thinks such sharing of conspiracy theories has become the most powerful community bonding mechanism of the 21st century. Conspiracy theories usually have a strong political component and books such as Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" describe the political efficacy of these alternate takes on reality. Some attribute Trump's political success to making such narratives a regular staple of Trumpist rhetoric, such as the purported rigging of the 2016 election to defeat Trump, that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, that Obama was not born in the United States, multiple conspiracy theories about the Clintons, that vaccines cause autism and so on. One of the most popular though disproven and discredited conspiracy theories is Qanon, which asserts that top Democrats run an elite child sex-trafficking ring and President Trump is making efforts to dismantle it. An October 2020 Yahoo-YouGov poll showed that these Qanon claims are mainstream, not fringe beliefs among Trump supporters, with both elements of the theory said to be true by fully half of Trump supporters polled.


title: Trumpism

text: Some social psychologists see the predisposition of Trumpists towards interpreting social interactions in terms of dominance frameworks as extending to their relationship towards facts. A study by Felix Sussenbach and Adam B. Moore found that the dominance motive strongly correlated with hostility towards disconfirming facts and affinity for conspiracies among 2016 Trump voters but not among Clinton voters. Many critics note Trump's skill in exploiting narrative, emotion, and a whole host of rhetorical ploys to draw supporters into the group's common adventure as characters in a story much bigger than themselves. It is a story that involves not just a community-building call to arms to defeat titanic threats, or of the leader's heroic deeds restoring American greatness, but of a restoration of each supporter's individual sense of liberty and power to control their lives. Trump channels and amplifies these aspirations, explaining in one of his books that his bending of the truth is effective because it plays to people's greatest fantasies. By contrast, Clinton was dismissive of such emotion-filled storytelling and ignored the emotional dynamics of the Trumpist narrative.


title: Trumpism

text: Peter E. Gordon, Alex Ross, sociologist David L. Andrews and Harvard political theorist David Lebow look on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's concept of the "culture industry" as useful for comprehending Trumpism. As Ross explains the concept, the culture industry replicates "fascist methods of mass hypnosis ... blurring the line between reality and fiction," claiming, "Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one." Gordon observes that these purveyors of popular culture are not just leveraging outrage, but are turning politics into a more commercially lucrative product, a "polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche markets ... within which one swoons to one's preferred slogan and already knows what one knows. Name just about any political position and what sociologists call pillarization—or what the Frankfurt School called "ticket" thinking—will predict, almost without fail, a full suite of opinions. Trumpism is from Lebow's perspective, more of a result of this process than a cause. In the intervening years since Adorno's work, Lebow believes the culture industry has evolved into a politicizing culture market "based increasingly on the internet, constituting a self-referential hyperreality shorn from any reality of referants ... sensationalism and insulation intensify intolerance of dissonance and magnify hostility against alternative hyperrealities. In a self-reinforcing logic of escalation, intolerance and hostility further encourage sensationalism and the retreat into insularity." From Gordon's view, "Trumpism itself, one could argue, is just another name for the culture industry, where the performance of undoing repression serves as a means for carrying on precisely as before."


title: Trumpism

text: From this viewpoint, the susceptibility to psychological manipulation of individuals with social dominance inclinations is not at the center of Trumpism, but is instead the "culture industry" which exploits these and other susceptibilities by using mechanisms that condition people to think in standardized ways. The burgeoning culture industry respects no political boundaries as it develops these markets with Gordon emphasizing "This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourse today. Instead of a public sphere, we have what Jürgen Habermas long ago called the refeudalization of society."


title: Trumpism

text: What Kreiss calls an "identity-based account of media" is important for understanding Trump's success because "citizens understand politics and accept information through the lens of partisan identity. ... The failure to come to grips with a socially embedded public and an identity group–based democracy has placed significant limits on our ability to imagine a way forward for journalism and media in the Trump era. As Fox News and Breitbart have discovered, there is power in the claim of representing and working for particular publics, quite apart from any abstract claims to present the truth."


title: Trumpism

text: Examining trumpism as an entertainment product, some media research focuses on the heavy reliance on outrage discourse which in terms of media coverage privileged Trump's rhetoric over that of other candidates due to the symbiotic relationship between his focus on the entertainment value of such storytelling and the commercial interests of media companies. A unique form of incivility, the use of outrage narratives on political blogs, talk radio and cable news opinion shows had in the decades prior become representative of a relatively new political opinion media genre which had experienced significant growth due to its profitability. Media critic David Denby writes, "Like a good standup comic, Trump invites the audience to join him in the adventure of delivering his act—in this case, the barbarously entertaining adventure of running a Presidential campaign that insults everybody." Denby's claim is that Trump is simply good at delivering the kind of political entertainment product consumers demand. He observes that "The "movement's" standard of allowable behavior has been formed by popular culture—by standup comedy and, recently, by reality TV and by the snarking, trolling habits of the Internet. You can't effectively say that Donald Trump is vulgar, sensational, and buffoonish when it's exactly vulgar sensationalism and buffoonery that his audience is buying. Donald Trump has been produced by America." Although Trump's outrage discourse was characterized by fictional assertions, mean spirited attacks against various groups and dog whistle appeals to racial and religious intolerance, media executives could not ignore its profitability. CBS's CEO Les Moonves remarked that "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," demonstrating how Trumpism's form of messaging and the commercial goals of media companies are not only compatible but mutually lucrative. Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center considers Trump a political "shock jock" who "thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage."


title: Trumpism

text: The political profitability of incivility was demonstrated by the extraordinary amount of free airtime gifted to Trump's 2016 primary campaign—estimated at two billion dollars, which according to media tracking companies grew to almost five billion by the end of the national campaign. The advantage of incivility was as true in social media, where "a BuzzFeed analysis found that the top 20 fake election news stories emanating from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated more engagement on Facebook (as measured by shares, reactions, and comments) than the top 20 election stories produced by 19 major news outlets combined, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and NBC News."


title: Trumpism

text: Surveying research of how Trumpist communication is well suited to social media, Brian Ott writes that, "commentators who have studied Trump's public discourse have observed speech patterns that correspond closely to what I identified as Twitter's three defining features [Simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility]." Media critic Neal Gabler has a similar viewpoint writing that "What FDR was to radio and JFK to television, Trump is to Twitter." Outrage discourse expert Patrick O'Callaghan argues that social media is most effective when it utilizes the particular type of communication which Trump relies on. O'Callaghan notes that sociologist Sarah Sobieraj and political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry almost perfectly described in 2011 the social media communication style used by Trump long before his presidential campaign. They explained that such discourse "[involves] efforts to provoke visceral responses (e.g., anger, righteousness, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and partial truths about opponents, who may be individuals, organizations, or entire communities of interest (e.g., progressives or conservatives) or circumstance (e.g., immigrants). Outrage sidesteps the messy nuances of complex political issues in favor of melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and improbable forecasts of impending doom. Outrage talk is not so much discussion as it is verbal competition, political theater with a scorecard."


title: Trumpism

text: Due to Facebook's and Twitter's narrowcasting environment in which outrage discourse thrives, Trump's employment of such messaging at almost every opportunity was from O'Callaghan's account extremely effective because tweets and posts were repeated in viral fashion among like minded supporters, thereby rapidly building a substantial information echo chamber, a phenomenon Cass Sunstein identifies as group polarization, and other researchers refer to as a kind of self re-enforcing homophily. Within these information cocoons, it matters little to social media companies whether much of the information spread in such pillarized information silos is false, because as digital culture critic Olivia Solon points out, "the truth of a piece of content is less important than whether it is shared, liked, and monetized." Citing Pew Research's survey that found 62% of US adults get their news from social media, Ott expresses alarm, "since the 'news' content on social media regularly features fake and misleading stories from sources devoid of editorial standards." Media critic Alex Ross is similarly alarmed, observing, "Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upswelling of ugliness on the Internet," and that "the failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the [Trump vs. Clinton] campaign season should have surprised no one. ... Traffic trumps ethics."


