Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What's the difference between determinism and fatalism?

One way may be to describe the difference in counterfactuals. Fatalism is the thesis that had things been different at some time t, it still would have occurred some event (here we may or may not want to see this event as a token or type, it may not matter) at a later time t'. Determinism has this as a vacuous truth since it could not have been different at time t because events at time t is determined by the events in some previous time and the laws of nature.

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