This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...) of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is modeled on the Wolffian division of logic textbooks into sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences. While it is undeniable that the Transcendental Logic contains elements that are similar to the content of these sections, I believe these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In this essay, I offer an alternative and, I believe, more plausible account of Wolff’s influence on the structure of the (...) Transcendental Logic, one that puts the focus on his empirical psychology rather than his logic. In particular, I argue that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is deeply indebted to a conception of purity that Wolff introduces in his empirical psychology and that this conception sheds more light on the overall structure of the Transcendental Logic than the accepted view. In section one, I outline two conceptions of purity found in Kant and trace them to similar views in Wolff. In section two, I turn to Kant’s views about logic as they are expressed in the Critique and argue that it is best to interpret Kant’s taxonomy of logic on its own terms rather than reading it through its terminological similarities to aspects of the Wolffian tradition. In section three, I argue that the second of the two conceptions of purity identified in section one is central to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In doing so, I argue against the widespread view that this section of the Critique is modeled solely on what Kant calls pure general logic as opposed to both pure and applied general logic. I then conclude by briefly reviewing my account and considering some of its broader implications for our understanding of Kant. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on three sets of issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what should we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s (...) justification for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been). (shrink)

Chez Foucault le pouvoir est d'abord pensé comme déploiement de la visibilité et comme inscription des corps. On voit dans une première partie comment les figures de l'autorité disparaissent, laissant place à un espace de dispersion où s'estompe la figure de l'homme comme effet passager d'une discontinuité entre le savoir et le pouvoir. Si le pouvoir est invisible lorsqu'il se confond avec l'adéquation à soi du savoir, c'est dans un effet de résistance que se constituent nos expériences qui sont à (...) la fois événements et significations : dans une deuxième partie nous reprenons la question du pouvoir à partir de l'impuissance du sujet à fonder son expérience, la perte de l'intériorité, la difficulté de la contestation, la perte de la profondeur, la perte du corps comme « propre » qui est aussi perte de l'excellence inhérente à tout être humain et du sexe comme affirmation de la différence . Nous croyons toujours opposer une nature intacte au déploiement du pouvoir. Nous examinons comment nous croyons trouver cette nature dans ce que nous caractérisons comme sujet de la contestation, peuple-substrat, corps-rebelle ou sexe-nature. Mais - nous le voyons dans la troisième partie - ces natures sont toujours « informées » par le pouvoir. C'est pourquoi, dans ce qui oppose une résistance au pouvoir, tels les expériences de la contestation sociale, de la sexualité et aussi du redoublement et de la transgression dans le langage, on retrouve les mêmes figures de déploiement qui caractérisent un pouvoir qui se redouble en lui-même et se dissémine dès qu'il rencontre des résistances, pour informer celles-ci. Car chez Foucault, l'expérience est une structure tripartite qui met en relation savoir, pouvoir et subjectivité.In Foucault's first writings, power was the spreading-out of visibility and an inscription of bodies. In the first part of this paper we examine how the figures of authority slowly faded, as power became very dispersed and diffused, only to give a last glimpse of the figure of man, a mere discontinuity between knowledge and power. If power remains invisible when it merges completely with a self-sufficient knowledge, our experiences take shape as effects of resistance to power. This is why experiences are simultaneously events and meanings : in a second part we reconsider the query on power in the light of Foucault's commentary on the difficulty of the subject to give foundation to his experiences, the loss of inferiority and profoundness, the challenge of true subversion, the loss of the body as one's "own", the loss of belief in a core of goodness in all human beings and the loss of sex as being decisive in recognition of a difference . We believe we ultimately can oppose an untouched and profound quality in human nature to the dispersion of power. We examine the different forms of such a belief in what we caractérise as the subject of subversion, the people as substratum, the body as rebel and sex as nature. But - as we can see in the third part - these natures are always "informed" by power. This is why we can find in most forms of resistance to power, as in the experiences of social subversion, sexuality, redoubling and transgression in language, the same forms of scattering which are specific to power itself, to a power which redoubles itself and in itself and is disseminated wherever he meets some resistance, to inform the latter. As with Foucault, experience is a tripartite structure which relates knowledge, power and subjectivity. (shrink)

