(1) How the word 'free' is in fact used

The determinist is using ordinary language, so he must mean to deny at least some part of what men ordinarily mean when they claim to act freely, for if he does not he has no excuse for using the words he does. So to understand him we must examine what men mean when they say they act of their own free will. To do this we must consider the actions which may be so described and how they distinguish between them and constrained actions. We say we do of our own free will when there is not a pistol at our backs, when another choice is open to us, when we are sane, not drunk; that we haven't done x of our own free will when someone threatens us, blackmails us, when we have to do x or lose our jobs, when we are neurotically driven to do x, when we act in response to the hypnotist's suggestion, etc.

Some philosophers have claimed that we understand the phrase 'doing x of my own free will 'simply because we can point to examples — e.g. case of a man who asks a girl to marry him without being pressed to do so. They then argue that since we could not understand the phrase unless we could point to at least one free act, the determinist must be wrong. This paradigm case argument is not conclusive. Its weakness is that it presupposes too simple a theory of meaning. We understand the phrase both by pointing to examples of such actions and by listing the characteristics of the actions which we are willing so to describe. Modern science might have shown that though we thought there were actions that had these characteristics we now know they did not. We could still understand the phrase for we would be able to describe what a free action would be like; it would be like the actions that we used to think were free, only it would really possess the characteristics our ancestors falsely attributed to them.