Word.ws English Dictionary

incompatibilism

incompatibilism noun: the doctrine that free will and determinism are incompatible, that one necessarily precludes the other.

Noun

incompatibilism (uncountable)

  1. The doctrine that free will and determinism are incompatible, that one necessarily precludes the other.
    • Because pretty much the same thing goes on in us when we have become the sort of person who would pull a trigger, or run into a building to save a child, or steal an extra cookie, or advocate hard incompatibilism in a book destined to be read only by two people who will hate it.2023, Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, New York: Penguin, →ISBN
    Antonyms:
    compatibilism

Synonyms of incompatibilism

Antonyms

Origin of incompatibilism

From in- + compatibilism or incompatible + -ism.

Questions about incompatibilism

What does incompatibilism mean?
Incompatibilism means the doctrine that free will and determinism are incompatible, that one necessarily precludes the other.
What part of speech is incompatibilism?
Incompatibilism is a noun.

Words near incompatibilism in the dictionary

  1. incompassionate
  2. incompassionately
  3. incompassionateness
  4. incompatability
  5. incompatable
  6. incompatibilism
  7. incompatibilist
  8. incompatibilistic
  9. incompatibilists
  10. incompatibilities
  11. incompatibility

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: incompatibilism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “incompatibilism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/incompatibilism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.