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Alan Rhoda
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Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680
| Posted 11/11/2004 11:31 AM (GMT -6) |   | Hey all,
It is widely assumed in philosophical circles that if state of affairs S IS the case at some time (say T) then at all times prior to T it WAS the case that S WILL BE the case at T. For ease of reference, I will case this the IS-WAS-WILL thesis (IWW for short).
Now, if IWW is correct, then open theism is in trouble, for it implies that everything that is the case about the world always was going to be just as it is. Additionally, IWW implies that if at any point in the future S obtains, then it is true now that S will obtain. But open theists want to say that, with respect to future contingents, God does now know either that "S will obtain" or that "S will not obtain". Since IWW implies that one or the other or those claim is now true, it implies that the God of open theism must be limited in omniscience, for there are some true claims about the future that God does not know.
So a question that open theists need to confront is this: Is IWW true? And if not, why not?
Defenders of IWW have an argument to support their claim. Let's call it the "Prediction Argument" (PA for short). The PA attempts to support IWW by appealing to ordinary language usage. If, the argument runs, someone makes a prediction about the future, say, that a certain horse will win the Derby, and that horse does win, then in retrospect we would typically say that the person's prediction was correct at the time they made it, irrespective of whether its occurring was contingent or necessary at that time. Accordingly, a claim that something WILL occur is true just in case in does come to pass at some future time.
But there are also arguments against IWW. Here's one, which I call the "Rational Assertability Argument" (RAA for short). One fundamental criterion we use in interpreting what other people mean is to consider if the statement is rationally assertable from their perspective. In other words, if a person says "S will obtain", we have to ask ourselves if that person was in a good position to assert that, given the infomation available to them. If we judge that they were not rationally justified in asserting the claim taken at face value, then we apply the principle of charity and look for other, less literal, ways to construe the statement that would be rationally assertible. Now, suppose a person says "S will obtain" but believes that S is improbable given the current state of the world. Is that claim, taken at face value, rationally assertible? No. If he really believes that S's obtaining is improbable, then he shouldn't say "S will obtain". The most he could reasonably assert would be "S might obtain" or "The probability that S will obtain is X". So for "S will obtain" to be rationally assertible, and therefore for it to be a claim that we can reasonably regard as true, it is not enough that S actually obtain, as IWW claims. Instead, S's obtaining must be at least probable with respect to the state of the world at the time the statement is made. This means that "will" has causal force and not merely temporal force, as IWW implies.
Does anyone else have thoughts on the IWW thesis? Can you come up with better arguments for or against it?
Regards,
Alan | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 11/11/2004 2:15 PM (GMT -6) | | Alan,
Your counter-argument seems sufficiently decisive against the IWW to me. So the only other question that I can think of that is relevant to your request is, "Why do most people believe in libertarian free will in the first place." Some philosophers have sided with the idea that the relation of the final cause is a necessary and intuitive notion which is ultimately the foundation of induction itself - just as intuitive as the relation of causality. If this is so, then the notion that all events are inevitable can never be coherently and consistently held, for one's intuiton of finality will ultimately reveal itself in one's ordinary language. This, I believe, is the case.
Apart from the belief in final causes and the vogue theory of quantum physics, I know of no reason why one would even want to get around the IWW. For without those contenders, the IWW would be the more parsimonious and, hence, rational account of things.
wjs | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 11/11/2004 4:23 PM (GMT -6) | | Alan: Does anyone else have thoughts on the IWW thesis? Can you come up with better arguments for or against it?
Tom: I like your RAA argument. I'd add a few things:
(1) The fundamental problem with IWW, as I understand it, is that it starts with language and then moves to ontology. Not sure I’ll do a good job at explaining this, but I’ll try. I think our language ought to reflect ontology rather than the other way around. Seems to me that IWW reasons from language usage to what must be the case about reality. Maybe this will be borne out in the rest of what I have to say (especially point 4).
(2) It entails determinism. If all the future is a “will” or a “will not” then all the future occurs with a probability of 1 (or not, with a probability of 0). Sure, we use “will” in everyday speech for events we would, if pressed, admit are indeterminate. That’s fine, but AT LEAST when pressed we MAKE THE DISTINCTION between events that have a probability of 1 of occurring and events that have a probability of less than 1 but greater than 0 of happening. In other words, if our language is sometimes vague, we are at least able to disambiguate it. But IWW doesn’t permit the disambiguation, and it seems so because it wants to conclude what is the case about REALITY based on language (rather than coming to conclude what reality is like and then developing a semantics for it).
