How stable is objective chance?

This chapter explores how German economists and statisticians of the historical school viewed the idea of social or statistical law as the product of confusion between spirit and matter or, equivalently, between history and nature. That the laws of Newtonian mechanics are fully time-symmetric and hence can be equally run backwards or forwards could not easily be reconciled with the commonplace observation that heat always flows from warmer to cooler bodies. James Clerk Maxwell, responding to the apparent threat to the doctrine of free will posed by thermodynamics and statistics, pointed out that the second law of thermodynamics was only probable, and that heat could be made to flow from a cold body to a warm one by a being sufficiently quick and perceptive. Ludwig Boltzmann resisted this incursion of probabilism into physics but in the end he was obliged, largely as a result of difficulties presented by the issue of mechanical reversibility, to admit at least the theoretical possibility of chance effects in thermodynamics. Meanwhile, the American philosopher and physicist C. S. Pierce determined that progress—the production of heterogeneity and homogeneity—could never flow from rigid mechanical laws, but demanded the existence of objective chance throughout the universe.

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Tolerance and Chance

10.1093/oso/9780192846655.003.0010 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 227-245

Author(s):

Cian Dorr ◽

John Hawthorne ◽

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri

Keyword(s):

Scientific Reasoning ◽

Objective Chance

This chapter explores Tolerance Puzzles in which the operative modality is that of objective chance. We show that a principle of ‘Chance Fixity’, according to which facts about the chances at a given time are not themselves matters of chance at that time, is deeply embedded in ordinary and scientific reasoning about chance and rules out Iteration-denial for the relevant chance operators. We also develop a new ‘Robustness Puzzle’ in which the analogue of Hypertolerance completely untenable. This puzzle turns on strengthenings of Tolerance claims to claims about high (conditional) chance, as opposed to mere positive chance.

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Knowledge and Objective Chance

Williamson on Knowledge ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199287512.003.0007 ◽

2009 ◽

pp. 92-108 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

John Hawthorne ◽

Maria Lasonen‐Aarnio

Keyword(s):

Objective Chance

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The Meanings of Objective Chance, and of Randomness

A Treatise on Probability ◽

10.1007/978-1-349-00843-8_24 ◽

1973 ◽

pp. 311-323

Author(s):

J. M. Keynes

Keyword(s):

Objective Chance

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Noisy Immune Optimization for Chance-Constrained Programming Problems

Applied Mechanics and Materials ◽

10.4028/www.scientific.net/amm.48-49.740 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 48-49 ◽

pp. 740-744 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Zhu Hong Zhang

Keyword(s):

Adaptive Sampling ◽

Chance Constrained Programming ◽

Noisy Environments ◽

Immune Optimization ◽

Noise Compensation ◽

Noisy Information ◽

Objective Chance ◽

And Performance ◽

Constrained Programming ◽

Optimization Mechanism

This work puts forward a parameter-less and practical immune optimization mechanism in noisy environments to deal with single-objective chance-constrained programming problems without prior noisy information. In this practical mechanism, an adaptive sampling scheme and a new concept of reliability-dominance are established to evaluate individuals, while three immune operators borrowed from several simplified immune metaphors in the immune system and the idea of fitness inheritance are utilized to evolve the current population, in order to weaken noisy influence to the optimized quality. Under the mechanism, three kinds of algorithms are obtained through changing its mutation rule. Experimental results show that the mechanism can achieve satisfactory performances including the quality of optimization, noise compensation and performance efficiency.

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