Chance and Necessity: from Humean Supervenience to Humean Projection
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper attempts to develop a projectivistic understanding of chance or objective probability or partial determination. It does so by critically examining David Lewis’ philosophy of probability and his defense of Humean Supervenience, building thereupon the constructive projectivistic alternative, which will basically be a suitable reinterpretation of de Finetti’s position. Any treatment of the topic must show how it extends to natural necessity or deterministic laws or full determination in perfect parallel. The paper indicates at the end how this demand can be met.
منابع مشابه
WHO’S AFRAID OF UNDERMINING? Why the Principal Principle might not contradict Humean Supervenience
The Principal Principle (PP) says that, for any proposition A, given any admissible evidence and the proposition that the chance of A is x%, one’s conditional credence in A should be x%. Humean Supervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worlds like ours, no two differ without differing in the spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement of local properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a) has ...
متن کاملHumean Supervenience in the Light of Contemporary Science
It is shown that Lewis’ ontological doctrine of Humean supervenience incorporates at its foundation the so-called separability principle of classical physics. In view of the systematic violation of the latter within quantum mechanics, the claim that contemporary physical science may posit nonsupervenient relations beyond the spatiotemporal ones is reinforced on a foundational basis concerning c...
متن کاملHumean Supervenience and Rotating Homogeneous Matter
Humean supervenience (HS) is the thesis that everything supervenes upon the spatiotemporal distribution of local intrinsic qualities. A recent threat to HS, originating in thought experiments by Armstrong and Kripke, claims that the mere possibility of rotating homogeneous discs proves HS false. I argue that the rotating disc argument (RDA) fails. If I am right, Humeans needn’t abandon or alter...
متن کاملHumean metaphysics versus a metaphysics of powers
The paper considers the opposition between Humean metaphysics and the metaphysics of powers, focusing on laws, probabilities and causation. It argues that within Humean metaphysics, everything is a matter of contingency. Consequently, there is no deep metaphysical difference between a deterministic world and a world in which only probabilistic laws hold. This position is contrasted with the fou...
متن کاملAre Humean Chances Formally Adequate?
This paper argues that the Humean theory of chance is formally adequate in the sense that it satisfies the axioms of finitely additive probability. To this end, firstly, a functionalist account of chance is defended, according to which chance is a functional property and the function relevant to chance is to constrain an agent’s credence in the manner prescribed by David Lewis’s Principal Princ...
متن کامل