Why God's beliefs are not hard-type soft facts

John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom–foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls ‘hard-type soft facts’, i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are ‘hard’, or ‘temporally non-relational properties’; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (i) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past.

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III. Review of the Past, Focus for the Future

Measurement and Evaluation in Guidance ◽

10.1080/00256307.1970.12022431 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 18-24

Author(s):

Frederick G. Brown

Keyword(s):

The Past ◽

The Future

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Proud of the Past, Planning for the Future

Allergy & Clinical Immunology International - Journal of the World Allergy Organization ◽

10.1027/0838-1925.16.6.251 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 16 (06) ◽

pp. 251-253

Author(s):

Myron Zitt

Keyword(s):

The Past ◽

The Future

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Becoming Politicized

Zeitschrift für Psychologie ◽

10.1027/2151-2604/a000311 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 225 (4) ◽

pp. 324-335 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Dimitrios Barkas ◽

Xenia Chryssochoou

Keyword(s):

Collective Identity ◽

Political Socialization ◽

Greek Society ◽

Economic Vulnerability ◽

The World ◽

The Future ◽

Identity Model ◽

Beliefs About The Future ◽

Of Greece ◽

The Way

Abstract. This research took place just after the end of the protests following the killing of a 16-year-old boy by a policeman in Greece in December 2008. Participants (N = 224) were 16-year-olds in different schools in Attiki. Informed by the Politicized Collective Identity Model ( Simon & Klandermans, 2001 ), a questionnaire measuring grievances, adversarial attributions, emotions, vulnerability, identifications with students and activists, and questions about justice and Greek society in the future, as well as about youngsters’ participation in different actions, was completed. Four profiles of the participants emerged from a cluster analysis using representations of the conflict, emotions, and identifications with activists and students. These profiles differed on beliefs about the future of Greece, participants’ economic vulnerability, and forms of participation. Importantly, the clusters corresponded to students from schools of different socioeconomic areas. The results indicate that the way young people interpret the events and the context, their levels of identification, and the way they represent society are important factors of their political socialization that impacts on their forms of participation. Political socialization seems to be related to youngsters’ position in society which probably constitutes an important anchoring point of their interpretation of the world.

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