Difference-making and deterministic chance
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Difference-making and deterministic chance Harjit Bhogal1 Accepted: 7 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Why do we value higher-level scientific explanations if, ultimately, the world is physical? An attractive answer is that physical explanations often cite facts that don’t make a difference to the event in question. I claim that to properly develop this view we need to commit to a type of deterministic chance. And in doing so, we see the theoretical utility of deterministic chance, giving us reason to accept a package of views including deterministic chance. Keywords Deterministic chance · Explanation · Difference-making · Special sciences · Levels of explanation
1 Introduction There’s a natural thought, expressed by, for example, by Lewis (1986b, p. 118) that determinism is incompatible with there being non-trivial objective chances (that is, with chances that have values greater than 0 and less than 1). The intuition is that if determinism is true, then every fact about the future is guaranteed by the current state of the world. And if some future fact—some coin toss landing heads, for example— is guaranteed to occur given the current state, then it’s natural to think that it must currently have a chance of 1. But, particularly over the past 10 years or so, many philosophers have argued in favor of deterministic chance. Those arguments typically work in one of two different ways. Either they argue that deterministic chance is consistent with the generally accepted platitudes about chance (at least when those platitudes are properly understood) so deterministic chance is in principle possible [see, for example, Glynn (2010) making this case, arguing contrary to Schaffer (2007)]. Or they argue that accepting deterministic chance has an important theoretical payoff—that it allows us to makes sense of some important scientific or everyday phenomenon. And that gives us a rea-
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Harjit Bhogal [email protected] University of Maryland, Skinner Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA
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H. Bhogal
son to accept a package of views that includes committing to deterministic chance. For example, Emery (2017) argues that deterministic chance allows us to make sense of our practice of asserting counterfactuals in light of concerns about counterfactual skepticism. Ismael (2009) argues that countenancing deterministic chance makes sense of our practices of experimental confirmation in science. And many people, notably Albert (2000) and Loewer (2001), argue that we need deterministic chance in order to make sense of statistical mechanics. I’m going to make an argument of this second kind. I’ll argue that accepting a kind of deterministic chance allows us to develop a plausible account of the value of higher-level, special science explanations—those explanations given by economics, or biology, or sociology, for example—in a physical world. In particular, I’ll argue that the very attractive difference-making approach to the question of levels of explanation needs deterministic chance to be developed properly.
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