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Determinism in Deterministic Chaos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Roger Jones
Roger Jones*
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
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Extract

In a paper fifteen years ago about the meaning and the possibility of the beginning and end of time, our redoubtable session chair, John Earman, ended up like this:

…[T]he answers to the questions posed at the outset lie somewhere in a thicket of problems growing out of the intersection of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. This paper has only located the thicket and engaged in a little initial bush beating. This is not much progress, but knowing which bushes to beat is a necessary first step.

Some philosophers will be disappointed that the thicket is populated by so many problems of a technical and scientific nature. On the contrary, I am encouraged by this result because it shows that a long-standing philosophical problem has a nontrivial and, indeed, a surprisingly large content. Moreover, this result is a good illustration of the artificiality and danger of trying to separate philosophy from science. (Earman 1977, p. 131-2)

These remarks are a kind of manifesto of an approach to philosophical questions about space and time dating from the late 1960’s.

Type
Part XIV. Laws, Conditions and Determinism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 536 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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