On Determinism (optional material, p. 3)

Determinism by Logical Necessity

Alternatively, the "soft" determinist may argue that the alternatives we choose are "logically necessary" in some sense—although what sense is meant remains unclear. If the determinist means simply that "whatever will be, will be," then the latter statement cannot be contested and might even be suitable for a song lyric. It does not follow, however, the "whatever will be, will have been necessitated by prior factors," as determinism would have it.

Perhaps the determinist imagines that some kind of being or super-computer could, if provided all the requisite data from past and present, predict all our choices and other future events. Because we have no experience of such an entity and no inkling of how it could be constructed, the notion is totally arbitrary and should be rejected. Furthermore, predictability does not in itself constitute metaphysical necessity; conceivably, for instance, I may know what course of action I will follow in a certain situation, even though that course of action and all the mental events leading up to it are undertaken entirely of my own volition. Thus even if an omniscient predictive entity could be shown to be feasible, it would prove only that certain events were epistemologically certain, and not that other alternatives were metaphysically impossible (cf. pp. 1.3:74-6).      Next page


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