Scrying an Indeterminate World

A claim p is inferentially scrutable from B if and only if an ideal reasoner can infer p from B. It is conditionally scrutable from B if and only if an ideal reasoner can know the (indicative) conditional ‘B! p,’ and it is a priori scrutable from B if and only an ideal reasoner can know the (material) conditional ‘B p’ a priori. 1 If p is scrutable (in one of these senses) from B, then B is a scrutability base for p. A class of claims is compact if it can be constructed from a suitably limited vocabulary. 2 In Constructing the World (2012), David Chalmers argues for the generalized scrutability thesis (GST) which roughly says that, no matter how the world had turned out, all truths would have been a priori scrutable from a compact base. GST is a bold thesis. The done thing when faced with a thesis this bold is to argue against it, either directly, by counterexample, or indirectly, by undercutting its motivation. But I’m not going to do the done thing, leaving it to those better suited. I want instead to explore some issues at the margins, about the relationship between scrutability and indeterminacy.