Abstract
In this note, I am critical of some aspects of David Lewis’s resolution of the Grandfather Paradox. I argue that Lewis gives the wrong explanation of Tim’s inability to kill Grandfather, and that the correct explanation makes essential reference to the self-undermining character of Tim’s attempt at grampicide.
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Notes
- 1.
I disagree with Lewis that this is the right fact to cite here; see (Garrett, 2019), published in this volume as Chapter 7.
- 2.
Jaster has a more concrete version of this worry, see (Jaster, 2020, 98).
- 3.
Jaster, in her discussion, also fails to vindicate any sense in which Tim can’t kill Grandfather. According to her version of the context-dependent view of ‘can’-judgements, Tim can’t kill Grandfather because “[he] does not shoot [Grandfather] in a sufficient proportion of the possible situations in which he intends to shoot him and the fact that he does not shoot him obtains” (italics in text) (Jaster, 2020, 104). Since this sentence is trivially true it can hardly imply that Tim can’t kill Grandfather. Trivialities only imply trivialities.
- 4.
Later in his article, Lewis rightly criticises a particularly egregious specimen of Fatalist reasoning (Lewis, 1976, 151–152). But there are many varieties of Fatalism, some more subtle than others, and Lewis seems to have succumbed to one of the more subtle variants.
References
Garrett, B. (2019). Bulletproof grandfathers, David Lewis, and ‘can’t’-judgements. Acta Analytica, 34(2), 177–180.
Jaster, K. (2020). What Tim can and cannot do: A paradox of time travel revisited. Kriterion Journal of Philosophy, 34(4), 93–110.
Lewis, D. (1976). The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13(1), 145–152.
Vihvelin, K. (1996). What time travelers cannot do. Philosophical Studies, 81(2/3), 315–30.
Vihvelin, K. (2020). Killing time again. The Monist, 103(3), 312–327.
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Garrett, B., Joven Joaquin, J. (2022). A Note on the Grandfather Paradox. In: Joaquin, J.J. (eds) Time, Identity and the Self: Essays on Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 442. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85517-8_6
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