Timeline for Popper and indeterminism, why is it part of philosophy?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 21, 2019 at 15:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackPhilosophy/status/1142084898771132417 | ||
| Jun 21, 2019 at 12:01 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold That's actually a good point i must say. I'm just a bit maniac and wanted to clarify what a prediction is. I think that even sayin "tomorrow, in the spirit real, an actual frog will save our world from a giant phantom" is a prediction. Of course it's averithing but scientific, nor it's founded on some rational reason, bit i still call it prediction. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 10:55 | comment | added | Conifold | Your prediction is at least verifiable, we can see it happen, determinism is too vague for that as well. But I am not sure how useful is the notion of prediction that only God can make use of, he already knows everything anyway. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 10:35 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold I agree with you, but probably I have a different idea of prediction. Prediction is not, I think, connected with whether or not it is falsifiable. If i say "one day, somewhere, someone will say exactly what i'm saying now", this is a prediction, even if it is not falsifiable. It's not a scientific because it's not falsifiable nor demonstrable, but still it's a prediction, in the sense that tries to predict some events of the future. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 10:23 | comment | added | Conifold | Except we can not demonstrate anything of the sort, for the same reason, only God can. We can only say that we did not find a cause yet (as some people say about quantum outcomes, for example). Falsifiable in science means falsifiable for us. And, for us, determinism predicts nothing, which is the only prediction that matters. As Peirce put it, it is easy to be never wrong, one just has to be sufficiently vague. A falsifiable deterministic theory must be far more specific than the metaphysical doctrine of determinism. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 10:13 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold Of course there is no 1 to 1 event, but still, if the rock breaks the window, the rock was at least 1 cause, but not the only. In the same way, determinism predicts that every single event in the univers has at least 1 cause. If we could demonstrate that an event X has no cause, zero, determinism would be confutated. The point os that ot's impossible to state that nothing coused X, because it requires you to know everything. But still, determinism predicts something. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 10:02 | comment | added | Conifold | I am afraid, it predicts nothing. Single events cause nothing by themselves, the entire environment, the whole universe, theoretically, contributes to the causing. Throwing a rock only "causes" the window to break if the gust of wind does not blow it off course, etc. The archaic event-to-event concept of causation is rejected in modern physics, we have global initial conditions and evolution laws instead. And if it takes omniscient God to falsify determinism, it is unfalsifiable. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 9:51 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold Well we could say that it predicts a lot. It predicts that if u have an event A, that event had surelly a cause B. And this is true for every singol event in the universe. Probably the point is that you cannot experiment the quality of determination, and surelly u cannot know for sure that it was not determined by something u don't know. | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 9:38 | comment | added | Conifold | No, determinism is not a scientific theory, it is a metaphysical doctrine. But there can be scientific theories that are deterministic, classical mechanics was one, so it can be used as a guideline for developing new theories. The difference is that classical mechanics made specific predictions about specific outcomes, whereas determinism in general is so vague that it can be made compatible with any outcome. It is true that just one negative outcome can falsify a theory, but there is no possible way to get one with determinism. "Everything is determined" predicts nothing in particular | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 9:32 | vote | accept | Giovanni Grassi | ||
| Jun 21, 2019 at 9:30 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold refutate he theory. The problem of stumentation never came to my attention for now in Popper's books, but i think that if something is not refutable because of the lack of precision in the instruments or of our current knowledge, then nothing at all can be refutate, so even einstein theories are not scientific, because we are not able to surelly refutate them due to the imprecision of our instruments... | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 9:26 | comment | added | Giovanni Grassi | @Conifold What I'm asking is whether It is a scientific theory or not. Determinism means "everything is determined", so to confutate it you need 1 case in which 1 event was not determined by something, but was completely casual. From a logical point of view this theory can be falisified as much as the theory "every single man is taller that a mountain", and it's equally scientific. Moreover, what i got from Popper, i might be wrong, is that what he means by refutable is "logically refutable"; you need to controll an infinite number of cases to demonstrate something, but u need onli one to | |
| Jun 21, 2019 at 4:19 | answer | added | user9166 | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jun 20, 2019 at 23:39 | comment | added | Conifold | There is no "just one case" with determinism, the universe does not split into causally isolated cases. Nor can we tell if a prediction of determinism came true or not. To prove that the future is not determined by the present we would have to first gather all the data about the present from all over the universe. Even then we can not be sure that we did not miss some law of nature that determines it even if we can't, or that our own actions aren't predetermined. And both our data and our measurements aren't infinitely precise, so that there is always a chance that we messed up. | |
| Jun 20, 2019 at 21:33 | history | asked | Giovanni Grassi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |