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### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: (6) Cp ⊃ p, |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: and so on. And this is absurd. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Reply.—If Aristotle had argued (1) that it is necessary that every proposition or its denial is true, and that therefore every proposition is itself necessarily true, or its denial necessarily true, or (2) that a proposition necessarily entails itself, and therefore necessarily entails that it is itself a necessary proposition, then his arguments would be as “swaggeringly invalid” as Donald Williams, who ascribes them to Aristotle, has claimed.58 But in fact he says nothing like this. Someone might be tempt |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ed to adopt Aristotle’s thesis on the basis of such amphibolies, but Aristotle did not,59 and neither do I. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: The reductio ad absurdum of the second part of this criticism is question begging, for it simply assumes that if a proposition is not true, then it is false, and if not false, then true—precisely the point at issue. Thus, the transposition of step 2 is sufficient for asserting “∼p” only if this is read “not-p.” This cannot be equated with “p is false” without begging the question. Again, step 5 is not even correctly symbolized; the consequent must read “~(~p),” meaning “it is not the case that not-p”—which |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: does not mean that p is true. Moreover, step 3 is accomplished only by substituting “contingent” for “not necessary,” and step 6 by substituting the same for “not impossible.” But “contingent” means “not necessary and not impossible”; it does not mean “not necessary or not impossible.” A thing which is impossible is indeed not necessary—but not therefore contingent; similarly, a thing which is necessary is indeed not impossible—but again, not therefore contingent. These distinctions are simply obliterated b |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: y this kind of criticism. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Sixth objection.—Whether or not there is any omniscient being, the conception of one involves no evident absurdity. But an omniscient being would by definition know everything, and hence everything that is going to happen, and being less than omniscient can know something of the future. And if any man or god might know which of various alternative contingent things are going to happen, then it must already be true, though not therefore necessary, that those things will happen, and that things incompatible w |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ith them, while not impossible, will not happen.60 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Reply.—An omniscient being would not be one who knows everything, simply, but one who knows everything that is knowable.61 If there is anything that cannot be known—and of course there are infinitely many such things, for example, all false propositions—then even an omniscient being cannot be expected to know it. This kind of qualification was presupposed by the Scholastics when God’s omnipotence was considered, the view of St. Thomas being, for example, that God can do only whatever is metaphysically capab |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: le of being done; if anything is inherently impossible, then it is idle to expect that God should do it.62 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: With this qualification, the question becomes whether things that are future and contingent are knowable. Now of course they are not knowable by inductive inference, but that is not the question. The question is whether any degree of prescient or sapient power would enable one to know which of several alternative contingencies will in time come about, assuming there are real contingencies. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: It seems evident that it would not. For in the first place, knowledge can be only knowledge of what is true, and it has been our main point to prove that statements about future contingencies are neither true nor false. To argue, then, that such statements must be true, since they are known to God, if there is a God, is plainly circular. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Secondly, if the future is partially undetermined and in its very nature ambiguous, an omniscient being would have to comprehend it just that way. This alone would be knowledge of the future; to see it as otherwise, to comprehend it as already determinate and to judge exactly what is going to happen, is not knowledge but only the obscurity of guesswork and error.63 Of course on this view an omniscient being would know more at one time than at another, but this need not be inconsistent with the idea of omnis |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: cience; at any time such a being would know all there is to know, and this ought surely to suffice.64 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: I think the only rejoinder that can be made to this is that, as Boethius and many others after him put it, “foreknowledge is not the cause of any necessity in things to come.”65 This point is iterated often, as if it left nothing more to be settled. Gilbert Ryle, for instance, observing that neither an “anterior truth” nor the knowledge of it could cause any event to happen, adds the similar point that propositions can never entail events but only other propositions.66 Now all this is true, but it is irrele |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: vant to what is here being asserted. I am not saying, nor did Aristotle, that foreknowledge would cause this thing or that to happen,67 or that propositions, known or unknown, entail events, all of which is surely nonsense, but rather that the supposition of foreknowledge is inconsistent with the claim that any of several alternative futures might become real, using “might” in the sense of real and not relative contingency. For the assumption that any one of these futures, no matter which, is already known, |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: and hence will in fact come into being, is incompatible with the theory of real contingency, viz., that some other future is no less likely to come into being than that one. