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Summary The chance facts appear to outrun what actually happens, and to involve constraints on what could happen, or on what will probably happen. Humeanism is – roughly – the thought that all such facts can be reduced to facts about what does in fact happen. The most influential characterisation of the view is David Lewis's thesis of Humean supervenience: that all matters of contingent fact supervene on the distribution of qualitative properties in space-time. In the case of chance, Lewis suggested that chanciness reduces to actual, occurrent patterns in the world. So for instance, according to a Humean, a coin's being fair reduces to some sort of fact about the actual ways in which that coin (or similar coins) fall.  Non-Humeans complain that a Humean analysis of chance does not do justice to the modal character of chances. In addition to this central concern, there is a particularly acute objection raised against Humeanism: the so called "Bug". Chances, according to a Humean, are both grounded in patterns of actual events but also provide chances for events which would falsify those same chance facts. Consequently, it appears that we need to believe that such deviant futures have some chance of occurring, but also have no chance of occurring. Working out a bridge between chance-facts and what we should believe that avoids this contradiction is a central feature of the contemporary Humean project. Because non-Humeans are frequently propensity theorists, and because Humeans are frequently frequentists, these PhilPapers categories are also relevant.
Key works The doctrine of Humean supervenience is put forth in Lewis 1986. Lewis's Humean account of chance is first proposed in Lewis 1980, and then refined in Lewis 1994. (See also Oppy 2000 and Loewer 1996.) Important non-Humean contributions are Bigelow et al 1993 and Black 1998. Other recent works of note include Briggs 2009Hall 2004, and Ismael 2008.
Introductions Chapter 7 of Handfield 2012 provides a critical evaluation of Humean accounts of chance, without discussion of the "Bug". Two recommended articles for an introduction to the bug are Bigelow et al 1993 and Briggs 2009.
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  1. Algorithmic Randomness and Probabilistic Laws.Jeffrey A. Barrett & Eddy Keming Chen - manuscript
    We consider two ways one might use algorithmic randomness to characterize a probabilistic law. The first is a generative chance* law. Such laws involve a nonstandard notion of chance. The second is a probabilistic* constraining law. Such laws impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. While each notion has virtues, we argue that the latter has advantages over the former. It supports a unified governing account of non-Humean laws and provides independently motivated solutions to (...)
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  2. Rationalizing the Principal Principle for Non-Humean Chance.J. Khawaja - manuscript
    According to Humean theories of objective chance, the chances reduce to patterns in the history of occurrent events, such as frequencies. According to non-Humean accounts, the chances are metaphysically fundamental, existing independently of the "Humean Mosaic" of actually-occurring events. It is therefore possible, by the lights of non-Humeanism, for the chances and the frequencies to diverge wildly. Humeans often allege that this undermines the ability of non-Humean accounts of chance to rationalize adherence to David Lewis' Principal Principle (PP), which states (...)
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  3. That Does Not Compute: David Lewis on Credence and Chance.Gordon Belot - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    Like Lewis, many philosophers hold reductionist accounts of chance (on which claims about chance are to be understood as claims that certain patterns of events are instantiated) and maintain that rationality requires that credence should defer to chance (in the sense that under certain circumstances one's credence in an event must coincide with the chance of that event). It is a shortcoming of an account of chance if it implies that this norm of rationality is unsatisfiable by computable agents. This (...)
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  4. What Chance Doesn’t Know.Harjit Bhogal & Michael Townsen Hicks - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Humean accounts of chance have a problem with undermining futures: they have to accept that some series of events are physically possible and have a nonzero chance but are inconsistent with the chances being what they are. This contradicts basic platitudes about chances (such as those given by Bigelow et al. (1993) and Schaffer (2007)) and leads to inconsistency between plausible constraints on credences. We show how Humeans can avoid these contradictions by drawing on metaphysically impossible worlds that are, nevertheless, (...)
