Rock, Reality, Ed Abbey, and the Attraction of the Incoherent

Ed_abbey_tv There is no denying the charm, the attractive power, of incoherent ideas. They appeal to adolescents of all ages. Edward "Cactus Ed" Abbey writes, "I sometimes think that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and that only rock is real." Well, Cactus Ed, is this thought of yours an illusion too?

Cactus Ed's thought is a conjunction of three sub-thoughts: man is a dream; his thoughts are illusory; only rock is real. If our thoughts are illusory, then each of these sub-thoughts is illusory too, and Abbey's
clever formulation refutes itself. But this won't stop Abbey or his admirers from finding it attractive. Man, and especially the literary type, is a perverse animal. He will believe anything and say anything, no matter how false. He will assert himself even unto incoherence. He will not be instructed.
  

Thus if I were to run this little argument past Cactus Ed and his admirers they would most likely snort derisively and call me a  logic-chopper. Their misology would make it impossible for them to take it seriously. You see, literary types are too often not interested in truth, but in literary effect, when it should be self-evident that truth is a higher value than literary effect. But it  is more complicated than this. Abbey is trying to have it both ways at once: he wants to say something true, but he doesn't want to bother satisfying the preconditions for his saying something true, one such precondition being that the proposition asserted not entail its own negation.

Continue reading “Rock, Reality, Ed Abbey, and the Attraction of the Incoherent”

Glenn Reynolds on the What Comes After the Higher Ed Bubble Bursts

Here.  Excellent analysis of the problem, but he also offers solutions:

For higher education, the solution is more value for less money. Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years — but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.  Up until now, the loan guarantees have meant that colleges, like the writers of subprime mortgages a few years ago, got their money up front, with any problems in payment falling on someone else. Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they'll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer.

[. . .]

Another response is an increased emphasis on non-college education. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, skilled trades are doing quite well. For the past several decades, America's enthusiasm for college has led to a lack of enthusiasm for vocational education.

Absolutely right.  The notion put forth by the foolish Obama and others that anyone can profit from a college education is absurd on the face of it. 

Remembering George Harrison

It is hard to believe, but George Harrison died ten years ago, last Sunday. All Things Must Pass is one of his best songs, from the album of the same name, released 27 November 1970. The album got a lot of play by me and my housemates in December of that year.  41 years later, I find the song even more moving.  Whatever you say about the '60s — and 1970 was the last year of the '60s — the music of that era had a depth that was entirely lacking in the popular music of preceding decades. Or can you think of a counterexample?

On Paul Churchland’s ‘Refutation’ of the Knowledge Argument

If this post needs theme music, I suggest Party Lights (1962) by the one-hit wonder, Claudine Clark:  "I see the lights/I see the party lights/They're red and blue and green/Everybody in the crowd is there/But you won't let me make the scene!"  (Because, mama dear, you've kept me cooped up in a black-and-white room studying neuroscience.)

…………………………..

The 'Knowledge Argument' as it is known in the trade has convinced many of the untenability of functionalism in the philosophy of mind.  Here is Paul M. Churchland's presentation of Frank Jackson's version of the argument:

1. Mary knows everything there is to know about brain states and their properties.
2. It is not the case that Mary knows everything there is to know about sensations and their properties.
Therefore, by Leibniz's law [i.e., the Indiscernibility of Identicals; see my post 'Leibniz's Law': A Useless Expression],
3. Sensations and their properties are not identical to brain states and their properties.

("Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of the Brain," Journal of Philosophy, vol. 82, no. 1, January 1985, pp. 8-28, sec. IV, "Jackson's Knowledge Argument.")

Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state.  Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray.  You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system.  Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV.  The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.

Churchland finds two "shortcomings" with the above argument. I will discuss only the first in this post.

Churchland smells a fallacy of equivocation.  'Knows about,' he claims, is being used in different senses in (1) and (2):

Knowledge in (1) seems to be a matter of having mastered a set of sentences or propositions, the kind one finds written in neuroscience texts, whereas knowledge in (2) seems to be a matter of having a representation of redness in some prelingusitic or sublinguistic medium of representation for sensory variables, or to be a matter of being able to make certain sensory discriminations, or something along these lines. (Emphasis in original)

Rather than argue that that there is no equivocation in the argument as Churchland formulates it, I think it is best to concede the point, urging instead that Chuchland has not presented the Knowledge Argument fairly.  He finds an equivocation only because he has set up a straw man.  Consider the following version:

4. Mary knows all of the of the physical facts about color vision.
5. Venturing outside her black-and-white domain for the first time, she comes to know a new fact: what it is like to see red.
Therefore
6. This new fact is not a physical fact.

