Interesting and stimulating, it has put my mind in such a state of agitation. — Richard B

I'm sorry for the agitation. I hope I can show you that there is no need for such disquiet, and at the same time take us back to the theme of this thread. I want to assure you that I agree with you that Malcolm has the better handle on language as a whole, and that Kripke has taken steps too far in applying his logic. I think we can be fairly precise as to where and how, and bring this back to the discussion of what is real and what is not real.

We started to talk about essences because some folk here suppose that in some way it is the essence of a thing that decides if it is real or not; or perhaps the other way around. It has been difficult to obtain a clear explanation of how we are to fill this all out.

Now the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus may well have had a view along these lines, since we can read amongst the changes between that work and the Investigations a change in Wittgenstein's approach to both logic and to essence. For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus - and here I must ride rough-shod over the detail - the essence of a thing is implicit in the logical form that sets out the nature of that thing. This reflects a kind of logical essentialism: the structure of reality (and language) is essential and necessary, and it defines the limits of meaningful discourse.

But by the Investigations, much of this had become unacceptable. The assumptions that had held this view firm were rejected. Where in the Tractatus each meaningful term had a strict definition, in the Investigations we were admonished to look instead at what we are doing with words and see that this vast variety of uses can and must not be understood in such a simple and fixed fashion. Doing so greatly misunderstands and misrepresents the variety of language. The notion of a family resemblance is important here, but is not alone.

At around the same time, Quine was proffering another influential critique of essences, one more within the constraints of formal logic. Quine's argument shows that when someone uses a name - "gavagai" there may be no fact of the matter as to what that might be referring to. There are two aspects of this, the first that it need not be necessary to fix the referent perfectly in order to get your rabbit stew. The second, that no statement is true or false only as it stands, but that they are true or false as a part of the whole web of belief. Extensionally, to supose "gavagai" refers to the same thing as "rabbit" is to suppose that each element of the set "rabbit" is an element of the set "gavagai" - that's setting out what it would be for "gavaga" to mean "rabbit" in a way that does not rely on the intentionality of speaker meaning or web of belief. But that some individual is a member of the set "gavagai" or "rabbit" is of course open to referential opacity. If reference wasn't fixed, so much the worse for essence.

Historically, these and other considerations led to a pretty widespread consensus in around the 1950's that essences were a bit useless, an anachronistic hangover form Medieval logic with which we could safely do without.

The spurning of modality had much to do with the great success of predicate calculus and other advances in formal logic after Russell that seemed to have left the formalisation of modality behind. This changed dramatically when a kid from Nebraska showed how to construct a semantics and demonstrate completeness for S5.

At the centre of this formalisation is a simple idea, restored from Leibniz. Modal language is pretty every-day. It comes about when we consider how things might have ben different - what if that table had been in the other room, or had been red instead of blue. In using such language we are asking about how the world would be if things had been a bit different - perhaps if the table were in the other room, the young people could play their board game on the table in there while we old folk dance in here... or whatever - we have interesting parties. The suggested way to understand such utterances is wondering what would be different in a world in which the table were in the other room. That's all a possible world is - a way of giving a firmness to such utterances by stipulating a difference and inferring the consequences.

The formal version gets a bit complex, of course, but that's the basic idea. The formal stuff is what gave the idea respectability - here we had a way of using modal talk that we could be assured was coherent and complete, and that for many was intuitively familiar.

And along with this comes a way of thinking about essences that shares in this coherence and completeness. Essence could be considered as being those properties that belong to a thing in every possible world in which that thing exists. Or, if you prefer, the properties without which we'd be talking about something else.

It's worth paying some attention to how this works. A typical example is that Nixon was necessarily Human, and so that in every possible world in which Nixon exists, Nixon is human. Now it remains that perhaps the Nixon who was impeached might have been an alien. In that case, we are not talking about Nixon, but some alien who has replaced Nixon. Our Nixon is necessarily human.

The point Id like you to see here is that the specification that Nixon is necessarily human is not a restriction on Nixon so much as a restriction on how we can make use of the word "Nixon". We might use the word "Nixon" to refer to something other than Nixon - to the alien. But doing so does not make Nixon an alien.

Notice here the shifting of the burden from ontology to language. That's really quite important. Kripke can be understood as sneaking metaphysics in in the guise of logic. And at time he does appear to be guilty of this sin. But there is also a way of treating possible worlds as setting out for us a way to talk coherently about modal problems, without, or at least with minimal, metaphysical implications.

Following this path, we treat possible worlds not as metaphysical entities but as stipulated language games within which we can evaluate the truth of particular propositions, of how things might otherwise have been. And essential properties are not discovered, nor the attributes of Platonic Forms, but are decided by virtue of keeping our language consistent. They are a thing we do together with words.

There's a lot more that can be said here, but I have to go do other things, an there is enough here for now. The Law of Diminishing Returns applies, too. Is any one reading this?

So we agree that the second response seems inadequate*? Cool.

Making a deduction is a process, something we do, rather than something sitting passively waiting to be noticed. This goes for rationality in general, as can be seen by the presence of irrationality. If we had no choice but to be rational, there wouldn't be so much fuss about being irrational. Adding six and seven and realising that doing so gives the same value as adding nothing to 13 is not quiescence.

This leads to another point relating to mathematics. Making a calculation requires effort. Performing a deduction makes explicit what was previously hidden. And physically, doing this require work - energy over time.

There's also the interesting fact that not all Hamiltonian path problems have an answer. That is, some of them are not equal to any value. It’s not accurate to say that “the input is the same thing as its output” in a Hamiltonian path problem when there is no path. The input does not implicitly contain a path if there isn’t a path. The input is not the same thing as the output.


*added: Is that your opinion? There is no explicit conclusion in your post.

, Leon


Much as I dislike the present infection of Aristotelian thinking, I have to agree with this:

A very recent book aiming at summarizing the philosophers’s doctrines concludes the chapter on Aristotle’s physics with the words: “We can say that nothing of Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos has remained valid.” From a modern physicist’s perspective, I’d say the opposite is true: “Virtually everything of Aristotle’s theory of motion is still valid”. It is valid in the same sense in which Newton’s theory is still valid: it is correct in its domain of validity, profoundly innovative, immensely influential and has introduced structures of thinking on which we are still building. — Carlo Rovelli, Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look

Does this roughly correspond to your point, Moli?

There's a risk, in focusing on second reply, of watering down the response to the other two. But it;s interesting, so...

I gather, or at least supose, that mathematicians and physicist see a continuity between their use of "=" in 1+1=2 and in $\langle E_k \rangle = \frac{3}{2} k_B T$. Philosophers are the sort of people who question such things. Let's look at the three examples provided.


makes the point that E=mc² can be considered as showing how we convert matter into energy, and that's a valid way to understand it. But others will say that it shows an equivalence such that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Need we insist that one of these views must be the correct on? I don't see why.

X = vt + Xi is a pretty direct bit of maths. If you start at 5m and travel at 1m/s for three seconds, you will be at 8m. Is that final position identical to "1m/s x 3s +5m"? That's just 3m + 5m, so yes, it is.

$\langle E_k \rangle = \frac{3}{2} k_B T$ was derived form first principles rather than from the results of experiment. Interestingly the 3/2 comes from $E = \frac{1}{2}m(v_x^2 + v_y^2 + v_z^2) = \frac{1}{2}mv^2$, the energy in each dimension added together. in kinetic theory, temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy. In this model, the concepts are interdefinable—we can understand temperature through motion and vice versa.

We are indeed doing quite different things with each equation. However there is a pretty strong case for claiming that despite this, the "=" fulfils much the same role in each.

That word - interdefinable - may well be seen as about a metaphysical stipulation.

Thank you.

So what I see is that skepticism, rather than security, is the basis of knowledge. — Moliere

Excellent phrase.

An excellent reply. "=" is used in different ways in these examples, so one can argue that such equations as these do not use "=" in the way that it is being used by logicians doing modal logic. If this is so then Kripke apparently overreaches in claiming the necessity of such equivalences. Following this line of thought, the relation between mean kinetic energy and temperature is not one of metaphysical identity.

The implication for Kripke is a weakening of the apparatus he uses to argue for a posteriori necessity and doubt cast on his argument against the identity of mind and brain.



One possible reply is that there is something in common to equations, since in each case they use the "=" to state that the value on the left will be the same as the value on the right; that it is this value that is rigidly designated, not the items in the equation. So in E=mc2, what is rigidly designated is that the value of E is the very same as the value of mc², and so on for each example. This would be to agree with you that in physics "=" does not always assert an ontological identity, but that if the use of "=" is to make any sense, it must assert the identity of the two values it equates.

On this account, the identity here is not between ontological entities but between their values within the structure put together by doing science. This would considerably weaken the applicability of Kripke's system.



A second possibility is that the historical use of "=" back to Russell's attempt to ground arithmetic in logic, does show that the "=" in physics is the same as the "=" in logic. They are both uses of the identity relation set out in Begriffsschrift, and that all arithmetic equations are grounded in that logical interpretation. It's just what "=" means. So the mean kinetic energy $\langle E_k \rangle$ just is $\frac{3}{2} k_B T$.

This is a pretty dogmatic response, stating that the reason we can write such equations at all is that their effectiveness is dependent on or justified by the logic of identity, that accepting your argument would be tantamount to claiming that identity signs in physics are ambiguous and equivocal. Pretty harsh. My response to suffered from something like this, and perhaps Tim might say something similar. Are physical equations really that precise?



A third approach might be to take on board what has been said, and go back to the basics to reassess how our modal logics work.

In propositional logic, one can substitute any proposition for any other provided that they have the same truth value. In predicate logic, one can substitute any individual variable for another provided that they designate the same individual. In modal logic, this fails: while two propositions may both be true in a given world, it does not follow that they are true in every possible world. Truth is evaluated not only by what individual is designated, but also by which world the evaluation takes place in.

However, at the level of possible worlds semantics, modal logic is extensional: formulas are assigned sets of possible worlds as their extensions, and modal operators like necessity (□) are interpreted as quantifying over those sets. That is, □A is true at a world w if A is true in every world accessible from w. Because substitution of formulas with identical extensions preserves truth across all worlds in the model, the possible worlds interpretation is extensional.

☐p is true in w iff p is true in every world that is accessible from w.

We also have that in S5 and elsewhere that it is valid that a=b→□(a=b). It is the consequences of this simple theorem that Kripke is teasing out. The salient bit is that we may find out only a posteriori that a is indeed equal to b. This is what leads to the conclusion that so many find objectionable, that there are necessities that are discovered by looking around at how things are rather than understood a priori.

In the simplest case, that a=b means that a and b are the very same individual. And becasue of the extensionality involved, with some standard considerations we have it that if some expression is true for a, it will also be true for b. There is no obvious reason that this analysis can't be somewhat extended, including to kinds. So if we find, as seems to be the case, that every animal that has a heart also has kidneys, then extensionally, the set of animals with hearts and the set of animals with kidneys are the very same set, and we can substitute "animals with hearts" for "animals with kidneys" while preserving truth.

So if, whenever we pick out an animal that has a heart, we also thereby pick out an animal that has a kidney, then necessarily, if an animal has a heart then it has kidneys. If they are extensionally equivalent in every possible world, then necessarily, if an animal has a heart is has kidneys.

We might do this if, for instance, we were to insist that if we were to come across some animal that appeared to have a kidney but no heart, what appears to be a kidney is not a kidney, but has been misidentified.

The third response, then is to note that Kripke's move treats identity statements as extensional, and not in the intensional fashion seen in Malcolm. These rigid designators refer to the same entity or set in all possible worlds. Substitution of such identical entities is permitted at a modal semantic level, so when we find that a=b a posteriori, we might stipulate this as a metaphysical necessity, and reject counter instances as errors of identification.




What we have here is an at least apparent conflict between two quite different approaches. Folk might be tempted to suppose, somewhat simplistically, that either one or the other must be true, and the other must be false. Is it the case that we must either adopt the extensional approach and Kripke, or the intensional approach of Malcolm? Or are they talking past each other.

It might be interesting to look at Malcolm's approach through the lens of one of the formal intuitionist logics. Perhaps relevance logic would be informative.

This post has taken a few hours to put together, so thanks for the challenge. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

Unless we have the difficult situation where an approved drug is blocked by legislation from being used for it's approved purpose.

In January, the Queensland Government issued a Health Service Directive that prohibits public hospitals and health services from initiating puberty blockers (Stage 1 treatment) or gender-affirming hormones (Stage 2 treatment) for new patients under 18 diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This directive was done following concerns about prescribing practices at a clinic in Cairns and is pending the outcome of an independent review.

Causing a bit of a stink. So should governments be permitted to overrule on such issues apparently on religious and ideological grounds, or is it better to leave it to those doing the work.

See The fight to overturn Queensland’s trans ban

That'll save on the physics budget then. No need for all that experimental machinery if they can work it out by deduction. Pencil and paper from now on.

