Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 56 (2005), 749–790
Randomness Is Unpredictability Antony Eagle Downloaded from
ABSTRACT
The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical liter- ature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in bjps.oxfordjournals.org which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. 1 Randomness in science at University of California, Berkeley on September 23, 2010 1.1 Random systems 1.2 Random behaviour 1.3 Random sampling 1.4 Caprice, arbitrariness and noise 2 Concepts of randomness 2.1 Von Mises/Church/Martin-Lo¨f randomness 2.2 KCS-randomness 3 Randomness is unpredictability: preliminaries 3.1 Process and product randomness 3.2 Randomness is indeterminism? 4 Predictability 4.1 Epistemic constraints on prediction 4.2 Computational constraints on prediction 4.3 Pragmatic constraints on prediction 4.4 Prediction defined 5 Unpredictability 6 Randomness is unpredictability 6.1 Clarification of the definition of randomness 6.2 Randomness and probability 6.3 Subjectivity and context sensitivity of randomness 7 Evaluating the analysis