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  5. Generalizing the Problem of Humean Undermining.Heather Demarest & Elizabeth Miller - forthcoming - In Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.), Humean Laws for Human Agents. Oxford: Oxford UP.
    For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively “about” particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. We investigate some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. We examine that example in detail and argue that popular existing strategies such as “holding the laws (...)
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  6. Does the Best System Need the Past Hypothesis?Chris Dorst - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    Many philosophers sympathetic with a Humean understanding of laws of nature have thought that, in the final analysis, the fundamental laws will include not only the traditional dynamical equations, but also two additional principles: the Past Hypothesis and the Statistical Postulate. The former says that the universe began in a particular very-low-entropy macrostate M(0), and the latter posits a uniform probability distribution over the microstates compatible with M(0). Such a view is arguably vindicated by the orthodox Humean Best System Account (...)
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  7. The Nomic Likelihood Account of Laws.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (9):230-284.
    An adequate account of laws should satisfy at least five desiderata: it should provide a unified account of laws and chances, it should yield plausible relations between laws and chances, it should vindicate numerical chance assignments, it should accommodate dynamical and non-dynamical chances, and it should accommodate a plausible range of nomic possibilities. No extant account of laws satisfies these desiderata. This paper presents a non-Humean account of laws, the Nomic Likelihood Account, that does.
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  8. How chance explains.Michael Townsen Hicks & Alastair Wilson - 2021 - Noûs 57 (2):290-315.
    What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in four (...)
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  9. Nomothetic Explanation and Humeanism about Laws of Nature.Harjit Bhogal - 2020 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 164–202.
    Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture (...)
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  10. Did the Universe Have a Chance?C. D. McCoy - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1262-1272.
    In a world awash in statistical patterns, should we conclude that the universe’s evolution or genesis is somehow subject to chance? I draw attention to alternatives that must be acknowledged if we are to have an adequate assessment of what chance the universe might have had.
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  11. No Interpretation of Probability.Wolfgang Schwarz - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (6):1195-1212.
    I argue that none of the usual interpretations of probability provide an adequate interpretation of probabilistic theories in science. Assuming that the aim of such theories is to capture noisy relationships in the world, I suggest that we do not have to give them classical truth-conditional content at all: their probabilities can remain uninterpreted. Indirectly, this account turns out to explain what is right about the frequency interpretation, the best-systems interpretation, and the epistemic interpretation.
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  12. A Naturalist’s Guide to Objective Chance.Emery Nina - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):480-499.
    I argue that there are such things as nomological probabilities—probabilities that play a certain explanatory role with respect to stable, long-run relative frequencies. Indeed, I argue, we should be willing to accept nomological probabilities even if they turn out to be metaphysically weird or even wholly sui generis entities. I then give an example of one way in which this argument should shape future work on the metaphysics of chance by describing a challenge to a common group of analyses of (...)
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  13. On the Inadmissibility of Some Historical Information.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2):479-493.
    I argue—from a Humean perspective—for the falsity of what I call the “Admissibility of Historical Information Thesis”. According to the AHIT, propositions that describe past events are always admissible with respect to propositions that describe future events. I first demonstrate that this thesis has some counter-intuitive implications and argue that a Humean can explain the intuitive attractiveness of the AHIT by arguing that it results from a wrong understanding of the concept of chance. I then demonstrate how a Humean “best (...)
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  14. A Humean Guide to Spielraum Probabilities.Claus Beisbart - 2016 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (1):189-216.
    The most promising accounts of ontic probability include the Spielraum conception of probabilities, which can be traced back to J. von Kries and H. Poincaré, and the best system account by D. Lewis. This paper aims at comparing both accounts and at combining them to obtain the best of both worlds. The extensions of both Spielraum and best system probabilities do not coincide because the former only apply to systems with a special dynamics. Conversely, Spielraum probabilities may not be part (...)
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  15. Undermined.Gordon Belot - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4):781-791.
