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Richard Taylor’s fatalism

But foreknowledge of the truth would not create any truth, nor invest your philosophy with truth, nor add anything to the philosophical foundations of the fatalism that would then be so apparent to you. It would only serve to make it apparent.

The genius of this argument is to show that fatalism does not in any way depend upon causal determinism. Determinism is the doctrine that, given complete information about the present (or a past) state of the universe, it would in principle be possible to predict all its future states with perfect accuracy. Taylor’s argument is that the future need not in any way be predictable from the past, not even by some purely hypothetical being like Laplace’s demon. Even if the universe contains true randomness or true agency, and is thus fundamentally unpredictable even in principle, its future states are nevertheless inevitable by simple virtue of the law of excluded middle — by virtue, that is, of the fact that all possible statements about future states of the universe are already either true or false and that this truth-value can never change (because nothing ever becomes true or ceases to be true). https://narrowdesert.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/richard-taylors-fatalism/

It is a bit elusive for me to catch the thread of his reasoning. How exactly does he explain the inevitability of the future?

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    It's a rather silly, stupid argument. Basically saying: "What happens, happens". Somewhat similar to the joke that everything has a 50% chance of happening, since it will definitely either happen or not. Any "reasoning" behind this is mere verbiage - completely fallacious. (For the record, I'm not VTC on this post.) Commented Sep 27 at 2:50
  • His point, I believe, is that the very notion of "alternative possibilities" is a construct present only in the human mind. Regardless of whether determinism is true or not, there can only be one timeline to reality Commented Sep 27 at 3:04
  • The Greeks were also saying: "If you try to run away from your fate, you will run directly into it." Commented Sep 27 at 3:18
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    Determinism is not equivalent to fatalism. Commented Sep 27 at 8:55
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    See the Sea battle argument: the issue has been already discussed by ancient Greek philosophers (as every relevant philosophical issue). Commented Sep 27 at 11:33

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Re."all possible statements about future states of the universe are already either true or false and that this truth-value can never change (because nothing ever becomes true or ceases to be true)."

In the currently accepted idea of truth as correspondence of notion with experience, the experience — i.e. sensory data acquisition — sense data i.e. fact gathering, has to happen before anything is considered true. So there are no "truth-values" in relation to something that is inaccessible or yet-to-happen.

See Wikipedia – Correspondence theory of truth

This type of theory attempts to posit a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or facts on the other.

In the above, facts are established by interaction with the world, i.e. directly or indirectly via sense data.

This is the same as Kant's definition of actuality (i.e. 'reality' in some usages):-

while possibility was merely a positing of a thing in relation to the understanding (to its empirical use), actuality is at the same time its connection with perception. B 287.

Truth or actuality is the connection of notion with perception. (If your perception is a bit fuzzy maybe apply confidence criteria.)

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His argument is to assume Block Time is true, then derive that the future is pre-set. This leads to fatalism.

In your quoted passage, he does not take the most direct route to argue this pretty straightforward derivation. Instead, this passage:

"the fact that all possible statements about future states of the universe are already either true or false and that this truth-value can never change (because nothing ever becomes true or ceases to be true"

He instead uses some derivable but less obvious features of Block time.

  • In Block time, the future is not only set, but NOTHING CHANGES. The block is the same from the big bang to heat death. There is no present, and therefore none of the "change" that happens in that magic interval between past and future.
  • AND -- the Logic state of everything in the universe does not change over time, if there is no change.
  • Therefore the truth value of a future event has been the same for ever

Under block time, these three bullets are true, and can indirectly support fatalism. This is his argument.

The challenges to this argument are that

  • the present seems to be real
  • change appears to happen
  • quantum mechanics appears to be incompatible with block time and determinism.
  • Inferences off a suspect and disputed theory, when one has direct evidence which is contrary to it, is the inversion of the scientific process.
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    I don’t think this is true. Block time is not mentioned anywhere. I think he is making the more mundane point that there can only be one timeline of events. Commented Sep 27 at 11:09
  • @Syed The linked review explicitly challenges Taylor's assumptions about time. and notes that logic statements DO change in truth-value over time, contrary to Taylor's claims about them. While Taylor is not quoted asserting block time -- one can assert the contents of a claim without using its name. Commented Sep 27 at 13:27
  • @Hudjefa I corrected a brain-fart typed late at night. Commented Sep 27 at 13:28
  • @Dcleve apologies for my comment. Taylor assumes a more historical-conventional notion of time. Block time supports determinism, but not fatalism IMHO. Commented Sep 28 at 0:56
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Basically, he is invoking the time travel paradox. If there is only one timeline, knowing the future with 100% certainty would already be factored into that future, meaning that future is inevitable.

Of course there are lots of other models involving less certainty: multiple timelines, mutable timelines, Heisenberg timelines where observing changes them, misinterpretation of what you thought you saw, and so on. He is just expressing his affiliation with that one.

These and many other models for timeline violation have been explored pretty thoroughly in the science fiction of the past century. He is saying nothing new, either in the idea or in defense of it. You might want to hit a library and check out some of these stories yourself.

(I own the original magazine art for one such story, in which a device that claims to predict time of death turns out to be doing something a bit different.)

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    The best way to make a true prediction is to cause it to happen yourself. Commented Sep 27 at 11:41
  • @ScottRowe: obvious reference, Robert Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies". Commented Sep 30 at 14:36
  • I liked Stranger In A Strange Land, but stopped most of the way through The Number Of The Beast. (I remember the number though) Commented Sep 30 at 17:53
  • @ScottRowe: "On this shelf are the Heinlein juveniles, next are the Heinlein adult books, and at the end are the Heinlein seniles..." Not literally, but he did suffer from becoming too successful an author to be edited. And he did like the idea of tying all his literary universes together, which led to some rather self-indulgent plot twists in some of the later books. Commented Sep 30 at 22:17
  • At least he never tried to do philosophy. That's a blessing. Some authors created religions. Commented Sep 30 at 22:55
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Let F be some proposition about the future, like, "It will rain tomorrow in Cedar City, Utah," or, "On January 17th, 2027, Mount Etna erupts." Assume that these are either true or false, and not in a nonprime way. Or, if one doesn't want to use bivalence directly, suppose, "It will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow," or, "Etna does or doesn't erupt." Again, use prime disjunction ("or"). Also, suppose that "F" is true if and only if F, e.g., "I will smile at the end of time," is true if and only if, at the end of time, I'm smiling.

Now, if it's already true that F, how could it become false instead? If on Monday, F is true, but it became false on Tuesday, why wasn't it already false on Monday anyway? For now, it's in the future either way, so wouldn't a prospective statement about it be true only if it were settled as true?

Incidentally, this is logical fatalism, which is not uniquely modern.

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Consider the possibility of a sea battle tomorrow, B = There will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Per LEM, B v ~B

If B then there has to be a sea battle tomorrow
If ~B then there has to be no sea battle tomorrow

The truth of B or ~B requires the corresponding reality (sea battle/no sea battle) tomorrow. In other words if LEM then the future is fixed/inevitable.

Kristian Berry correctly identifies this form of fatalism as logical fatalism.

This is how it's supposed to be understood IMHO.

For clarity I frame it as a dilemma.

Aristotle-Taylor dilemma:

LEM XOR Free will (take care this is a XOR not an OR)

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