Reichenbach on Indeterminism and Becoming

Abstract

On first inspection, there would appear to be a close connection between the thesis of indeterminism and the belief that, while the past and present are real, the future is not real.¹ The claim that the future is indeterminate sits nicely with the claim that the state of the world at the present time (together with the laws of nature) does not determine what the state of the world will be at a later time. This intuitively plausible connection between indeterminism and a dynamic view of the world has been suggested by a number of philosophers, some of whom believed that indeterminism is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the world to be a dynamic one. Hans Reichenbach is widely taken to have defended this position, and a number of authors — including Michael Tooley (1997; § 1.4), Richard Healey (1981; § 3) and Adolf Grünbaum (1963; § ch. 10) — have criticised Reichenbach for this view. In this paper, I will argue that each of these critics has, in one way or another, seriously misrepresented Reichenbach’s views, and that their criticisms are therefore almost entirely misdirected.