Determinism in Deterministic Chaos
Roger S. Jones · PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association · 1990
In a paper fifteen years ago about the meaning and the possibility of the beginning and end of time, our redoubtable session chair, John Earman, ended up like this: …[T]he answers to the questions posed at the outset lie somewhere in a thicket of problems growing out of the intersection of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. This paper has only located the thicket and engaged in a little initial bush beating. This is not much progress, but knowing which bushes to beat is a necessary first step. Some philosophers will be disappointed that the thicket is populated by so many problems of a technical and scientific nature. On the contrary, I am encouraged by this result because it shows that a long-standing philosophical problem has a nontrivial and, indeed, a surprisingly large content. Moreover, this result is a good illustration of the artificiality and danger of trying to separate philosophy from science. (Earman 1977, p. 131-2) These remarks are a kind of manifesto of an approach to philosophical questions about space and time dating from the late 1960’s.