    ABSTRACTA popular strategy for understanding the probabilities that arise in physics is to interpret them via reductionist accounts of chance—indeed, it is sometimes claimed that such accounts are uniquely well-suited to make sense of the probabilities in classical statistical mechanics. Here it is argued that reductionist accounts of chance carry a steep but unappreciated cost: when applied to physical theories of the relevant type, they inevitably distort the relations of probability that they take as input.
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  16. The Best Humean System for Statistical Mechanics.Roman Frigg & Carl Hoefer - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (S3):551-574.
    Classical statistical mechanics posits probabilities for various events to occur, and these probabilities seem to be objective chances. This does not seem to sit well with the fact that the theory’s time evolution is deterministic. We argue that the tension between the two is only apparent. We present a theory of Humean objective chance and show that chances thus understood are compatible with underlying determinism and provide an interpretation of the probabilities we find in Boltzmannian statistical mechanics.
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  17. On the possibility of stable regularities without fundamental laws.Aldo Filomeno - 2014 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    This doctoral dissertation investigates the notion of physical necessity. Specifically, it studies whether it is possible to account for non-accidental regularities without the standard assumption of a pre-existent set of governing laws. Thus, it takes side with the so called deflationist accounts of laws of nature, like the humean or the antirealist. The specific aim is to complement such accounts by providing a missing explanation of the appearance of physical necessity. In order to provide an explanation, I recur to fields (...)
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  18. Humean Supervenience Rebugged.Suki Finn - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (4):959-970.
    This paper is a response to Lewis’ ‘Humean Supervenience Debugged’ . Lewis was in the business of defending Humean Supervenience, and the project seemed successful until the case of chance. Lewis thus originally named chance the ‘big bad bug’ for Humean Supervenience until the aforementioned paper in which he claims victory. Here I argue that he was unsuccessful and that Humean Supervenience remains bugged by chance. I will show how this bug remains due to a misdiagnosis of where the problem (...)
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  19. Autonomous Chances and the Conflicts Problem.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2014 - In Alastair Wilson (ed.), Asymmetries in Chance and Time. Oxford University Press. pp. 45-67.
    In recent work, Callender and Cohen (2009) and Hoefer (2007) have proposed variants of the account of chance proposed by Lewis (1994). One of the ways in which these accounts diverge from Lewis’s is that they allow special sciences and the macroscopic realm to have chances that are autonomous from those of physics and the microscopic realm. A worry for these proposals is that autonomous chances may place incompatible constraints on rational belief. I examine this worry, and attempt to determine (...)
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  20. Chance and Temporal Asymmetry.Alastair Wilson (ed.) - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This volume presents twelve original essays on the metaphysics of science, with particular focus on the physics of chance and time. Experts in the field subject familiar approaches to searching critiques, and make bold new proposals in a number of key areas. Together, they set the agenda for future work on the subject.
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  21. What Chance‐Credence Norms Should Not Be.Richard G. Pettigrew - 2013 - Noûs 47 (3):177-196.
    A chance-credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non-modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance-credence norms: the first is Hall's and Thau's New Principle (...)
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  22. A philosophical guide to chance.Toby Handfield - 2012 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physical laws that are time-symmetric; and chances are used to explain and (...)
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  23. Accuracy, Chance, and the Principal Principle.Richard Pettigrew - 2012 - Philosophical Review 121 (2):241-275.
    In ‘A Non-Pragmatic Vindication of Probabilism’, Jim Joyce attempts to ‘depragmatize’ de Finetti’s prevision argument for the claim that our partial beliefs ought to satisfy the axioms of probability calculus. In this paper, I adapt Joyce’s argument to give a non-pragmatic vindication of various versions of David Lewis’ Principal Principle, such as the version based on Isaac Levi's account of admissibility, Michael Thau and Ned Hall's New Principle, and Jenann Ismael's Generalized Principal Principle. Joyce enumerates properties that must be had (...)
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  24. D. H. MELLOR The Matter of Chance.Luke Glynn - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (4):899-906.
