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Process and Prediction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
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Traditional definitions of determinism in terms of causation seem nowadays to have been largely superseded by accounts in terms of predictability. If it were true that all and only caused events were predictable then doctrines of universal causation and universal predictability would be equivalent and it would only remain to ask what advantages if any an indirect epistemological account had over a direct ontological one—none, one might have thought, more especially if the former presupposed the latter. In fact, however, the two are by no means so simply and directly related: being caused is neither alone sufficient nor yet again is it necessary for predictability, or so at least I shall be endeavouring here to show.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1965
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page 146 note 1 As opposed to talking of those strict or immediate ones with which so far we have been exclusively concerned. Remote causes, it will incidentally appear, are quite certainly not sufficient for their effects, for their having which they depend not simply upon the circumstances prevailing at the time when they are operative but equally upon those that prevail from that time on right up to the time of their putative effects.Google Scholar
page 147 note 1 This is true even in the looser sense of the word in which events do take time, but only because one does not call by that name any process or action that is not completed, i.e. because events are, by definition, in the perfect tense.
page 150 note 1 This positively; the corresponding negative is that a condition of its continuing should cease to hold, or what supports it be withdrawn.
page 150 note 2 It is a simplification, since while in the latter case the consequences in question are to include our own actions, their causes only what are not our own actions—a restriction quite evidently arbitrary—in the former what is really being said is that those actions are most truly our own which are not conseuquent upon anything—that is, which are completely inconsequent.Google Scholar