If one wishes to affirm real indeterminacy, then one should offer a semantics for expressing such indeterminacy. If indeterminacy is real, it should be “expressible.” So express it. If we refuse our belief in indeterminacy specific expression, do we really believe in indeterminacy? I don’t think so. I guess (2) applies only to folks like Craig who agree that indeterminacy is real but who refuse to make room for it in their language. If a proponent of IWW is a determinist, then (2) obviously does no damage.
(3) IWW isn’t logically required to explain predictions which end up obtaining. There’s nothing that constrains us to explain events in deterministic terms. In other words, IWW isn’t logically required. If I predict a winner in a horse race and my horse wins, my win is as explainable on indeterministic grounds as it is on deterministic grounds. And for those who admit to real contingency, my win is more consistently explained on indeterministic grounds and in language that appropriately reflects that. Nothing about language or reason constrains us to say that every “is” can only be meaningfully explained as having always been a “will be.” It’s as equally explainable as having been a “might and might not be.”
(4) We need to seriously talk about “guesses”—what they are (as propositions or not?) and what grounds their truth value. I offered this a long time ago and haven’t thought about it since then. I got no bites then, but it makes sense to me still. In answering IWW I’d like to know more about the precise nature of the particular “prediction” being considered. When somebody “guesses” (which is what our predictions usually are) that the toss of a coin will land heads, or that a particular horse will win, her guess need not make a claim about the objective probabilities at the time of prediction. I take predictions like “My horse will win the race” to include an unspoken qualifier “I believe that…” so that what’s really being claimed is “I believe that my horse will win.” If this is the case, then guesses are in actuality not truth claims about a reality other than the belief state of the one making the guess. So in terms of the reality that grounds truth values of propositions, the truth value of such a guess is grounded in the belief state of the guesser and not in the objective probability of the coin toss or horse race. The reality projected is the guessers belief state about what will eventually turn out to be the case regardless of what the objective possibilities are. Two entirely different realities.
So when the coin turns up heads or my horse ends up winning, we “say” the guess is true, and when what was predicted or guessed doesn’t happen we “say” the guess was not true. But to conclude that the real world outside our own belief states must conform to those belief states is not sound. Guesses of how contingent events “will occur” may be said to be “true” in the sense that what I imagined would happen did happen, not in the sense that it was always true of what did happen that it “will” happen. It doesn’t justify the move FROM language TO ontology. So for Sam to predict “The coin will land on heads” is for Sam to make a claim about his own epistemic state, for him to imagine which of the possible outcomes will happen. That’s precisely what a guess is. And that’s the problem with using predictions that reflect belief states to argue what must be the case in the real world outside that belief state.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 11/12/2004 1:38 AM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: I had assumed that the IWW'ers WERE determinists. If they're not, then they seem to be really confused.
Tom: I'm thinking of Bill Craig as an example. He wants to affirm real indeterminacy but argue also that the only truths about the future are "will" and "will not" propositions. He simply denies that our libertarian freedom to do A or B, or that A and B are both REALLY indeterminate, has anything to do with its being IN FACT true that I "will" do A and "will not" do B.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680
| Posted 11/12/2004 10:38 AM (GMT -6) | | Jeff and Tom,
Thanks for your responses. Good stuff.
quote:
(1) The fundamental problem with IWW, as I understand it, is that it starts with language and then moves to ontology. ... I think our language ought to reflect ontology rather than the other way around.
I agree with you that ontology is explanatorily prior to semantics, but I think the problem you notice here pertains specifically to the Prediction Argument (PA) and not to the IWW per se. As an argument PA clearly moves from language to ontology. But IWW is not an argument but a claim - a claim, moreover, that is an ontological claim. Thus, it claims that IS is a sufficient condition for WAS(WILL). Seems to me that this claim is inconsistent with a genuinely dynamic view of the future, i.e., it conflicts with presentism and with the A-theory of time.
quote:
(2) It entails determinism. If all the future is a “will” or a “will not” then all the future occurs with a probability of 1 (or not, with a probability of 0).
I agree, though Craig et al. would sharply disagree. They would say that you're committing a modal fallacy here in going from "will" to "must".
quote:
Sure, we use “will” in everyday speech for events we would, if pressed, admit are indeterminate. That’s fine, but AT LEAST when pressed we MAKE THE DISTINCTION between events that have a probability of 1 of occurring and events that have a probability of less than 1 but greater than 0 of happening.