There is no equivocation on 'knows' in this argument.  Mary knows all of the physical facts about the brain and the visual system.  If the physical facts are all the facts, then, when she emerges from the room and views a red sunset, she learns nothing new.  But this is not the case.  She does learn something new, something she might express by exclaiming, "So this is what it is like to see red!"  That is a new fact that she comes to know.

The best counter to this argument is to deny (2) by arguing that that no new fact is learned when Mary steps outside.  Mary simply acquires a new concept, a new way of gaining epistemic access to the same old physical facts, namely, the physical and functional facts involved in seeing a red thing.  As Churchland puts it,

. . . the difference between a person who knows all about the visual cortex but has never enjoyed a sensation of red, and a person who knows no neuroscience but knows well the sensation of red, may reside not in what is respectively known by each (brain states by the former, qualia by the latter), but rather in the different type of knowledge each has of exactly the same thing.  The difference is in the manner of the knowing, not in the nature(s) of the thing known. (Emphases in original)

Churchland's suggestion is that one and the same  physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being.  The sensory quale is not an item distinct from the underlying state of the brain, an item that escapes the physicalist's net; the quale is a mode of presentation of the brain state.   The quale is an appearance of the brain state.  And so Churchland thinks that one can have knowledge of one's sensations via their qualitative features without knowing any neuroscience without it being the case that "sensations are beyond the reach of physical science."

In sum, sensations are identical to brain states.  But they can be accessed in two ways, via qualia, and via neuroscience.  That there are two different modes of epistemic access does not entail that qualia are distinct in reality from brain states.  One and the same btrain "uses more modes and media or representation than the simple stoarge of sentences." 

Critique

Unfortunately, there is no clear sense in which a quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the  quale is of or about the brain state. Phenomenal redness does not present a brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, qualia are non-intentional: they lack aboutness.   No doubt a quale has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.  I can't desire without desiring something, a cold beer, say.  So 'cold beer' enters, and enters necessarily, into the description of the mental state I am in when I desire a cold beer.  But no words referring to neural items need enter into the description of what I experience when I experience a yellowish-orange afterimage, or feel anxious.

Qualia do not play a merely epistemic role as Churchland thinks.  They are items in their own right.  They are not mere appearances of an underlying reality; they are items with their own mode of being.  For a quale, to be is to be perceived.  Its reality consists in its appearing.  For this reason it makes no sense to say that the reality of a quale is something distinct from it, something physical to which the quale refers.

Suppose someone, armed with the Indiscernibility of Identicals,  were to argue that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise, the one, but not the other, being the brightest celestial object in the morning sky.    Such an argument could be easily rebutted by pointing  out that the two 'stars'  are merely different modes of presentation of one and the same physical thing, the planet Venus.  Difference in epistemic access does not argue difference in being!  Churchland  thinks he can similarly rebut the person who argues that qualia are distinct from brain states by claiming that qualia and sentences of neuroscience are different modes of presentation or "media of representation" of one and the same thing, which is wholly physical.

But here is precisely where the mistake is made.  Qualia do not present or represent anything. In particular, they do not represent their causes.  They are items in their own right with their own mode of being, a mode of being distinct from the mode of being of physical items.  For a quale, to be is to be perceived.  For a physical item, this is not the case.  One cannot drive a wedge between the appearance and the reality of a quale; but one can and must drive such a wedge between the appearance and the reality of physical items. 

Even if one were to insist that qualia present or represent their underlying brain states, the materialist position would still be absurd.  For if x represents y, then x is distinct from y — in reality and not merely for us.  So if phenomenal redness is an appearance of a complex brain state, the two items are distinct.  Churchland thinks he can place qualia on the side of representation and then forget about them.  But that is an obvious mistake.

Underlying this obvious mistake is the fundamental absurdity of materialism, which is the attempt to understand mind in wholly non-mental terms.  It cannot be done since the very investigation of physical reality presupposes mind.