I raise three questions relevant to De Boer’s overall project in Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. The first is whether Kant’s 1799 open letter to Fichte supports or threatens her contention that Kant had an abiding interest in developing a reformed metaphysics from 1781 onwards. The second is whether De Boer’s conception of the pure intellect and its place in Kant’s projected system of metaphysics captures the role of pure sensibility in the Analytic of Principles, rational physics and rational psychology. (...) The third is whether one might accept the outline of this system as De Boer develops it while still holding that it is more accurate to characterize it as revolution rather than reform. (shrink)

Recently academic freedom and academic tenure have been in the media spotlight because of concerns that academic freedom is being misused and that academic tenure provides job security to a select few. First, this paper provides a brief history of these two institutions and follow with an analysis using Stone’s (2002) policy analysis format. Second, this paper examines the university through two lenses: (a) an economic market lens; and (b) a community lens. These two lenses offer contrasting views of (...) the university and help explain the different views of academic freedom and tenure. The authors suggest that faculty make use of the economic model to increase their chances of maintaining tenure in a university atmosphere frequently characterized by a business approach rather than a collegial one. Recommendations for future research are also provided. (shrink)

In their article “Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs,” Earp, Lewis, and Hart argue for the end of our War on Drugs in order to alleviate our reliance on mass incarceration, harm...

This article explores the 'second chance' myth that surrounds the role of adult education in society. This myth apparently offers all citizens an equal chance to access educational opportunities to improve their life chances. I argue that recent developments in educational policy-making are increasingly shaped by neoliberal discourses that adapt adult education principles, such as lifelong learning and emancipation, for its own economic and political logic. This has important implications for adult education, especially equality of opportunity and (...) social inclusion. (shrink)

This article explores the 'second chance' myth that surrounds the role of adult education in society. This myth apparently offers all citizens an equal chance to access educational opportunities to improve their life chances. I argue that recent developments in educational policy-making are increasingly shaped by neoliberal discourses that adapt adult education principles, such as lifelong learning and emancipation, for its own economic and political logic. This has important implications for adult education, especially equality of opportunity and (...) social inclusion. (shrink)

Is the sky open to us? -- A brief history of space ethics -- Icarus -- Cloud riders -- The spaceship Earth -- A threatening sky -- The greater Earth -- Exploration -- Invaders -- The place of humans.

Face aux sommes colossales investies par les Etats, à l'augmentation des débris dans les orbites autour de la Terre, aux risques pris par les spationautes, et à l'exploitation commerciale de l'espace, cet ouvrage propose une réflexion critique sur les stratégies mises en oeuvre par les hommes dans leur conquête des étoiles.

This paper examines the phenomenon of transformational growth in maternal caregivers of children who have undergone a kidney transplant. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven mothers of transplant children who shared narrative accounts of their lived experience. Through a phenomenological analysis of the interview data, the fundamental structure of positive growth in caregivers of transplant children was illuminated, revealing both themes of unresolved suffering and trauma and themes of posttraumatic growth and transformation.

Mr. F. is a fifty‐year‐old father of two school‐aged daughters. Six years ago, he received a double lung transplant because he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, a fatal illness that causes suffocation by progressive scarring of the lungs. He is now experiencing chronic rejection of the transplant and is being considered to receive another. Without it, he is expected to survive only a year and a half. With it, his prognosis will improve, but the numbers are still not good. (...) Three years after his lung transplant, Mr. F. stopped attending his office visits. For a period of sixteen months he went without the studies and attention essential to posttransplant care. He stopped performing the required daily self‐monitoring of his lung function about eight months after his transplant, but he has maintained a regular exercise regimen. While lost to follow‐up, he continued to take his immunosuppressant medications, but he stopped taking medicine to control his high blood pressure because of its expense. (shrink)

Mass incarceration and the aging prison population in the United States is an ethical crisis, understudied in empirical bioethics research. In this article, I share one woman’s narrative to illustrate how older Black women describe accessing healthcare while incarcerated and identify sites for bioethical exploration. I argue that, due to the punitive nature of prison healthcare interactions, wherein women are seen as inmates first and patients second, healthcare providers are caught in a trap of competing ethical commitments to their (...) patients and the state. As the prison population ages, these challenges will become more acute. Feminist bioethics has a critical role to play in imagining new possibilities for accessing, giving, and receiving care in the carceral context. (shrink)