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Seventh objection.—Suppose someone, “A,” indulged in prophecy, asserting, “Henry will sneeze tomorrow,” and another person, “B,” following Aristotle’s principles, replied, “No, he might, or he might not; it cannot yet be true either that he will or that he will not, this being in the realm of contingencies.” Tomorrow comes, and Henry sneezes. A, it would seem, can now say, “I said he would sneeze, and he did, so what I said was true, while you, in denying that what I said was true, are now shown to have bee |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: n wrong.” This comment by A seems reasonable, for it certainly seems that yesterday A had something that B did not have—namely, a true opinion. Of course, B did not say Henry would not sneeze, but still, his opinion was not as good as A’s—for A’s opinion, we now discover, was true, while B’s was just noncommittal. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Reply.—The most this argument can be claimed to prove is that either A’s prophecy was true or that it became true, just as it became fulfilled,68 through the lapse of time and the reduction to zero of alternative possibilities. There is nothing in it to show that it was antecedently true, any more than that it was antecedently fulfilled. Or, to put it otherwise, all the argument shows is the trivial fact that when “tomorrow” had ceased to be tomorrow and had become today, it contained just those events whic |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: h then happened; it does not show that, on the day before, it was going to contain those rather than alternative ones.69 No advantage, in the way of true opinion, can be claimed by A as having obtained when he first made his prediction, for all he can claim is that it was fulfilled—which suffices for any wagers that were made. The apparent advantage of his opinion over B’s is only an ex post facto sort of one—much like the advantage one might have who, by taking one path rather than another, stumbles upon a |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: fortune. B, on the other hand, has had from the beginning a real advantage, for he claimed the future to be ambiguous and unsettled—as in fact it then was. His opinion, unlike A’s, did not have to wait to become true but was true from the start. It only became an inadequate opinion, but not disconfirmed, when A’s prediction came true, that is, when the event in question ceased to be a future contingency and to admit of any possibility of being otherwise. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: It might be said that if we allow B’s opinion to have been true in advance, then nothing prevents A’s opinion from having been true as well. But this overlooks the fact that A’s statement concerns a future contingency, whereas there is nothing of contingency in B’s proposition that Henry might sneeze or he might not. We need not wait upon anything to see whether this is so. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Again, it might be said that A’s statement can be reformulated to say, “The belief that Henry will sneeze, while perhaps not true now, will become true” and that this assertion is about a future contingency no less than the first. But this complication introduces nothing new into the original argument; for B could reply that it might become true or it might not, the rest of the argument then proceeding exactly as before, only with more words. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: NOTES |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response:
1 De Int., ch. ix. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 2 See C. A. Baylis, “Are Some Propositions neither True nor False?” Philosophy of Science, III (1936), 156-166; Donald Williams, “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” in Structure, Method and Meaning, ed. P. Henle, H. M. Kallen, and S. K. Langer (New York, 1951), pp. 280-306; A. N. Prior, “Three-valued Logic and Future Contingents,” Philosophical Quarterly, III (1953), 317-326; Leonard Linsky, “Professor Donald Williams on Aristotle,” Philosophical Review, LXIII (1954), 250-252; Donald Williams, “Professor Linsky on Ar |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: istotle,” ibid., 253-255; Gilbert Ryle, “It Was to Be,” in Dilemmas (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 15-35; R. J. Butler, “Aristotle’s Sea Fight and Three-valued Logic,” Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955), 264-274; G. E. M. Anscombe, “Aristotle and the Sea Battle,” Mind, n.s., LXV (1956), 1-15. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 3 Op. cit. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 4 “On a So-called Paradox,” Mind, n.s., LXII (1953), 65. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 5 Op. cit. Cf. the introductory lecture of this collection. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 6 “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” pp. 284, 291. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 7 Aristotle believed that “p ∨ ∼p,” is true for any interpretation of “p” including statements of future contingencies, if understood in the sensus compositionis . Neither “true” nor “false” can be predicated of the constituents of an interpretation of that law, however, if “p” is a statement about a future contingency. Aristotle could accordingly accept the first but not the other two of the following formulations as applying to any statements whatever, including future contingency statements: (1) “If a st |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: atement is true, its denial is false, and if false, its denial is true”; (2) “Each statement is true, or, if not true, then false”; (3) “If two propositions contradict each other, one must be true.” |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 8 De. Int. 18b 5-9. All quotations are from the Oxford translation of E. M. Edghill, ed. by W. D. Ross. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 9 Ibid., 18b 33-36. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 10 Ibid., 18b 36-38. Cf. Ryle, op. cit., pp. 16-17. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 11 De Int. 18b 13-16. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 12 Ibid., 18b 30-31. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 13 Ibid., 19a 9-20. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 14 Ibid., 19a 32-35. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 15 Linsky, op. cit., p. 252, interprets Aristotle as abolishing this distinction, comparing his philosophy to that of Leibniz in this respect. Cf. Butler, op. cit., pp. 267-268. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 16 H. Van Rensselaer Wilson, “Causal Discontinuity in Fatalism and Indeterminism,” Journal of Philosophy, LII (1955), 70. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 17 Met., bk. VI, ch. iii. Cf. De Gen. et Corr., 337a 34 ff.; also, W. D. Ross, Aristotle (London, 1949), p. 164. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 18 See Met. 1046a 38-1046b 25; Phys. 251a 28. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 19 Met. 1047b 1-1048a 16. See also H. H. Joachim, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1951), pp. 108-110. This distinction is not consistently maintained, for Aristotle sometimes connects contingency with matter as such. See also Met. 1050b 6-14: “Every potency is at one and the same time a potency of the opposite.” |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 20 Met. 1047b 35-1048a 11. Cf. Joachim, op. cit., p. 109. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 21 See De. Int., ch. xiii; also Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “Mr. Weiss on the Paradox of Necessary Truth,” Philosophical Studies, VI (1955), 92-93. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 22 Cf. W. V. Quine, “Notes on Existence and Necessity,” Journal of Philosophy, XL (1943), 121. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 23 Cf. Nelson Goodman, “On Likeness of Meaning,” in Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Leonard Linsky (Urbana, Ill., 1952), p. 68. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 24 “Nomic necessity” has been used by R. B. Braithwaite and W. E. Johnson. “Etiological necessity” has been used by C. J. Ducasse. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 25 Cf. Butler, op. cit., p. 269. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 26 Prior, op. cit., p. 324, has shown that Aristotle was not thinking of logical necessity in these arguments. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 27 Cf. Anscombe, op. cit., p. 12. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 28 Hobbes is an excellent example: “All propositions concerning future things, contingent or not contingent ... are either necessarily true, or necessarily false; but we call them contingent because we do not yet know whether they be true or false; whereas their verity depends not upon our knowledge, but upon the foregoing of their causes” (The Metaphysical System of Hobbes, Open Court edition, ed. by M. W. Calkins, pp. 78-79). Cf. C. J. Ducasse, “Truth, Verifiability, and Propositions about the Future,” Ph |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ilosophy of Science, VIII (1941), 331-333. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 29 Cf. Baylis, op. cit., p. 163. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 30 Ibid., p. 162. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 31 “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” pp. 294 ff. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 32 Ibid., pp. 294-295. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 33 De Gen. et. Corr., 337b 35; Met., 1015b 14; E. N. 1139b24. Cf. Anscombe, op. cit., pp. 6-7. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 34 “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” p. 286. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 35 Ibid., p. 290. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 36 Summa Theologica, pt. I, q. 14, art. 13. Donald Williams expresses the same idea (“The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” p. 283): “The most accidental and ephemeral proposition—that the dog’s tail twitches at just such and such a moment, for example—is likewise an eternal truth, if it is true at all. It was true when the sun was formed; it will be true when the sun explodes or is extinguished.” |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 37 Cf. W. V. Quine, Elementary Logic (Boston, 1941), p. 6 (quoted by Williams, “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” p. 286). |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 38 Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940), p. 113. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 39 Philosophical Essays (London, 1954), p. 186. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 40 The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 297. