Everything can be determined. Therefore, the world is deterministic. What do you think?

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(1) Everything can be determined.
(2) Determinism is the thesis that everything can be determined.
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Therefore, (3) the world is deterministic.

For example, suppose I am raking the leaves outside my house. Then the fact that I am raking the leaves can be determined. It can be determined by anybody driving past my house. It can be determined by a high resolution satellite (on a clear day with no overhanging trees). It can be determined by merely witnessing me raking the leaves. The same goes for anything else that happens. Its occurrence can be determined.

For (1) not to be true would be to undermine the assumption used in court trials. All court trials assume that the occurrence of any crime can always be determined (even if not by the available evidence).

For (2) not to be true would be to say that there are things that cannot be determined in determinism. But obviously then, determinism as we know it would not hold.

So what do you think? Isn't this a good argument for determinism?

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@browser32,

I think you have a problem with the definition of the word 'determinism' as generally used in philosophic discourse.

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@browser32,

Premise one is clearly false in philosophical terms because you are avoiding its implication of "predictability". That is its significance in court cases, when mitigating circumstances like "bad childhood" are argued...not simple "weight of evidence". If "mechanistic predictable determinism" were true, we would have to scrap the concept of culpability.

As usual, simplistic logic is futile in dealing with contextual semantics (and according to Wittgenstein that means all semantics)

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@browser32,

Determinism does not account for uncertainty. How we deal with uncertainty can come down to 3 things:
1)The illusion of understanding (or how everyone thinks they know what is going on in the world when it is far more complex or random than they realise)
2)The retrospective distortion (or how we asses matters only after the fact)
3)The overvaluation of factual information (and the handicap of learned people to categorise or "platonify")
(The triplet of Opacity from the The Black Swan- Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

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@browser32,

browser32 wrote:

(1) Everything can be determined.
(2) Determinism is the thesis that everything can be determined.
______________________________________…
Therefore, (3) the world is deterministic.

For example, suppose I am raking the leaves outside my house. Then the fact that I am raking the leaves can be determined. It can be determined by anybody driving past my house. It can be determined by a high resolution satellite (on a clear day with no overhanging trees). It can be determined by merely witnessing me raking the leaves. The same goes for anything else that happens. Its occurrence can be determined.

For (1) not to be true would be to undermine the assumption used in court trials. All court trials assume that the occurrence of any crime can always be determined (even if not by the available evidence).

For (2) not to be true would be to say that there are things that cannot be determined in determinism. But obviously then, determinism as we know it would not hold.

So what do you think? Isn't this a good argument for determinism?

No. In fact, it's horrendous.

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@Ding an Sich,

I wouldn't say it is a bad argument; it is no argument at all. What's its relation to causation?

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Everything can be determined. Therefore, the world is deterministic. What do you think?

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