It is impossible to predict another person’s behavior. While agreeing that a person’s behavior may not be perfectly predictable in practice, the determinist would say that all human behavior is...

It is impossible to predict another person’s behavior. While agreeing that a person’s behavior may not be perfectly predictable in practice, the determinist would say that all human behavior is predictable in principle. We may never be 100 percent accurate in predicting an individual’s behavior because a human’s psychological makeup is so complex that we cannot know someone’s total psychological state in detail. To use an analogy, we cannot predict the weather perfectly. However, we do know enough about its causes to make some fairly good probability judgments. The reason that our predictions are not perfect is that the variables that affect the weather’s behavior are too complex and numerous to make an accurate prediction possible.