From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 25 1999 - 16:21:28 MST
'What is your name?' 'Robert Owen.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':
> In which case you distinguish "potentiality" (or "possibility") from
> "actuality". "Causality" is a relation useful for describing observed
> connections among actualities (c.f. "covariance" and "correlation").
I intentionally avoided this route for a number of reasons, the most
important being that there is a strict sense in which counterfactual
situations really AREN'T possible: if you allow for only deterministic
elements in the universe, then the fact that something hasn't happened or
isn't happening now entails that it couldn't happen at all.
Another important point is that it would be difficult for me to
distinguish the difference between him being "externally" determined to
decide that A and "internally" deciding that A. Surely I don't want to
make a claim as trivial as "Yes, but in some alternate universe, you don't
associate Consciousness with death!" Because that just leaves open the
argument: "Who cares what's going on in alternate universes? In THIS
universe, I act this way, and in THIS universe, it's impossible for me to
be having a different opinion than the one I do now."
Nonetheless, and this is important, we can still define an event in a
deterministic universe, which we can call a decision (though
non-determinists would be loathe to do so) which has motivational causes.
I'm going to the refrigerator because I want to; this, too, is determined
by other motivational reasons, (I want food), which, in turn is determined
by non-motivational reasons (my brain is wired to want food at certain
times of the day). The charm of all this is that it reaffirms the
importance of internal motivation in decision-making without denying
determinism its due.
In response to your last question? Depends on what you mean by possible.
Epistemological possibility ("It could be X, it could be Y, we don't know
enough to say for sure") seems pretty non-mysterious to me. The relation
between the actuality and one of those possibilities is identity, but we
don't know which it is. Counterfactuals ("It's X, but it could have been
not X") are tricky monsters. I'm in the camp that says that the correct
interpretation of a counterfactual is a matter of filtering out what's
normatively "important;" that the relation is normatively determined
rather than analytically determined.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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