چکیده:
Future Contingency has been an old debate between philosophers
throughout history. On one hand, Aristotle thinks events of the future
happen contingently. On the other hand, Diodorus believes what happens
in the future is now determined. Diodorus has presented an argument for
determinism based on a few premises. Logicians and philosophers try to
avoid determinism by denying the first premise of Diodorus, which is the
necessity of the past. However, they only regard a qualified version of
this premise based on the medieval argument for determinism while
some other philosophers consider this premise in a general way. A new
argument shall be presented in this paper for determinism similar to the
medieval one based on the general version of the premise which is not
rejected by systems which reject the medieval argument. This flaw
originates in a few properties of the branching model for time. We shall
show what this property is and how it would be possible to resolve the
problem this property creates.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Every true proposition about the past is necessary An impossible proposition cannot follow from a possible one There is a proposition that is possible which neither is nor will be true Diodorus accepted the first two premises and rejected the third one.
Actually, what could be accepted by the first premise of Diodorus' common sense is if the content of a proposition (meaning the content of the proposition's final event) is pertinent to the past, then, the proposition is necessary.
Naturally and with respect to the intuition which exists in the branching model, the possibility of a proposition in a temporal point considering a special history means the proposition is true in a history at the same time which is equivalent to the first history at the time point of consideration.
Formalization of the necessity of the past The first premise of Diodorus is regarded frequently like this: Every true proposition about the past is necessary In a formal interpretation we could consider it (Pr ior 1967, p.
With this approach, the second formula must be rejected, unless the proposition p is about an event related to the past before m time units earlier.
Improvements for the branching model What has caused these systems to accept other versions of the first premise of Diodorus is that time is linear with regards to the past in their branching semantics, on the one hand, and the definition of necessity based on histories we face, on another.