title: Trumpism

text: O'Callaghan's analysis of Trump's use of social media is that "outrage hits an emotional nerve and is therefore grist to the populist's or the social antagonist's mill. Secondly, the greater and the more widespread the outrage discourse, the more it has a detrimental effect on social capital. This is because it leads to mistrust and misunderstanding amongst individuals and groups, to entrenched positions, to a feeling of 'us versus them'. So understood, outrage discourse not only produces extreme and polarising views but also ensures that a cycle of such views continues. (Consider also in this context Wade Robison (2020) on the 'contagion of passion' and Cass Sunstein (2001, pp. 98–136) on 'cybercascades'.)" Ott agrees, stating that contagion is the best word to describe the viral nature of outrage discourse on social media, and writing that "Trump's simple, impulsive, and uncivil Tweets do more than merely reflect sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia; they spread those ideologies like a social cancer." Robison warns that emotional contagion should not be confused with the contagion of passions that James Madison and David Hume were concerned with. Robison states they underestimated the contagion of passions mechanism at work in movements, whose modern expressions include the surprising phenomena of rapidly mobilized social media supporters behind both the Arab Spring and the Trump presidential campaign writing, "It is not that we experience something and then, assessing it, become passionate about it, or not", and implying that "we have the possibility of a check on our passions." Robison's view is that the contagion affects the way reality itself is experienced by supporters because it leverages how subjective certainty is triggered, so that those experiencing the contagiously shared alternate reality are unaware they have taken on a belief they should assess.


title: Trumpism

text: The roots of Trumpism in the United States can be traced to the Jacksonian era according to scholars Walter Russell Mead, Peter Katzenstein and Edwin Kent Morris. Eric Rauchway says: "Trumpism—nativism and white supremacy—has deep roots in American history. But Trump himself put it to new and malignant purpose."


title: Trumpism

text: Andrew Jackson's followers felt he was one of them, enthusiastically supporting his defiance of politically correct norms of the nineteenth century and even constitutional law when they stood in the way of public policy popular among his followers. Jackson ignored the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in "Worcester v. Georgia" and initiated the forced Cherokee removal from their treaty protected lands to benefit white locals at the cost of between 2,000 and 6,000 dead Cherokee men, women, and children. Notwithstanding such cases of Jacksonian inhumanity, Mead's view is that Jacksonianism provides the historical precedent explaining the movement of followers of Trump, marrying grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements, and obsession with American power and sovereignty, acknowledging that it has often been a xenophobic, "whites only" political movement. Mead thinks this "hunger in America for a Jacksonian figure" drives followers towards Trump but cautions that historically "he is not the second coming of Andrew Jackson," observing that "his proposals tended to be pretty vague and often contradictory," exhibiting the common weakness of newly elected populist leaders, commenting early in his presidency that "now he has the difficulty of, you know, 'How do you govern?'"


title: Trumpism

text: Morris agrees with Mead, locating Trumpism's roots in the Jacksonian era from 1828 to 1848 under the presidencies of Jackson, Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk. On Morris's view, Trumpism also shares similarities with the post-World War I faction of the progressive movement which catered to a conservative populist recoil from the looser morality of the cosmopolitan cities and America's changing racial complexion. In his book "The Age of Reform" (1955), historian Richard Hofstadter identified this faction's emergence when "a large part of the Progressive-Populist tradition had turned sour, became illiberal and ill-tempered."


title: Trumpism

text: Prior to World War II, conservative themes of Trumpism were expressed in the America First Committee movement in the early 20th century, and after World War II were attributed to a Republican Party faction known as the Old Right. By the 1990s, it became referred to as the paleoconservative movement, which according to Morris has now been re-branded as Trumpism. Leo Löwenthal's book "Prophets of Deceit" (1949) summarized common narratives expressed in the post-World War II period of this populist fringe, specifically examining American demagogues of the period when modern mass media was married with the same destructive style of politics that historian Charles Clavey thinks Trumpism represents. According to Clavey, Löwenthal's book best explains the enduring appeal of Trumpism and offers the most striking historical insights into the movement.


title: Trumpism

text: Writing in "The New Yorker", journalist Nicholas Lemann states the post-war Republican Party ideology of fusionism, a fusion of pro-business party establishment with nativist, isolationist elements who gravitated towards the Republican and not the Democratic Party, later joined by Christian evangelicals "alarmed by the rise of secularism", was made possible by the Cold War and the "mutual fear and hatred of the spread of Communism". An article in Politico has referred to Trumpism as "McCarthyism on steroids".


title: Trumpism

text: Championed by William F. Buckley Jr. and brought to fruition by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the fusion lost its glue with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a growth of income inequality in the United States and globalization that "created major discontent among middle and low income whites" within and without the Republican Party. After the 2012 United States presidential election saw the defeat of Mitt Romney by Barack Obama, the party establishment embraced an "autopsy" report, titled the Growth and Opportunity Project, which "called on the Party to reaffirm its identity as pro-market, government-skeptical, and ethnically and culturally inclusive." Ignoring the findings of the report and the party establishment in his campaign, Trump was "opposed by more officials in his own Party ... than any Presidential nominee in recent American history," but at the same time he won "more votes" in the Republican primaries than any previous presidential candidate. By 2016, "people wanted somebody to throw a brick through a plate-glass window", in the words of political analyst Karl Rove. His success in the party was such that an October 2020 poll found 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed considered themselves supporters of Trump rather than the Republican Party.


title: Trumpism

text: American historian Robert Paxton poses the question as to whether the democratic backsliding evident in Trumpism is fascism or not. As of 2017, Paxton believed it bore greater resemblance to plutocracy, a government which is controlled by a wealthy elite. Paxton changed his opinion following the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, and stated that it is "not just acceptable but necessary" to understand Trumpism as a form of fascism. Sociology professor Dylan John Riley calls Trumpism "neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism" because it does not capture the same mass movement appeal of classical fascism to be fascism.


title: Trumpism

text: In 2015, British historian Roger Griffin stated Trump was not a fascist because he does not question the politics of the United States and he also does not want to outright abolish its democratic institutions. After the violent attempt to interfere with the peaceful transition of power by Trump supporters during the Capitol attack, Griffin maintained this writing "Trump is far too pathologically incoherent and intellectually challenged to be a fascist, and suffers from Attention Deficiency Disorder, lack of self-knowledge, capacity for denial, narcissism and sheer ignorance and lack of either culture or education to a degree that precludes the Machiavellian intelligence and voracious curiosity about and knowledge about contemporary history and politics needed to seize power in the manner of Mussolini and Hitler."


title: Trumpism

text: Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein believes significant intersections exist between Peronism and Trumpism because their mutual disregard for the contemporary political system (in the areas of both domestic and foreign policy) is discernible. American historian Christopher Browning considers the long-term consequences of Trump's policies and the support which he receives for them from the Republican Party to be potentially dangerous for democracy. In the German-speaking debate, the term initially appeared only sporadically, mostly in connection with the crisis of confidence in politics and the media and described the strategy of mostly right-wing political actors who wish to stir up this crisis in order to profit from it. German literature has a more diverse range of analysis of Trumpism.


title: Trumpism

text: In "How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship", Turkish author Ece Temelkuran describes Trumpism as echoing a number of views and tactics which were expressed and used by the Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during his rise to power. Some of these tactics and views are right-wing populism, demonization of the press, subversion of well-established and proven facts through the big lie (both historical and scientific), democratic backsliding such as dismantling judicial and political mechanisms; portraying systematic issues such as sexism or racism as isolated incidents, and crafting an ideal citizen.


