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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Contingency per se can be understood without committing to causal indeterminism

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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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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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 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 against 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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