I think the interesting philosophical point is precisely the sense in which the laws of nature seem true a priori, irrespective of experience. I mean, whenever something is suggested that might not obey those laws on this forum, merry hell usually follows :-) — Wayfarer

"seem true a priori"?

Surely not. Your intuitions can't be that bad.

the laws don't just describe motion, they enable precise prediction. — Wayfarer

The law doesn't enable anything much. Except text book, perhaps. They do describe motion precisely, enabling prediction. Best avoid giving then the ontological status of involved in causation. Reification and all that. So better not to talk of enabling.

None of which makes the descriptions arbitrary.

There's a difference between outlawing and not approving. That's what I'm drawing your attention to.

...keep going....

What is determined is how they orbit their stars and planets. — Wayfarer

Not determined so much as described. The motion precedes the "law," and supersedes it, too. The law was decided as a result of looking at the motion, and is changed in the light of further observation.

So which is doing the "determining"?

That will not be happening in the future because it will be against the law. — frank

Not too keen on that.

You've got a fairly profound misapprehension about how medine works. — frank

I'm involved in health consumer advocacy hereabouts, so I hope not - and doubt it, since I get to hear more than my share of horror stories. I do hope for the best, though. Evidence based practice is in the consumer's interest. Legislation tends to be either misguided or too slow.

Puberty blockers were outlawed in Britain for people under 18 because there's no evidence that they accomplish what they're supposed to. Other countries including the US are following their lead. — frank

Thanks for being candid. I have a bit of an issue with legislating such "protections". Probably a hang over from studying Popperian ad hoc social engineering. I prefer to see the decisions made "locally" than "globally", except in the case of evidence-based demonstrated harm. The first finding in CASS is - lack of such an evidence base. Then noting "conflicting views among clinicians regarding appropriate treatment."

The recommendations lean in the right direction. (edit)

Keep going, if you like. encourage me to admire your views even less. — Banno

it's working.

Someone a while ago made a joke about me doing quantum mechanics of gender here, and I guess I’ve moved on to quantum field theory of gender now. — Pfhorrest

Neat analysis. Cool. Makes a mess of the conservative desire to force everyone into one of two fixed boxes because complexity and ambiguity make them uncomfortable.

I can see why you might prefer to maintain some distance from this discussion.

I asked you over and over again for either evidence or sophisticated argument. — Jeremy Murray

And ignored the reasons given for not doing so. I didn't come here for a mud wrestle, a he-said-she-said yawn fest. Your accusations of trolling are feeble, your ad homs hackneyed.

Basically you are being a bit of a dick. Perhaps your aim was to change my mind, but the result has been to reinforce my view of an unreasoning, wilfully ill-informed and ideologically driven opposition to trans discussions.

Keep going, if you like. encourage me to admire your views even less.

Compounding your own confusion.

The law of diminishing returns applies. Have fun.

You, sir, are contributing to the "Spiral of Silence". — Jeremy Murray

I'm here. I'm making noise.

While your passion is apparent, I've not been persuaded to reconsider my view. Your tone is confrontational rather than enquiring, your evidence one-sided and your logic dubious.

Cheers.

That's how a lot of philosophy is done. — RogueAI

Calling this thread "philosophy" is a stretch. More like mud wrestling.

And pretending that there is no evidence in support of the efficacy of puberty blockers is an act of bad faith.

You came here to prove your point, not to discuss the topic. That's fine, if tedious.

What about prudence and restraint? Nuance? Context? Perhaps the wisest course is epistemic modesty: recognising complexity, acknowledging uncertainty, and striving for a response that does justice to both care and caution.

And in the mean time allowing some flexibility in order to accomodate the diversity of individual difficulties folk face.

Not blanket responses.

common sense — frank

...is a prevaricating term.

And if it turn out to be so, your were right - but if it turns out to be wrong, then you will point to some machinations on the part of those of ill will, or do-gooders, to explain why.

You win either way. Well done.

It's a fact. That's where we're headed. — frank

And you know this... from examining a crystal ball?

This thread is shite.

What good is philosophy if it does not help evaluate evidence? — Jeremy Murray

Would you have a philosopher evaluate your cancer biopsy?

It took me ten minutes to come up with this evidence, and I can go on. — Jeremy Murray

Why so long? Slow internet connection? If you would be an instant expert you might need to upgrade your network.

I can do it too.

