Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):67 – 76 (2004)
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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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DOI | 10.1080/713659804 |
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References found in this work BETA
New Work for a Theory of Universals.David Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
Causal Necessity: A Pragmatic Investigation of the Necessity of Laws.Brian Skyrms - 1980 - Yale University Press.
A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance.David K. Lewis - 1980 - In Richard C. Jeffrey (ed.), Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, Volume II. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 263-293.
View all 18 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
The Third Way on Objective Probability: A Sceptic's Guide to Objective Chance.Carl Hoefer - 2007 - Mind 116 (463):549-596.
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