Q&A: Logical Determinism
Logical Determinism
Question
Have a good week and a good year,
In your book The Science of Freedom, page 127, you write:
"The truth value of the proposition was 'true' all along, except that until now we (and no one else either) did not know this. Now it has become known to us. But at the same time, this does not mean that a situation in which no sea battle takes place is impossible, that is, that the battle was predetermined (as determinism maintains). Such a situation is בהחלט possible, as libertarianism holds. If no sea battle takes place, then it will become clear retroactively that the truth value of the proposition is 'false,' and that too was the case from time immemorial, except that until now we did not know it."
If no sea battle took place and it becomes clear retroactively that the truth value of the proposition is false, then it could not have taken place at all, because that was the situation from time immemorial. How does retroactive clarification solve the problem?
That is, if the physical occurrence a thousand years from now determines the truth value of the proposition now, what truth value can we assign to the proposition if we do not have the information about the occurrence? It can only be either true or false, so what help is retroactive clarification and the atemporality of logic?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. Anything can happen in the future, and when it happens, it will determine the truth value of the proposition retroactively.
Discussion on Answer
I explained it there. A truth value is nothing more than a label that we attach, so it does not “exist” at any particular time. It is atemporal. Therefore retroactive influence in time is also not problematic here, because the relation between the event and the truth value of the proposition that describes it is not a relation of causal determination.
Can one say that as long as the thing has not yet happened, to say that there will be a sea battle is a meaningless sentence?
Would it have the same truth value as the sentence “This sentence is true” or “This sentence is not true” or the sentence “Banana” — meaningless sentences, and therefore neither truth-valued nor false?
Is that correct?
Absolutely not. It has a very clear meaning. What is the difference in meaning between the statement “Tomorrow there will be a sea battle” and the statement “Yesterday in Kamchatka there was a bullfight”? They are both claims that say something very clear, and you do not know their truth value.
There is nothing special about the value “true” as opposed to other values and mental states of a person. And there is nothing more special about the future than the present. Even in the present there are propositions that are true and only a few people know that they are true, while the majority do not.
For example, most mathematical propositions are known to be true only by a few; the rest do not know the propositions at all, or do not know the proof.
A proposition is true for a certain person only if that person feels that it is true, and only at those moments when he feels that it is true.
But for reasons of efficiency and laziness, we broaden the definition so that a proposition is true if at some point an expert in the matter will prove to himself that it is true.
Propositions that are not known to be true but are thought to have a significant chance of being true are called conjectures.
Peshita, all the criteria you gave are irrelevant. A proposition is true if its content matches the state of affairs in the world that it describes. It does not matter whether anyone will ever prove this or even know it. Those may be epistemic criteria and not logical ones (how I know that a proposition is true, rather than what the definition of the truth of a proposition is).
"A proposition is true if its content matches the state of affairs in the world that it describes"
That is exactly what I said, just in different words. The content of a proposition is what follows from the arrangement of its concepts, and in order for there to be a logical arrangement and concepts, a person is required. When there is no person, there is no proposition; when there is no proposition, there is nothing to prove; when there is nothing to prove, there is no truth.
There is no meaning at all to speaking about a proposition without a person who apprehends the proposition. Words, concepts, logic — all these occur only in the soul and mind of a person. The state of affairs that a proposition describes is also part of the soul. Everything takes place in the soul. Without a soul, there is no proposition.
Fine. Apparently we are using completely different languages. I do not see any connection at all between your statements and mine.
So what is the value of the proposition in the present, when the information about the future event does not exist? If you say it has no truth value, doesn’t that contradict the law of the excluded middle?