A good argument for better health care. Not for rejecting gender affirmation outright.

every male who takes puberty blockers will be permanently infertile and will never have an orgasm. — frank

That's misinformation. Not wrong, but not quite right, either.

Puberty blockers will eventually be illegal everywhere. — frank

Or improved so as to avoid these complications.

But again, Instant expert syndrome is at play here.

...the consequences are permanent infertility and sexual dysfunction. — frank

That's a bit like saying that giving blood causes Myocardial infarction. It happens, but not often.

Again, this forum is not the place to evaluate the evidence, and we are not the people to do the evaluation. Instant expert syndrome is at play here.

What we can conclude is that that there are issues, and urge caution. In both directions.

As a philosopher, I'm slightly inclined to say that this is not a type of supervenience. — J

Pretty clear that $\langle E_k \rangle = \frac{3}{2} k_B T$ is an equivalence. The "=" bit.

Taking a measurement is a whole language game. There's quite a bit to say about such a simple task. Malcolm added to this with the other article mentioned, Kripke and the Standard Metre. At the heart of that article is whether a stipulation is necessary or contingent. Lots of material here. Do we go into all that?

Ah, well. The lounge provides me with a nice echo chamber.

"moderates are hijacking the devastating election loss to suit their agenda" according to Four Corners.

And so it begins...

Now there is a rather large and growing body of evidence concerning puberty blockers.
— Banno

Okay, share it. — Jeremy Murray

So the logic of your argument is much the same as that used to reject the fact of famine in Bangladesh: "You say thousands are starving, but can't name one".

Pretending that there is no evidence in support of the efficacy of puberty blockers is pretty poor.

I have seen a great deal of evidence to the contrary. — Jeremy Murray

Confirmation bias is an amazing thing.

I believe I have been following the issue longer than you have — Jeremy Murray

Presumptive. And a poor argument. I was professionally involved with Trans children for decades.

You compared a drug to gender affirmative treatment. — Jeremy Murray

No I didn't. You are confabulating.

You 'presume' I dislike trans people. — Jeremy Murray

I'm glad to hear you have "skin in the game", albeit from a distance.

I'm not seeing anything interesting accruing from this discussion.

Hear, hear.

OK, you are refusing to accept what Hanover called "temporal necessity". — Metaphysician Undercover

That's quite a misrepresentation, given that what I did was to point to how temporal necessity can itself be accommodated by formal modal logic. Here's more on Prior’s basic tense logic TL from SEP, including a section on how it uses a Kripke-style semantics.

The other supposed objections you raise have either been or can be dealt with within the standard framework. In particular, the treatment of accessibility answers your main misunderstanding. Explaining this repeatedly is tedious.

You are slipping into nonsensical babble. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not me.

Not sure you are reading what I write. — Jeremy Murray

Oh, I read your reply. But I haven't read this whole thread, for obvious reasons. You are quite presumptive in your response. That to me does not bode well for your claims of being open to argument.

I didn't use an analogy. Drugs do not do anything until they are used, and it is that use that has moral import.

As you say, "this much smaller OG trans demographic group COULD benefit from puberty blockers", but you support their not having access to these drugs? I disagree.

Now there is a rather large and growing body of evidence concerning puberty blockers. If you think the evidence is not there for examination, then you are wrong. If you think that this philosophy forum is the pace to evaluate that body of evidence, then you are wrong again.

If your move is just the rhetorical one of calling evidence with which you disagree, "dogma", then there is no point in showing you the evidence.

Is there a consensus? No. This is quite a different thing to there being no evidence. And in the mean time we have cases where puberty blockers will help remit pressing and substantive problems.

If a Truly True sentence is supposed to be one that is uttered without a context, I don't know what that would be. — J

The view from nowhere. The god's-eye view. What's being asked is, might there be some alternative? There's. lot to unravel there, but we can't start from assuming monism.

Does he suggest "supervenience" as another possible way of cashing out the notion of "identity"? — J

No, although he might be considered as anticipating such things.

Kripke was too lax with his use of "heat". Hence the suggestion of moving to temperature, which is less ambiguous.

I don't see that we can say that, to follow through, heat supervenes on the mean energy of the item's molecules. The temperature, and so the mean energy of the molecules, of a wooden and a metal spoon may be the same, but the spoon will feel colder. The sensation of heat does not supervene on temperature, not vice versa.


