Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard Beale
Let me get silly: How does the determinist know anything, like 2+2=4? I'm serious. How can such a person believe that anything they say is true?
Presumably, most determinists (and most everyone else much of the time) hold to some correspondence theory of truth, i.e that a proposition P is true if the state of affairs described by P actually reflects the state of the world.
Determinism, as an account of causality, bears on that concept of truth only in that it describes how it is a determinist would understand the process of coming to know something. That is, presumably all determinists are physicalists, and would describe the state of knowing something as reducing to (or at least being
logically supervenient upon) some physical state, and probably mostly the physical state of a brain. So, Person A knows P when A's brain is in some state which we describe as "knowledge". That state is caused by some complex process of interaction with the world.
For example, A knows that it is raining when sensory stimuli from her eyes, ears, and skin (the sight of clouds and rain drops, the feeling of water droplets hitting the skin, the sound of rain on the roof) lead to particular brain states which represent a mental model of the world in which it is raining, and the proposition "it is raining" which arises from that mental model is true because it corresponds to the actual world. Everything in this process, according to the determinist, is causally determined, but we can differentiate between determined states of knowledge-about-P and states without knowledge-about-P.