Laplace’s demon tries on Aristotle’s cloak: on two approaches to determinism

Synthese 196 (1):11-30 (2019)
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Abstract

The paper describes two approaches to determinism: one focuses on the features of global objects, such as possible worlds or models of a theory, whereas the other’s concern is the possible behaviour of individual objects. It then gives an outline of an individuals-based analysis of the determinism of theories. Finally, a general relativistic spacetime with non-isometric extensions is described and used to illustrate a conflict between the two approaches: this spacetime is indeterministic by the first approach but deterministic by the second approach.

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Tomasz Placek
Jagiellonian University