Liver transplantation offers a lifesaving treatment for patients suffering from end-stage liver failure, but not all candidates in the United States are eligible owing to center-specific criteria. When a patient is rejected at a transplantation center for medical, surgical, or psychosocial issues, they are often referred to other centers. We focus on this practice of reevaluation at a second center when the candidate was rejected for psychosocial reasons. We review the criteria used by health professionals to determine psychosocial eligibility (...) and present three case examples from a large teaching hospital that demonstrate this phenomenon in practice. The cases illustrate the conflicts among autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. We present arguments for and against this practice and provide concrete solutions as a path forward. (shrink)

Molecular chaperones in cells constantly monitor and bind to exposed hydrophobicity in newly synthesized proteins and assist them in folding or targeting to cellular membranes for insertion. However, proteins can be misfolded or mistargeted, which often causes hydrophobic amino acids to be exposed to the aqueous cytosol. Again, chaperones recognize exposed hydrophobicity in these proteins to prevent nonspecific interactions and aggregation, which are harmful to cells. The chaperone‐bound misfolded proteins are then decorated with ubiquitin chains denoting them for proteasomal degradation. (...) It remains enigmatic how molecular chaperones can mediate both maturation of nascent proteins and ubiquitination of misfolded proteins solely based on their exposed hydrophobic signals. In this review, we propose a dynamic ubiquitination and deubiquitination model in which ubiquitination of newly synthesized proteins serves as a “fix me” signal for either refolding of soluble proteins or retargeting of membrane proteins with the help of chaperones and deubiquitinases. Such a model would provide additional time for aberrant nascent proteins to fold or route for membrane insertion, thus avoiding excessive protein degradation and saving cellular energy spent on protein synthesis. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/gkElfmqaKG4. (shrink)

Mr. F. is a fifty‐year‐old father of two school‐aged daughters. Six years ago, he received a double lung transplant because he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, a fatal illness that causes suffocation by progressive scarring of the lungs. He is now experiencing chronic rejection of the transplant and is being considered to receive another. Without it, he is expected to survive only a year and a half. With it, his prognosis will improve, but the numbers are still not good. (...) Three years after his lung transplant, Mr. F. stopped attending his office visits. For a period of sixteen months he went without the studies and attention essential to posttransplant care. He stopped performing the required daily self‐monitoring of his lung function about eight months after his transplant, but he has maintained a regular exercise regimen. While lost to follow‐up, he continued to take his immunosuppressant medications, but he stopped taking medicine to control his high blood pressure because of its expense. (shrink)

A first impression matters, in particular when encounters are brief as in most doctor-patient interactions. In this study, we investigate how physicians’ body postures impact patients’ first impressions of them and extend previous research by exploring posture effects on the perception of all roles of a physician – not just single aspects such as scholarly expertise or empathy. In an online survey, 167 participants ranked photographs of 4 physicians in 4 postures. The results show that male physicians were rated more (...) positively when assuming open rather than closed postures with respect to all professional physician roles. Female physicians in open postures were rated similarly positive for items related to medical competence, but they tended to be rated less favorably with respect to social skills. These findings extend what is known about the effects of physicians’ body postures on the first impressions patients form to judge physicians’ medical versus social competencies. We discuss practical implications and the need for more research on interaction effects of body postures and physician gender on first impressions. (shrink)

The story of the devil’s fall poses at least three separate philosophical puzzles, only two of which Anselm addressed. The first (Puzzle A) wonders how this angel could have committed a sin in the first place since he was created with a good will and good desires. A second puzzle (Puzzle B) consists of trying to explain why the devil cannot ever be forgiven for that first sin. According to Christian teaching, the devil is unable to “repent” (i.e., express (...) sorrow for) that first sin and thereby acquire forgiveness for it. Humans, by contrast, are portrayed as repeatedly sinning, repenting, and being forgiven. It is a mystery why no mechanism similar to that humans use for forgiveness is available to the devil. The final puzzle (Puzzle C) is slightly different. It wonders why the devil was never given a second chance. In daily life, most of us are given (and grant to others) second chances all the time. Given that the consequences of choosing incorrectly were in this case so disastrous and permanent, it seems inconceivable that a good God would permit one of His angels merely one chance to choose and thereby determine his eternal fate. And yet, despite this inconceivability, this is precisely the way the story is presented. Anselm addressed Puzzles A and B but never explicitly raised Puzzle C. I propose he failed to raise it because he conflated it with Puzzle B. In this paper, I first explain how he solved Puzzles A and B. I then go on to argue that Puzzle C does indeed constitute a separate puzzle that should not be conflated with Puzzle B. I then argue that the best (and perhaps only) way in which Anselm could solve Puzzle C is to appeal to a type of free will that conflicts with his solution to Puzzle A. As a result, I argue that there may be a latent contradiction in Anselm’s treatment of the devil’s sin unless an alternate solution to Puzzle C can be found. (shrink)

