ÿþ<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>dankadoomsday</TITLE> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=unicode"><LINK href="mailto:danka.istvan@freemail.hu"> <META content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-2"> <META content="danka istvan" name=author> <META content="MSHTML 5.50.4807.2300" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <P>First Name: István<BR>Last Name: Danka<BR>Institution: Hungarian Academy of Sciences/University of Pécs/University of Bergen<BR>Department: Institute for Philosophical Researches (assistant fellow)/Philosophy Department (PhD-student)/Wittgenstein Archives (visiting scholar)</P> <HR> <P>Title of paper: Doomsday argument. A case study on what the case would be (if it were not the case)</P> <HR> <P align=justify>I claim that so-called Doomsday Argument hangs on some kind of verificationist antirealism. In this case, the argument aims only at antirealism, in its verificationist form. Realists as well as non-verificationist antirealists could steady down. Doomsday is only the doomsday of verificationist antirealism.</P> <P>My argument is as follows.</P> <P align=justify>Doomsday argument sponges on the concept of probability. Nonetheless, a common feature of the non-verificationist strategies is to accept the principle of bivalence. It is sure that if probability of a fact F is p(F)=0,99999... then it is reasonable to believe that F but that is not equal to that it <I>is</I> the case that F. The argument is about probability, therefore knowability (this step probably should and definitely will be argued better in details) but not about facts themselves. There is a slight difference between 0,99999... and 1 but it is quite enough to think they are not equal. In fact, propositions about facts cannot be probable but <I>either</I> true <I>or</I> false.</P> <P align=justify>If someone has a realist attitude toward facts and therefore she accept that principle of bivalence is valid for speaking about facts, she is able to make a methodological distinction between a direct realist way of speaking about how things are on one hand, and an antirealist way of speaking about epistemological problems of how to get knowledge. Probability, in that case, is a question of the latter, whereas whether doomsday comes on <I>in fact</I>, is a question of the former. An answer to the question <I>whether or not</I> doomsday comes on is quite different from an answer to how probable it is.</P> <HR> </BODY></HTML>