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Who's Afraid of Determinism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Leslie Stevenson
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Abstract

Because of the idealizations involved in the ideas of a total state of the world and of all the laws of nature, the thesis of all-encompassing determinism is unverifiable. Our everyday non-scientific talk of causation does not imply determinism; nor is it needed for the Kantian argument for a general causal framework as a condition for experience of an objective world. Determinism is at best a regulative ideal for science, something to be approached but never reached.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 431 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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References

1 As Anscombe, Elizabeth noted in her inaugural lecture ‘Causality and Determination’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, reprinted in Sosa, E. (ed.) Causality and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. The point has also been made by the distinguished mathematician Penrose, Roger, in The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 224–5, 559Google Scholar.

2 See Earman, John, A Primer of Determinism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, II.3–4.

3 van Inwagen, Peter, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar Ch.3, reprinted in Free Will, 2nd edition, ed. Watson, Gary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 At first sight it seems possible that the same total world-state could come about from two different preceding states – but I do not need to decide that question here. Earman offers an equivalent definition in terms of time-slices of all physically possible worlds, i.e. possible worlds that satisfy the laws of nature that hold in our actual world, op. cit. note 2, II.6.

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9 I am reminded of the Northern Irish story about a university student of engineering who got talking to the men digging up the road outside his department; when he remarked that in his work he had to be accurate to within the thousandth part of an inch, the fellow at the bottom of the hole replied: ‘Youse is lucky! In our work we've gotta be dead on!’

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13 Op. cit. note 12, Chapters 2 and 3.

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15 See Earman, op. cit. note 2, II.2, and Cartwright op. cit. note 5, 5.2.5.

16 My informal examples receive support, I think, from Cartwright's discussion of the problems involved in the composition of causes in op. cit. note 12, Introduction and Essay 3; see also Robert Bishop's discussion of the failure of causal closure in physics in Chapters 4 and 5 of op. cit. note 6.

17 Anscombe, op. cit. note 1. See also her paper ‘The Causation of Action’, in Ginet, C. (ed.) Knowledge and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, reprinted in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 103–4Google Scholar.

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19 See the Second Analogy of Experience, and the arguments for the thesis and antithesis of the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason.

20 Henry Allison, doyen of Kant interpreters, has written: ‘the Kantian project requires not merely the reconciliation of free agency with causal determinism … but rather the reconciliation of such determinism with an incompatibilist conception of freedom’, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, 28.

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24 Quotations are from the English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Guyer and Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

25 Treatise of Human Nature I.III.xi–xii.

26 A728-9/B756-7; A775/B803; A820-2/B848-50.

27 Anscombe wrote of ‘an itch for determinism’ in the human mind (‘The Causality of Action’, op. cit. note 17). This consideration suggests there are limits to how much we should scratch it.

28 Reason for Kant being the faculty of making inferences and seeking explanations. In the third Critique, he explicitly recommended a regulative interpretation of the maxim that ‘all production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws’ (Critique of Judgment, Section 70, 5:386–8).

29 This article is a substantially revised version of the last essay ‘A Kantian Defense of Free will’ in my book Inspirations from Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 139–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.