A Recipe for Brussels Sprouts

This just over the transom from Kevin Wong:

I greatly enjoy your blog. I especially enjoyed today's post, as I too had brussels sprouts at Thanksgiving with my in-laws. What I did was halve or quarter them. In a hot pan with no oil, I threw in some sliced up bacon. After the bacon starts to acquire some color and a little crispiness (but has not fully cooked yet), I then toss in the brussels sprouts. They will begin to absorb some of the bacon grease. Then I crush some black pepper over the mixture. Continue to toss. After taking a fork to test some of the sprouts for tenderness, when it gets close, I will toss in some grape tomatoes. Once some of the tomatoes start to blister, serve. It's that simple and very tasty.

This I have to try.  Sounds delicious.

Of Brussels Sprouts and Professor Mondo

Professor Mondo describes himself as follows:

I am a medievalist at a small college in a small college town. I like reading, writing, music, and thinking — practicing any of these individually or in combination. Turnoffs include Brussels sprouts, bad music, and creeping totalitarianism.

Excellent, except I simply do not understand food aversions.  Nothing edible is foreign to me.  Pursuing the Terentian parallel into the precincts of (bad) humor:  I am edible; nothing edible is foreign to me.

Brussels sprouts were on the menu at Thanksgiving, and mine were pronounced delicious by all parties to the feast.  But you have to steam the hell out of them and then drench them in a good Hollandaise sauce, itself laced with Tabasco, that marvellous Louisiana condiment simply unsurpassed in its class.

The same steaming-and-saucing treatment works wonders with broccoli and other stink-weeds.

Middle-Sized Happiness

The best of this blog is hidden in its vast archives, a fact that mitigates 'You're only as good as your last post.'  So there is justification for the occasional repost.  Think of a repost as a blogospheric rerun. It has been over two years since I ran Middle-Sized Happiness.  Having mentioned its topic  in the entry immediately preceding, here is the post again, slightly emended.

***************

Life can be good. Middle-sized happiness is within reach and some of us reach it. It doesn't require much: a modicum of health and wealth; work one finds meaningful however it may strike others; the independence of mind not to care what others think; the depth of mind to appreciate that there is an inner citadel into which one can retreat at will for rest and recuperation when the rude impacts of the world become too obtrusive; a relatively stable economic and political order that allows the tasting of the fruits of such virtues as hard work and frugality; a political order secure enough to allow for a generous exercise of liberty and a rich development of individuality; a rationally-based hope that the present, though fleeting, will find completion either here or elsewhere; a suitable spouse whose differences are complementations rather than contradictions; a good-natured friend who can hold up his end of a chess game. . . . 

All of these things and a few others, but above all: the wisdom to be satisfied with what one has. In particular, no hankering after more material stuff; no lusting after a bigger house, a newer car, a bigger pile of the lean green.

So much for middle-sized happiness. It falls short of true happiness for various reasons one of which is that one cannot be truly happy in the knowledge that many if not most will never have even the possibility of attaining middle-sized happiness.

Another reason meso-eudaimonia is not true happiness is that it is under permanent threat by impermanence, which argues the unreality of everything finite, as noted in an earlier meditation. But middle-sized happiness has an irrefragable advantage over true happiness: it is certain for those who have attained it for as long as they abide in it. And when it is over, there are the memories, and the knowledge that nothing that happens can change what was, which fact confers upon what was a modality the Medievals called necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. True happiness, however, the happy life St. Augustine speaks of, is uncertain and for all we know chimerical. You can believe in it, of course; but I for one am not satisfied with mere belief: I want to know.

Perhaps it is like this: one day you die and become nothing for ever. Anyone who claims to know with certainty that death is annihilation is most assuredly a fool. But it still might be the case that the death of the individual is the utter destruction of the individual.

Well, suppose that is the case: you die, you are utterly dead, and that's it. All of that struggling and striving and caring and contending and loving and despairing come to nothing. You and all your works end up dust in the wind. Your fall-back position is this meso-eudaimonia I have been writing about. You have it in your possession; it is here free and clear and certain while it lasts. Part of it is the rational hope that there is some sort of completion unto true happiness if not here below (which is arguably impossible), then yonder. A hope exists whether or not its intentum is realized. So, immanently speaking, you have the benefit of hoping whether or not the goal is ever attained.

