The determinist’s argument in De Int. 9 (as given by Aristotle and interpreted by Richard Sorabji[1]) runs as follows: it is either true or false that event X will occur. If the statement “X will happen” turns out to be true, then it will have been true in the past. But if the statement “X will happen” was true in the past, then there is no point to deliberating whether or not to bring it about that X, since “X will happen” was true in the past, and the past cannot be altered. Thus, “X will happen” is necessarily true.
As Sorabji points out, Aristotle seems to accept the inference from the premise that any given statement is either true or false to the determinist conclusion. According to what Sorabji calls the traditional interpretation, Aristotle answers the determinist by arguing that predictive statements like “X will happen” are not yet true or false, but become true or false when X actually happens (or becomes inevitable). Sorabji finds this response unsatisfying, because e.g. if a statement’s being true means that it corresponds to a state of affairs in the world (which was a fairly common understanding of “true” for the Greeks) then the statement “there will be a sea battle tomorrow” is true (when uttered) if in fact it corresponds to a state of affairs, viz. the sea battle happening tomorrow; to speak of it as “not yet true” seems odd (Sorabji 101).
Sorabji’s own solution is to deny the inference between the premise that any given statement is either true or false to the determinist conclusion by making reference to one’s power, or lack of power, to bring about a state of affairs. Thus, if the statement “X will happen” turns out to be true, i.e. actually happens, then I do not have it in my power to make it the case that not-X, since X has already happened and I cannot alter the past. But, Sorabji thinks that this scenario is disanalogous to a situation in which I have been told “X will happen,” but X has not yet happened. Sorabji argues that since the event X still lies in the future, we still have the power to bring about not-X, and thus even if the statement “X will happen” does turn out to be true, it is not necessarily true, as the determinist thinks.
However, it seems to me as though something like Sorabji’s reply was addressed by Aristotle. At 19a7-23, Aristotle argues that it is false that all events happen of necessity: before an event X happens, both X and not-X are possible states of affairs. Since not-X is possible, then if X happens, it cannot have happened necessarily since it was in some agent’s power to bring about not-X. This passage seems to mirror Sorabji’s discussion of irrevocability in the first paragraph on p. 102, and Aristotle seems to argue here for the same disanalogy between past events and future events that Sorabji does.
Returning to Sorabji’s objection that it seems as though statements about the future should be said to be actually true or false depending on whether they in fact correspond to a state of affairs, it seems to me that Aristotle could answer that they are not yet true or false simply because they do not yet correspond to a state of affairs, and that only when they can truly be said to correspond, or fail to correspond, to a state of affairs can they be said to be true or false. It seems to me that this is the line Aristotle takes in his conclusion to this section at 19b1. Thus it appears that Aristotle argues both for a qualified principle of bivalence (cf. Sorabji p. 94-95) and against the determinist’s belief that all events happen of necessity.
[1] Sorabji, Richard. “Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory.” Duckworth, 1980, pp. 91-103.
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