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The Principal Principle and Theories of Chance: Another Bug?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Joshua Haddock
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Abstract

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 of Alan Hájek's recent work might go some distance toward their resolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 854 - 863
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank audiences at the 2010 PSA, and the University of Cincinnati; in particular, Doug Keaton, Jon Martin, Tom Polger, Rob Skipper, and Hayden Thornburg.

References

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