title: Trumpism

text: Political scientist Mark Blyth and his colleague Jonathan Hopkin believe strong similarities exist between Trumpism and similar movements towards illiberal democracies worldwide, but they do not believe Trumpism is a movement which is merely being driven by revulsion, loss, and racism. Hopkin and Blyth argue that both on the right and on the left the global economy is driving the growth of neo-nationalist coalitions which find followers who want to be free of the constraints which are being placed on them by establishment elites whose members advocate neoliberal economics and globalism. Others emphasize the lack of interest in finding real solutions to the social malaise which have been identified, and they also believe those individuals and groups who are executing policy are actually following a pattern which has been identified by sociology researchers like Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman as originating in the post-World War II work of the Frankfurt School of social theory. Based on this perspective, books such as Löwenthal and Guterman's "Prophets of Deceit" offer the best insights into how movements like Trumpism dupe their followers by perpetuating their misery and preparing them to move further towards an illiberal form of government.


title: Trumpism

text: Trump is considered by some analysts to be following a blueprint of leveraging outrage, which was developed on partisan cable TV and talk radio shows such as the Rush Limbaugh radio show—a style that transformed talk radio and American conservative politics decades before Trump. Both shared "media fame" and "over-the-top showmanship", and built an enormous fan base with politics-as-entertainment, attacking political and cultural targets in ways that would have been considered indefensible and beyond the pale in the years before them.


title: Trumpism

text: Both featured "the insults, the nicknames" (for example, Limbaugh called preteen Chelsea Clinton the "White House dog", Trump mocked the looks of Ted Cruz's wife); conspiracy theories (Limbaugh claiming the 2010 Obamacare bill would empower "death panels" and "euthanize" elderly Americans, Trump claiming he won the 2020 election by a landslide but it was stolen from him); both maintained global warming was a hoax, Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, and the danger of COVID-19 was vastly exaggerated by liberals; both attacked black quarterbacks (Limbaugh criticizing Donovan McNabb, Trump Colin Kaepernick); both mocked people with disabilities, with Limbaugh flapping his arms in imitation of the Parkinson's disease of Michael J. Fox, and Trump doing the same to imitate the arthrogryposis of reporter Serge F. Kovaleski, although he later denied he had done so. Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, preceded Trump in moving the Republican Party away from "serious and substantive opinion leaders and politicians", towards political provocation, entertainment, and anti-intellectualism, and popularizing and normalizing for "many Republican politicians and voters" what before his rise "they might have thought" but would have "felt uncomfortable saying". His millions of fans were intensely loyal and "developed a capacity to excuse ... and deflect" his statements no matter how offensive and outrageous, "saying liberals were merely being hysterical or hateful. And many loved him even more for it."


title: Trumpism

text: Writing in "The Atlantic", Yaseem Serhan states Trump's post-impeachment claim that "our historic, patriotic, and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun," should be taken seriously as Trumpism is a "personality-driven" populist movement, and other such movements—such as Berlusconism in Italy, Peronism in Argentina and Fujimorism in Peru, "rarely fade once their leaders have left office". Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos wrote in "Newsweek" that separating Trumpism from Donald Trump himself was key to the Republican Party's future following his loss in the 2020 United States presidential election.


title: Trumpism

text: In terms of foreign policy in the sense of Trump's "America First", unilateralism is preferred to a multilateral policy and national interests are particularly emphasized, especially in the context of economic treaties and alliance obligations. Trump has shown a disdain for traditional American allies such as Canada as well as transatlantic partners NATO and the European Union. Conversely, Trump has shown sympathy for autocratic rulers, such as Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom Trump often praised even before taking office, and during the 2018 Russia–United States summit. The "America First" foreign policy includes promises by Trump to end American involvement in foreign wars, notably in the Middle East, while also issuing tighter foreign policy through sanctions against Iran, among other countries.


title: Trumpism

text: In terms of economic policy, Trumpism "promises new jobs and more domestic investment". Trump's hard line against export surpluses of American trading partners and general protectionist trade policies led to a tense situation in 2018 with mutually imposed punitive tariffs between the United States on the one hand and the European Union and China on the other. Trump secures the support of his political base with a policy that strongly emphasizes neo-nationalism and criticism of globalization. In contrast, the book "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America" suggested that Trump "radicalized economics" to his base of white working- to middle-class voters by the promoting the idea that "undeserving [minority] groups are getting ahead while their group is being left behind."


title: Trumpism

text: According to "Global News", "Maclean's" magazine, the "National Observer", "Toronto Star", and "The Globe and Mail", there is Trumpism in Canada. In a November 2020 interview on "The Current", immediately following the 2020 US elections, law professor Allan Rock, who served as Canada's attorney general and as Canada's ambassador to the U.N., described Trumpism and its potential impact on Canada. Rock said that even with Trump's losing the election, he had "awakened something that won't go away". He said it was something "we can now refer to as Trumpism"—a force that he has "harnessed" Trump has "given expression to an underlying frustration and anger, that arises from economic inequality, from the implications from globalisation." Rock cautioned that Canada must "keep up its guard against the spread of Trumpism, which he described as "destabilizing", "crude", "nationalistic", "ugly", "divisive", "racist", and "angry"; Rock added that one measurable impact on Canada of the "overtly racist behaviour" associated with Trumpism is that racists and white supremacists have become emboldened since 2016, resulting in a steep increase in the number of these organizations in Canada and a shockingly high increase in the rate of hate crimes in 2017 and 2018 in Canada.


title: Trumpism

text: "Maclean's" and the "Star", cited the research of Frank Graves who has been studying the rise of populism in Canada for a number of years. In a June 30, 2020 "School of Public Policy" journal article, he co-authored, the authors described a decrease in trust in the news and in journalists since 2011 in Canada, along with an increase in skepticism which "reflects the emergent fake news convictions so evident in supporters of Trumpian populism." Graves and Smith wrote of the impact on Canada of a "new authoritarian, or ordered, populism" that resulted in the 2016 election of President Trump. They said 34% of Canadians hold a populist viewpoint—most of whom are in Alberta and Saskatchewan—who tend to be "older, less-educated, and working-class", are more likely to embrace "ordered populism", and are "more closely aligned" with conservative political parties. This "ordered populism" includes concepts such as a right-wing authoritarianism, obedience, hostility to outsiders, and strongmen who will take back the country from the "corrupt elite" and return it a better time in history, where there was more law and order. It is xenophobic, does not trust science, has no sympathy for equality issues related to gender and ethnicity, and is not part of a healthy democracy. The authors say this ordered populism had reached a "critical force" in Canada that is causing polarization and must be addressed.


title: Trumpism

text: According to an October 2020 Léger poll for 338Canada of Canadian voters, the number of "pro-Trump conservatives" has been growing in Canada's Conservative Party, which was under the leadership of Erin O'Toole at the time of the poll. Maclean's said this might explain O'Toole's "True Blue" social conservative campaign. The Conservative Party in Canada also includes "centrist" conservatives as well as Red Tories,—also described as small-c conservative, centre-right or paternalistic conservatives as per the Tory tradition in the United Kingdom. O'Toole featured a modified version of Trump's slogan—"Take Back Canada"—in a video released as part of his official leadership candidacy platform. At the end of the video he called on Canadians to "[j]oin our fight, let's take back Canada." In a September 8, 2020 CBC interview, when asked if his "Canada First" policy was different from Trump's "America First" policy, O'Toole said, "No, it was not." In his August 24, 2019 speech conceding the victory of his successor Erin O'Toole as the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer cautioned Canadians to not believe the "narrative" from mainstream media outlets but to "challenge" and "double check ... what they see on TV on the internet" by consulting "smart, independent, objective organizations like "The Post Millennial" and "True North". The "Observer" said Jeff Ballingall, who is the founder of the right-wing Ontario Proud, and is also the Chief Marketing Officer of "The Post Millennial".


