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Compatibilism about Chance and Determinism

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http://thebjps.typepad.com/my-blog/2017/...emery.html

EXCERPT: Suppose that it is already determined that the coin I just flipped will land heads. Can it also be the case that that very coin, on that very flip, has some chance of landing tails? Intuitively, the answer is no. But according to an increasing number of contemporary philosophers, especially philosophers of physics, the answer is yes.

According to these philosophers there are non-trivial chances (chances between zero and one) in worlds where the fundamental dynamical laws are deterministic. In such worlds, at any time t, for any event e, it is already (at t) determined that e will happen or that e will not happen. Nonetheless, these philosophers say, in at least some such worlds and for at least some events, the chance of those events happening is between zero and one. Call the chances that are supposed to exist in such world ‘deterministic chances’, and the view that there are such chances ‘compatibilism about chance and determinism’, or for brevity just ‘compatibilism’.

Should we endorse compatibilism? You might think that before we can answer this question we first need to answer the question of what sorts of things chances are in general. (Is the chance of some event happening just the relative frequency with which that type of event happens? Or is it something more metaphysically robust, like the propensity of certain set-ups to produce that type of event? And if the latter, what on earth is a propensity?) But there’s good reason to think that we might be able to make significant progress on the question of whether to be compatibilists even if we aren’t yet willing to take a stance on the metaphysics of chance more generally. To see why, it’s helpful to keep in mind the following two distinctions....

MORE: http://thebjps.typepad.com/my-blog/2017/...emery.html
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