Kolejny odczyt w ramach seminarium ZJR (13 V 2022): Apriority and the fixed past: a puzzle

The next meeting of the Sign-Language-Reality seminar will take place tomorrow: Friday, 13 V 2022, 17.00, Central European Time.

The meeting will be HYBRID (both online and in-person)

For online participation:
meet.google.com/huk-acij-hzz

For in-person participation:
Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 3 Street, room nr 4

Fabio Lampert
(University of Greifswald)

will deliver a talk:

Apriority and the fixed past: a puzzle

ABSTRACT

There seems to exist an important asymmetry between the past and the future. Perhaps you will order the pumpkin spice latte tomorrow at the coffee shop. Perhaps not. Regardless of what you will actually do, you can still choose which coffee you will drink tomorrow, if at all. You have genuine options ahead of you, future possibilities the realization of which are still up to you. This is not so with what has already happened. You did order the pumpkin spice latte last week, and now you regret it. Now you cannot do anything about the fact that last week you ordered the pumpkin spice latte. There are no past possibilities in the same sense as there are future possibilities. The past is ‘closed’ and there is nothing you can do to change it. In fact, if we consider the genuine future possibilities ahead of you, it seems they must all come with a certain baggage, namely, the past itself. For whatever you are able to do in the future, those seem to be circumstances that would only add to the given past. This intuition, namely, that the past is somehow ‘fixed’ and out of our control can and has been articulated more carefully in numerous ways. One way of doing so is by the following principle of the ‘fixity of the past’:Fixity of the past: For every action A, agent S, times t and t* (where t ≤ t*), and possible world w, S is able at t to A at t’ in w only if there is a possible world w* with the same past as that of w up to t in which S A-s at t*.This principle captures the relevant sense in which the past differs from the future. According to it, the past remains fixed in whatever circumstances witness one’s ability to do something. And although this principle is indeed intuitive, having been defended by many philosophers, it has disastrous and well known consequences when conjoined with the assumption that there is an omniscient being who infallibly believes in every truth, or with the assumption that the laws of nature are deterministic. For such assumptions seem to entail that no one is, or ever has been, able to do otherwise than what one actually does. If, moreover, being able to do otherwise is required for having free will, this entails that no one has or ever had free will. In this talk, I will argue for a novel way out of such arguments for the incompatibility of free will and infallible foreknowledge, or simply determinism. There are plausible assumptions about logic and language inspired by the works of Kripke and Kaplan which are widely accepted by philosophers, and when conjoined with other widely accepted principles about knowledge lead to the conclusion that there is a priori knowledge of contingent truths. One example is a priori knowledge of contingent trivialities such as p iff actually p, where p is a contingent truth and ‘actually’ gets formalized with a modal operator. But there are other relevant examples not involving the ‘actually’ operator. I will argue that some such instances of a priori knowledge are inconsistent with the principle of the Fixity of the past. If the theist, for instance, should like to hold on to a traditional view of divine omniscience, in conjunction with the view that there is free will, she might do well in rejecting the Fixity of the past. There is an asymmetry between the future and the past, but the latter plays no role in constraining what free agents are able to do in a given situation — or so I shall argue.

The list of this year’s seminar meetings is available at:
http://pts.edu.pl/seminarium-2021-2022.html
Sign-Language-Reality seminars are organized jointly by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw and Polish Semiotic Society.