- compatibilism
- Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. As Steven Weinberg puts it: "I would say that free will is nothing but our conscious experience of deciding what to do, which I know I am experiencing as I write this review, and this experience is not invalidated by the reflection that physical laws made it inevitable that I would want to make these decisions."
- determinism
- Determinism is the metaphysical view that all events within the universe (or multiverse) can occur only in one possible way.
- Causal determinism, sometimes synonymous with historical determinism (a sort of path dependence), is "the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature." However, it is a broad enough term to consider that: "...One's deliberations, choices, and actions will often be necessary links in the causal chain that brings something about. In other words, even though our deliberations, choices, and actions are themselves determined like everything else, it is still the case, according to causal determinism, that the occurrence or existence of yet other things depends upon our deliberating, choosing and acting in a certain way." Causal determinism proposes that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The relation between events and the origin of the universe may not be specified. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing in the universe that has no cause or is self-caused.
- Nomological determinism is the most common form of causal determinism and is generally synonymous with physical determinism. This is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws and that every occurrence inevitably results from prior events. Nomological determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Laplace posited that an omniscient observer, knowing with infinite precision all the positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, could predict the future entirely.
- empiricism
- In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence.
- metaphysical naturalism
- Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism) is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences.
- naturalism
- In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.
- Methodological naturalism, the second sense of the term "naturalism", is "the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism … with or without fully accepting or believing it." Robert T. Pennock used the term to clarify that the scientific method confines itself to natural explanations without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. "We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of (philosophical) naturalism, but nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is."
- verificationism
- Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through the senses) or a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). Verificationism rejects statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in conveying truth value or factual content, though they may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behavior.
jul 16 2025 ∞
jul 17 2025 +