Determinism and Indeterminism Charlotte Werndl Forthcoming in: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, edited by Paul Humphreys Abstract This article focuses on three themes concerning determinism and indeter- minism....
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Determinism and Indeterminism Charlotte Werndl Forthcoming in: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, edited by Paul Humphreys Abstract This article focuses on three themes concerning determinism and indeter- minism. The first theme is observational equivalence between deterministic and indeterministic models. Here I discuss several results about observational equivalence and present an argument on how to choose between deterministic and indeterministic models involving indirect evidence. The second theme is whether Newtonian physics is indeterministic. I argue that the answer depends on what one takes Newtonian mechanics to be, and I highlight how contem- porary debates on this issue differ from those in the nineteenth century. The third major theme is how the method of arbitrary functions can be used to make sense of deterministic probabilities. I discuss various ways of interpreting the initial probability distributions and argue that they are
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