ABSTRACT
Fatalism holds that the future is fixed irrespective of our attempts to affect it. Seldom held as a philosophical doctrine this view often appears in literature (e.g. the Oedipus legend). A view often leading to the same effects, though for quite different reasons (without appealing to the ‘will of fate’ etc.), is logical determinism. This argues that a given future event must either occur or not occur. Whichever happens, the prediction that it would happen will turn out to be correct, and therefore was correct all along, whether or not we knew it. Therefore since one statement about the apparent future alternatives is already true, nothing we can do will alter matters. This puzzle affects the nature of TRUTH: can a statement (one about the future) be true at one time (when the future
comes) and not at another (before the future comes), or is it senseless to talk of a statement as true ‘at a time’? Or is logical determinism true but harmless, until we confusedly infer that the future is there-fore already causally fixed, which suggests that deliberation is pointless? Strictly, ‘logical determinism’ is a misnomer, since the doctrine is not about things being determined but about certain statements being true.
