A Primer on Determinism¶
Earman, J. (1986). A Primer on Determinism.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Determinism
- Determinism is the structural thesis that the present state of a system, taken together with the laws that govern it, fixes exactly one successor state — the transition rule is a single-valued function, not a multi-valued relation, and the entire trajectory of the system is settled by initial conditions plus the laws, as Earman (1986) and Hoefer (2016) develop in their canonical treatments.
This sourceCanonical philosophy-of-science treatment of determinism: develops the state-space + law + single-valued-transition decomposition, sharpens the determinism/causality and determinism/predictability distinctions, and surveys the thesis across classical, relativistic, and quantum physics.
- Determinism is the structural thesis that the present state of a system, taken together with the laws that govern it, fixes exactly one successor state — the transition rule is a single-valued function, not a multi-valued relation, and the entire trajectory of the system is settled by initial conditions plus the laws, as Earman (1986) and Hoefer (2016) develop in their canonical treatments.
- Stochasticity vs. Determinism
- It is the distinction, articulated systematically by Earman (1986), between "given the initial conditions, the future is fully specified" versus "given the initial conditions, multiple futures remain possible."
This sourceCanonical philosophy-of-science treatment of determinism: develops the state-space + law + single-valued-transition decomposition, sharpens the determinism/causality and determinism/predictability distinctions, and surveys the thesis across classical, relativistic, and quantum physics.
- It is the distinction, articulated systematically by Earman (1986), between "given the initial conditions, the future is fully specified" versus "given the initial conditions, multiple futures remain possible."
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