davidm wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2017 5:29 pm
That's correct, I'm not talking about intervention, But as it happens, if the foreknower did also intervene, there would be no contradiction.
I find it hard to make sense of this because if we imagine something as being is a position of 'foreknowing', then it seems to drain the idea of 'knowing' (and being a 'something') of any meaning.
Suppose the universe is entirely deterministic and I know everything about that universe. In that case, I know it holistically. Whereas those with only a partial knowledge would see particular events, particular cause-and-effects, such thinking would make no sense to me because I see the totality. Events imply change; something was once like this - now it is like that. But for me, there was never any separate 'something'. Nor was there ever change; I only see the totality of things and change within that totality does not affect that totality.
As an analogy, if I understand 'oak tree' then I understand that the loss and regrowth of leaves are all part of my understanding 'oak tree'. That is what oak trees do; the term 'oak tree' includes 'loses and regrows leaves', an oak tree with, or without, leaves remains that oak tree....If I understood the whole universe in that way, the same would apply. The universe would
always just be the universe.
I can only reintroduce the idea of 'knowing' if I introduce some factor I
don't know. For example, the understanding of 'oak tree' does not embrace an understanding of time, so I can say that my knowledge of oak trees enables me to 'know' what will happen to their leaves seen in another context; time. Whereas if my knowledge embraces
everything, there will be no context. So, if the 'foreknower' is to know, then there must be things they don't know! It could be something like 'time'; we could declare that time is independent of the 'foreknower'. Or it could be that we say the 'foreknower' themselves is independent; that they know the universe relative to themselves, themselves not being part of that universe.
So it seems to me that claims about determinism and the 'foreknower' and so on are incomplete. We need to ask; '
what do you mean 'determined'?', and '
what do you mean 'known'?'
As I mentioned earlier, this alleged problem of epistemic determinism is just special subset of the broader "problem" of future contingents -- so-called logical determinism. It's a curious way of asking something much more basic: if it's true today that tomorrow it will rain, does that mean it has to rain tomorrow? And of course the answer is no.
I do not think that '
tomorrow it will rain' is either true or false. If we argue what would make it true or false is how it relates to facts, then there exists no fact that relates to it.
When tomorrow comes and it rains, then we might think that the person who said '
tomorrow it will rain' was correct, but that would be a fact about the person ('they were right'), not the rain. (We might also say '
tomorrow it will rain' can be given a truth value in logic, which would contrast with '
Not: tomorrow it will rain', but again this is treating the sentence itself as the object, its truth would not depend on it raining.)
The only other way it might be thought true is if '
tomorrow it will rain' was understood as shorthand for something like
'I have seen the weather forecast and it predicts rain' (i.e. it is really making a claim about something which is an existing fact, not a future fact). Or it is a claim about the state of mind of the speaker:
It is true that I think 'tomorrow it will rain'.
In all these cases, when saying '
tomorrow it will rain', the future-rain does not determine its truth or falsity.