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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Barry Ward
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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

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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.

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