But take away the hope, and then what do you have? If you believe that it is all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then you ought to find life more difficult to construe as meaningful. Indeed, if you really believe this, can you live it without flinching, without evasion?

It is a curious predicament we are in. If you believe in this Completion of the fleeting present whether in a temporal eschaton or in eternity, and the Completion doesn't exist, then in a sense you are being played for a fool. If, on the other hand, you believe both that life is a tale told by an idiot, etc., and that it is nonetheless meaningful, then you are also being played for a fool: you are playing yourself for a fool. You are self-deceived, in despair without knowing it. (Kierkegaard)

To paraphrase Brenda Lee, "Are you fool number one, or are you fool number two?"

The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell

Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red — and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue — and no one should be allowed to read them." (Recollections of Wittgenstein,* ed. R. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 112.)

Here is a passage from Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (Liveright 1930, p. 24) whose urbanity, wit, and superficiality might well have irritated the self-tormenting Wittgenstein:

I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.

This observation ties in nicely with my remarks on short views and long views.  If middle-sized happiness is your object, then short views are probably best.  But some of us want more.

 __________

*This title is delightfully ambiguous. Read as an objective genitive, it refers to recollections about Wittgenstein, while read as a subjective genitive, it denotes Wittgenstein's recollections. The book, consisting as it does of both, is well-titled.

Excluded Middle and Future-Tensed Sentences: An Aporetic Triad

Do you remember the prediction, made in 1999, that the DOW would reach 36,000 in a few years?  Since that didn't happen, I am inclined to say that Glassman and Hasset's prediction was wrong and was wrong at the time the prediction was made.  I take that to mean that the content of their prediction was false at the time the prediction was made.  Subsequent events merely made it evident that the content of the prediction was false; said events did not first bring it about that the content of the prediction have a truth-value.

And so I am not inclined to say that the content of their irrationally exuberant prediction was neither true nor false at the time of the prediction. It had a truth-value at the time of the prediction; it was simply not evident at that time what that truth-value was.  By 'the content of the prediction' I mean the proposition expressed by 'The DOW will reach 36,000 in a few years.' 

I am also inclined to say that the contents of some predictions are true at the time the predictions are made, and thus true in advance of the events predicted.  I am not inclined to say that these predictions were neither true nor false at the time they were made.  Suppose I predict some event E and E comes to pass.  You might say to me, "You were right to predict the occurrence of E."  You would not say to me, "Although the content of your prediction was neither true nor false at the time of your prediction, said content has now acquired the truth-value, true."

It is worth noting that the expression 'come true' is ambiguous.  It could mean 'come to be known to be true' or it could mean 'come to have the truth-value, true.'  I am inclined to read it the first way.  Accordingly, when a prediction 'comes true,' what that means is that the prediction which all along was true, and thus true in advance of the contingent event predicted, is now known to be true.

So far, then, I am inclined to say that the Law of Excluded Middle applies to future-tensed sentences. If we assume Bivalence (that there are exactly two truth-values), then the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM)can be formulated as follows. For any proposition p, either p is true or p is false. Now consider a future-tensed sentence that refers to some event that is neither impossible nor necessary. An example is the DOW sentence above or  'Tom will get tenure in 2014.'  Someone who assertively utters a sentence such as this makes a prediction.  What I am currently puzzling over is whether any predictions, at the time that they are made, have a truth-value, i.e., (assuming Bivalence), are either true or false.

Why should I be puzzling over this?  Well, despite the strong linguistic inclinations recorded above, there is something strange in regarding a contingent proposition about a future event as either true or false in advance of the event's occurrence or nonoccurrence.  How could a contingent proposition be true before the event occurs that alone could make it true? 

Our problem can be set forth as an antilogism or aporetic triad:

1. U-LEM:  LEM applies unrestrictedly to all declarative sentences, whatever their tense.
2. Presentism:  Only what exists at present exists.
3. Truth-Maker Principle: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

Each limb of the triad is plausible.  But they can't all be true.  The conjunction of any two entails the negation of the third.  Corresponding to our (inconsistent) antilogism there are three (valid) syllogisms each of which is an argument to the negation of one of the limbs from the other two limbs.

