Vasudevan Anubav
University of Chicago, United States.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2018 Feb;67:32-43. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.11.009. Epub 2018 Jan 12.
This paper situates the metaphysical antinomy between chance and determinism in the historical context of some of the earliest developments in the mathematical theory of probability. Since Hacking's seminal work on the subject, it has been a widely held view that the classical theorists of probability were guilty of an unwitting equivocation between a subjective, or epistemic, interpretation of probability, on the one hand, and an objective, or statistical, interpretation, on the other. While there is some truth to this account, I argue that the tension at the heart of the classical theory of probability is not best understood in terms of the duality between subjective and objective interpretations of probability. Rather, the apparent paradox of chance and determinism, when viewed through the lens of the classical theory of probability, manifests itself in a much deeper ambivalence on the part of the classical probabilists as to the rational commensurability of causal and probabilistic reasoning.
本文将偶然性与决定论之间的形而上学矛盾置于概率数学理论最早发展的一些历史背景中。自哈金关于该主题的开创性著作以来，人们普遍认为，概率经典理论家在一方面对概率的主观（或认知）解释与另一方面的客观（或统计）解释之间不知不觉地存在着模棱两可的问题。虽然这种说法有一定道理，但我认为，概率经典理论核心的紧张关系并非最好地从概率主观与客观解释的二元性角度来理解。相反，从概率经典理论的视角来看，偶然性与决定论表面上的悖论在经典概率论者对因果推理和概率推理的理性可通约性方面表现出更深层次的矛盾心理。