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 41 “Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles,” in Essays on Logic and Language, ed. by Antony Flew (New York, 1951), p. 53. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 42 Williams, “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” pp. 287 ff. Cf. his “The Myth of Passage,” Journal of Philosophy, XLVIII (1951), 459-460. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 43 “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” p. 282. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 44 Ibid., pp. 305-306. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 45 Cf. Paul Weiss, Nature and Man (New York, 1947), p. 12. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 46 Cf. Butler, op. cit., p. 273. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 47 This argument is familiar from Leibniz, who in the Discourse on Metaphysics (Art. 13) argued that whatever is going to happen is already “assured” or “certain,” but not therefore any more “necessary” than what has already happened. The same point was well made by Thomas Reid (Essays on the Intellectual and Active Powers of Man (1790), vol. I, Essay III, ch. ii), and more recently by Ryle, who asks, “Why does the slogan ‘Whatever is, always was to be’ seem to imply that nothing can be helped, where the ob |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: verse slogan ‘Whatever is, will always have been’ does not seem to imply this?” (op. cit., p. 21). |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 48 Cf. Baylis, op. cit., pp. 161-162. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 49 Cf. Reid, op. cit., vol. III, Essay IV, ch. x. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 50 See G. Grote, Aristotle (London, 1880), pp. 115-116. Cf. Paul Weiss, “The Past: Its Nature and Reality,” Review of Metaphysics, V (1952), 508-509. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 51 E. N. 1139b: “No one deliberates about the past, but about what is future and capable of being otherwise, while what is past is not capable of not having taken place; hence Agathos is right in saying ‘For this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have once been done.’” Cf. St. Thomas, S. T. pt. I, Q. 25, art. 4, and Weiss, “The Past: Its Nature and Reality,” p. 511. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 52 Cf. Anscombe, op. cit., p. 11. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 53 Donald Williams writes that “as for the irrevocability of past time, it seems to be no more than the trivial fact that the particular events of 1902, let us say, can not also be the events of 1952” (“The Myth of Passage,” p. 465). But so also, the events of 2002 cannot also be the events of 1952; yet the future is alterable. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 54 This point is taken from Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God (Chicago, 1941), p. 101. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 55 Cf. Mary and Arthur Prior, “Erotetic Logic,” Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955), 57-58. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 56 Donald Williams remarks that “there is a wholly unacceptable suggestion in these passages that an event may be contingent before it happens and necessary afterward; that indeed all present and past events ... are necessary. But in so far as he is persuaded of the truth of his first proposition, it must be by deduction from his own metaphysics of potentiality and tendency, rather than by logic or observation” (“The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” pp. 290-291. I think this interpretation is right but the evaluation w |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: rong. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 57 De Int. 19a 23-24. But notice that this is a temporal, and not an ordinary hypothetical statement. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 58 “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” pp. 291-292. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 59 As Linsky, op. cit., p. 251 and Butler, op. cit., pp. 267-268, have both pointed out. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 60 Cf. St. Thomas, S.T. pt. I, Q. 22, art. 4. For a brief history of Scholastic opinion on this point, see Philotheus Boehner’s edition and study of Ockham’s Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei et de futuris contingentibus , Franciscan Institute Publications (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1945), pp. 75 ff. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 61 Cf. Weiss, Nature and Man, p. 13. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 62 S.T. pt. I, Q. 25, art. 3. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 63 Hartshorne, op cit., p. 98. Cf. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Loeb Classical Library), p. 387. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 64 Hartshorne, (op. cit., pp. 104, 139) calls this conception of omniscience “the Principle of Gersonides,” after Levi ben Gerson (fourteenth century) who may have been its originator. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 65 Op. cit., p. 385. Cf. E. Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (St. Louis, 1941), p. 119. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 66 Op. cit., pp. 21-23. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 67 Aristotle explicitly denied it (De. Int. 19b 36). |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 68 Essentially this point is made by Ryle, op cit., pp. 19-20: “A prophecy is not fulfilled until the event forecast has happened.... The establishment of in-correctness certainly cancels ‘true’ but not, as a rule, so fiercely as to incline us to say ‘false.’” |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 69 Cf. Hartshorne, op. cit., p. 103. |