If there is no compelling reason to adopt one ofthese syllogisms over the other two, then I would say that the problem is a genuine aporia, an insoluble problem.

People don't like to admit that there are insolubilia.  That may merely reflect their dogmatism and overpowering need for doxastic security.  Man is a proud critter loathe to confess the infirmity of reason.

A Diversity Paradox for Immigration Expansionists

Liberals love 'diversity' even at the expense of such obvious goods as unity, assimilation, and comity. So it is something of a paradox that their refusal to take seriously the enforcement of immigration laws has led to a most undiverse stream of immigrants. "While espousing a fervent belief in diversity, immigrant advocates and their allies have presided over a policy regime that has produced one of the least diverse migration streams in our history." Here

In the once golden and great state of California, the Left's diversity fetishism has led to a letting-go of academics in the Cal State university system with a concomitant retention of administrative 'diversity officers.'   Unbelievable but true.  Heather McDonald reports and comments in Less Academics, More Narcissism. 

My only quibble is her failure to observe the distinction between 'less' and 'fewer.'  Use 'fewer' with count nouns; 'less' with mass terms.  I don't have less shovels than you; I have fewer shovels.  I need fewer shovels because I have less manure.

Short Views, Long Views, and the Feel for the Real

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.

Is it best to take short views? Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that — sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the univere is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources of the other’s view. This may lead to toleration, which is good within limits.  For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.

As for the problem of how to get along with people with wildly different views, I recommend voluntary segregation.

Caesar, the Rubicon, Tenseless Truth, Determinism, and Fatalism

In a post the point of which was merely to underscore the difference between absolute and necessary truth, I wrote, somewhat incautiously:

Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value does not vary from time to time, place to place, person to person, or relative to any other parameter in the actual world. P is true now, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. P is true in Los Angeles, in Bangkok, and on Alpha Centauri. It is true whether Joe Blow affirms it, denies it, or has never even thought about it. And what goes for Blow goes for Jane Schmoe.

As a couple of astute readers have pointed out, the usual date given for Caesar's crossing of the river Rubicon  is January 10, 49 B.C. and not 44 B. C. as stated above.  If only the detection and correction of philosophical erors were as easy as this!

The erudite proprietor of Finem Respicem, who calls herself 'Equity Private' and describes herself as a "Armchair Philosophy Fangirl and Failed Theoretical Physicist Turned Finance Troublemaker," writes, "Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 B.C., reportedly (though perhaps fancifully) prompting Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus to comment Alea iacta est ('The die is cast.')"  And Philoponus the Erudite has this to say: 

I'm not sure whether you are deliberately testing the faithful readers of The Maverick, but the accepted date for Caesar and Legio XIII Gem. wading across fl. Rubico is 49 BCE, on or about Jan 10th. That's what is inferred from Suetonius' acct of Divus Caesar at the beginning of De Vita Caesarum (written 160 years after the fact) and some other latter sources like Plutarch.

So I stand corrected on the factual point.  Both correspondents go on to raise philosophical points.  I have space to respond to only one of them.

Equity Private asks, concerning the proposition expressed by 'Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49 B.C.,' "But is it true in 50 BC?  In a deterministic universe, I think it is. In a non-deterministic universe I think it isn't. Are you a determinist?"

To discuss this properly we need to back up a bit.   I distinguish declarative sentences from the propositions they are used to express, and in the post in question I was construing propositions along the lines of Gottlob Frege's Gedanken.  Accordingly, a  proposition is the sense of a context-free declarative sentence.  A context-free sentence is one from which all indexical elements have been extruded, including verb tenses.  Propositions so construed are a species of abstract object.  This will elicit howls of outrage from some, but it is a view that is quite defensible.  If you accept this (and if you don't I will ask what your theory of the proposition is), then the proposition expressed by 'Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49 B.C.' exists at all times and is true at all times.  (Bear in mind that, given the extrusion of all indexical elements, including verb tenses, the occurrence of 'crosses' is not present-tensed but tenseless.)  From this it follows that the truth-value of the proposition does not vary with one's temporal perspective.  So, to answer my correspondent's question, the proposition is true in 50 B.C. and is thus true before the fateful crossing occurred!

