Logical determinism
Have a good week and a happy new year,
In your book, The Science of Freedom, page 127, you write:
“The truth value of the claim was “true” all along, but until now we (and no one else) knew this. Now this has come to our attention. But at the same time this does not mean that a situation is not possible in which a naval battle does not occur, that is, that the battle was predetermined (as determinism holds). Such a situation is certainly possible, as libertarianism believes. If a naval battle does not occur, then it will be found out retroactively that the truth value of the claim is “false”, and this has also always been the case, except that until now we did not know about it.”
If a naval battle did not occur and it was revealed retrospectively that the value of the claim was false, then it could not have occurred at all because that has been the case since the beginning of time. How does the retrospective clarification solve the problem?
That is, if the physical occurrence of another thousand years determines the truth value of the claim now, what truth value can we attach to the claim if we do not have the information about the occurrence? It can be either true or false, and then what use is the clarification of the retroactive and temporal nature of logic?
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So what is the value of the claim in the present when the information about the future event does not exist? If you say there is no truth value, doesn't that contradict the Third Law of the Averted?
I explained it there. A truth value is nothing more than a label that we attach, and therefore it does not “exist” at any given time. It is atemporal. Therefore, even going back in time is not problematic for it, because the relationship between the event and the truth value of the statement that describes it is not a relationship of causality.
Can it be said that as long as it has not happened, saying that there will be a naval battle is a meaningless sentence?
The sentence will have the same truth value as the sentence “This sentence is true” or “This sentence is false” or the sentence “Banana”, meaningless sentences, therefore neither true nor false.
Is this true?
Absolutely not. It has a very clear meaning. What is the difference in meaning between the statement “Tomorrow there will be a naval battle” and the statement “Yesterday in Kamchatka there was a bullfight’? Both are statements that say something very clear and you don't know their truth value.
There is nothing special about “truth” from the rest of the values and mental states of man. And there is nothing more special in the future than in the present. Even in the present there are sentences that are true and only a few know that they are true and the majority do not.
For example, most mathematical sentences only a few know their truth; the rest do not know the sentences at all, or do not know the proof.
A sentence is true for a particular person only if a particular person feels that it is true, and only in those moments when he feels that it is true.
But for reasons of efficiency and laziness we expand the definition to mean that a sentence is true if ever a person who is an expert in the matter proves to himself that it is true.
Sentences that we do not know if they are true but think that there is a significant chance that they are true are called hypotheses.
Psita, all the criteria you gave are irrelevant. A sentence is true if its content corresponds to the state of affairs in the world it describes. It doesn't matter if anyone ever proves it or even knows it. These can be epistemic criteria rather than logical ones (how do I know that a sentence is true, and not what is the definition of the truth of a sentence).
“A sentence is true if its content corresponds to the state of affairs in the world it describes”
That's exactly what I said, just in other words. The content of a sentence is what is implied by the arrangement of its concepts, and for there to be a logical arrangement, and concepts, a person is required. When there is no person, there is no sentence, when there is no sentence, there is nothing to prove, when there is nothing to prove there is no truth.
There is no meaning in talking about a sentence without a person who perceives the sentence. Words, concepts, logic, all of these happen only in the soul and intellect of a person. The state of affairs that a sentence describes is also part of the soul. Everything happens in the soul. Without a soul, there is no sentence.
Shavin. We probably use completely different languages. I don't see any connection between what you said and what I said.
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