    Though almost forty years have elapsed since its first publication, it is a testament to the philosophical acumen of its author that 'The Matter of Chance' contains much that is of continued interest to the philosopher of science. Mellor advances a sophisticated propensity theory of chance, arguing that this theory makes better sense than its rivals (in particular subjectivist, frequentist, logical and classical theories) of ‘what professional usage shows to be thought true of chance’ (p. xi) – in particular ‘that (...)
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  25. The Principal Principle and Theories of Chance: Another Bug?Joshua Haddock - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (5):854-863.
    Objective chance, or the “big bad bug” of David Lewis's account of Humean Supervenience forces, as is well known, is a modification of the Principal Principle. Here, I argue that standard assumptions regarding conditional probabilities entail several puzzling consequences for Lewis's New Principle, namely, an apparent requirement to account for the chance of a theory of chance. These problems, I argue, cannot be adequately answered within the received framework, and so I suggest that an interpretation of conditional probabilities in terms (...)
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  26. Physics and the Humean approach to probability.Carl Hoefer - 2011 - In Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann (eds.), Probabilities in Physics. Oxford University Press. pp. 321.
  27. Determinism and Chance from a Humean Perspective.Roman Frigg & Carl Hoefer - 2010 - In Friedrich Stadler, Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao González, Hartmann J., Uebel Stephan, Weber Thomas & Marcel (eds.), The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science. Springer. pp. 351--72.
    On the face of it ‘deterministic chance’ is an oxymoron: either an event is chancy or deterministic, but not both. Nevertheless, the world is rife with events that seem to be exactly that: chancy and deterministic at once. Simple gambling devices like coins and dice are cases in point. On the one hand they are governed by deterministic laws – the laws of classical mechanics – and hence given the initial condition of, say, a coin toss it is determined whether (...)
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  28. Contemporary Approaches to Statistical Mechanical Probabilities: A Critical Commentary - Part I: The Indifference Approach.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (12):1116-1126.
    This pair of articles provides a critical commentary on contemporary approaches to statistical mechanical probabilities. These articles focus on the two ways of understanding these probabilities that have received the most attention in the recent literature: the epistemic indifference approach, and the Lewis-style regularity approach. These articles describe these approaches, highlight the main points of contention, and make some attempts to advance the discussion. The first of these articles provides a brief sketch of statistical mechanics, and discusses the indifference approach (...)
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  29. Contemporary Approaches to Statistical Mechanical Probabilities: A Critical Commentary - Part II: The Regularity Approach.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (12):1127-1136.
    This pair of articles provides a critical commentary on contemporary approaches to statistical mechanical probabilities. These articles focus on the two ways of understanding these probabilities that have received the most attention in the recent literature: the epistemic indifference approach, and the Lewis-style regularity approach. These articles describe these approaches, highlight the main points of contention, and make some attempts to advance the discussion. The second of these articles discusses the regularity approach to statistical mechanical probabilities, and describes some areas (...)
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  30. Chance and Necessity : From Humean Supervenience to Humean Projection.Wolfgang Spohn - 2010 - In Ellery Eells & James H. Fetzer (eds.), The Place of Probability in Science: In Honor of Ellery Eells. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 101-132.
    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 (...)
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  31. The anatomy of the big bad bug.Rachael Briggs - 2009 - Noûs 43 (3):428-449.
  32. Probability in GRW theory.Roman Frigg & Carl Hoefer - 2007 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (2):371-389.
    GRW Theory postulates a stochastic mechanism assuring that every so often the wave function of a quantum system is `hit', which leaves it in a localised state. How are we to interpret the probabilities built into this mechanism? GRW theory is a firmly realist proposal and it is therefore clear that these probabilities are objective probabilities (i.e. chances). A discussion of the major theories of chance leads us to the conclusion that GRW probabilities can be understood only as either single (...)
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  33. The Third Way on Objective Probability: A Sceptic's Guide to Objective Chance.Carl Hoefer - 2007 - Mind 116 (463):549-596.
