Logical determinism
Logical determinism is the view that a proposition in the future tense (‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’) is true or false now, and that what makes it true or false is the present existence of a state of affairs – a truthmaker.[1] If so, then the future is determined in the sense that the way things are now – namely the existence state of affairs that makes ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ true or false – determines the way that things will be. Furthermore, if the past is necessary, in the sense that a state of affairs that existed yesterday cannot be altered, then the state of affairs that made the proposition ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ true or false yesterday cannot be changed, and so the proposition is either necessarily true or necessarily false, and it is either necessarily the case that there will be a sea-battle tomorrow, or necessarily not the case. This seems to present a problem for the conception of free will which requires that different courses of action are possible, for the sea-battle argument suggests that only one course is possible, because necessary.
In trying to resolve the problem, the 13th century philosopher Duns Scotus argued in an early work that a future proposition can be understood in two ways: either as signifying something in reality that makes something be true in the future, or simply as signifying that something will be the case. The second sense is weaker in that it does not commit us to any present state of affairs that makes the future proposition true, only a future state of affairs.[2]