Abstract
In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like.
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Notes
Pike (1965).
Ginet (1990, chap. 5).
For instance, in his chapter, “Defining Determinism”, in his book, A Primer on Determinism, John Earman says, concerning the challenge of distinguishing hard and soft facts, that he “will simply assume that the challenge can be met.” See his 1986, p. 15. And in his encyclopedia entry on the topic, Carl Hoefer (2010) invokes the “state of world at a time”, but does not address the distinction between soft and hard facts. See further van Inwagen (1983, p. 59).
Another standard candidate would be: (4) It was true yesterday at t1 that Jones would sit tomorrow at t3. There is, in general, no “canonical” way to refer to or express soft facts about the past, and I won’t detain us by trying to develop one here. How one will wish to more formally regiment the soft/hard distinction will substantially depend one one’s metaphysical framework concerning the status of facts, propositions, states of affairs, times, and the like. I am confident, however, that the basic points I develop below could be made mutatis mutandis within any such framework.
I thank Fritz McDonald in particular for helping me to see the need for this change.
See Adams (1967).
See Fischer (1983) in Fischer (1989).
See Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1984).
See Freddoso (1983).
See Zemach and Widerker (1988).
See Hasker (1988).
See Kvanvig (1986, chap. 3).
Fischer (1989, p. 43).
Zagzebski (1991, pp. 72–73).
Widerker (1990) also employs the example of God’s past decrees (and God’s past promises; the seemingly hard fact that God once promised to bring something about entails that the thing comes about) against the entailment view of soft facts. As Widerker says, and I agree, such decrees and promises seem “fully accomplished” and “over and done with”. In the literature on the hard/soft distinction, it is common for philosophers to talk of hard facts being (in Pike’s phrase) “over and done with.” In my view, what seems “over and done with” is best thought of as a heuristic in determining whether a fact about the past is hard or soft. My points here can thus be seen as trying to bring out the deeper reasons why the entailment view fails, and not just establishing (as I am inclined to think Widerker did establish) that it does fail.
See Schaffer (2009).
See Fine (1995).
Theists, of course, should be inclined to grant this example. But I think it would be a mistake even for non-theists to respond to the decrees case by saying that there is no God, or that the existence of someone who could make such determining decrees is impossible. What’s important is that the example is conceptually coherent. Similarly, I take it that it would be a mistake to respond to Fine’s singleton-set case by denying that there are (or even could be) sets. For a similar “neutrality” approach concerning ontological dependence, see Correia (2005, pp. 9–10).
Lowe (1998, p. 138).
SUB is sometimes also glossed as the idea that a substance is something that could exist all alone in the world. Intuitively, this idea is exactly parallel to the theme from Freddoso, Zemach and Widerker, and Hasker that hard facts are those facts which could obtain at the last moment of time or are compatible with the world’s ending. Further, these accounts of hard facts seem to be exactly parallel to David Lewis’ (subsequently much refined) suggestion that a thing’s intrinsic properties are those properties it could have compatibly with loneliness. See Lewis (1983) and Langton and Lewis (1998). There are substantial parallels between these two literatures that I lack the space to bring out.
Fischer (1989, p. 43).
See Fine (1995).
Fischer (1983) in Fischer (1989, pp. 93–94).
Pike (1993, p. 135).
Of course, Fischer only puts the point in terms of counterfactuals, but I think the core idea Fischer’s passage suggests is that whether the process counts as the process thus specified is (at least in part) determined by (and not merely counterfactually dependent on) Saunders’ writing his paper. Further, the counterfactual formulation suggested by Fischer seemingly runs into trouble with respect to God’s beliefs (and decrees); Fischer is in effect suggesting that the state of God’s mind at t1 which counts as his belief that Jones will do X at t2 would still count as that belief even if Jones didn’t do X at t2. I think this is ‘getting at’ something true, but it nevertheless relies on a (best avoided) per impossible conditional. I thank John Fischer for helping me to formulate this point about per impossible conditionals.
