Abstract
Cosmic hermeneutics is the project of ascertaining all of the facts of our world from some proper subclass of the facts of our world — some class of facts. I am concerned with a particular project of cosmic hermeneutics that presupposes that all the facts of our world are determined by the physical facts of our world. Following Frank Jackson, I formulate this thesis of physical determinism as follows: any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. A minimal physical duplicate of our world is a world that is exactly like our world in every physical respect and that contains nothing more than is required to be exactly like our world in every physical respect. A duplicate simpliciter of our world is a world that is exactly like our world in every respect whatsoever. I focus on the following epistemological question: if physical determinism is true, then what, in addition to the physical facts of our world, would a Laplacean demon have to know in order to predict all of the facts of our world from the physical facts?