|
I'm going to deal with each of these determinism one at a time so I don't have to write a monster post, and spend all day responding to this one topic. I'm going to tackle logical determinism first. If I understand this correctly, logical determinism states that because factual statements about the future must be true or not true, then the future must already be decided today. For example, if I use the proposition "Tomorrow it is going rain.", the proposition must be either true or not true. More importantly it is true or not true today, when I make the statement. Therefore, the future (tomorrow) must already be decided to make the statement true or not true.
What we are dealing with, from what I've read is the "law of the excluded middle" which claims that a statement like "Tomorrow it will rain or it will not rain" (A or not A) is necesarily true simply by the form of the statement. The statement "A or not A." is true because it encompases all truth values for A, it does not make a claim to the truth value of "A" or "not A" only that one of them must be true. This is because logic supposes that "A" combined with "not A" encompass all possibilities that exist in the universe and that all statements have a truth value.
Why is it supposed that all statements have a truth value?
I see no reason for this assumption. When there is no absolute definition for a word (ex. tall) then there is no absolute truth value for a statemnt that uses the word (ex. "Jon is tall"). These statements are what we call opinions, because opinion explicitly means a statement that does not have an absolute truth value. Predictive statements fall into the same category, they can not said to be true because the future has not happened yet, there is no absolute truth value that exists for predictive statemtents in the present.
__________________
The advantage law is the best law in rugby, because it lets you ignore all the others for the good of the game.
|