Beliefs about Free Will in Russia: Sociological Analysis of the Philosophical Concept

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers about the existence of free will. Since theoretical attempts have failed to come to an agreement on this issue, experimental philosophers, who study folk intuitions by using social science methods, also began searching for an answer. Still, due to various reasons results of the studies remained very controversial. Some critics argued that the main problem lied in the way the questionnaires were formulated because this itself could confuse participants of the studies. My study attempts to find out whether people believe or do not believe in free will by creating a questionnaire based on vocabulary and concepts that are used by non-philosophers for defining and describing free will. It is also aimed to create a list of terms and concepts of these “basic” descriptive constructions that could be used in further research. Several focus groups will be conducted to collect data which will be used for formulation of the questionnaire. The questionnaire will be used for an online-survey. Final results will be analyzed by content analysis and statistical methods.