O problema da liberdade da vontade e a psicologia cognitiva

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the issue of will, investigating how this concept is treated in cognitive psychology. From this, we sought to determine whether cognitive psychology favors some kind of explanation for the will. Therefore, initially we exposed a brief historical contextualization of the problem as discussed by philosophy to find how cognitive psychology inherited the issue. We show how the debate around the concept of the will relates to the problem of free will, freedom of action and moral responsibility as well as have implications for the nomological determinism. We present the arguments for and against the possibility of free will in a deterministic world, according to compatibilist view, accepting these two hypotheses are possible; the incompatibilist, which denies that a free will is possible in a deterministic world; and a pessimistic view, which denies the possibility of free will in either a determinist or indeterministic world. Then we investigated the foundations of cognitive psychology, such as functionalism, constructivism, and the theory of information processing in order to track possible philosophical affiliations linked to the problem of will. We also seek to provide an overview of how other disciplines pertaining to the cognition science project influenced a possible vision of cognitive psychology in this matter, especially computer science, with Alan Turing, and neuroscience, with the experiments of Benjamin Libet. Finally, we present some considerations of influential psychologists on the subject and we have seen how the concept of will is involved in research on motivation, since this is address the reasons or causes of behavior, as well as the concept of executive function, related to voluntary acts, global cognitive control, planning and execution of behavior. We conclude that it still seems precarious for a definitive position on the issue of the will, as some researchers seem to proclaim, even in light of recent scientific advances.