Commentary: Coda--a Socratic dialogue: Plato.

Epimenides Where do you come from, Socrates, and where are you going? Socrates Actually, it was you I was looking for in the marketplace. I just met with Theodorus and Alcibiades and we had a discussion that was well worth hearing about the interesting letter of the noble Charles Poole. Epimenides What do you think of the present debate, Socrates? Socrates Good heavens, I fancy you will never let me go until I have given you some sort of clarification. Epimenides You are quite right about my intentions. Socrates Very well my dear fellow. So in the present case, it is necessary to investigate what we mean by determinism. Sufficient conditions are embodying the deterministic assumption that everything that occurs is fully necessitated by antecedent facts or events: determinism is an all-or-nothing affair; it assumes a quantitative complete causal bonding and supposes exception-less and universal laws of nature. Epimenides And as things are, what can we say it is with deter-minism? Socrates Tell me: is it not true that most if not all scientific laws or generalizations given by particular scientific disciplines are not precisely true? They are true-ish (or verisimilar pace Popper). Upon my word, most of what epidemiology tells us about cause is in stochastic form. Epimenides Then, is it not necessary for us to start out knowing why many epidemiologists still believe in determinism? Socrates Think of it, then, in this way. Two points are quite clear. First, determinism is completely, or almost completely, devoid of any empirical support. And secondly, our best and most successful scientific and epidemiological theories describe a probabilistic, not a deterministic world. Statistics and probability theory are currently the official mathematical language of epidemiology. Is it not surprising in these circumstances, that determinism remains a live option? Why hunt the Holy Grail when it does not exist? Epimenides Doubtless, but give me your opinion of the following view of determinism. I fancy that the stochastic cause is just one factor entering into the situation so that if we got the full story we would know exactly what determines that effect: a stochastic cause is just one part of the full deterministic story. Socrates Well spoken, Epimenides. The account you give of the nature of determinism is not, by any means, to be despised. Who, then could challenge so great an array and not make himself a laughing-stock? Epimenides That would be no …