Dennett and Taylor’s Alleged Refutation of the Consequence Argument

Daniel C. Dennett has long maintained that the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism is confused. In a joint work with Christopher Taylor, he claims to have shown that the argument is based on a failure to understand Logic 101. Given a fairly plausible account of having the power to cause something, they claim that an inference rule that the argument relies on is invalid. In this paper, I show that Dennett and Taylor’s refutation does not work against a better, more standard version of the Consequence Argument. Hence Dennett and Taylor’s alleged refutation fails.