Thread by @davidbkinney

Happy to have just learned that my paper, "Blocking an Argument for Emergent Chance", has been accepted for publication in Journal of Philosophical Logic. Here's a pre-print, followed by a short thread on it: davidbkinney.com/Blocking_an_Ar…. 1/8

For a long time now, philosophers of science, metaphysicians, and epistemologists have been interested in the conditions under which a probability distribution represents "objective chances", or uncertainties that are observer-independent. 2/8

The exemplars are the probabilities used in fundamental physics (e.g., quantum mechanics), but there's also some debate over whether the probabilities used in "special" sciences like biology, econ, etc. can be objective chances, i.e. whether there are "emergent" chances. 3/8

Christian List and Marcus Pivato have a really influential and beautiful paper where they argue that the answer is 'yes': philpapers.org/rec/LISEC. It's a great example of philosophy of science that is seriously informed by dynamical systems theory and complexity science. 4/8

However, as I argue in my paper, List and Pivato's argument depends crucially on their particular way of coarse-graining of the space of possible worlds. That such a strong metaphysical conclusion could depend on a formal decision like that is somewhat worrying. 5/8

To that end, in this paper I put forward an alternative method for coarse-graining the possibility space. I prove that it has the same representational power as L&P's method, and that it does not entail the existence of emergent chances. 6/8

I also argue that my approach does a better job in handling two puzzling cases: the Miner's Puzzle and Simpson's Paradox. I conclude that ultimately, an argument for emergent chances will have to differ from L&P's, and there may just not be a sound arg for emergent chance. 7/8

I had lots of help with this paper, but of those on twitter I believe it's just @birchlse and @pdaniell. Also, because of both the content and where I started work on it, this is the paper of mine I associate most with Australia and my time with @anu_philosophy. 8/8