title: Trumpism

text: Following the 2020 United States elections, "National Post" columnist and former newspaper "magnate", Conrad Black, who had had a "decades-long" friendship with Trump, and received a presidential pardon in 2019, in his columns, repeated Trump's "unfounded claims of mass voter fraud" suggesting that the election had been stolen.


title: Trumpism

text: Trumpism has also been said to be on the rise in Europe. Political parties such as the Finns Party and France's National Rally have been described as Trumpist in nature. Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon called Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán "Trump before Trump".


title: Trumpism

text: In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the "Brazilian Donald Trump", who is often described as a right-wing extremist, sees Trump as a role model and according to Jason Stanley uses the same fascist tactics. Like Trump, Bolsonaro finds support among evangelicals for his views on culture war issues. Along with allies he publicly questioned Joe Biden's vote tally after the November election. Some analysts warn Brazil's ties with the US might be further corroded "by a blind belief in Trumpism and a lack of pragmatism".


title: Trumpism

text: According to "The Guardian" and "The Washington Post", there is a significant affinity towards Trump in Nigeria. Donald Trump's comments on the ethno-religious conflicts between Christians and the predominantly Muslim Fulani tribe has contributed to his popularity among Christians in Nigeria, in which he stated: "We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria. We are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen". Donald Trump is praised by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group that supports the independence of Biafra from Nigeria and is designated as a terrorist group by the Nigerian government. IPOB has claimed that he "believes in the inalienable right of an indigenous people to self-determination" and it also praised him for "the direct and serious manner he addressed and demanded immediate end to the serial slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, especially Biafran Christians".


title: Trumpism

text: After Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu wrote a letter to Trump that claimed his victory placed upon him a "historic and moral burden ... to liberate the enslaved nations in Africa". As Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, IPOB organized a rally in support of Trump that resulted in violent clashes with Nigerian security forces and resulted in multiple deaths and arrests. On January 30 2020, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu attended a Trump rally in Iowa as a special VIP guest, at the invitation of the Republican Party of Iowa. According to a 2020 poll from Pew Research, 58% of Nigerians had favorable views of Donald Trump, the fourth highest percentage globally. According to John Campbell of Council on Foreign Relations, Trump's popularity in Nigeria can be explained by a "manifestation of the widespread disillusionment in a country characterized by growing poverty, multiple security threats, an expanding crime wave, and a government seen as unresponsive and corrupt", and his popularity is likely to be reflective of wealthier urban Nigerians rather than the majority of Nigerians who live in rural areas or urban slums and are unlikely to have strong opinions on Trump.


title: Trumpism

text: Donald Trump and his policy towards Iran has been praised by the Iranian opposition group 'Restart', which also supports American military action against Iran and offered to fight alongside Americans to overthrow the Iranian government. The group has adopted the slogan "Make Iran Great Again" (a play on Trump's "Make America Great Again").


title: Trumpism

text: Restart has been compared to QAnon by Ariane Tabatabai, in terms of "conspiracist thinking going global". Among conspiracy theories advocated by the group is that Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has died (or went into coma) in 2017 and a double plays his role in public.


title: Melanie Hamrick

text: Melanie Hamrick (born 1987) is an American choreographer and former ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre, from which she retired in 2019 after fifteen years. In 2014, she began a relationship with the musician Mick Jagger, with whom she has one child, born in 2016.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: The Essex Serpent is a 2022 British gothic romance period drama miniseries based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Perry. The series is written by Anna Symon, and directed by Clio Barnard, and stars Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in lead roles. It premiered on Apple TV+ on 13 May 2022.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: "The Essex Serpent" follows London widow Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes) who moves to Essex to investigate reports of a mythical serpent. She forms a surprising bond of science and skepticism with the local pastor (Tom Hiddleston), but when tragedy strikes, locals accuse her of attracting the creature.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: In August 2020, it was reported that Apple gave a straight-to-series order for "The Essex Serpent" to See-Saw Films.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: When "The Essex Serpent" was announced in August 2020, Keira Knightley was set to play the leading role of Cora as well as executive produce, however in October 2020, she chose to leave the project due to "family reasons". In February 2021, Claire Danes signed on to play Cora to replace Knightley. Tom Hiddleston joined the cast the following month. In April, Frank Dillane, Hayley Squires, Clémence Poésy and Jamael Westman would be added to the main cast.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: Filming was previously set to begin in late November 2020 before Knightley exited the series. Filming for "The Essex Serpent" began in February 2021, in a number of Essex locations, including Alresford, Brightlingsea, North Fambridge and Maldon, as well as across London, including Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Filming for the series concluded on the week of 27 June 2021.


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 76% approval rating with an average rating of 7.1/10, based on 41 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Distinguished by biting performances and coiling ambience, "The Essex Serpent" is a highly accomplished Gothic romance." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has a score of 69 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: The Essex Serpent (TV series)

text: The miniseries was nominated for two Royal Television Society Craft & Design Awards, for outstanding achievement in Design - Titles, and Production Management.


title: Mark Madoff

text: Mark David Madoff ( ; March 11, 1964 – December 11, 2010) was an American financier, best known for his role in exposing the multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme committed by his father, Bernie Madoff.


title: Mark Madoff

text: Madoff was born and raised on Long Island, New York, the elder of Bernard and Ruth Madoff's two sons. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 1986. He joined the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity there. He married his college girlfriend, Susan Elkin, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where they raised two children. They divorced in 2000, and he eventually moved back to Manhattan. In 2003, he married Stephanie Mikesell, with whom he had two children, born in 2006 and 2008.


title: Mark Madoff

text: Madoff joined his father's company in 1987. He and his brother, Andrew Madoff (1966–2014), worked in the firm's legitimate market-making and proprietary trading arm.


title: Mark Madoff

text: In December 2008, Mark and his brother confronted their father over his plans to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to employees months ahead of schedule. The elder Madoff then confessed to them that his business was based on a "big lie", a long-running Ponzi scheme that was collapsing under the global financial crisis. He asked them to give him 24 hours to get his affairs in order, before going to the authorities. The brothers went to the authorities immediately on the advice of their lawyers, however; Bernard Madoff was arrested the next day. They never spoke with him again.


title: Mark Madoff

text: While no criminal charges were filed against Mark Madoff, the scandal and its aftermath proved devastating to his personal and professional life. Mark, his mother and his brother were all the subject of constant media attention, with articles speculating that they had been involved in their father's crime, or at least were aware of it. He also found it incredibly difficult to find employment.


title: Mark Madoff

text: On December 11, 2010, Madoff was found dead in his Manhattan apartment at 158 Mercer Street. With a dog leash tied to a beam, he had hanged himself from the ceiling. His suicide occurred on the second anniversary of his father's arrest.


title: Mark Madoff

text: Madoff's estate amounted to $18.6 million. In 2012, his ex-wife, Susan Elkin, and widow, Stephanie Mack, were sued by Irving Picard, the trustee for his father's swindled clients, under a claim they should have known their wealth was based on crime. Mack had claims against her for tens of millions of dollars.


title: Free will

text: Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.


title: Free will

text: Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of whether it exists or not are some of the longest running debates of philosophy and religion. Some conceive of free will as the right to act outside of external influences or wishes.


