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The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science Foundation and the School of Humanities of the University of California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California at Irvine VII INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATION, CHANCE, AND CREDENCE The search for causes is so central to science that it has sometimes been taken as the defining attribute of the scientific enterprise. Yet even after twenty-five centuries of philosophical analysis the meaning of "cause" is still a matter of controversy, among scientists as well as philosophers. Part of the problem is that the servicable concepts of causation built out of Necessity, Sufficiency, Locality, and Temporal Precedence were constructed for a deterministic world-view which has been obsolete since the advent of quantum theory. A physically credible theory of causation must be, at basis, statistical. And statistical analyses of caus ation may be of interest even when an underlying deterministic theory is assumed, as in classical statistical mechanics.
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 predict frequencies of events, although they cannot be reduced to those frequencies. This book offers an accessible and non-technical introduction to these and other puzzles. Toby Handfield engages with traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science, drawing upon recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to provide a novel account of objective probability that is empirically informed without requiring specialist scientific knowledge.
The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science Foundation and the School of Humanities of the University of California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California at Irvine VII INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATION, CHANCE, AND CREDENCE The search for causes is so central to science that it has sometimes been taken as the defining attribute of the scientific enterprise. Yet even after twenty-five centuries of philosophical analysis the meaning of "cause" is still a matter of controversy, among scientists as well as philosophers. Part of the problem is that the servicable concepts of causation built out of Necessity, Sufficiency, Locality, and Temporal Precedence were constructed for a deterministic world-view which has been obsolete since the advent of quantum theory. A physically credible theory of causation must be, at basis, statistical. And statistical analyses of caus ation may be of interest even when an underlying deterministic theory is assumed, as in classical statistical mechanics.
There are various arguments for the metaphysical impossibility of time travel. Is it impossible because objects could then be in two places at once? Or is it impossible because some objects could bring about their own existence? In this book, Nikk Effingham contends that no such argument is sound and that time travel is metaphysically possible. His main focus is on the Grandfather Paradox: the position that time travel is impossible because someone could not go back in time and kill their own grandfather before he met their grandmother. In such a case, Effingham argues that the time traveller would have the ability to do the impossible (so they could kill their grandfather) even though those impossibilities will never come about (so they won't kill their grandfather). He then explores the ramifications of this view, discussing issues in probability and decision theory. The book ends by laying out the dangers of time travel and why, even though no time machines currently exist, we should pay extra special care ensuring that nothing, no matter how small or microscopic, ever travels in time.
In this collection I present 16 of my, I feel, more substantial papers on theoretical philosophy, 12 as originally published, one co-authored with Ulrike Haas-Spohn (Chapter14), one (Chapter 15) that was a brief conference commentary, but is in fact a suitable appendix to Chapter 14, one as a translation of a German paper (Chapter 12), and one newly written for this volume (Chapter 16), which, however, is only my recent attempt to properly and completely express an argument I had given in two earlier papers. I gratefully acknowledge permission of reprint from the relevant publishers at the beginning of each paper. In disciplinary terms the papers cover epistemology, general philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The section titles Belief, Causation, Laws, Coherence, and Concepts and the paper titles give a more adequate impression of the topics dealt with. The papers are tightly connected. I feel they might be even read as unfolding a program, though this program was never fully clear in my mind and still isn’t. In the Introduction I attempt to describe what this program might be, thus drawing a reconstructed red thread, or rather two red threads, through all the papers. This will serve, at the same time, as an overview over the papers collected.
The book is a collection of essays on various issues in philosophy of science, with special emphasis on the foundations of probability and statistics, and quantum mechanics. The main topics, addressed by some of the most outstanding researchers in the field, are subjective probability, Bayesian statistics, probability kinematics, causal decision making, probability and realism in quantum mechanics.
Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. The Facts of Causation, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account.
Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey world we actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World is a collection of specially written papers by world-class metaphysicians. Its focus is the problem facing the 'reductionist' approach to causation: the attempt to cover all types of causation, deterministic and indeterministic, with one basic theory. Contributors: Stephen Barker, Helen Beebee, Phil Dowe, Dorothy Edgington, Doug Ehring, Chris Hitchcock, Igal Kwart, Paul Noordhof, Murali Ramachandran and Michael Tooley.
Probability has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians for hundreds of years. Although the mathematics of probability is, for most applications, clear and uncontroversial, the interpretation of probability statements continues to be fraught with controversy and confusion. What does it mean to say that the probability of some event X occurring is 31%? In the 20th century a consensus emerged that there are at least two legitimate kinds of probability, and correspondingly at least two kinds of possible answers to this question of meaning. Subjective probability, also called 'credence' or 'degree of belief' is a numerical measure of the confidence of some person or some ideal rational agent. Objective probability, or chance, is a fact about how things are in the world. It is this second type of probability with which Carl Hoefer is concerned in this volume, specifically how we can understand the meaning of statements about objective probability. He aims to settle the question of what objective chances are, once and for all, with an account that can meet the demands of philosophers and scientists alike. For Hoefer, chances are constituted by patterns that can be discerned in the events that happen in our world. These patterns are ideally appropriate guides to what credences limited rational agents, such as ourselves, should have in situations of imperfect knowledge. By showing this, Hoefer bridges the gap between subjective probability and chance. In a field where few scholars have given adequate treatment to interpreting statements of chance, Hoefer develops a philosophically rich theory which draws on the disciplines of metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy of science.