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I was reading an essay (that has been simplied such that it takes on the format of notes but still is like an essay...not sure how to categorize it) at this webpage : http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz/freewill1.htm#intro
which concerns free will. At this time, I have only read through the two pages or so when I ran into an intriguing idea presented by the author:
For a bit of back ground for the particular paragraph of interest, read this:
And the following is the one of interest:
What the author is saying here is that the law of the excluded middle does not hold true for future truth values and that it is not possible within the present laws of logic which the author considered. However, the author failed to consider the possibility of probability, which if I may say so is the basis for a truth table. When one is making a truth table for a statement, one is assessing the possiblities of certain truth values that occur in correspondence with other truth values (within the same statement). As such, the truth value of a future event is also based on a structured probability. The author is basically assuming that all truth values must neccesarily be definite for every temporal direction. And with this, I disagree.
Am I flawed in my analysis?
which concerns free will. At this time, I have only read through the two pages or so when I ran into an intriguing idea presented by the author:
For a bit of back ground for the particular paragraph of interest, read this:
Two admirals, A and B, are preparing their navies for a sea battle tomorrow. The battle will be fought until one side is victorious. But the 'laws' of the excluded middle (every statement is either true or false) and of noncontradiction (no statement is both true and false), require that one of the statements, 'A wins' and 'B wins', is true and the other is false. Suppose 'A wins' is (today) true. Then whatever A does (or fails to do) today will make no difference; similarly, whatever B does (or fails to do) today will make no difference: the outcome is already settled. Or again, suppose 'A wins' is (today) false. Then no matter what A does today (or fails to do), it will make no difference; similarly, no matter what B does (or fails to do), it will make no difference: the outcome is already settled. Thus, if every statement is either true or false (and not both), then planning, or as Aristotle put it 'taking care', is illusory in its efficacy. The future will be what it will be, irrespective of our planning, intentions, etc.
Is it possible to 'escape' the sting of the conclusion of this argument? How might one argue against accepting the conclusion that planning (for the future) is useless?
There have been three ways that have been proposed to avoid having to accept the conclusion.
Proposal One: One might argue that propositions are not true in advance of the events described. Propositions 'become' true when the events described occur.
Objections to Proposal One: (1) When did it 'become true' that Bush won the 1988 election? When the votes were counted? When it was clear that he would win? When 'the deciding vote' was cast? ...
And the following is the one of interest:
The questions in the preceding paragraph strongly suggest that it will prove problematic in the extreme to try to put precise times on the (supposed) occurrence of a proposition's 'becoming true'. Moreover, propositions, you'll recall, are supposed to be abstract entities, entities which do not exist in space and time; but if they do not exist in time, how can their properties change at some particular time?
Another Objection to Proposal One: To argue that propositions about the future acquire a truth-value only when the described event occurs (i.e. in the future) will entail abandoning the law of the excluded middle: propositions about the future will not, then, have truth-values now, i.e. prior to the occurrence of the predicted event. Adopting Proposal One would require our creating a far more complicated logic. This is not to say that this proposed solution is completely without merit; but it is to say that we ought to try to find some other solution before resorting to such a major revision of logic.
What the author is saying here is that the law of the excluded middle does not hold true for future truth values and that it is not possible within the present laws of logic which the author considered. However, the author failed to consider the possibility of probability, which if I may say so is the basis for a truth table. When one is making a truth table for a statement, one is assessing the possiblities of certain truth values that occur in correspondence with other truth values (within the same statement). As such, the truth value of a future event is also based on a structured probability. The author is basically assuming that all truth values must neccesarily be definite for every temporal direction. And with this, I disagree.
Am I flawed in my analysis?
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