title: Free will

text: Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will. Ancient Greek philosophy identified this issue, which remains a major focus of philosophical debate. The view that conceives free will as incompatible with determinism is called "incompatibilism" and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism (the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible) and hard determinism (the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible). Incompatibilism also encompasses hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also indeterminism to be incompatible with free will and thus free will to be impossible whatever the case may be regarding determinism.


title: Free will

text: In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will "is" compatible with determinism. Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is "necessary" for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of "how" choices will turn out. Compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs. determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what "free will" means and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatibilists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will simply if, "had" one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one "could" have done otherwise without physical impediment. Contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one's behavior in a way responsive to reason, and there are still further different conceptions of free will, each with their own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of determinism a threat to the possibility of free will.


title: Free will

text: The problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature. The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle (fourth century BCE) and Epictetus (1st century CE); "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them". According to Susanne Bobzien, the notion of incompatibilist free will is perhaps first identified in the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias (third century CE); "what makes us have control over things is the fact that we are causally undetermined in our decision and thus can freely decide between doing/choosing or not doing/choosing them".


title: Free will

text: The term "free will" ("liberum arbitrium") was introduced by Christian philosophy (4th century CE). It has traditionally meant (until the Enlightenment proposed its own meanings) lack of necessity in human will, so that "the will is free" meant "the will does not have to be such as it is". This requirement was universally embraced by both incompatibilists and compatibilists.


title: Free will

text: The underlying questions are whether we have control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent. These questions predate the early Greek stoics (for example, Chrysippus), and some modern philosophers lament the lack of progress over all these centuries.


title: Free will

text: On one hand, humans have a strong sense of freedom, which leads them to believe that they have free will. On the other hand, an intuitive feeling of free will could be mistaken.


title: Free will

text: It is difficult to reconcile the intuitive evidence that conscious decisions are causally effective with the view that the physical world can be explained entirely by physical law. The conflict between intuitively felt freedom and natural law arises when either causal closure or physical determinism (nomological determinism) is asserted. With causal closure, no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain, and with physical determinism, the future is determined entirely by preceding events (cause and effect).


title: Free will

text: The puzzle of reconciling 'free will' with a deterministic universe is known as the "problem of free will" or sometimes referred to as the "dilemma of determinism". This dilemma leads to a moral dilemma as well: the question of how to assign responsibility for actions if they are caused entirely by past events.


title: Free will

text: Compatibilists maintain that mental reality is not of itself causally effective. Classical compatibilists have addressed the dilemma of free will by arguing that free will holds as long as humans are not externally constrained or coerced. Modern compatibilists make a distinction between freedom of will and freedom of "action", that is, separating freedom of choice from the freedom to enact it. Given that humans all experience a sense of free will, some modern compatibilists think it is necessary to accommodate this intuition. Compatibilists often associate freedom of will with the ability to make rational decisions.


title: Free will

text: A different approach to the dilemma is that of incompatibilists, namely, that if the world is deterministic, then our feeling that we are free to choose an action is simply an illusion. Metaphysical libertarianism is the form of incompatibilism which posits that determinism is false and free will is possible (at least some people have free will). This view is associated with non-materialist constructions, including both traditional dualism, as well as models supporting more minimal criteria; such as the ability to consciously veto an action or competing desire. Yet even with physical indeterminism, arguments have been made against libertarianism in that it is difficult to assign "Origination" (responsibility for "free" indeterministic choices).


title: Free will

text: Free will here is predominantly treated with respect to physical determinism in the strict sense of nomological determinism, although other forms of determinism are also relevant to free will. For example, logical and theological determinism challenge metaphysical libertarianism with ideas of destiny and fate, and biological, cultural and psychological determinism feed the development of compatibilist models. Separate classes of compatibilism and incompatibilism may even be formed to represent these.


title: Free will

text: Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. In contrast, "metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true. Another view is that of hard incompatibilists, which state that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism.


title: Free will

text: Traditional arguments for incompatibilism are based on an "intuition pump": if a person is like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot, then people must not have free will. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.


title: Free will

text: Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain". Incompatibilism is key to the idealist theory of free will. Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means that someone must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. They must be "causa sui", in the traditional phrase. Being responsible for one's choices is the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if a person has free will, then they are the ultimate cause of their actions. If determinism is true, then all of a person's choices are caused by events and facts outside their control. So, if everything someone does is caused by events and facts outside their control, then they cannot be the ultimate cause of their actions. Therefore, they cannot have free will. This argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.


title: Free will

text: A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the "consequences" of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the "consequence argument". Peter van Inwagen remarks that C.D. Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.


title: Free will

text: The difficulty of this argument for some compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider". David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise if "different circumstances" had actually obtained in the past.


title: Free will

text: Using "T", "F" for "true" and "false" and "?" for undecided, there are exactly nine positions regarding determinism/free will that consist of any two of these three possibilities:


title: Free will

text: "Incompatibilism" may occupy any of the nine positions except (5), (8) or (3), which last corresponds to "soft determinism". Position (1) is "hard determinism", and position (2) is "libertarianism". The position (1) of hard determinism adds to the table the contention that "D" implies "FW" is untrue, and the position (2) of libertarianism adds the contention that "FW" implies "D" is untrue. Position (9) may be called "hard incompatibilism" if one interprets "?" as meaning both concepts are of dubious value. "Compatibilism" itself may occupy any of the nine positions, that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. However, the most common meaning attached to "compatibilism" is that some form of determinism is true and yet we have some form of free will, position (3).


title: Free will

text: Alex Rosenberg makes an extrapolation of physical determinism as inferred on the macroscopic scale by the behaviour of a set of dominoes to neural activity in the brain where; "If the brain is nothing but a complex physical object whose states are as much governed by physical laws as any other physical object, then what goes on in our heads is as fixed and determined by prior events as what goes on when one domino topples another in a long row of them." Physical determinism is currently disputed by prominent interpretations of quantum mechanics, and while not necessarily representative of intrinsic indeterminism in nature, fundamental limits of precision in measurement are inherent in the uncertainty principle. The relevance of such prospective indeterminate activity to free will is, however, contested, even when chaos theory is introduced to magnify the effects of such microscopic events.


title: Free will

text: Determinism can be divided into causal, logical and theological determinism. Corresponding to each of these different meanings, there arises a different problem for free will. Hard determinism is the claim that determinism is true, and that it is incompatible with free will, so free will does not exist. Although hard determinism generally refers to nomological determinism (see causal determinism below), it can include all forms of determinism that necessitate the future in its entirety. Relevant forms of determinism include:


title: Free will

text: Other forms of determinism are more relevant to compatibilism, such as biological determinism, the idea that all behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic endowment and our biochemical makeup, the latter of which is affected by both genes and environment, cultural determinism and psychological determinism. Combinations and syntheses of determinist theses, such as bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.


title: Free will

text: Suggestions have been made that hard determinism need not maintain strict determinism, where something near to, like that informally known as adequate determinism, is perhaps more relevant. Despite this, hard determinism has grown less popular in present times, given scientific suggestions that determinism is false – yet the intention of their position is sustained by hard incompatibilism.


title: Free will

text: Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires that the agent be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.


title: Free will

text: Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, which requires that the world is not closed under physics. This includes interactionist dualism, which claims that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality. Physical determinism implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. As consequent of incompatibilism, metaphysical libertarian explanations that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior – theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Incompatibilist theories can be categorised based on the type of indeterminism they require; uncaused events, non-deterministically caused events, and agent/substance-caused events.