Websites (e.g. intervention websites targeting health risk behaviors) can be effective in achieving their goals if they are used. The actual use, however, is often very low. This study aimed to assess the effect of visual complexity on intention to use websites, by using within-subjects manipulations of visual complexity and cognitive load (1097 trials, N = 93). The results indicate that high visual complexity has a negative effect on intention to use websites ( F (1, 1095) = 14.81, p < (...) .001), but this is fully mediated through attitude towards the website based on the first impression ( F (1, 1094) = 13.41, p < .001). This clearly demonstrates the powerfulness of a first impression before interacting with a website and stresses the need for evidence-based insight into how this first impression is constituted. Keywords: visual complexity; websites; intention to use. (shrink)

Websites can be effective in achieving their goals if they are used. The actual use, however, is often very low. This study aimed to assess the effect of visual complexity on intention to use websites, by using within-subjects manipulations of visual complexity and cognitive load. The results indicate that high visual complexity has a negative effect on intention to use websites = 14.81,p<.001), but this is fully mediated through attitude towards the website based on the first impression = 13.41,p<.001). This (...) clearly demonstrates the powerfulness of a first impression before interacting with a website and stresses the need for evidence-based insight into how this first impression is constituted. Keywords: visual complexity; websites; intention to use. (shrink)

Websites can be effective in achieving their goals if they are used. The actual use, however, is often very low. This study aimed to assess the effect of visual complexity on intention to use websites, by using within-subjects manipulations of visual complexity and cognitive load. The results indicate that high visual complexity has a negative effect on intention to use websites = 14.81, p <.001), but this is fully mediated through attitude towards the website based on the first impression = (...) 13.41, p <.001). This clearly demonstrates the powerfulness of a first impression before interacting with a website and stresses the need for evidence-based insight into how this first impression is constituted. Keywords: visual complexity; websites; intention to use. (shrink)

A chance-credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non-modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance-credence norms: the first is (...) Hall's and Thau's New Principle (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone. (shrink)

Among the liveliest disputes in evolutionary biology today are disputes concerning the role of chance in evolution--more specifically, disputes concerning the relative evolutionary importance of natural selection vs. so-called "random drift". The following discussion is an attempt to sort out some of the broad issues involved in those disputes. In the first half of this paper, I try to explain the differences between evolution by natural selection and evolution by random drift. On some common construals of "natural selection", those (...) two modes of evolution are completely indistinguishable. Even on a proper construal of "natural selection", it is difficult to distinguish between the "improbable results of natural selection" and evolution by random drift. In the second half of this paper, I discuss the variety of positions taken by evolutionists with respect to the evolutionary importance of random drift vs. natural selection. I will then consider the variety of issues in question in terms of a conceptual distinction often used to describe the rise of probabilistic thinking in the sciences. I will argue, in particular, that what is going on here is not, as might appear at first sight, just another dispute about the desirability of "stochastic" vs. "deterministic" theories. Modern evolutionists do not argue so much about whether evolution is stochastic, but about how stochastic it is. (shrink)

What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in (...) four metaphysical disputes concerning chance. First, it makes it more plausible that even low chances can have explanatory power. Second, it undercuts a circularity objection against reductionist theories of chance. Third, it redirects the debate about a prominent argument against epistemic theories of chance. Finally, it sheds light on potential chancy explanations of the Universe's origin. (shrink)

A chance‐credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non‐modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance‐credence norms: the first is (...) Hall's and Thau's New Principle (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone. (shrink)

