Could He Have Acted Otherwise?

Could he have acted otherwise, except what he actually did do? This problem is the core of the controversy between Free Will and Determinism. We can't, notably, answer it empirically, for what happened can not happen again unless we invent the time machine. Then, how can it be answered? According to the philosophers, it can be solved only by examining the use of 'could have' in ordinary language to see what it exactly means. At this moment, that 'verbal statements are no guarantee' is not the only truth, whereas 'verbal statements' shows the truth.At the beginning of the 20th century, G.E.Moore and Nowell-Smith gave a positive answer to the problem by examining the use of 'could have', and so argued the two are compatible. After that J.L.Austin criticized Moore's and Smith's arguments through detailed examination of the use of 'can', 'could have', 'if', etc. Austin's paper, like a stone that raised a thousand waves, aroused a heated debate among other philosophers so that a great many new literatures in the sphere of Free Will emerged. This paper, taking this problem as a clue, will select several important papers from those literatures and interpret their views and arguments in detail. At last, I shall give my view about some important problems in the controversy and try to argue that we can't give a permanent solution to the problem 'Could he have acted otherwise?'...