    The goal of this paper is to sketch and defend a new interpretation or 'theory' of objective chance, one that lets us be sure such chances exist and shows how they can play the roles we traditionally grant them. The account is 'Humean' in claiming that objective chances supervene on the totality of actual events, but does not imply or presuppose a Humean approach to other metaphysical issues such as laws or causation. Like Lewis (1994) I take the Principal Principle (...)
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  34. Three proposals regarding a theory of chance.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):281–307.
    I argue that the theory of chance proposed by David Lewis has three problems: (i) it is time asymmetric in a manner incompatible with some of the chance theories of physics, (ii) it is incompatible with statistical mechanical chances, and (iii) the content of Lewis's Principal Principle depends on how admissibility is cashed out, but there is no agreement as to what admissible evidence should be. I proposes two modifications of Lewis's theory which resolve these difficulties. I conclude by tentatively (...)
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  35. Projecting Chances: A Humean Vindication and Justification of the Principal Principle.Barry Ward - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (1):241-261.
    Faced with the paradox of undermining futures, Humeans have resigned themselves to accounts of chance that severely conflict with our intuitions. However, such resignation is premature: The problem is Humean supervenience (HS), not Humeanism. This paper develops a projectivist Humeanism on which chance claims are understood as normative, rather than fact stating. Rationality constraints on the cotenability of norms and factual claims ground a factual-normative worlds semantics that, in addition to solving the Frege-Geach problem, delivers the intuitive set of possibilia (...)
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  36. Infinitesimal chances and the laws of nature.Adam Elga - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):67 – 76.
    The 'best-system' analysis of lawhood [Lewis 1994] faces the 'zero-fit problem': that many systems of laws say that the chance of history going actually as it goes--the degree to which the theory 'fits' the actual course of history--is zero. Neither an appeal to infinitesimal probabilities nor a patch using standard measure theory avoids the difficulty. But there is a way to avoid it: replace the notion of 'fit' with the notion of a world being typical with respect to a theory.
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  37. Two mistakes about credence and chance.Ned Hall - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):93 – 111.
    David Lewis's influential work on the epistemology and metaphysics of objective chance has convinced many philosophers of the central importance of the following two claims: First, it is a serious cost of reductionist positions about chance (such as that occupied by Lewis) that they are, apparently, forced to modify the Principal Principle--the central principle relating objective chance to rational subjective probability--in order to avoid contradiction. Second, it is a perhaps more serious cost of the rival non-reductionist position that, unlike reductionism, (...)
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  38. David Lewis’s Humean Theory of Objective Chance.Barry Loewer - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):1115--25.
    The most important theories in fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, posit objective probabilities or chances. As important as chance is there is little agreement about what it is. The usual “interpretations of probability” give very different accounts of chance and there is disagreement concerning which, if any, is capable of accounting for its role in physics. David Lewis has contributed enormously to improving this situation. In his classic paper “A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance” he described a framework (...)
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  39. On what we know about chance.Frank Arntzenius & Ned Hall - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2):171-179.
    The ‘Principal Principle’ states, roughly, that one's subjective probability for a proposition should conform to one's beliefs about that proposition's objective chance of coming true. David Lewis has argued (i) that this principle provides the defining role for chance; (ii) that it conflicts with his reductionist thesis of Humean supervenience, and so must be replaced by an amended version that avoids the conflict; hence (iii) that nothing perfectly deserves the name ‘chance’, although something can come close enough by playing the (...)
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  40. Chance-lowering causes.Phil Dowe - 2003 - In Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World. Routledge.
    In this paper I reconsider a standard counterexample to the chance-raising theory of singular causation. Extant versions of this theory are so different that it is difficult to formulate the core thesis that they all share, despite the guiding idea that causes raise the chance of their effects. At one extreme, ‘Humean’ theories – which can be traced to Reichenbach – say that a particular event of type C is the cause of a particular event of type E only if (...)
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  41. Who's afraid of undermining?Peter B. M. Vranas - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (2):151-174.
