Determinism
The view that every event is fixed by earlier events together with the laws of nature.
Also: causal determinism, hard determinism, Laplace's demon
What it means
Causal determinism says that, given how the world is at one moment, the laws of nature fix everything that happens afterwards. Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an intelligence that, knowing every force and position at one instant, could calculate the entire past and future. Determinism differs from fatalism, which says certain outcomes will happen whatever we do, and from predictability, since a deterministic world might still be impossible to forecast in practice. Whether our world is deterministic is unsettled: standard quantum mechanics is usually read as indeterministic, but some interpretations are deterministic. The main philosophical worry is free will: if the past and the laws fix your choices, could you have done otherwise?
The questions it belongs to
- 1.7 Free Will and DeterminismCould you have done otherwise?
- 1.4.2 CausationWhat do you actually see when you see one thing cause another?
- 1.9 Laws of NatureDo laws of nature make things happen, or only describe what happens?
Thinkers
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
- Derk Pereboom