I am assuming both Bivalence and Excluded Middle.    Bivalence says that there are exactly two truth-values, true and false, as opposed to three or more.  If Bivalence holds, then 'not true' is logically equivalent to 'false.'  Excluded Middle says that, for every proposition p, either p is true or it is not the case that p is true.   Note that Bivalence and Excluded Middle are not the same. Suppose that Bivalence is false and that there are three truth-values. It could still be the case that every proposition is either true or not true. (In a 3-valued logic, 'not true' is not the same as 'false.') So Excluded Middle does not entail Bivalence. Therefore Excluded Middle is not the same as Bivalence.  Bivalence does, however, entail Excluded Middle.

Here is a simpler and more direct way to answer my correspondent's question.  Suppose some prescient Roman utters in 50 B.C. the Latin equivalent of 'Julius Caesar will cross the Rubicon next year.'  Given Bivalence and Excluded Middle, what the Roman says is either true, or if not true, then false.  Given that Caesar did cross in 49 B.C., what the prescient Roman said was true.  Hence it was true before the crossing occurred.

Let's now consider how this relates to the determinism question.   Determinism is the view that whatever happens in nature is determined by antecedent causal conditions under the aegis of the laws of nature. Equivalently, past facts, together with the laws of nature, entail all future facts. It follows that facts before one's birth, via the laws of nature, necessitate what one does now. The necessitation here is conditional, not absolute.  It is conditional upon the laws of nature (which might have been otherwise) and the prior causal conditions (which might have been otherwise).

If determinism is true, then Caesar could not have done otherwise  than cross the Rubicon when he  did given the (logically contingent) laws of nature and the (logically contingent) conditions antecedent to his crossing.  If determinism is not true, then the laws plus the prior causal conditions did not necessitate his crossing.  Equity Private says  that the Caesar proposition is not true in 50 B.C. in a non-deterministic universe.  But I don't think this is right.  For there are at least two other ways the proposition might be true before the crossing occurred, two other ways which reflect two other forms of determination.  Besides causal determination (determination via the laws of nature and the antecedent causal conditions), there is also theological determination (determination via divine foreknowledge) and logical determination (determination via the law of excluded middle in conjunction with a certain view of propositions).  Logical determinism is called fatalism.  (See the earlier post on the difference between determinism and fatalism.) 

Someone who is both a fatalist and an indeterminist could easily hold that the Caesar proposition is true at times before the crossing.  Equity Private asked whether I am a determinist.  She should have asked me whether I am a fatalist.  For it looks as if I have supplied the materials for a fatalist argument. Here is a quick and dirty version of an ancient argument known as 'the idle argument' or 'the lazy argument':

1. Either I will be killed tomorrow or I will not. 
2. If I will be killed, I will be killed no matter what precautions I take.
3. If I will not be killed, then I will be killed no matter what precautions I neglect.
Therefore
4. It is pointless to take precautions.

This certainly smacks of sophistry!  But where exactly does the argument go wrong?  The first premise is an instance of LEM on the assumption of Bivalence.  (2) looks to be a tautology of the form p –> (q –>p), and (3) appears to be a tautology of the form ~p –>(q –>~p).  Or think of it this way.  If it is true that I will killed tomorrow, then this is true regardless of what other propositions are true.  And similarly for (3).

Some will say that the mistake is to think that LEM applies to propositions about future events:  in advance of an event's occurrence it is neither true nor not true that it will occur.  This way out is problematic, however.  'JFK was assassinated in 1963' is true now.  How then can the prediction, made in 1962, 'JFK will be assassinated in 1963,' lack a truth-value?  Had someone made that prediction in 1962, he would have made a true prediction, not a prediction lacking a truth-value.  Indeed, the past-tensed and the future tensed sentences express the same proposition, a proposition that could be put using the tenseless sentence 'JFK is assassinated in 1963.'  Of course, no one could know in 1962 the truth-value of this proposition, but that is not to say that it did not have a truth-value in 1962.  Don't confuse the knowledge of truth with truth. 

Suppose I predict today that such-and-such will happen next year, and what I predict comes to pass.  You would say to me, "You were right!"  You would not say to me, "What you predicted has acquired the truth-value, true."  I can be proven right in my prediction only if I was right, i.e., only if my prediction was true in advance of the event's occurrence.

So the facile restriction of LEM to present and past is a dubious move.  And yet the 'lazy argument' is surely invalid!