Abstract An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference aligned with chances. My thesis is if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles incompatible. Anti-Humeans think it possible for actual frequencies to depart from As long as recognise like this, cannot both spread evenly a...

This paper argues that the Humean theory of chance is formally adequate in the sense that it satisfies the axioms of finitely additive probability. To this end, firstly, a functionalist account of chance is defended, according to which chance is a functional property and the function relevant to chance is to constrain an agent’s credence in the manner prescribed by David Lewis’s Principal Princ...

Abstract If one has Humean inclinations, what account should provide for idealization laws? I introduce the currently most popular approach to laws of nature, best systems account, along with some basic requirements how be Humean. then show why are unlikely accommodated within this laws. Finally, offer an alternative that takes meta-laws, placing on theorems system.

Our beliefs about which actions we ought to perform clearly have an effect on what we do. But so-called “Humean” theories—holding that all motivation has its source in desire—insist on connecting such beliefs with an antecedent motive. Rationalists, on the other hand, allow normative beliefs a more independent role. I argue in favor of the rationalist view in two stages. First, I show that the ...

§0 Introduction By far the most central and important question about laws of nature is this: Are they mere patterns in the phenomena (patterns that are in some way salient, to be sure—but still, nothing more than patterns)? Or are they something more, something that somehow governs or constrains those phenomena? Disagreement over this issue constitutes the Schism in contemporary philosophical w...

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are formal rebuttals—some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden’s and Gerhard Schurz’s)— to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defens...