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hard determinism

hard determinism noun: a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

Noun

hard determinism (uncountable)

  1. A view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.
    • Moreover, suggestions that compatibilists can refute hard determinism on non-semantic grounds are misguided, building more into hard determinism than an adherent of this view needs to accept. […] Hard determinism merely claims that our actions are brought about by genetics and environment, and that...2009, Susan Pockett, William P. Banks, Shaun Gallagher, editors, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 128
    Synonyms:
    incompatibilism, metaphysical determinism, strict determinism

Synonyms of hard determinism

Antonyms

Questions about hard determinism

What does hard determinism mean?
Hard determinism means a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.
What part of speech is hard determinism?
Hard determinism is a noun.

Words near hard determinism in the dictionary

  1. hard currencies
  2. hard currency
  3. hard deck
  4. hard deletion
  5. hard deletions
  6. hard determinism
  7. hard determinist
  8. hard determinists
  9. hard disc
  10. hard disc drive
  11. hard disc drives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard determinism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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