Determinism and Chance

It is generally thought that objective chances for particular events different from 1 and 0 and determinism are incompatible. However, there are important scientific theories whose laws are deterministic but which also assign non-trivial probabilities to events. The most important of these is statistical mechanics whose probabilities are essential to the explanations of thermodynamic phenomena. These probabilities are often construed as ‘ignorance’ probabilities representing our lack of knowledge concerning the microstate. I argue that this construal is incompatible with the role of probability in explanation and laws. This is the ‘paradox of deterministic probabilities’. After surveying the usual list of accounts of objective chance and finding them inadequate I argue that an account of chance sketched by David Lewis can be modified to solve the paradox of deterministic probabilities and provide an adequate account of the probabilities in deterministic theories like statistical mechanics.     

中国期货市场的混沌性检验

以国内各期货品种日收盘价格序列作为研究对象,对中国期货市场是否存在混沌进行全面的检验。首先运用新的最大交易量复权法对期货价格数据进行采样,再进行收益率和对数线性去趋势平稳化处理,运用R/S分析和BDS检验来检验其非线性,运用递归图方法进行确定性检验,发现国内期货市场普遍具有非线性和确定性。其后,对这些时间序列进行相空间重构,计算最大Lyapunov指数、关联维数和Kolmogorov熵等几何不变量,从而得出中国期货市场具有混沌和分形特征的结论,为进一步的混沌预测分析打下基础。     

Chance,determinism and the classical theory of probability

This paper situates the metaphysical antinomy between chance and determinism in the historical context of some of the earliest developments in the mathematical theory of probability. Since Hacking's seminal work on the subject, it has been a widely held view that the classical theorists of probability were guilty of an unwitting equivocation between a subjective, or epistemic, interpretation of probability, on the one hand, and an objective, or statistical, interpretation, on the other. While there is some truth to this account, I argue that the tension at the heart of the classical theory of probability is not best understood in terms of the duality between subjective and objective interpretations of probability. Rather, the apparent paradox of chance and determinism, when viewed through the lens of the classical theory of probability, manifests itself in a much deeper ambivalence on the part of the classical probabilists as to the rational commensurability of causal and probabilistic reasoning.     

Long Day＇s Journey into Night与The Glass Menagerie的主题与人物比较

文章主要从家庭自传体戏剧主题与人物刻画两个方面探讨了尤金、奥尼尔和田纳西．威廉斯这两位美国戏剧史上著名剧作家的代表作Long Day＇s Journey into Night与The Glass Menagerie的共性与差异。虽然两者存在很多的相似之处，但其叙事风格却不同：威廉斯更崇尚人物的内心刻画与神秘浪漫气氛的营造，而奥尼尔则更具有现实主义倾向，注重由小见大，由一个家庭的矛盾折射整个社会的共性问题。     

Determinism, Indeterminism and Mathematics

The aim of this paper is to argue that very often one is not able to distinguish between deterministic processes governed by some dynamical systems and stochastic processes. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Who let the demon out? Laplace and Boscovich on determinism

In this paper, I compare Pierre-Simon Laplace's celebrated formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1814 Essai philosophique sur les probabilités with the formulation of the same principle offered by Roger Joseph Boscovich in his Theoria philosophiae naturalis, published 56 years earlier. This comparison discloses a striking general similarity between the two formulations of determinism as well as certain important differences. Regarding their similarities, both Boscovich's and Laplace's conceptions of determinism involve two mutually interdependent components—ontological and epistemic—and they are both intimately linked with the principles of causality and continuity. Regarding their differences, however, Boscovich's formulation of the principle of determinism turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine. A detailed analysis of these similarities and differences, so far missing in the literature on the history and philosophy of the concept of determinism, is the main goal of the present paper.