ellauri096.html on line 53: Typically prophecies like catastrophe warnings are made to serve opposite goals simultaneously. Competition between accuracy and helpfulness makes it possible for a prediction to be self-fulfilling by being self-defeating. Consider a prophet who warns ‘Your godless life will cause fatalities along the sinners’. Because of the warning, spectacle-seekers make a special trip to witness the carnage. They die like flies. The prophet’s announcement succeeds as a prediction by backfiring as a warning, or conversely.
ellauri096.html on line 55: Michael Scriven (1964) tried to refute predictive determinism (the thesis that all events are foreseeable), by conjuring two players, “Predictor” who has all the data, laws, and calculating capacity needed to predict the choices of others. Scriven goes on to imagine, “Avoider”, whose dominant motivation is to avoid prediction. Therefore, Predictor must conceal his prediction. The catch is that Avoider has access to the same data, laws, and calculating capacity as Predictor. Thus Avoider can duplicate Predictor’s reasoning. Consequently, the optimal predictor cannot predict Avoider. Let the teacher be Avoider and the student be Predictor. Avoider must win. Therefore, it is possible to give a surprise test. This sounds silly. The Predictor can predict that the Avoider double guesses her. Both can fiture out that this will go on and on, until time runs out, and they still just sit on their asses doing nothing. Thing is, you must remember that the players are part of the game, not outside of it as idealists would have it.
ellauri096.html on line 67: In response to the apparent conflict between freedom and foreknowledge, medieval philosophers denied that future contingent propositions have a truth-value. That´s silly. They took themselves to be extending a solution Aristotle discusses in De Interpretatione to the problem of logical fatalism. According to this truth-value gap approach, ‘You will take a dump tomorrow’ is not true now. The prediction will become true tomorrow. A morally serious theist can agree with the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
ellauri096.html on line 75: The teacher has free will. Therefore, predictions about what he will do are not true (prior to the examination). Accordingly, Paul Weiss (1952) concludes that the student’s argument falsely assumes he knows that the announcement is true. The student can know that the announcement is true after it becomes true – but not before. What a wimpy argument.
ellauri096.html on line 159: Just as someone’s awareness of a prediction can affect the likelihood of it being true, awareness of that sensitivity to his awareness can also affect its truth. If each cycle of awareness is self-defeating, then there is no stable resting place for a conclusion.
ellauri096.html on line 199: Several commentators on the surprise test paradox object that interpreting surprise as unprovability changes the topic. Instead of posing the surprise test paradox, it poses a variation of the liar paradox. Other concepts can be blended with the liar. For instance, mixing in alethic notions generates the possible liar: Is ‘This statement is possibly false’ true? (Post 1970) (If it is false, then it is false that it is possibly false. What cannot possibly be false is necessarily true. But if it is necessarily true, then it cannot be possibly false.) Since the semantic concept of validity involves the notion of possibility, one can also derive validity liars such as Pseudo-Scotus’ paradox: ‘Squares are squares, therefore, this argument is invalid’ (Read 1979). Suppose Pseudo-Scotus’ argument is valid. Since the premise is necessarily true, the conclusion would be necessarily true. But the conclusion contradicts the supposition that argument is valid. Therefore, by reductio, the argument is necessarily invalid. Wait! The argument can be invalid only if it is possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion to be false. But we have already proved that the conclusion of ‘Squares are squares, therefore, this argument is invalid’ is necessarily true. There is no consistent judgment of the argument’s validity. A similar predicament follows from ‘The test is on Friday but this prediction cannot be soundly deduced from this announcement’.
ellauri096.html on line 248: , then the prediction is a reason to believe p
ellauri180.html on line 569: Namely a prediction for what will happen to the planet if the human race does not change (for the better).
ellauri188.html on line 120: He invites correspondence, hence this communication. Mr. Wester refers to statements in the romantic "White Shadows in the South Seas," and to the inter- esting article by Church in the Geographie for Octo- ber, 1919, and mentions Church's prediction that in ten years from that date "there would not be a full- blooded Marquesan alive." If taken literally, this would mean that the year 1929 or 1930 will witness the extinction of all pare-blooded Marquesans, and consequently, very shortly after, according to Wester, the gradual dying out of all Marquesan breadfruit.
ellauri336.html on line 630: In March, the Permian overtook Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar to become the world’s most productive oilfield. While Saudi Arabia’s overall production remains far higher, predictions are that the Permian’s output will continue to grow at a similar rate – doubling by 2023 as pipeline capacity expands and major oil companies increase their presence – the only thing in the way are alarming environmentalists like Greta.
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 596: Write a letter to the future: set goals for yourself, make a prediction about the world. Envision the future, and then make it happen. FutureMe has been delivering letters to the future for millions of people since 2002.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 764: Läppä läppä. Deeply depressed, Humbert unexpectedly receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores (signing as "Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)"), telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert, armed with a pistol, tracks down Dolores' address and gives her the money, which was due as an inheritance from her mother. Humbert learns that Dolores' husband, a deaf mechanic, is not her abductor. Dolores reveals to Humbert that Quilty took her from the hospital and that she was in love with him, but she was rejected when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films. Dolores also rejects Humbert's request to leave with him. Humbert goes to the drug-addled Quilty's mansion and shoots him several times. Shortly afterward, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death. Dolores dies in childbirth on Christmas Day in 1952, disappointing Humbert´s prediction that "Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years."
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