Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose we have a backwards-infinite sequence of asexually reproducing chickens, ...,  c −3 ,  c −2 ,  c −1 ,  c 0 with c n having a chanc...

Suppose that a dod is a critter that chancily, with probability 1/2 , causes one offspring during its life. The lifespan of a dod is one yea...

Say that a function P  :  F  → [0,1] where F is a σ -algebra of subsets of Ω is chanceable provided that it is metaphysically possible t...

Suppose that we live in a Humean universe and the universe contains an extremely large collection of coins scattered on a flat surface. Stat...

According to the probabilistic best-systems account of laws (PBSA), the fundamental laws of nature are the axioms of the system that optimiz...

If I intend for an event to happen, I had better intend for my action to raise the chance of the event happening. And most of the time I rai...

I’ve often defended a probabilistic objection to open future views on which either future-tensed contingents are all false or are neither tr...

It seems a paradigm of irrationality to intend an event E in an action A and yet take the action to lower the probability of E . But it’s...

It’s occurred to me that the “might well happen that” operator makes for an interesting modality. It divides into an epistemic and a metaphy...

I am very much drawn to the objective causal tendency interpretation of chances. What makes a quantum die have chance 1/6 of giving any of i...

In the 1960s, it dawned on philosophers of science that: Other things being equal, low-probability explanation confers equally good unders...

Suppose a naturalistic computational theory of mind is true: To have mental states of a given kind is to engage in a particular kind of comp...

Here is an interesting question: How can one tell from a physics theory whether some event is physically possible according to that theory? ...

Consider an item x with a half-life of one hour. Then over the period of an hour, it has a 50% chance of decaying, over the period of a sec...

Suppose a poor and good person is forced to flip a fair and indeterministic coin in circumstances where heads means utter ruin and tails mea...

Thomists have two stories about how God can act providentially in the world. First, God can work simply miraculously , directly producing an...

It is often assumed that one couldn’t finitely specify a nonmeasurable set. In this post I will argue for two theses: It is possible that ...

Suppose soft determinism is true: the world is deterministic and yet we are responsible for our actions. Now imagine a device that can be a...

A countably infinite number of people, including me, is about to roll fair indeterministic dice? What probability should I assign to rolling...

A standard thing in the philosophy of science to say such stochastic explanation questions is that one can given an answer in terms of the o...