title: Free will

text: Non-causal accounts of incompatibilist free will do not require a free action to be caused by either an agent or a physical event. They either rely upon a world that is not causally closed, or physical indeterminism. Non-causal accounts often claim that each intentional action requires a choice or volition – a willing, trying, or endeavoring on behalf of the agent (such as the cognitive component of lifting one's arm). Such intentional actions are interpreted as free actions. It has been suggested, however, that such acting cannot be said to exercise control over anything in particular. According to non-causal accounts, the causation by the agent cannot be analysed in terms of causation by mental states or events, including desire, belief, intention of something in particular, but rather is considered a matter of spontaneity and creativity. The exercise of intent in such intentional actions is not that which determines their freedom – intentional actions are rather self-generating. The "actish feel" of some intentional actions do not "constitute that event's activeness, or the agent's exercise of active control", rather they "might be brought about by direct stimulation of someone's brain, in the absence of any relevant desire or intention on the part of that person". Another question raised by such non-causal theory, is how an agent acts upon reason, if the said intentional actions are spontaneous.


title: Free will

text: Some non-causal explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities.


title: Free will

text: Event-causal accounts of incompatibilist free will typically rely upon physicalist models of mind (like those of the compatibilist), yet they presuppose physical indeterminism, in which certain indeterministic events are said to be caused by the agent. A number of event-causal accounts of free will have been created, referenced here as "deliberative indeterminism", "centred accounts", and "efforts of will theory". The first two accounts do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe. Ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" that libertarians believe necessary. A first common objection to event-causal accounts is that the indeterminism could be destructive and could therefore diminish control by the agent rather than provide it (related to the problem of origination). A second common objection to these models is that it is questionable whether such indeterminism could add any value to deliberation over that which is already present in a deterministic world.


title: Free will

text: "Deliberative indeterminism" asserts that the indeterminism is confined to an earlier stage in the decision process. This is intended to provide an indeterminate set of possibilities to choose from, while not risking the introduction of "luck" (random decision making). The selection process is deterministic, although it may be based on earlier preferences established by the same process. Deliberative indeterminism has been referenced by Daniel Dennett and John Martin Fischer. An obvious objection to such a view is that an agent cannot be assigned ownership over their decisions (or preferences used to make those decisions) to any greater degree than that of a compatibilist model.


title: Free will

text: "Centred accounts" propose that for any given decision between two possibilities, the strength of reason will be considered for each option, yet there is still a probability the weaker candidate will be chosen. An obvious objection to such a view is that decisions are explicitly left up to chance, and origination or responsibility cannot be assigned for any given decision.


title: Free will

text: "Efforts of will theory" is related to the role of will power in decision making. It suggests that the indeterminacy of agent volition processes could map to the indeterminacy of certain physical events – and the outcomes of these events could therefore be considered caused by the agent. Models of volition have been constructed in which it is seen as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of physical indeterminism. An example of this approach is that of Robert Kane, where he hypothesizes that "in each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposes – a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which must be overcome by effort." According to Robert Kane such "ultimate responsibility" is a required condition for free will. An important factor in such a theory is that the agent cannot be reduced to physical neuronal events, but rather mental processes are said to provide an equally valid account of the determination of outcome as their physical processes (see non-reductive physicalism).


title: Free will

text: Although at the time quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, in his book "Miracles: A preliminary study" C.S. Lewis stated the logical possibility that if the physical world were proved indeterministic this would provide an entry point to describe an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality. Indeterministic physical models (particularly those involving quantum indeterminacy) introduce random occurrences at an atomic or subatomic level. These events might affect brain activity, and could seemingly allow incompatibilist free will if the apparent indeterminacy of some mental processes (for instance, subjective perceptions of control in conscious volition) map to the underlying indeterminacy of the physical construct. This relationship, however, requires a causative role over probabilities that is questionable, and it is far from established that brain activity responsible for human action can be affected by such events. Secondarily, these incompatibilist models are dependent upon the relationship between action and conscious volition, as studied in the neuroscience of free will. It is evident that observation may disturb the outcome of the observation itself, rendering limited our ability to identify causality. Niels Bohr, one of the main architects of quantum theory, suggested, however, that no connection could be made between indeterminism of nature and freedom of will.


title: Free will

text: Agent/substance-causal accounts of incompatibilist free will rely upon substance dualism in their description of mind. The agent is assumed power to intervene in the physical world.


title: Free will

text: Agent (substance)-causal accounts have been suggested by both George Berkeley and Thomas Reid. It is required that what the agent causes is not causally determined by prior events. It is also required that the agent's causing of that event is not causally determined by prior events. A number of problems have been identified with this view. Firstly, it is difficult to establish the reason for any given choice by the agent, which suggests they may be random or determined by "luck" (without an underlying basis for the free will decision). Secondly, it has been questioned whether physical events can be caused by an external substance or mind – a common problem associated with interactionalist dualism.


title: Free will

text: Hard incompatibilism is the idea that free will cannot exist, whether the world is deterministic or not. Derk Pereboom has defended hard incompatibilism, identifying a variety of positions where free will is irrelevant to indeterminism/determinism, among them the following:


title: Free will

text: Pereboom calls positions 3 and 4 "soft determinism", position 1 a form of "hard determinism", position 6 a form of "classical libertarianism", and any position that includes having F as "compatibilism".


title: Free will

text: John Locke denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense (compare with theological noncognitivism, a similar stance on the existence of God). He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to "postpone" a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "…the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose".


title: Free will

text: The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the


title: Free will

text: problem. He argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless.


title: Free will

text: According to Strawson, if one is responsible for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in any respect. This is because to be responsible in some situation "S", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S". To be responsible for the way one was at "S", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S", and so on. At some point in the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states "ex nihilo". This argument entails that free will itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism. Strawson calls his own view "pessimism" but it can be classified as hard incompatibilism.


title: Free will

text: Causal determinism is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states. Causal determinism proposes that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing uncaused or self-caused. The most common form of causal determinism is nomological determinism (or scientific determinism), the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. Quantum mechanics poses a serious challenge to this view.


title: Free will

text: Fundamental debate continues over whether the physical universe is likely to be deterministic. Although the scientific method cannot be used to rule out indeterminism with respect to violations of causal closure, it can be used to identify indeterminism in natural law. Interpretations of quantum mechanics at present are both deterministic and indeterministic, and are being constrained by ongoing experimentation.


title: Free will

text: Destiny or fate is a predetermined course of events. It may be conceived as a predetermined future, whether in general or of an individual. It is a concept based on the belief that there is a fixed natural order to the cosmos.


title: Free will

text: Fate generally implies there is a set course that cannot be deviated from, and over which one has no control. Fate is related to determinism, but makes no specific claim of physical determinism. Even with physical indeterminism an event could still be fated externally (see for instance theological determinism). Destiny likewise is related to determinism, but makes no specific claim of physical determinism. Even with physical indeterminism an event could still be destined to occur.


title: Free will

text: Destiny implies there is a set course that cannot be deviated from, but does not of itself make any claim with respect to the setting of that course (i.e., it does not necessarily conflict with incompatibilist free will). Free will if existent could be the mechanism by which that destined outcome is chosen (determined to represent destiny).


title: Free will

text: Discussion regarding destiny does not necessitate the existence of supernatural powers. Logical determinism or determinateness is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. This creates a unique problem for free will given that propositions about the future already have a truth value in the present (that is it is already determined as either true or false), and is referred to as the problem of future contingents.


title: Free will

text: Omniscience is the capacity to know everything that there is to know (included in which are all future events), and is a property often attributed to a creator deity. Omniscience implies the existence of destiny. Some authors have claimed that free will cannot coexist with omniscience. One argument asserts that an omniscient creator not only implies destiny but a form of high level predeterminism such as hard theological determinism or predestination – that they have independently fixed all events and outcomes in the universe in advance. In such a case, even if an individual could have influence over their lower level physical system, their choices in regard to this cannot be their own, as is the case with libertarian free will. Omniscience features as an incompatible-properties argument for the existence of God, known as the argument from free will, and is closely related to other such arguments, for example the incompatibility of omnipotence with a good creator deity (i.e. if a deity knew what they were going to choose, then they are responsible for letting them choose it).


