Abstract

The object of this paper is to examine what evidence we can have for or against the truth of determinism, a doctrine often set forward by the proposition ‘every event has a cause’. I understand in this context by the cause of an event a set of prior conditions jointly sufficient for the occurrence of the event. Since the determinist is concerned with all physical states and not merely with changes of states, which are most naturally termed events, we may phrase this claim more precisely as follows: There is for every physical state at some earlier instant a set of conditions jointly sufficient for its occurrence.