The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Masked Abilities and Compatibilism
Abstract
An object's disposition to A in circumstances C is masked if circumstances C obtain without the object Aing. This paper explores an analogous sense in which abilities can be masked, and it uses the results of this exploration to motivate an analysis of agents’ abilities in terms of dispositions. This analysis is then shown to provide the resources to defend a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities against Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Although this principle is often taken to be congenial to incompatibilism concerning free action and determinism, the paper concludes by using the dispositional analysis of abilities to argue for compatibilism, and to show why the ‘master argument’ for incompatibilism is unsound.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
Frankfurt, H. G. (1971) · The Journal of Philosophy · doi:10.2307/2024717 · Cited by 4,663
Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility
Frankfurt, H. G. (1969) · The Journal of Philosophy · doi:10.2307/2023833 · Cited by 2,405
Pereboom, D. (2001) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511498824 · Cited by 1,519
Martin, C. B. (1994) · The Philosophical Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2220143 · Cited by 774
Mele, A. R. (2006) · Cited by 333
Fischer, J. M. (1994) · Cited by 268
van Inwagen, P. (1980) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-94-017-3528-5 · Cited by 128
Alternative Possibilities and the Failure of the Counterexample Strategy
McKenna, M. S. (1997) · Journal of Social Philosophy · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.1997.tb00388.x · Cited by 100
Cited by
Agency, Teleological Control and Robust Causation
Usher, M. (2020) · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · doi:10.1111/phpr.12537 · Cited by 29
Metadata
- Authors
- Fara, M.
- Venue
- Mind
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2008-10-01
- Volume
- 117
- Issue
- 468
- Pages
- 843-865
- ISSN
- 0026-4423 (ISSN-L)
- 1460-2113
- OpenAlex
- W2145288914
- Cited by
- 375
- References
- 8
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Masked Abilities and Compatibilism. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/mind/fzn078
- The paper
- Fara, M. (2008). Masked Abilities and Compatibilism. Mind. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzn078
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