Or consider the fact at t1 that ‘Jones is bleeding to death’. Whether Jones is bleeding to death at t1 is—so one might maintain—in part determined by whether there exists in the future the event of Jones’ dying. Here, Jones himself (presumably a substance?) is the relevant entity.
For instance, one might suppose that ‘Kennedy is being shot 49 years prior to Todd’s writing his paper’ specifies the following entity: Kennedy’s being shot 49 years prior to Todd’s writing his paper. What would decide between this proposal and the one just given? My tentative thought is simply to say: it specifies both—but so long as it specifies an entity with the relevant features, then it should come out soft, and does so under my proposal. Of course, it’s tempting to define ‘specifies an entity’ as ‘entails that there exists an entity’, but, as I have been at pains to emphasize above, entailment is a rather blunt instrument, and though I can’t address these questions here, I have my doubts that it is fit for the needed task. (I thank Kenny Boyce for raising this issue.)
It is worth noting at this point that the relation here is not causal. The criminal’s having committed the crime (plausibly) does not cause the punishment to be just; rather, it helps to constitute its being just. And the mark’s having been produced by a mosquito does not cause it to be a mosquito bite, but helps to constitute its being a mosquito bite. Similarly, Jones’ sitting at t3 does not cause Smith to have been correct at t1; what’s at issue in soft-facthood is not backwards causation, but something more like backwards constitution (or determination). There are, of course, substantive issues concerning what (if any) ontology of time such a relation presupposes, but I must set these issues aside.
It is important to see that, just as it is no part of the concept of a soft fact about the past that someone has a choice about it, it is no part of the concept of a hard fact about the past that no one has a choice about it; if one thinks one has a choice about some past fact, one does not (or need not) ipso facto deny that it is hard. The “Multiple Pasts Compatibilist”, for instance, responds to the Consequence Argument by denying that even (uncontroversially) hard facts about the past must be fixed. For more on this issue, see Fischer (1994).
These points also apply to the case of causal determinism (the laws and the past plausibly don’t count as being what they are or were in virtue of one’s actions) and suggest a partial account what is “up to us”, viz. that whether something obtains is “up to one” only if one’s actions could determine that it obtains. But a full development of these points must lie outside the scope of this paper.
Referring obliquely to the debate about the hard/soft fact distinction, van Inwagen writes that “If some philosopher’s definition or analysis of ‘about the past’ has the consequence that the proposition that God believed in 1900 that I was going to lie at a certain moment is not ‘about the past’, that proposition constitutes a counterexample to that philosopher’s definition.” Van Inwagen (2008, p. 218).
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Acknowledgments
This paper has a long history, and I have many people to thank, both for comments on previous drafts and for helpful conversations. In particular, I’d like to thank the members (or former members) of the Agency Group at the University of California, Riverside, where the first version of this paper was presented, Garrett Pendergraft, Chris Franklin, Ben Mitchell-Yellin, Justin Coates, Philip Swenson, Michael Nelson, and especially Neal Tognazzini. I’d also like to thank Phil Bricker (whose probing early comments led—I hope—to substantial improvements), Bill Hasker, Eleonore Stump, Dean Zimmerman, Michael Rea, Alan Rhoda, E. J. Lowe, Kathrin Koslicki, Alex Arnold, and especially Kenny Boyce and Andrew Bailey. Finally, and most importantly, John Fischer’s influence on the paper has been enormous, and I thank him for comments on countless drafts; John has been (as usual) incredibly supportive of this project from the very beginning, and for this I’m deeply thankful. A short version of the paper was presented at the Eastern meeting of the SCP at Wake Forest University (March 2010), the Alabama Philosophical Society, in Pensacola, Florida (September 2010), the 2010 Joint Meeting of the Illinois and the Indiana Philosophical Associations, in Charleston, Illinois, and finally at the 2011 Central APA in Minneapolis. Thanks to audiences at these conferences, and especially to Fritz McDonald for his excellent comments at the APA. Thanks also to Alvin Plantinga and Marilyn McCord Adams for comments at this session. This project/publication was made possible through the support of grant ID#15571 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Todd, P. Soft facts and ontological dependence. Philos Stud 164, 829–844 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9917-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9917-4