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The Costs of Ockhamism

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Abstract

This paper has a twofold aim. The first is to offer a precise definition of soft fact. Without such definition it is impossible to assess the Ockhamist solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom in an accurate way. The second purpose is to identify the costs of such a solution, distinguishing them from some of the other costs usually ascribed to Ockhamism, which Ockhamism does not actually need to pay. In particular, it is argued that Ockhamism is committed to the view that a true future exists and to a form of backward causation.

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Notes

  1. “If ‘Socrates is seated” is true, “ Socrates was seated” will always be necessary”(Tractatus, 1.C). Ockham defines the necessity of the past accidental necessity to distinguish it from logic necessity.

  2. An anonymous referee underlined the historical closeness between this solution to the foreknowledge dilemma and the solution proposed by Leibniz. Even in this case, our previous considerations still hold. Øhrstrøm and Hasle state that Ockham and Leibniz solutions are in a way similar (1995, pp 102–106). Leibniz recalls the distinction between two kinds of necessity (the logical necessity and the “accidental” necessity) and the asymmetry between past and future (cf., for instance Teodicea II \(\S\)170). But what mainly associates Leibniz and Ockham is the intuition according to which indeterminism and divine foreknowledge are both essential features for the Christian tradition. What is, maybe, more troublesome for Leibniz is the very concept of free will; as it is well known, the fate of an individual is, in a sense, already included in its individual concept:

    Since the individual concept of every person includes once and for all everything which can ever happen to him, one sees in it a priori proofs or reasons for the truths of each event and why one has happened rather than another, but these truths, however certain, are nevertheless contingent, being based on the free will of God and of creatures. (Leibniz 1969, p. 310)

    If it is already included in Caesar’s individual concept the choice to cross the Rubicon, it is not clear in which sense Caesar is free to refrain from that. Therefore, differently from Ockham, Leibniz spouses a conception of free will more linked to a compatibilist stance and, for that very reason, less problematic for divine foreknowledge.

  3. Cf., among others, Adams (1967), Freddoso (1983), Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1984), Craig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Zemach and Widerker (1988), Hasker (1988), and Todd (2013a).

  4. For instance, Fischer (1983) criticizes the definition of Adams (1967), Craig (1986, 1991) criticizes all the previous definitions, Winderker (1989, 1990) criticizes the criticism of Fischer (1983) regarding Adams, while Todd (2013a) states that all the previous definitions are insufficient.

  5. There are many possibilities for specifying this definition. For example, Adams (1967) affirms that sentences that describe soft facts at t necessarily imply something that happens at a time subsequent to t. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1984), in order to amend some shortcomings of McCord Adam’s definition, state that soft facts at t imply that something unrestrictedly repeatable happens at a time subsequent to t. Freddoso (1983) appeals to the notion of history and maintains that hard facts at t are those facts that are facts in every history of the world that follows t. Zemach and Widerker (1988) draw on this idea and define hard facts at t as the set of facts that would be facts even if the world ended an instant after t. Finally, Todd (2013a) defines a soft fact at t as a fact that specifies an entity e as having a property P at t and, whether e counts as having P at t, is at least in part determined by whether there exists an event or events in the future relative to t. These definitions are obviously different but nevertheless have something in common (i.e. the idea that a soft fact at t in some way involves the taking place of something at a time subsequent to t). They differ in the way in which this involvement is specified.

  6. For such a definition, cf. Craig (1986, 1991) and Plantinga (1986).

  7. For a recent example of such confusion, cf. Pendergraft and Coates (2014). At the beginning of their paper, the authors very clearly illustrate the first definition but then, in the course of their arguments, they actually use the second one.

  8. As a matter of fact, the counterfactual dependence does hold, as we will see soon, between John’s sound belief and Mary’s action. However, we think that the soundness of a belief is not an intrinsic property of the belief (at least in a classical correspondence theory of truth) but a relational property which connects the belief in question with the fact it refers to.