Added: the article is at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9205.1980.tb00409.x

(in this case, many possible worlds can be designed — A Christian Philosophy

Better to see them as stipulated.

But yes, free will implies the capacity to make a choice. What do you want me to conclude from that?

What remains is that the OG (a dreadful phrase) can't do the job it was invented for. That god can create any possible world does not explain why he created this one. And if god created this world out of necessity, then it could not be other than it is. Modal collapse.

There are bad actors self-identifying as trans to take advantage of vulnerable women. — Jeremy Murray

And the problem here - is it that they take advantage of vulnerable women, or is it that they are trans?

Let's make sure we are addressing the right issue.


A drug is not immoral. It's a drug. What's done with it might be. Do you think that the State ought legislate to override the professional decisions of a child's carers and doctors, as well as parents, with a general piece of legislation that cannot take into account the context in which that decision is made?

Thanks. That's an excellent post. I have great respect for Malcolm, his work always gives me pause. Kripke on Heat and Sensations of Heat and Kripke and the Standard Metre are amongst the most challenging responses to PWS and Naming and Necessity.

And I think much of his criticism is spot on. I think he shows us that Kripke's ideas about necessity have been misapplied when he comes to use them to talk about minds and sensations.

I would first like to ask you a question. The aim here is to make sure that we are addressing the same problem. So if you will, consider this.

Malcolm, I think quite rightly, takes Kripke to task for equating a sensation and a physical characteristic. So consider this: What if Kripke had argued instead that the temperature of a sample was the mean kinetic energy of its molecules? Now the problems of sensation have been removed, and we have an equivalence between two physical expressions. We then also, as you mentioned, have the maths linking mean kinetic energy directly to temperature:

$\langle E_k \rangle = \frac{3}{2} k_B T$

My question is, if we make this change, does the objection you have in mind dissipate? Or are the problems that Malcolm suggests still there?

Again, this is by way of checking for agreement. I hope this removes Kripke's error of equating a sensation and a physical characteristic. Is there still an objection, after this? I think that much of the metaphysical stuff Kripke suggests still stands.

Thanks. It's fun to move past just explaining Kripke to some real critique.

Let's take a look at how PWS deals with Caesar.

"Caesar crossed the Rubicon" is possible, but not necessary.

That is, there are possible worlds in which Caesar crossed the Rubicon; and there are possible worlds in which Caesar did not cross the Rubicon. There are also possible worlds in which there is no Caesar, and possible worlds in which there is no Rubicon.

The possible worlds in which Caesar crossed the Rubicon include the actual world.

Now from this actual world, in 2025, we can't access any possible world in which Caesar did not cross the Rubicon.

But from the actual world, in 48BC, prior to his crossing, we could access those possible worlds in which he didn't cross the Rubicon.

And, to top it all off, in none of all of those possible worlds, the ones in which Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the ones in which Caesar did not cross the Rubicon, the ones without a Caesar and the ones without a Rubicon, did Caesar both cross and not cross the Rubicon.

So there is no contradiction here.

And notice that, since we can supose "Caesar" to be a rigid designator, we are talking about the very same individual in each of those possible worlds in which he exists. We are not supposing that someone else, who happened to be very much like Caesar, crossed the Rubicon.

Doing that would be to move from a Kripke-style response to Lewis's counterparts.

Aren't you contradicting yourself? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, no. Rather, you haven't been able to understand what is being said.

And again, this is not just my view. It is the standard approach to modality.

You still don't understand what I am saying about the relevance of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I do. I also think that your view is mistaken.

Looking backward in time, all things are necessary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then it was a necessity that Caesar crossed the Rubicon - it could not have been otherwise. Again, if it is necessarily true, it is true in all circumstances. And if that is so, Caesar had no choice.

You want to claim that it is not necessarily true until it becomes a past event. This is mistaking modality for temporality.

Again, plainly we can consider what might have occurred had Caesar not crossed the Rubicon. Therefore it is possible that Caesar not have crossed the Rubicon. If this were not so, we would not be able to consider the possibility.

But it could not have be otherwise in the actual world. Once he crossed the Rubicon, his, and indeed our, fates were set.

And this is not a contradiction becasue Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the actual world, but we can stipulate another in which he didn't.

All the imagined contradictions you ply us with dissipate when modal logic and possible world semantics are understood.

So again, I think both and I have a very good grasp of what you are trying to claim, but that we have a better grasp of the Possible World Semantics you refuse to read about, and so can see where you are mistaken.