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Middle knowledge, fatalism and comparative similarity of worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 1998

RICHARD GASKIN
RICHARD GASKIN
Affiliation:
Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QN
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Abstract

The doctrine of Middle Knowledge presupposes that conditionals of freedom (statements of the form ‘If A were circumstances C, he would perform X’) can be true. Such conditions are, where true, not true in virtue of the truth of any categorical proposition. Nor can their truth be modelled in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds, because the structure of possible worlds is a necessary one, whereas the connection between antecedent and consequent of a conditional of freedom is a contingent one. Lewis and Stalmaker are committed to ‘conditional fatalism’, the view that things only would go a certain way if they would have to go that way. Although commitment to conditional fatalism does not itself import a commitment to fatalism, it is hard to find a separate motivation for it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , May 1998 , pp. 189 - 203
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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