The Nothing from infinity paradox versus plenitudinous indeterminism

Shackel, Nicholas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1751-1400 2022. The Nothing from infinity paradox versus plenitudinous indeterminism. European Journal for the Philosophy of Science 12 , 39. 10.1007/s13194-022-00463-z

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Abstract

The Nothing from Infinity paradox arises when the combination of two infinitudes of point particles meet in a supertask and disappear. Corral-Villate claims that my arguments for disappearance fail and concedes that this failure also produces an extreme kind of indeterminism, which I have called plenitudinous. So my supertask at least poses a dilemma of extreme indeterminism within Newtonian point particle mechanics. Plenitudinous indeterminism might be trivial, although easy attempts to prove it so seem to fail in the face of plausible continuity principles. However, the question of its triviality is here moot, since I show that, except in one case, Corral-Villate’s disproofs fail, and with a correction, the original arguments are unrefuted. Consequently, of the two contenders for the outcome of my supertask, the Nothing from Infinity paradox has won out.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
ISSN:	1879-4912
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 April 2022
Date of Acceptance:	21 April 2022
Last Modified:	19 May 2023 06:54
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/149380

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