Intelligibility, Rule-Following and Mechanism

I've driven some wedges between these concepts on open question grounds already in this blog, but I want to draw attention to a particular conclusion that we can draw with some confidence:

If the whole of reality was, in some sense, 'mechanically deterministic' - even, in fact, if this hypothesis was adjusted to accommodate the kind of uncertainties projected by quantum mechanics - then decisions about truth and falsehood would also have to be rendered in mechanical terms.

This would include the truth or falsehood of any statement of mechanistic determinism. In other words, if MD is true, then it is only true on deterministic grounds.

And, of course, if there are other grounds then there are things in the world which cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanistic determinism.