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    Contingency per se can be understood without committing t... — Carmelics
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    Contingency per se can be understood without committing to causal indeterminism

    Causation
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.David Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation defines contingency via sensitivity to initial conditions, not indeterministic branching.
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    • 2.A deterministic system can be radically contingent if small variations in antecedent conditions reliably produce divergent outcomes.
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    • 3.Sensitive dependence on initial conditions (chaos theory) shows that causal necessity and historical contingency are jointly satisfiable.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Aristotle's distinction between per se necessity and per accidens outcomes grounds a concept of contingency in the accidental concurrence of causal chains.
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    • 2.Two fully deterministic causal sequences can intersect accidentally, making their joint outcome contingent without invoking indeterminism.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.What Gould cared about was random or unbiased macroevolutionary sorting
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    • 2.Processes such as coin tosses and random genetic drift can be random or unbiased without violating causal determinism
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    • 3.A frequentist conception of probability allows outcomes to be causally determined at the small scale while remaining statistically unbiased at the macro scale
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    Modality & PossibilityCausation

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    Related

    A deterministic system can be radically contingent if small variations in antece...A frequentist conception of probability allows outcomes to be causally determine...Aristotle's distinction between per se necessity and per accidens outcomes groun...David Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation defines contingency via sensi...
    +4 moreShow less
    Processes such as coin tosses and random genetic drift can be random or unbiased...Sensitive dependence on initial conditions (chaos theory) shows that causal nece...Two fully deterministic causal sequences can intersect accidentally, making thei...What Gould cared about was random or unbiased macroevolutionary sorting

    Similar

    Therefore A is not causally independent of B.80%The Second Analogy establishes only the general principle of causality...79%The Second Analogy does not establish that particular causal laws are ...79%Under pervasive indeterminism, effects do not generally counterfactual...78%

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    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: macroevolution
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    Beatty (2006), however, has shown that there are two different senses of ‘contingency’ in play in Gould’s work. In addition to what Beatty calls contingency as causal dependence—basically, sensitivity to initial conditions—there is a second form of contingency that Beatty initially called contingency as unpredictability, but now calls contingency per se (Beatty 2016). These two senses of contingency correspond with two versions of the famous thought experiment that Gould (1989) deployed. Sometim
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit