Observational determinism has been proposed in the literature as a way to ensure confidentiality for multi-threaded programs. Intuitively, a program is observationally deterministic if the behavior of the public variables is deterministic, i.e., independent of the private variables. Several formal definitions of observational determinism exist, but all of them have shortcomings; for example the...

Determinism is a powerful property, making it much easier to design, implement, and debug parallel programs when it can be guaranteed. There has been much work on guaranteeing determinism of programs, both through dynamic and static approaches. The dynamic approaches tend to have high overheads, while the static approaches can be difficult for non-experts to understand and can require high prog...

This paper addresses a specific question of reductionism, viz., the question of whether modalities are basic for the notions of determinism and indeterminism, or whether one can do without them. I will argue that the current treatment of these notions within philosophy of science, which takes determinism and indeterminism to be properties of scientific theories rather than metaphysical theses a...