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Actualism is the view that the actual world is the only possible world. But I was told that even most actualists believe in true counterfactuals, like, "It might have been the case that Adolf Hitler was never born". However, what is the term for the belief that not only is this world the only possible world, but that all counterfactuals are false? So, such a person with that belief would believe that, for instance, unicorns can't possibly have evolved, that Hitler had to have been born, that no one but Einstein would have discovered relativity, etc. I am sorry if this question is similar to several I have asked before, but this formulation of the question is what I really want to ask. The previous times I asked this kind of question, I was not clear enough.

user107952
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    Believing that all counterfactuals are false is incoherent. Their negations are also counterfactuals, and one would have to believe that they are all true contradictions. One could say that all counterfactuals are, strictly speaking, meaningless, and hence lack truth value, but then they'd have to explain how those are seemingly meaningful in everyday discourse. Strict actualists do it along the lines of fictionalism, with "world stories", etc. – Conifold Oct 25 '20 at 04:10

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If you think events could not have happened otherwise, and every choice made by the flip of a coin was nevertheless determined, you are in a world of universal determinism, or predestination.

While it seems reasonable that events and choice can be subject to random variability, the question of randomness has some challenges, e.g. Is there anything that is totally random?

Chris Degnen
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