title: Free will

text: Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance. Predeterminism is the philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been decided or are known (by God, fate, or some other force), including human actions. Predeterminism is frequently taken to mean that human actions cannot interfere with (or have no bearing on) the outcomes of a pre-determined course of events, and that one's destiny was established externally (for example, exclusively by a creator deity). The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre-established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain. Predeterminism can be used to mean such pre-established causal determinism, in which case it is categorised as a specific type of determinism. It can also be used interchangeably with causal determinism – in the context of its capacity to determine future events. Despite this, predeterminism is often considered as independent of causal determinism. The term predeterminism is also frequently used in the context of biology and heredity, in which case it represents a form of biological determinism.


title: Free will

text: The term predeterminism suggests not just a determining of all events, but the prior and deliberately conscious determining of all events (therefore done, presumably, by a conscious being). While determinism usually refers to a naturalistically explainable causality of events, predeterminism seems by definition to suggest a person or a "someone" who is controlling or planning the causality of events before they occur and who then perhaps resides beyond the natural, causal universe. Predestination asserts that a supremely powerful being has indeed fixed all events and outcomes in the universe in advance, and is a famous doctrine of the Calvinists in Christian theology. Predestination is often considered a form of hard theological determinism.


title: Free will

text: Predeterminism has therefore been compared to fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future.


title: Free will

text: Theological determinism is a form of determinism stating that all events that happen are pre-ordained, or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic deity, or that they are destined to occur given its omniscience. Two forms of theological determinism exist, here referenced as strong and weak theological determinism.


title: Free will

text: There exist slight variations on the above categorisation. Some claim that theological determinism requires predestination of all events and outcomes by the divinity (that is, they do not classify the weaker version as 'theological determinism' unless libertarian free will is assumed to be denied as a consequence), or that the weaker version does not constitute 'theological determinism' at all. Theological determinism can also be seen as a form of causal determinism, in which the antecedent conditions are the nature and will of God. With respect to free will and the classification of theological compatibilism/incompatibilism below, "theological determinism is the thesis that God exists and has infallible knowledge of all true propositions including propositions about our future actions," more minimal criteria designed to encapsulate all forms of theological determinism.


title: Free will

text: There are various implications for metaphysical libertarian free will as consequent of theological determinism and its philosophical interpretation.


title: Free will

text: The basic argument for theological fatalism in the case of weak theological determinism is as follows:


title: Free will

text: This argument is very often accepted as a basis for theological incompatibilism: denying either libertarian free will or divine foreknowledge (omniscience) and therefore theological determinism. On the other hand, theological compatibilism must attempt to find problems with it. The formal version of the argument rests on a number of premises, many of which have received some degree of contention. Theological compatibilist responses have included:


title: Free will

text: In the definition of compatibilism and incompatibilism, the literature often fails to distinguish between physical determinism and higher level forms of determinism (predeterminism, theological determinism, etc.) As such, hard determinism with respect to theological determinism (or "Hard Theological Determinism" above) might be classified as hard incompatibilism with respect to physical determinism (if no claim was made regarding the internal causality or determinism of the universe), or even compatibilism (if freedom from the constraint of determinism was not considered necessary for free will), if not hard determinism itself. By the same principle, metaphysical libertarianism (a form of incompatibilism with respect to physical determinism) might be classified as compatibilism with respect to theological determinism (if it was assumed such free will events were pre-ordained and therefore were destined to occur, but of which whose outcomes were not "predestined" or determined by God). If hard theological determinism is accepted (if it was assumed instead that such outcomes were predestined by God), then metaphysical libertarianism is not, however, possible, and would require reclassification (as hard incompatibilism for example, given that the universe is still assumed to be indeterministic – although the classification of hard determinism is technically valid also).


title: Free will

text: The idea of "free will" is one aspect of the mind-body problem, that is, consideration of the relation between mind (for example, consciousness, memory, and judgment) and body (for example, the human brain and nervous system). Philosophical models of mind are divided into physical and non-physical expositions.


title: Free will

text: Cartesian dualism holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance, the seat of consciousness and intelligence, and is not identical with physical states of the brain or body. It is suggested that although the two worlds do interact, each retains some measure of autonomy. Under cartesian dualism external mind is responsible for bodily action, although unconscious brain activity is often caused by external events (for example, the instantaneous reaction to being burned). Cartesian dualism implies that the physical world is not deterministic – and in which external mind controls (at least some) physical events, providing an interpretation of incompatibilist free will. Stemming from Cartesian dualism, a formulation sometimes called "interactionalist dualism" suggests a two-way interaction, that some physical events cause some mental acts and some mental acts cause some physical events. One modern vision of the possible separation of mind and body is the "three-world" formulation of Popper. Cartesian dualism and Popper's three worlds are two forms of what is called epistemological pluralism, that is the notion that different epistemological methodologies are necessary to attain a full description of the world. Other forms of epistemological pluralist dualism include psychophysical parallelism and epiphenomenalism. Epistemological pluralism is one view in which the mind-body problem is "not" reducible to the concepts of the natural sciences.


title: Free will

text: A contrasting approach is called physicalism. Physicalism is a philosophical theory holding that everything that exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no non-physical substances (for example physically independent minds). Physicalism can be reductive or non-reductive. Reductive physicalism is grounded in the idea that everything in the world can actually be reduced analytically to its fundamental physical, or material, basis. Alternatively, non-reductive physicalism asserts that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties: that mental states (such as qualia) are not ontologically reducible to physical states. Although one might suppose that mental states and neurological states are different in kind, that does not rule out the possibility that mental states are correlated with neurological states. In one such construction, anomalous monism, mental events "supervene" on physical events, describing the emergence of mental properties correlated with physical properties – implying causal reducibility. Non-reductive physicalism is therefore often categorised as property dualism rather than monism, yet other types of property dualism do not adhere to the causal reducibility of mental states (see epiphenomenalism).


title: Free will

text: Incompatibilism requires a distinction between the mental and the physical, being a commentary on the incompatibility of (determined) physical reality and one's presumably distinct experience of will. Secondarily, metaphysical libertarian free will must assert influence on physical reality, and where mind is responsible for such influence (as opposed to ordinary system randomness), it must be distinct from body to accomplish this. Both substance and property dualism offer such a distinction, and those particular models thereof that are not causally inert with respect to the physical world provide a basis for illustrating incompatibilist free will (i.e. interactionalist dualism and non-reductive physicalism).


title: Free will

text: It has been noted that the laws of physics have yet to resolve the hard problem of consciousness: "Solving the hard problem of consciousness involves determining how physiological processes such as ions flowing across the nerve membrane "cause" us to have experiences." According to some, "Intricately related to the hard problem of consciousness, the hard problem of free will represents "the" core problem of conscious free will: Does conscious volition impact the material world?" Others however argue that "consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe."


title: Free will

text: Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. They believe freedom can be present or absent in a situation for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. For instance, courts of law make judgments about whether individuals are acting under their own free will under certain circumstances without bringing in metaphysics. Similarly, political liberty is a non-metaphysical concept. Likewise, some compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one's determined motives without hindrance from other individuals. So for example Aristotle in his "Nicomachean Ethics", and the Stoic Chrysippus.


title: Free will

text: In contrast, the incompatibilist positions are concerned with a sort of "metaphysically free will", which compatibilists claim has never been coherently defined. Compatibilists argue that determinism does not matter; though they disagree among themselves about what, in turn, "does" matter. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.


