4.3 Article

What Are the New Implications of Chaos for Unpredictability?

Journal

BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Volume 60, Issue 1, Pages 195-220

Publisher

UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/bjps/axn053

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Funding

  1. St John's College, Cambridge,

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From the beginning of chaos research until today, the unpredictability of chaos has been a central theme. It is widely believed and claimed by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists alike that chaos has a new implication for unpredictability, meaning that chaotic systems are unpredictable in a way that other deterministic systems are not. Hence, one might expect that the question 'What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability?' has already been answered in a satisfactory way. However, this is not the case. I will critically evaluate the existing answers and argue that they do not fit the bill. Then I will approach this question by showing that chaos can be defined via mixing, which has never before been explicitly argued for. Based on this insight, I will propose that the sought-after new implication of chaos for unpredictability is the following: for predicting any event, all sufficiently past events are approximately probabilistically irrelevant.

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