ABSTRACT
Most philosophers consider determinism to be an assertion about the world, so it is no more possible to establish its truth or falsity by a purely logical investigation than it was to prove that there had to be seven planets because seven was a celestial number. Probably the best hope of establishing the truth of determinism is the scientific method. The history of science shows that we proceed inexorably from anthropomorphic explanation, through religious explanation, then classificatory and relatory scientific explanation, and finally to nomological, deterministic, scientific explanation. General relativity has stood for an impressive amount of time and may well come to be accepted as final in its field as geometrical optics is in its. Quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, and determinism seems to aspire to determinateness. The point of Terence Horgan's cosmic hermeneutics is that Laplace's Demon would not really know all the facts about the world just by knowing the position and momentum of all elementary particles.
