The Switch From Deterministic Pictures to Indeterministic Pictures

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There used to be a strong methodological principle guiding scientific inquiry across many different instances of scientific inquiry. To the extent that your theory has some probabilities in it, that's a marker of your ignorance and you're still trying to make pretty accurate predictions using your probabilistic model. So now our predictive enterprises aren't to get what happens right, it's to match our credences to the chances or match our credence to the probabilities given by the theory. We want to make predictions at the rate at which we're doing something differently now. And as we were talking about at the reason, we need to rethink our explanatory project because we're arguably not trying to find sufficient reasons for things to happen

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/24/244-katie-elliott-on-metaphysics-chance-and-time/

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Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.

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