A Naturalist’s Guide to Objective Chance

Philosophy of Science 84 (3):480-499 (2017)
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Abstract

I argue that there are such things as nomological probabilities—probabilities that play a certain explanatory role with respect to stable, long-run relative frequencies. Indeed, I argue, we should be willing to accept nomological probabilities even if they turn out to be metaphysically weird or even wholly sui generis entities. I then give an example of one way in which this argument should shape future work on the metaphysics of chance by describing a challenge to a common group of analyses of objective probability—Humean analyses— understood as analyses of nomological probability.

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Nina Emery
Mount Holyoke College

Citations of this work

Non‐Humean theories of natural necessity.Tyler Hildebrand - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (5):e12662.
Laws and their instances.Nina Emery - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (6):1535-1561.
The Governing Conception of Laws.Nina Emery - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
Breaking the explanatory circle.Michael Townsen Hicks - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):533-557.

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References found in this work

Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
Time and Chance.David Z. Albert - 2000 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Two accounts of laws and time.Barry Loewer - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):115-137.
The propensity interpretation of probability.Karl R. Popper - 1959 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (37):25-42.
Determinism and Chance.Barry Loewer - 2001 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4):609-620.

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