Th6 — The Control Argument v1.0

 

Th6 — The Control Argument v1.0

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

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The Theorem

Th6 — The only things in our control are our beliefs and will, and anything entailed by our beliefs and will.

In Core Stoicism (2005) this proposition is marked “Th” and given no argument. But Sterling defended it directly, more than once, against a real challenger on the International Stoic Forum. Two threads — “Control” (January 2021) and its follow-up — preserve the defense in full.

Three Arguments, Not an Assertion

1. The definitional argument. Sterling distinguishes “control” from “influence” by example. A friend claims “I control the City Council” and then, when the outcome fails, retreats to “I only meant I have some control.” Sterling treats this as a betrayal of the word’s meaning: “'I control the Council' means 'I can guarantee that the Council always does what I tell it to do.' That's what 'control' means, as opposed to 'influence.'”

2. The zero-sum conservation argument. If an agent has complete control over her own choices, no one else can have any control over them: “the sum total of control for everyone else in the universe must be 0%... there cannot be more than 100% of anything, control included.” Extended across the whole causal landscape: “With regard to my own actions, I have 100% control... With regard to the actions of others, they have 100% control, leaving none for me. With regard to external things other than the actions of others, God has 100% control, leaving none for me.”

3. The reductio from value-bivalence. Partial control would require partial moral value, which Sterling treats as incoherent: “Either such things have value (good or evil) or they don't — there is no middle ground,” so “'some control' is equal to 'complete control' from the standpoint of ethics, or it is neither good nor evil, in which case 'some control' is equivalent ethically to 'no control.' The middle is unstable.”

What This Establishes

Th6 is not a bare intuited postulate. It is argued — by a definitional move, a genuine logical derivation from a conservation premise, and a reductio that ties Th6 directly to Th10’s. good/evil bivalence. Of the three foundational theorems examined for their termination mechanism, Th6 is the one Sterling closes most completely: the universal scope (“the only things in our control”) is not left to introspective sampling but is derived from the conservation argument, which by its nature covers every case at once.

This reclassifies Th6 from an unassigned foundational postulate to a derived proposition (Sterling's own “provable-but-unproven” category, with the proof supplied later in the archive rather than in the 2005 post) — grounded jointly in a stipulative definition of “control” and in Th10’s prior claim about where value resides.

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Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.