Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T02:54:32.355Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Projecting Chances: A Humean Vindication and Justification of the Principal Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Barry Ward
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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 for each chance law. Hence, the account does not entail HS, and the paradox does not arise. A confirmation theory is developed, and the Principal Principle is justified.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 241 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

Many thanks to Frank Arntzenius, Barry Loewer, and Tim Maudlin for extensive enlightening discussions of chance and related matters, and to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions.

References

Arntzenius, Frank, and Hall, Ned (2003), “On What We Know about Chance”, On What We Know about Chance 54:171–179.Google Scholar
Bigelow, John, Collins, John, and Pargetter, Robert (1993), “The Big Bad Bug: What Are the Humean Chances?”, The Big Bad Bug: What Are the Humean Chances? 44:443–462.Google Scholar
Blackburn, Simon (1980), “Opinions and Chances”, in Mellor, D. H. (ed.), Prospects for Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 175–196.Google Scholar
Blackburn, Simon (1993), Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
de Finetti, Bruno ([1937], 1964), “Foresight: Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources”. Reprint. Translated in Henry Kyburg and Howard Smokler (eds.), Studies in Subjective Probability. New York: Wiley, 93–158. Originally published as “La Prevision: Ses Sois Logiques, Ses Sources Subjectives”, Annales de l’institut Henri Poincare 7:1–68.Google Scholar
Earman, John (1992), Bayes or Bust. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gaifman, Haim (1988), “A Theory of Higher Order Probability”, in Skyrms, Brian and Harper, William (eds.), Causality, Chance, and Choice. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 191–219.Google Scholar
Geach, Peter (1965), “Assertion”, Assertion 74:449–465.Google Scholar
Gibbard, Allan (1990), Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Ned (1994), “Correcting the Guide to Objective Chance”, Correcting the Guide to Objective Chance 103:504–517.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, Richard (1983), The Logic of Decision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1980), “A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance”, in Jeffrey, R. C. (ed), Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability. Berkeley: University of California Press, 263–293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David (1986), Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1994), “Humean Supervenience Debugged”, Humean Supervenience Debugged 103:473–490.Google Scholar
Logue, James (1995), Projective Probability. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
O’Leary-Hawthorne, John, and Price, Huw (1996), “How to Stand up for Non-Cognitivists”, How to Stand up for Non-Cognitivists 74:275–292.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan (2003), “Principled Chances”, Principled Chances 54:27–41.Google Scholar
Skyrms, Brian (1984), Pragmatics and Empiricism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Strevens, Michael (1995), “A Closer Look at the ‘New’ Principle”, A Closer Look at the ‘New’ Principle 46:545–561.Google Scholar
Strevens, Michael (1999), “Objective Probability as a Guide to the World”, Objective Probability as a Guide to the World 95:243–275.Google Scholar
van Fraassen, Bas C. (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, Bas C. (1989), Laws and Symmetry. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Barry (2002), “Humeanism without Humean Supervenience: A Projectivist Account of Laws and Possibilities”, Humeanism without Humean Supervenience: A Projectivist Account of Laws and Possibilities 107:191–208.Google Scholar
Ward, Barry (2003), “Sometimes the World Is Not Enough: The Pursuit of Explanatory Laws in a Humean World”, Sometimes the World Is Not Enough: The Pursuit of Explanatory Laws in a Humean World 84:175–197.Google Scholar