Abstract

As far as scientific theories are concerned, contingent events are those that fall outside their explanatory framework, either because the theory doesn’t have the resources to explain them or because the events are unpredictable in principle. In what follows, the focus is on contingency as a problem about how we describe those features of the world that fall outside our best theories, including our best high-level theories. On this understanding of contingency, contingent things are things that just happen. I want to explore how contingency, in this sense, has remained a problem from ancient to early modern scientific theories and to sketch how what might be termed “the problem of contingency” has been transformed.