| 13106 | Maybe there is no pure chance; a man's choices cause his chance meetings [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Some people find there is no such thing as a chance event. ..If someone chanced to come into the city square and met someone he wanted to meet but had not expected, they say the cause was his wanting to go and do business in the square. | |
| From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 195b39) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle spends the book discussing the problem. There is a clear candidate for an uncaused event here, in the chance meeting of two people. See Idea 13108. |
| 13108 | Chance is a coincidental cause among events involving purpose and choice [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Clearly chance is a coincidental cause in the sphere of events which have some purpose and are the subject of choice. | |
| From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 197a05) | |
| A reaction: This is the culmination of his discussion of going to the market place and happening to meet your debtor (196b33). We must now decide whether a 'coincidental cause' is a true case of causation. |
| 13110 | Intrinsic cause is prior to coincidence, so nature and intelligence are primary causes, chance secondary [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: A cause in its own right is prior to a coincidental cause. So spontaneity and chance are posterior to intelligence and nature. Hence however much spontaneity is the cause of the universe, intelligence and nature are more primary causes. | |
| From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 198a10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be Aristotle's final word on chance - that it is a genuine sort of causation, but only a secondary one. I take 'nature' to refer to the powers of essences. Aristotle does not accept meetings in the market as uncaused events. |
| 2215 | There is no such thing as chance [Hume] |
| Full Idea: There is no such thing as chance in the world. | |
| From: David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], VI.46) |
| 14804 | Is chance just unknown laws? But the laws operate the same, whatever chance occurs [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Chance is the name for some law that is unknown to us? If you say 'each die moves under the influence of precise mechanical laws', it seems to me it is not these laws which made the tie turn up sixes, for the laws act the same when other throws come up. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Doctrine of Necessity Examined [1892], p.333) |
| 19252 | Objective chance is the property of a distribution [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Chance, as an objective phenomenon, is a property of a distribution. ...In order to have any meaning, it must refer to some definite arrangement of all the things. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Reasoning and the Logic of Things [1898], VI) |
| 23900 | Chance is compatible with necessity, and the two occur together [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Chance is not the contrary of necessity; it is not incompatible with necessity. On the contrary, it never appears except at the same time as necessity. | |
| From: Simone Weil (The Scientific Image [1941], p.175) | |
| A reaction: She illustrates it with the six terminating results of a die throw, and the innumerabe ways the throw can occur. This thought strikes me as relevant to discussions of free will. …But I'm not sure I fully understand it. |
| 15560 | We can explain a chance event, but can never show why some other outcome did not occur [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I think we are right to explain chance events, yet we are right also to deny that we can ever explain why a chance process yields one outcome rather than another. We cannot explain why one event happened rather than the other. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causal Explanation [1986], VI) | |
| A reaction: This misses out an investigation which slowly reveals that a 'chance' event wasn't so chancey after all. Failure to explain confirms chance, so the judgement of chance shouldn't block attempts to explain. |
| 20146 | 'Luck' is the unpredictable and inexplicable intersection of causal chains [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: 'Luck' is loose shorthand. It stands for various causal chains that intersect and whose intersection we can neither predict nor explain, because we lack the relevant knowledge. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 01.2) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle's example is a chance meeting in the market place. The point about 'intersection' seems good, since luck doesn't seem to arise for an event in isolation. |
| 19671 | The idea of chance relies on unalterable physical laws [Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: The very notion of chance is only conceivable on condition that there are unalterable physical laws. | |
| From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 4) | |
| A reaction: Laws might be contingent, even though they never alter. Chance in horse racing relies on the stability of whole institution of horse racing. |