Abstract
Philosophers are continually challenged to comprehend chance phenomena and probabilistic relationships. Those cases are especially intriguing in which we speak of chance or probability but can hardly attribute this manner of speaking to our being partially or totally ignorant of the situations in question. Those cases, then, can be taken to possess chance as an objective feature. In its intent, this paper is restricted to a discussion of such cases. Among objective chance relationships there is one kind which seems especially incomprehensible. These are stochastic relationships, i.e., chance relationships between consecutive states of physical systems. The existence of such relationships offends the common conviction that the temporal evolution or succession of states in physical systems is fully deterministic.
Die Ereignisse sind von endlicher Ausdehnung in Raum und Zeit, und ihre Individualität ist bestimmt durch die diskreten Eigenwerte der Operatoren, die den physikalischen Eigenschaften zugeordnet sind. Dann folgt aber der statistische Charakter der Theorie automatisch. Eine durch Differentialgleichungen ausgedrückte Beziehung zwischen den Ereignissen zu verlangen, würde einen Widerspruch implizieren. Joachim HöLling (1936-1968)
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Kirschenmann, P. (1976). Two Forms of Determinism. In: Cohen, R.S., Hooker, C.A., Michalos, A.C., Van Evra, J.W. (eds) PSA 1974. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1449-6_20
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