Om determinismen är sann, hur kan då sannolikheter förstås? Kan inte allt bara bli på ett sätt med sannolikheten 1? Jo, men eftersom vi inte har kunskap om ”allt” vet vi aldrig exakt vad som kommer att hända. Men det finns ändå, givet denna epistemiska utmaning, sannolikhetsfördelningar som är objektiva. Detta hävdar, om jag förstår dem rätt, Roman Frigg och Carl Hoefer i ”Determinism and Chance from a Humean Perspective”:
In our discussion we focus on a simple example, a coin toss, then develop a Humean account of chance, and then show that on this account there is a non-trivial sense in which the coin flips are chance events while at the same time being governed by deterministic laws. … We agree that we use chances in the absence of better (i.e. inadmissible) knowledge: if we had such knowledge we would set chances aside and adjust our credence in the outcome of a trial in accordance with this extra information. However, the chance itself is not an expression of our lack of knowledge, nor is the shape of the probability distribution over the outcome space an expression of particular ways in which we are ignorant.
Djupt.