Objective Chance: Not Propensity, Maybe Determinism
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 p...
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| Format: | Article |
| Status: | Published version |
| Publication date: | 2016 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repository: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/116252 |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/116252 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | Filosofia de la ciència Determinisme (Filosofia) Física Metafísica Probabilitats Philosophy of science Determinism (Philosophy) Physics Metaphysics Probabilities |
| Summary: | 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. |
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