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Determinism is a spectre that has haunted our scientifically-oriented culture from the beginning. I happen to think that it is literally a ‘spectre’, a trick of the vision, an appearance with an internal cause only, and that it is no more than the ghost of our own conceptual determinations projected outward into a world in which it has no place and no proper being. From one point of view it is no more than an alienated fantasy involving a number of incoherent assumptions. Of these, one of the most important, and one of the most deeply eroded by much contemporary work, is the assumption that science and scientific understanding is a potentially completable system. From another point of view, however, the deterministic picture seems an inevitable product of scientific activity.
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- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 9: Impressions of Empiricism , March 1975 , pp. 200 - 215
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1975
References
page 202 note 1 Even Popper, (who comes the closest to carrying on the empiricist tradition) gives an ambiguous role and status to experience. For him, what he calls ‘basic statements’ carry the real logical load, and he describes the relation of experience to them (in successive sentences of the Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 105Google Scholar) as ‘causing’ and as ‘motivating’ the acceptance of basic statements. What experience does not do, for him, is to justify the acceptance of basic statements, nor, presumably, the whole scientific edifice constructed with their help.
page 204 note 1 Enquiry, section VIII, pt 1. That conclusion is in itself a very dark saying. It is hard enough to understand what can be meant by calling necessity a quality of or in an agent, but to call it a quality of or in an onlooker seems beyond unravelling. One should note also Hume's bland substitution of the preposition ‘in’ for the ‘of’ that normally connects qualities and their subjects - a change that tends to blur, if not obliterate, the distinction between things and qualities.
page 205 note 1 In ‘Semantics for Propositional Attitudes’, Models for Modalities
page 207 note 1 ‘Modality de Dicto and de Re’, in Nagel, Suppes and Tarski (eds), Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science, p. 630.Google Scholar