Table 2.

Comparison of essentialist and instrumentalist accounts of the concept of FW/VA.^*.

Essentialist concept of FW/VA	Instrumentalist concept of FW/VA
Concept of FW designates an all or none (dichotomous) property or state of agents or their decisions	A folk psychological and commonly used approximate and umbrella concept capturing voluntariness of action on a continuum
Static, does not change; refers to a fix state	Dynamic, can increase or decrease depending on one's cognitive or physical state
Essentially a third person concept, whose existence is confirmed or invalidated by science (science chiefly revises ontology)	Originates from one's own sense of agency, with respect to situations and with respect to one's own self-understanding and behaviors; an inter-subjective concept rooted in first person ontology, which can be understood through scientific inquiry (science chiefly revises epistemology)

^*The essentialist strategy emphasizes the search for the “true” nature of a phenomenon. Historically, the Western philosophical tradition has stressed that those essences would be fix, immutable, and universal. Dewey described this quest as the “philosophical fallacy” and suggested, following Peirce's work in logic, to define concepts in terms of their functional roles. Dewey referred to this approach as “instrumentalism” (Misak, 2013).