Logical Determinism
Logical determinism is the simple idea that events in the future must be as true or false today as they will be after they happen.
Socrates, the first
logician, argued that some knowledge followed from the nature of argument itself. He invented the syllogism, literally "with logic or argument."
The great systematizer of logic was
Aristotle. Aristotle doubted this in his famous discussion of the Sea Battle.
De Interpretatione IX
Bertrand Russell said "The law of causation, according to which later events can theoretically be predicted by means of earlier events, has often been held to be a priori, a necessity of thought, a category without which science would not be possible." (Russell, External World p.179) Although he felt some claims for causality might be excessive, he was unwilling to give up strict determinism, saying "Where determinism fails, science fails." (Determinism and Physics, p.18)
Logic - Aristotle's logic was accepted as the paradigm of truth for over 2000 years until Frege in 1879 and
Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica in 1910 failed to establish a logical basis for mathematics and found the first of the paradoxes that call logic into question.
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The logical positivists thought that the truth of a proposition depended on it being a representation of an independent reality. Logic itself was a regulative principle reflecting laws of nature and reality. Verifiability said that the meaning of a proposition was found in the method of verification, by experience or observation.
nothing is logically true of the world
Truths of the world are at best provisionally held, subject to further experiment.
Nothing is logically true of the world. Just as there is nothing physically
certain or
necessary. Truth within logic retains its correct formal use, but logic itself has its limits.
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Aristotle, in his De Interpretatione IX, raised the question of whether the logical truth of a statement about the future might entail the necessity of the future event:
"What is, necessarily is, when it is; and what is not, necessarily is not, when it is not. But not everything that is, necessarily is; and not everything that is not, necessarily is not.
For to say that everything that is, is of necessity, when it is, is not the same as saying unconditionally that it is of necessity. Similarly with what is not. And the same account holds for contradictories: everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary.
I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, nor for one not to take place—though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place.
So, since statements are true according to how the actual things are, it is clear that wherever these are such as to allow of contraries as chance has it, the same necessarily holds for the contradictories also.
This happens with things that are not always so or are not always not so. With these it is necessary for one or the other of the contradictories to be true or false — not, however, this one or that one, but as chance has it; or for one to be true rather than the other, yet not already true or false.
Clearly, then, it is not necessary that of every affirmation and opposite negation one should be true and the other false. For what holds for things that are does not hold for things that are not but may possibly be or not be; with these it is as we have said."
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