Topics Freedom

Question Everything can be determined. Therefore, the world is deterministic. What do you think? (1) Everything can be determined. (2) Determinism is the thesis that everything can be determined. __________________________________________________________ Therefore, (3) the world is deterministic. For example, suppose I am raking the leaves outside my house. Then the fact that I am raking the leaves can be determined. It can be determined by anybody driving past my house. It can be determined by a high resolution satellite (on a clear day with no overhanging trees). It can be determined by merely witnessing me raking the leaves. The same goes for anything else that happens. Its occurrence can be determined. For (1) not to be true would be to undermine the assumption used in court trials. All court trials assume that the occurrence of anything, crimes included, can always be determined (even if not by the available evidence). For (2) not to be true would be to say that there are things that cannot be determined in determinism. But obviously then, determinism as we know it would not hold. So what do you think? Isn't this a good argument for determinism?

Accepted:
November 17, 2011

Comments

As the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the subject defines it, causal determinism "is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event isnecessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the lawsof nature".

This is a much stronger claim that is made at (2). To say that "everything can be determined", in the sense in which that phrase is used at (1), seems to mean just that every current fact can be known, i.e., can be determined to be true by some sort of ideal observer. That is itself a very strong claim, and not one that is obviously true. (Can it now be known what the temperature is inside some star millions of light years from here? What about facts in the past?) But even if it is true, that does not show that, to use your example, your raking the leaves now was causally necessitated by past events.