You raise an important point. If "will" has purely temporal force, in accordance with IWW, then to make these distinctions one has to use additional qualifiers. Thus, one would have to distinguish, as Craig does, between its merely being the case that something "will" happen, and its being the case that something "necessarily will" happen. So IWW doesn't make contingency inexpressible.
quote:
(3) IWW isn’t logically required to explain predictions which end up obtaining. There’s nothing that constrains us to explain events in deterministic terms. ... If I predict a winner in a horse race and my horse wins, my win is as explainable on indeterministic grounds as it is on deterministic grounds. And for those who admit to real contingency, my win is more consistently explained on indeterministic grounds and in language that appropriately reflects that. Nothing about language or reason constrains us to say that every “is” can only be meaningfully explained as having always been a “will be.” It’s as equally explainable as having been a “might and might not be.”
I agree. IWW is a metaphysical thesis that is not, as far as I can see, logically necessary. We don't need to suppose that IS implies WAS(WILL). We can suppose instead that IS implies either WAS(WILL) or WAS(MIGHT).
quote:
(4) We need to seriously talk about “guesses”—what they are (as propositions or not?) and what grounds their truth value. ... When somebody “guesses” (which is what our predictions usually are) that the toss of a coin will land heads, or that a particular horse will win, her guess need not make a claim about the objective probabilities at the time of prediction. I take predictions like “My horse will win the race” to include an unspoken qualifier “I believe that…” so that what’s really being claimed is “I believe that my horse will win.” If this is the case, then guesses are in actuality not truth claims about a reality other than the belief state of the one making the guess.
Agreed. This ties in with the RAA. Random guesses (as opposed to educated guesses in which one is confident of the outcome) are not rationally assertible. So if a person says "Eclipse will win the Derby" we should conclude either (a) that they really believe that Eclipse's winning is probable, or (b) that they are making an autobiographical claim, e.g., "I'm betting on Eclipse." If (a) does not seem rationally assertible, then some variant of (b) is the most reasonable construal of the statement. Only (a) is a true prediction, however. (b) can be expressed in the linguistic form of a prediction but, semantically, it is not. It does not express the thought that something is likely to happen, but rather the thought that one is somehow committed to its happening.
Blessings,
Alan | | Back to Top | | |
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GregBoyd
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 1818
| Posted 11/12/2004 7:37 PM (GMT -6) | | The problem with IWW is that it fails to notice that "will" and "will not" are contraries while "is" and "is not" are contradictories. Temporal passage is marked by this transition from contraries to contradictories. "Lucky strike will win" is contrary to "Lucky strike will not win" AND contrary to "Lucky strike might and might not win." But "Lucky strike wins" is the contradictory of "Lucky strike did not win." We could say that temporal passage is delineated by the fact that there are THREE distinct modes of being that describe the future, but only TWO that describe the present and past. (SAY hello to the HEXAGON!)
What of the person who says "Lucky strike will win" and Lucky strike turns out to win, even though it was not determinate (and/or epistemologically warranted) at the time of the utterance that Lucky strike would definitely win? Such utterances are strictly FALSE, for they fail to correspond to reality. But they may be analyzed NOT as making truth claims at all, but as PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES. When a person says "LUcky strike will win," she may be expressing HOPE that Lucky strike will win. OR she may be trying to get someone to bet on Lucky strike. OR she may be expressing her BELIEF that Lucky will win. In THIS SENSE such utterances can be "true" viz. they accurately express hope, or an agenda or a belief). But as a claim purporting to reflect REALITY, they are false, just in case it is either a) determinately the case that Lucky STrike will lose or b) indeterminately the case that Lucky Strike will win (or lose).
Them's me thoughts.
Doc
"The responsibility is with the chooser -- God is blameless." Plato, Republic, 10. | | Back to Top | | |
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Holiday
Registered Member
Date Joined Nov 2003
Total Posts : 22
| Posted 11/15/2004 8:28 AM (GMT -6) | | Hi,
No I will not dare to dabble in the esoteric, but very interesting discussion.
I was wondering though if or when your forthcoming paper is going to be published and if so where I might be able to read it.
Thanks much,
Holiday
All this three modes of being in the future and only two in the past have sufficiently wet my appetite.
Have you guys thought of a title yet? I've thought of one..."Crucifying Craig's Modal Logic." though I bet Philosophia Christi and others would be reluctant to take such a title. :) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 11/15/2004 10:56 AM (GMT -6) | | Hi Holiday-
Greg is reading an abbreviated version (12-15 pages?) of the paper this week at the Evangelical Philosophical Society's meeting. I think he wants to submit this same version for publication in Philosophi Christi.
The longer more detailed version (40+ pages) is almost done. Not sure where that'll be published. Alan's working on that I think.
Blessigns,
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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