@ughaibu,
@ Zetherin
ughaibu wrote:
kennethamy wrote:The issue is whether professional philosophers hold (or do not hold) that the notion of universal causal laws are an essential part of the idea of determinism. . . . I have presented in support two statements: One from the Cambridge Dictionary, and one from the On Line Encyclopedia.
kennethamy wrote:Causal determinism (hereafter, simply “determinism”) is the thesis that the course of the future is entirely determined by the conjunction of the past and the laws of nature. Imagine a proposition that completely describes the way that the entire universe was at some point in the past, say 100 million years ago. Let us call this proposition “P.” Also imagine a proposition that expresses the conjunction of all the laws of nature; call this proposition “L.” Determinism then is the thesis that the conjunction of P and L entails a unique future. Given P and L, there is only one possible future, one possible way for things to end up.
There is no mention here of cause, is there? As I said, determinism is a thesis about laws of nature. There's no mention of "statements" or explanations, is there?
Further, you hold that the future, in a determined world is not fixed, dont you? The above piece, quoted by you, disagrees. By the same author "Since causal determinism removes all alternative possibilities, PAPf preserves the flicker strategist’s insistence that moral responsibility is incompatible with the truth of causal determinism."
http://home.sandiego.edu/~ktimpe/research/critique.pdf
You also hold that there can be "macro-determinism" even if determinism is false at the micro level, your source disagrees, doesn't it? "The course of the future is entirely determined".
You have been consistently and incorrigibly mistaken about determinism in almost its entirety, for all the time I've known you, instead of insisting, in the face of the facts, that you're correct, wouldn't you prefer to hold a view that actually is correct? At present, you claim to be a member of a group of people with whom you disagree!!
I’m going to do something that is often despised, but I’m going to do it with the best of intentions. I’m going to make a distinction with use of capital letters. I’m going to distinguish between 1) Laws of Nature and 2) laws of nature.
The first (Laws of Nature) [notice the capital letters] will refer to the inventions that often come subsequent to the discoveries. They usually take the form of either formulas and/or sets of statements.
The second (laws of nature) [notice the lower case letters] will refer to the discoveries or regularities found in nature that bring rise to subsequent inventions.
In short, if the term begins with uppercase letters, then I’m referring to the man-made descriptions, and if I use lower-case letters, then I am referring to what in nature is being described—that which is discovered.
I’m doing the same thing for all laws, be they laws of nature or scientific laws.
With that in mind, let us, Zetherin, turn back to Kennethamy’s and Ughaibu’s discussion quoted above and examine it to see if my suspicion’s are correct—that Ughaibu is not talking about laws of nature but instead Laws of Nature. The point of course is that Kennethamy brings up laws of nature while Ughaibu speaks instead of Laws of Nature. Why else would he say, “As I said, determinism is a thesis about [L]aws of [N]ature. There's no mention of "statements" or explanations, is there?”
The interesting part about this is that there is a substantive issue underlying what may appear on the surface as a verbal dispute. The verbal dispute can be corrected by temporarily adopting my distinction between Laws and laws.
I don’t suppose that Ughaibu is correct, but for the sake of argument, let us suppose anyway, for a few brief moments, that he is actually addressing what Kennethamy is talking about. If that is the case, then we should interpret what Kennethamy quoted as a discussion on Laws of Nature instead of laws of nature. But, I don’t think for a moment that what was being discussed was Laws of Nature, so I find it difficult to accept Ughaibu’s response, “As I said, determinism is a thesis about [L]aws of [N]ature. There's no mention of "statements" or explanations, is there?[,]” as in anyway pertaining to the issue.