  9. Todd (2013a) states that “soft facts will in some sense depend for their identities on the future” (p. 838).

  10. On the concept of extrinsic property, cf. Lewis (1983). Lewis defines an extrinsic property as a property that an object possesses “in virtue of the way some larger whole is [...] If something has an intrinsic property, then so does any perfect duplicate of that thing; whereas duplicates situated in different surroundings will differ in their extrinsic properties.” (p. 197)

  11. Craig (1986, 1991) defended such an idea. If divine beliefs are assimilated to the second definition, then, pace Merricks, the position advanced by Merricks (2009, 2011) is fully-fledged Ockhamist.

  12. The combination of tense and modality respect to the past is not interesting since, in our framework, given the unicity of the past history, \(P\varphi\), \(\square P\varphi\), and \(\lozenge P\varphi\) are equivalent.

  13. The first modern formulation of an Ockhamist temporal system goes back to Prior (1967, p. 126). For a logical exposition of the system, cf. Øhrstrøm (2009).

  14. As Craig (1991) vividly states, “I have the power so to act that, were I to do so, a belief held at an earlier time would not have been held at that earlier time” (p. 161).

  15. The Ockhamist solution differs in this aspect both from the Augustinian/Frankfurtanian compatibilist solution, for which there is a true future but the agents could have not done otherwise, and from the eternalist solution, that is compatible with a view according to which today it is neither true nor false that the agent will actualize \(\varphi\) and only tomorrow this proposition will become true or false. We have shown the compatibility of the eternalist solution with such a radically indeterminist view in [our paper].

  16. As Craig (1986, 1991) repeatedly noted, to state that the past is determined by the future does not mean being committed to the view that we can change the past. By means of her future actions, the agent does not change but instead determines what God believed in the past. On this point, see below.

  17. It is contradictory only if a view is embraced whereby the temporal order of events is determined by the causal order of events. For such a view, see Reichenbach (1956).

  18. For a discussion on the idea of backward causation, see Craig (1991) pp. 94–157.

  19. On this line of thought, see Craig (1986, 1991). Merricks (2009, 2011) also claims that his approach is not committed to backward causation.

  20. For instance, Lewis (1973b) says: “If c and e are two actual events such that e would have not occurred without c, then c is a cause of e” (p. 563).

  21. For example, the Presentist can appeal to Lucretianism, i.e. to the idea that the world possesses properties such as “being such that Caesar was murdered in 44 BC” (cf. Bigelow 1996), or to Haecceitist presentism, i.e. to the idea that the truthmaker of “Caesar was murdered in 44 BC” is a certain relation between the haecceities of Caesar and of being a time in 44 BC (cf. Keller 2004)or to the distinction between logical and concrete existence (Linsky and Zalta 1996; Williamson 2002), i.e. to the idea that, even though Caesar is no more a concrete object, he still exists in a logical sense and, then, we can still predicate something of him.

  22. The solutions cited in the previous footnote are all available for Presentist who wishes to provide truthmakers to the propositions concerning future events. Not every solution is however so transferable. For example, a paper of Rhoda (2009) defends the idea according to which the Presentist can account for the truthmakers of past truths by appealing to God’s (infallible) memories. This solution cannot of course be exported to the future case.

  23. This point has been vigorously highlighted by W. L. Craig. He says that, when we determine divine past beliefs, we do not exercise “the power to change the past, but the power to act in such a way that were I to act in that way the past would have been different” (Craig 1991, p. 159). He adds: “we have the ability to act in ways other than we in fact act and were we to act in these other ways, then states of reality conditional upon those acts would be different than they in fact are. The chronological precedence or subsequence of those states with regard to the action is irrelevant (...) From the fact that their consequences are actual, we know that the actions will be actual, for were they not to be actual, different consequences would have obtained” (p. 161).

  24. This point has been underlined by Merricks (2009, 2011).

  25. On the distinction between these two senses of changing the past and the future, cf. Mavrodes (1984).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Università Cattolica, L.go Gemelli 1, 20123, Milan, Italy

    Ciro De Florio & Aldo Frigerio

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  2. Aldo Frigerio
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Correspondence to Ciro De Florio.

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De Florio, C., Frigerio, A. The Costs of Ockhamism. Axiomathes 26, 489–507 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9298-y

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