Chance Debugged

Lato Sensu: Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 8 (2):6-14 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

A ‘Big Bad Bug’ threatens Lewis’s Humean metaphysics of chance (Lewis 1986a, p. XIV); his Principal Principle provides an intuitive link between chance and credence. Yet on the one hand, certain future developments are incompatible with the true theory of chance, but on the other hand, such future developments have a positive chance to occur. The combination of these two claims with the Principal Principle leads to inconsistent credences. I present a Humean solution to the Bug: chances are relative to a limited perspective. The perspective comprises facts available as evidence to an ideal cognizer at a point in space-time. As a consequence, the same future event can have different chances of occurring provided the perspective is different. I show how this dissolves the Bug.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 93,296

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The big bad bug: What are the humean's chances?John Bigelow, John Collins & Robert Pargetter - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3):443-462.
Humean Supervenience Rebugged.Suki Finn - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (4):959-970.
What Chance Doesn’t Know.Harjit Bhogal & Michael Townsen Hicks - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
On what we know about chance.Frank Arntzenius & Ned Hall - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2):171-179.
Principled chances.Jonathan Schaffer - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (1):27-41.
Chance, credence, and the principal principle.Robert Black - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3):371-385.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-07-14

Downloads
18 (#860,222)

6 months
13 (#219,908)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Daniel Dohrn
Università degli Studi di Milano

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references