Ockham, Plantinga and the Row of Ants

For millennia, philosophers have discussed whether divine omniscience is compatible with human freedom – conceived of in a libertarian way – or not. If libertarianism is true,some actions are free and no action is free unless it is within the agent’s power to act otherwise. If God is omniscient, however,he completely foreknows how I will act in the future, which seems to entail that it is never within my power to act otherwise, provided I cannot change God’s past beliefs. Therefore, I am not free in the libertarian sense. Ockhafamously contrastethis conclusionAccordinto him, propositions about God’s past foreknowledge of future human actions are not strictly but only “by word” (secundum vocem) about the pastIn Nelson Pike’s more recent terms, they describe “soft” rather than “hard” facts. Soft facts about the past fail to be “accidentally necessary”, so it is within our power to act in such a way that God would not have believed what in fact he does believe. In “Ockham’s Way Out” Plantinga made efforts to clarify the point. Even in his version,however,Ockham’s way-out faces a number of problems. Our aim is to defend Ockham’s way-out by defining in new terms both the notion of a hard fact and the idea that we are, in some sense, able to do otherwise. We propose to interpret the notion of a hard fact in terms of grounding, and identify accidentally necessary facts with a propersubset of hard facts,making of accidental necessity a non-modal property. By contrast, we characterize our power to do otherwise in genuinely modal terms. We argue that, arranged that way, Ockham’s way-out is by and large more viable than in Plantinga’s version.