    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 argued that PP contradicts HS, and the validity of his argument has been endorsed by Bigelow et al. (1993), Thau (1994), Hall (...)
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  42. Determinism and Chance.Barry Loewer - 2001 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4):609-620.
    It is generally thought that objective chances for particular events different from 1 and 0 and determinism are incompatible. However, there are important scientific theories whose laws are deterministic but which also assign non-trivial probabilities to events. The most important of these is statistical mechanics whose probabilities are essential to the explanations of thermodynamic phenomena. These probabilities are often construed as 'ignorance' probabilities representing our lack of knowledge concerning the microstate. I argue that this construal is incompatible with the role (...)
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  43. Undermining undermined: Why Humean supervenience never needed to be debugged (even if it's a necessary truth).John T. Roberts - 2001 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2001 (3):S98-.
    The existence of "undermining futures" appears to show that a contradiction can be deduced from the conjunction of Humean supervenience (HS) about chance and the Principal Principle. A number of strategies for rescuing HS from this problem have been proposed recently. In this paper, a novel way of defending HS from the threat is presented, and it is argued that this defense has advantages not shared by others. In particular, it requires no revisionism about chance, and it is equally available (...)
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  44. Lewis's dilemma of explanation under indeterminism exposed and resolved.Philip Percival - 2000 - Mind 109 (433):39-66.
    In a brief passage, David Lewis derives from quantum-theory a dilemma regarding the explanation of chance events which he tries to solve by first distinguishing plain from contrastive why-questions have answers. His brevity warrants elaboration and critique. I endorse his derivation, but I make a structural objection to his solution. Once a further distinction is drawn between different kinds of contrastive why-question, his solution can be modified and refined so as to go some way to meeting this objection. However, it (...)
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  45. Chance, credence, and the principal principle.Robert Black - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3):371-385.
    Any adequate theory of chance must accommodate some version of David Lewis's ‘Principal Principle’, and Lewis has argued forcibly that believers in primitive propensities have a problem in explaining what makes the Principle true. But Lewis can only derive (a revised version of) the Principle from his own Humean theory by putting constraints on inductive rationality which cannot be given a Humean rationale.
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  46. Lewis, Thau, and hall on chance and the best-system account of law.John F. Halpin - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (2):349-360.
    August 16, 1997 David Lewis2 has long defended an account of scientific law acceptable even to an empiricist with significant metaphysical scruples. On this account, the laws are defined to be the consequences of the best system for axiomitizing all occurrent fact. Here "best system" means the set of sentences which yields the best combination of strength of descriptive content 3 with simplicity of exposition. And occurrent facts, the facts to be systematized, are roughly the particular facts about a localized (...)
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  47. Humean chance: Five questions for David Lewis. [REVIEW]S. Sturgeon - 1998 - Erkenntnis 49 (3):321-335.
    David Lewis's approach to objective chance is doubly distinctive. On the one hand, Lewis uses an epistemic principle to disclose the nature of chance. One the other, Lewis conjoins realism about chance with a reductive Humean metaphysics. I aim to undermine both aspects of his view. Specifically, I argue that reductive Humeanism fails across the board, and I use my discussion of chance to explain why. I also argue Lewis's "best-systems" approach to chance fails his own criteria for a metaphysics (...)
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  48. On Lewis's objective chance: "Humean supervenience debugged".Carl Hoefer - 1997 - Mind 106 (422):321-334.
  49. Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
    Tn this paper I explore and to an extent defend HS. The main philosophical challenges to HS come from philosophical views that say that nomic concepts-laws, chance, and causation-denote features of the world that fail to supervene on non-nomic features. Lewis rejects these views and has labored mightily to construct HS accounts of nomic concepts. His account of laws is fundamental to his program, since his accounts of the other nomic notions rely on it. Recently, a number of philosophers have (...)
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  50. The big bad bug: What are the humean's chances?John Bigelow, John Collins & Robert Pargetter - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3):443-462.
    Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.
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