This book examines in detail two of the fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics. First, is the world indeterministic? Second, are there connections between spatially separated objects? In the first part, the author examines several interpretations, focusing on how each proposes to solve the measurement problem and on how each treats probability. In the second part, the relationship between probability (specifically determinism and indeterminism) and non-locality is examined, and it is argued that there is a non-trivial relationship between (...) probability and non-locality. The author then re-examines some of the interpretations of part one of the book in the light of this argument, and considers how they fare with regard to locality and Lorentz invariance. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, including researchers in the philosophy of physics and theoretical physics, as well as graduate students in those fields. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers in scientifically informed metaphysics, tackling a range of philosophical puzzles which have emerged from recent work on chance and temporal asymmetry. How do the probabilities found in fundamental physics and the probabilities of the special sciences relate to one another? How can we account for the normative significance of chance? Can constraints on the initial conditions of the universe underwrite the second law of thermodynamics, and potentially also all (...) other lawlike regularities? How does contemporary quantum theory bear on debates over the nature of chance and the arrow of time? What grounds do we have for believing in a fundamental temporal direction, or flow? And how do all these questions connect up with one another? The aim of the volume is both to survey and summarize recent debates about chance and temporal asymmetry and to push them forward. The authors bring perspectives from metaphysics, from philosophy of physics and from philosophy of probability. Mainstream approaches are subjected to searching new critiques, and bold new proposals are made concerning (inter alia) the semantics of chance-attributions, the justification of the Principal Principle connecting chance and degree of belief, the limits on inter-theoretic reduction and the source of the temporal asymmetry of human experience. (shrink)

The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology is taken to be that period in which a consensus developed among biologists about the major causes of evolution, a consensus that informed research in evolutionary biology for at least a half century. As such, it is a particularly fruitful period to consider when reflecting on the meaning and role of chance in evolutionary explanation. Biologists of this period make reference to “chance” and loose cognates of “chance,” such as: “random,” “contingent,” (...) “accidental,” “haphazard,” or “stochastic.” Of course, what an author might mean by “chance” in any specific context varies. -/- In the following, we first offer a historiographical note on the synthesis. Second, we introduce five ways in which synthesis authors spoke about chance. We do not take these to be an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible ways in which chance meaningfully figures in explanations in evolutionary biology. These are simply five common uses of the term by biologists at this period. They will serve to organize our summary of the collected references to chance and the analysis and discussion of the following questions: • What did synthesis authors understand by chance? • How did these authors see chance operating in evolution? • Did their appeals to chance increase or decrease over time during the synthesis? That is, was there a “hardening” of the synthesis, as Gould claimed (1983)? (shrink)

The ‘rollback argument,’ pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in any form is incompatible with free will. The argument has two major premises: the first claims that certain facts about chances obtain in a certain kind of hypothetical situation, and the second that these facts entail that some actual act is not free. Since the publication of the rollback argument, the second claim has been vehemently debated, but everyone seems to have taken the first (...) claim for granted. Nevertheless, the first claim is totally unjustified. Even if we accept the second claim, therefore, the argument gives us no reason to think that free will and indeterminism are incompatible. Furthermore, seeing where the rollback argument goes wrong illuminates how a certain kind of incompatibilist, the ‘chance-incompatibilist,’ ought to think about free will and chance, and points to a possibility for free will that has remained largely unexplored. (shrink)

Principles of chance deference face two kinds of problems. In the first place, they face difficulties with a priori knowable contingencies. In the second place, they face difficulties in cases where you've lost track of the time. I provide a principle of chance deference which handles these problem cases. This principle has a surprising consequence for Adam Elga's Sleeping Beauty Puzzle.

Some have argued that chance and determinism are compatible in order to account for the objectivity of probabilities in theories that are compatible with determinism, like Classical Statistical Mechanics (CSM) and Evolutionary Theory (ET). Contrarily, some have argued that chance and determinism are incompatible, and so such probabilities are subjective. In this paper, I argue that both of these positions are unsatisfactory. I argue that the probabilities of theories like CSM and ET are not chances, but also that (...) they are not subjective probabilities either. Rather, they are a third type of probability, which I call counterfactual probability. The main distinguishing feature of counterfactual-probability is the role it plays in conveying important counterfactual information in explanations. This distinguishes counterfactual probability from chance as a second concept of objective probability. (shrink)