title: Free will

text: Although there are various impediments to exercising one's choices, free will does not imply freedom of action. Freedom of choice (freedom to select one's will) is logically separate from freedom to "implement" that choice (freedom to enact one's will), although not all writers observe this distinction. Nonetheless, some philosophers have defined free will as the absence of various impediments. Some "modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue free will is simply freely choosing to do what constraints allow one to do. In other words, a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires.


title: Free will

text: Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person is acting on the person's own will only when it is the desire of that person to do the act, and also possible for the person to be able to do otherwise, "if the person had decided to". Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to each individual and not to some abstract notion of "will", asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe." In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains." Similarly, Voltaire, in his "Dictionnaire philosophique", claimed that "Liberty then is only and can be only the power to do what one will." He asked, "would you have everything at the pleasure of a million blind caprices?" For him, free will or liberty is "only the power of acting, what is this power? It is the effect of the constitution and present state of our organs."


title: Free will

text: Compatibilism often regards the agent free as virtue of their reason. Some explanations of free will focus on the internal causality of the mind with respect to higher-order brain processing – the interaction between conscious and unconscious brain activity. Likewise, some modern compatibilists in psychology have tried to revive traditionally accepted struggles of free will with the formation of character. Compatibilist free will has also been attributed to our natural sense of agency, where one must believe they are an agent in order to function and develop a theory of mind.


title: Free will

text: The notion of levels of decision is presented in a different manner by Frankfurt. Frankfurt argues for a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails over the others. A person's will is identified with their effective first-order desire, that is, the one they act on, and this will is free if it was the desire the person wanted to act upon, that is, the person's second-order desire was effective. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling addicts" and "willing addicts". All three groups may have the conflicting first-order desires to want to take the drug they are addicted to and to not want to take it.


title: Free will

text: The first group, "wanton addicts", have no second-order desire not to take the drug. The second group, "unwilling addicts", have a second-order desire not to take the drug, while the third group, "willing addicts", have a second-order desire to take it. According to Frankfurt, the members of the first group are devoid of will and therefore are no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third group willingly take the drug they are addicted to. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference. Others argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the hierarchy mesh together.


title: Free will

text: In "Elbow Room", Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book "Freedom Evolves". The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future.


title: Free will

text: According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.


title: Free will

text: In the philosophy of decision theory, a fundamental question is: From the standpoint of statistical outcomes, to what extent do the choices of a conscious being have the ability to influence the future? Newcomb's paradox and other philosophical problems pose questions about free will and predictable outcomes of choices.


title: Free will

text: Compatibilist models of free will often consider deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world (including the brain). Cognitive naturalism is a physicalist approach to studying human cognition and consciousness in which the mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, such as the behavioral and cognitive sciences ("i.e." neuroscience and cognitive psychology). Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition is also important. For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The "will" is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain. The neuroscience of free will places restrictions on both compatibilist and incompatibilist free will conceptions.


title: Free will

text: Compatibilist models adhere to models of mind in which mental activity (such as deliberation) can be reduced to physical activity without any change in physical outcome. Although compatibilism is generally aligned to (or is at least compatible with) physicalism, some compatibilist models describe the natural occurrences of deterministic deliberation in the brain in terms of the first person perspective of the conscious agent performing the deliberation. Such an approach has been considered a form of identity dualism. A description of "how conscious experience might affect brains" has been provided in which "the experience of conscious free will is the first-person perspective of the neural correlates of choosing."


title: Free will

text: Recently, Claudio Costa developed a neocompatibilist theory based on the causal theory of action that is complementary to classical compatibilism. According to him, physical, psychological and rational restrictions can interfere at different levels of the causal chain that would naturally lead to action. Correspondingly, there can be physical restrictions to the body, psychological restrictions to the decision, and rational restrictions to the formation of reasons (desires plus beliefs) that should lead to what we would call a reasonable action. The last two are usually called "restrictions of free will". The restriction at the level of reasons is particularly important since it can be motivated by external reasons that are insufficiently conscious to the agent. One example was the collective suicide led by Jim Jones. The suicidal agents were not conscious that their free will have been manipulated by external, even if ungrounded, reasons.


title: Free will

text: Alternatives to strictly naturalist physics, such as mind–body dualism positing a mind or soul existing apart from one's body while perceiving, thinking, choosing freely, and as a result acting independently on the body, include both traditional religious metaphysics and less common newer compatibilist concepts. Also consistent with both autonomy and Darwinism, they allow for free personal agency based on practical reasons within the laws of physics. While less popular among 21st-century philosophers, non-naturalist compatibilism is present in most if not almost all religions.


title: Free will

text: Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or incompatibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. For example, Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if indeterminism is true, incompatibilists have not provided, and cannot provide, an adequate account of origination. He rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and origination. Both notions are required to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this conflict.


title: Free will

text: David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a "velleity"), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.


title: Free will

text: According to Arthur Schopenhauer, the actions of humans, as phenomena, are subject to the principle of sufficient reason and thus liable to necessity. Thus, he argues, humans do not possess free will as conventionally understood. However, the will [urging, craving, striving, wanting, and desiring], as the noumenon underlying the phenomenal world, is in itself groundless: that is, not subject to time, space, and causality (the forms that governs the world of appearance). Thus, the will, in itself and outside of appearance, is free. Schopenhauer discussed the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in "The World as Will and Representation", Book 2, Sec. 23:


title: Free will

text: Schopenhauer elaborated on the topic in Book IV of the same work and in even greater depth in his later essay "On the Freedom of the Will." In this work, he stated, "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can "will" only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."


title: Free will

text: In his book "Free Will," philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion, stating that "thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control."


title: Free will

text: Rudolf Steiner, who collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work, wrote "The Philosophy of Freedom", which focuses on the problem of free will. Steiner (1861–1925) initially divides this into the two aspects of freedom: "freedom of thought" and "freedom of action". The controllable and uncontrollable aspects of decision making thereby are made logically separable, as pointed out in the introduction. This separation of "will" from "action" has a very long history, going back at least as far as Stoicism and the teachings of Chrysippus (279–206 BCE), who separated external "antecedent" causes from the internal disposition receiving this cause.


title: Free will

text: Steiner then argues that inner freedom is achieved when we integrate our sensory impressions, which reflect the outer appearance of the world, with our thoughts, which lend coherence to these impressions and thereby disclose to us an understandable world. Acknowledging the many influences on our choices, he nevertheless points out that they do not preclude freedom unless we fail to recognise them. Steiner argues that outer freedom is attained by permeating our deeds with "moral imagination." "Moral" in this case refers to action that is willed, while "imagination" refers to the mental capacity to envision conditions that do not already hold. Both of these functions are necessarily conditions for freedom. Steiner aims to show that these two aspects of inner and outer freedom are integral to one another, and that true freedom is only achieved when they are united.


title: Free will

text: William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds", he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds, nor did his own introspections support it. Ultimately he believed that the problem of free will was a metaphysical issue and, therefore, could not be settled by science. Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as formulated below; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work "Pragmatism", he wrote that "instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" – it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may, through individuals' actions, become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism – the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world.


title: Free will

text: In 1739, David Hume in his "A Treatise of Human Nature" approached free will via the notion of causality. It was his position that causality was a mental construct used to explain the repeated association of events, and that one must examine more closely the relation between things "regularly succeeding" one another (descriptions of regularity in nature) and things that "result" in other things (things that cause or necessitate other things). According to Hume, 'causation' is on weak grounds: "Once we realise that 'A must bring about B' is tantamount merely to 'Due to their constant conjunction, we are psychologically certain that B will follow A,' then we are left with a very weak notion of necessity."