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From: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Time and Free Will
Message-ID: <727@hou3c.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Aug-84 15:48:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: hou3c.727
Posted: Mon Aug  6 15:48:46 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Aug-84 08:17:53 EDT
References: <351@ism780.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 33


	What I mean to say is we cannot talk about free will in a
	language that assumes Cause and Effect.  You say the word
	*because* implies Cause and Effect, but I say it assumes
	it....  My position is that I can't explain what a free
	choice is or how I go about choosing, because (there's that
	word again) the tool I have at my disposal, language, is
	based on the concepts of Cause and Effect and Time Marching
	On.  If language were based on the concepts of objective as
	cause and time moving from present to past, then I believe
	this discussion would be about why I couldn't explain what
	I meant by Determinism.

The general concensus seems to be that natural languages are "univer-
sal" in the sense of being able to express any concept.  A given
language may make it easier or harder to express a given concept, but
I don't believe that a natural language like English can make any
concept impossible to express.  For example, English is pretty clearly
biased towards the notion that people have free will, but that doesn't
prevent people from defending determinism.  Indeed, the fact that many
language constructs ("I decided", etc.) assume free will is little help
to someone who wants to construct a *valid* argument for free will.

The paragraph I quoted jumps from the claim that the word "because"
implies cause and effect to the claim that all of English implies cause
and effect.  The reason that the word "because" appears in the quoted
paragraph is that the writer was reasoning in terms of cause and effect.
The word "because" is hard to avoid because cause and effect reasoning
is hard to avoid, not the other way around.  (By the way, the word
"because" is normally used to express effect/cause instead of cause/effect.
It is used to take an effect and reason back to the cause.  Thus it is
not clear that the word "because" implies a forward flow of time.)
				Kenneth Almquist