The sample space of the chance distribution at a given time is a class of possible worlds. Thanks to this connection between chance and modality, one’s views about modal space can have significant consequences in the theory of chance and can be evaluated in part by how plausible these implications are. I apply this methodology to evaluate certain forms of modal contingentism, the thesis that some facts about what is possible are contingent. Any modal contingentist view that (...) meets certain conditions that I specify generates difficulties in the philosophy of chance, including a problem usually associated with Humeanism that is known as ‘the problem of undermining futures’. I consider two well-known versions of modal contingentism that face this difficulty. The first version, proposed by Hugh Chandler and Nathan Salmon, rests on an argument for the claim that many individuals have their modal features contingently. The second version is motivated by the thesis that the existence of a possible world depends on the existence of the contingent individuals inhabiting it, and that many worlds are therefore contingent existents. (shrink)

One currently popular view about the nature of objective probabilities, or objective chances, is that they – or some of them, at least – are primitive features of the physical world, not reducible to anything else nor explicable in terms of frequencies, degrees of belief, or anything else. In this paper I explore the question of what the semantic content of primitive chance claims could be. Every attempt I look at to supply such content either comes up empty-handed, or (...) begs important questions against the skeptic who doubts the meaningfulness of primitive chance claims. In the second half of the paper I show that, by contrast, there are clear, and clearly contentful, ways to understand objective chance claims if we ground them on deterministic physical underpinnings. (shrink)

I offer an argument regarding chances that appears to yield a dilemma: either the chances at time t must be determined by the natural laws and the history through t of instantiations of categorical properties, or the function ch(•) assigning chances need not satisfy the axioms of probability. The dilemma's first horn might seem like a remnant of determinism. On the other hand, this horn might be inspired by our best scientific theories. In addition, it is entailed by the familiar (...) view that facts about chances at t are ontologically reducible to facts about the laws and the categorical history through t. However, that laws are ontologically prior to chances stands in some tension with the view that chances are governed by laws just as categorical-property instantiations are. The dilemma's second horn entails that if chances are in fact probabilities, then this is a matter of natural law rather than logical or conceptual necessity. I conclude with a suggestion for going between the horns of the dilemma. This suggestion involves a generalization of the notion that chances evolve by conditionalization. Introduction "Chances evolve by conditionalization" How might the lawful magnitude principle be defended? A historical interlude What if chances failed to be determined by the laws and categorical facts? (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

Chance has been a focus of attention ever since the beginning of population genetics, but neutrality has not, as natural selection once appeared to be the only worthwhile issue. Neutral change became a major source of interest during the neutralist–selectionist debate, 1970–1980. It retained interest beyond this period for two reasons that contributed to its becoming foundational for evolutionary reasoning. On the one hand, neutral evolution was the first mathematical prediction to emerge from Mendelian inheritance: until then evolution by (...) natural selection was considered the alternative to the fixity of species; now it appears to be the alternative to continuous change. Second, neutral change generated a set of clear predictions on standing variation. These could be used as a reference for detecting more elusive alternative mechanisms of evolution including natural selection. In the wake of the transition from Mendelism to genomics, the combination of coalescent theory, DNA sequence variation, and numerical analysis made it possible to integrate contingent aspects of the history of species into a new null model, thus opening a new dimension in the concept of population that the Modern Synthesis formerly considered as a mere gene pool. (shrink)

Consider a gas that is adiabatically isolated from its environment and confined to the left half of a container. Then remove the wall separating the two parts. The gas will immediately start spreading and soon be evenly distributed over the entire available space. The gas has approached equilibrium. Thermodynamics (TD) characterizes this process in terms of an increase of thermodynamic entropy, which attains its maximum value at equilibrium. The second law of thermodynamics captures the irreversibility of this process by (...) positing that in an isolated system such as the gas entropy cannot decrease. The aim of statistical mechanics (SM) is to explain the behavior of the gas and, in particular, its conformity with the second law in terms of the dynamical laws governing the individual molecules of which the gas is made up. In what follows these laws are assumed to be the ones of Hamiltonian classical mechanics. We should not, however, ask for an explanation of the second law literally construed. This law is a universal law and as such cannot be explained by a statistical theory. But this is not a problem because we.. (shrink)