Greetings, once again,
We had an excellent meeting at the Landmark Diner last night; thanks to everyone who showed up! With seven people, our first "Technical Meeting" was a smash success, and I for one got to enjoy a cup of coffee and a nice piece of baklava while waiting.
Our topic for the evening was "fatalism", as it is covered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The encyclopedia defines fatalism as "the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do", which certainly made for an interesting discussion. After much dialogue, our group came to the conclusion that either fatalism is necessarily true or it is necessarily false, and that, if it is necessarily true, morality/normative claims are necessarily false. I can comment more on how we came to that conclusion if someone desire, but I would instead like to devote some space to developing an argument against fatalism-- my ontological argument against fatalism-- which we had some time to explore at the meeting.
Consider,
"U" refers to "In the understanding". Therefore, "Ux" would mean that "x exists in the understanding". Phrased another way, "I am not only capable of understanding the concept of x, but actually possess an understanding of it".
"f" refers to "freedom".
"a" refers to "fatalism"
"<>", my best attempt at an ASCII diamond, means "logically possible". <>Ux means that "It is logically possible that x exists in the understanding"
"[]", my best attempt at an ASCII square, means "necessarily". []Ux means that "x necessarily exists in the understanding".
"~" refers to negation. ~a means "not fatalism"-- that is, if "fatalism" is true, then "not fatalism" is false, and vice versa.
"<->" refers to a biconditional, "...if and only if...". "a <-> f" means, "a is true if and only if f is true".
Lastly, "->" refers to a conditional, "if...then" statement. "a->f" means, "if a is true, then f is true".
So, on to the argument.
1. Uf
2. Uf -> <>f
3. ~([]a <-> <>f)
Thus, 4. ~a
I'll break it down.
1. "I understand the idea of freedom". While not necessarily obvious, I believe that a charitable proponent of fatalism might grant this premise. Nevertheless, it could certainly be attacked. I think it fair and in good faith, though, as a starting place.
2. "If I understand the idea of freedom, there exists the logical possibility that freedom exists". Regardless of whether fatalism actually is necessarily true, I can imagine a world wherein freedom exists, and there is nothing necessarily contradictory about this world; therefore, it is logically possible, even if not in actuality.
3. "It is not the case that 'fatalism is necessarily true' and 'freedom possibly is true' can both be true at the same time". If fatalism is true, it is not possible that humans are free, by sheer definition. The mere possibility of freedom negates fatalism in its most basic form.
4. Thus, "Fatalism is not true".
What do you all think? There's further argument I could make, but I'd love to read some comments. Thanks!
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
An Ontological Argument Against Fatalism
Posted by Zach Sherwin at 8:33 AM
Labels: club meeting, fatalism, free will, freedom
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4 comments:
I think I understand your argument. It might be good to make clear that you are attacking some form of logical fatalism. The fatalist attempts to derive fatalism from a logical principle, usually the principle of bivalence. But logical principles, if true, are necessarily true. So if there is a deductively valid argument that leads from the principle of bivalence to fatalism without the aid of any contingent premises, the conclusion must be necessarily true. But if it is possible to be free, fatalism is not necessarily true. Therefore, fatalism cannot follow from logically necessary premises.
The fatalist response should be to accept the necessity of fatalism and to question the intuition that freedom is logically possible. Intuitions about such matters as possibility can be unreliable, so the fatalist reply is plausible. A helpful comparison may be the debate on the modality of identity statements in the philosophy of language and mind.
Also, could your argument also be applied against theological fatalism?
As always, my dear, I am awed by your philosoraptor powers! I enjoyed reading it...but I'm afraid I'd have to speak to you in person about all the logical proof stuff, LOL. Very nice entry!
Why does freedom necessarily exist just because it's logically possible? Do I not understand perfectly well that Batman wears pink? I wrote a really long comment and then it was deleted when I tried to publish it, so i'm just doing a very short one now. My main point was this:
Can I not employ my reason to reason that freedom is not logically possible? Wouldn't that then make my reasoning logically possible? I feel like Reason is a very subjective thing, and I feel like what we're talking about mostly are human concepts--but humans have so many opposing concepts! Where is your root for this argument? On what do you base that logically possible things become real? I don't mean that in any way offensively, I just mean that it seems like you need to go a little deeper and tell us why you have such a high regard for human reason.
Anonymous' questions are good ones and deserve a response. I'm not sure I can give a reply for Zach's argument, because my interpretation may be wrong (Zach will have to confirm). But I took Zach's argument to be directed at logical fatalists. The logical fatalists are committed to the claim that fatalism is a necessary truth because it follows from purely logical premises. But if fatalism is logically necessary, freedom must be logically impossible. But freedom seems to be possible, therefore logical fatalism is false.
This argument, though, is not strong enough to establish the existence of freedom (anonymous is right about that) because some forms of non-logical "fatalism" may be contingently true, for example, physical determinism (if it's incompatible with freedom) is consistent with at least the logical possibility of freedom.
I'm not sure why anonymous thinks that reason is subjective (or even what it means to say that it's subjective). Maybe that was explained in the longer post that got deleted. If so, I'd be very interested in reading more on this matter.
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