Chance.

The presentation will be in four parts.

In_ PART I_ we will discuss three different concepts of "chance." We will also take a look how Lucretius defines "fortuitous."

In _PART II_ we look at what happens when two causes clash. We will also discuss why Spinoza and Aquinas deny the existence of

chance. In _PART III _we will examine how the theory of chance bears on the theory of knowledge. We will also look at the moral implications of chance.

In _PART IV we cover how the theory of chance bears on the theory of art. We also cover the concept of fortune.

One sense in which we use the word "chance" does not exclude the operation of causes.

The chance event, in this sense, is not uncaused.

But within this meaning of chance, there is the question of how_ the chance event is caused.

On one view, what happens by chance is distinguished from what happens by nature in terms of a difference in manner of causation the difference between the contingent and the necessary.

On another view, the chance event does not differ causally from that which happens uniformly or regularly.

The difference lies not in the pattern of causes, but in our knowledge of them.

The chance event is unpredictable or less predictable because of our ignorance of its causes, not because of any real contingency in the order of nature.

There is still a third sense of "chance" in which it means that which happens totally without cause卟bsolutely spontaneous or fortuitous.

These three meanings of chance at once indicate the basic issues in which the concept is involved.

The third meaning is the most radical.

It stands in opposition to the other two.

The doctrine of absolute fortuitousness is indeterminate in its most extreme form.

The familiar phrase "a fortuitous concourse of atoms," indicates the classical statement of this doctrine, and identifies it in the great books with the theory of atomism.

The swerve of atoms, according to Lucretius, accounts for the origin of the world, the notions of nature, and the free will of men.

But nothing accounts for the swerve of atoms.

"When the atoms are being carried downwards straight through the void by their own weight, they push a little from their path at times quite undetermined and at undetermined places, yet only just so much as you would call a change of trend."

"If they did not swerve, all things would fall downward through the deep void like drops of rain, nor would collision come to be, nor blows be brought to blow among atoms; thus nature would never have brought anything to being."

Since atoms differ in shape, size, and weight, it might be supposed that the heavier atoms, falling straight yet more rapidly, would overtake and hit the lighter atoms, thus bringing about their grouping or interlocking.

But this supposition, says Lucretius, is contrary to reason.

It may hold for things falling through water or thin air, but through the empty void "all things, even of unequal weight, more with an equal velocity through the unresisting void."

Therefore heavier things will never be able to fall on the lighter from above nor of themselves bring about the blows sufficient to produce the varied motions by which nature carries things on.

Wherefore, Lucretius concludes, the atoms "must swerve a little."

Once the atoms have collided, the way in which they are locked together in the patterns of composite things, and all the subsequent motions of these things, can be accounted for by reference to the natural properties of atoms.

The atomic sizes, shapes, and weights determine how they behave singly or in combination.

But the swerve of atoms is not so determined.

It is completely spontaneous.

"If each motion is always due to another, and the new always springs from the old in a determined order, and if the atoms do not by swerving break through the decrees of fate, so that cause does not follow cause through infinite time;"

whence, asks Lucretius, "is it wrested from fate, this will whereby we move forward where pleasure leads each one of us, and swerve likewise in our motions, neither at a fixed time nor at a fixed place, but only when and where the mind itself has prompted us?"

The answer he gives is that there must be "in the atoms . . . another cause of motion besides blows and weights, whence comes this power born in us, since we see that nothing can come to be from nothing."

In _PART II_ we will look at what happens when two causes clash. We will also discuss why Spinoza and Aquinas deny the existence of chance.

Being absolutely fortuitous, the swerve of atoms is absolutely unintelligible.

There is no answer to the question why they chance to swerve at undetermined times and places.

This unintelligibility may not, however, make the fortuitous either unreal or impossible.

It can be argued that chance may exist even though, for our limited understanding it remains mysterious.

The same problem of intelligibility arises with respect to the meaning of chance wherein it is identified with coincidence or contingency.

Here, as in the case of the absolutely fortuitous, chance belongs to reality or nature.

"Some things always come to pass in the same way, and others for the most part," writes Aristotle as an observer of nature, but there is also a "third class of events besides these two events which all say are my chance."

Things of this last kind, he goes on to say, are those which "come to pass incidentally" or accidentally.

According to this theory, a real or objective indeterminism exists.

Chance or contingency is not just an expression of human uncertainty born of insufficient knowledge.

Contingency, however, differs from fortuitousness or spontaneity of the atom swerve, in that it is a product of causes, not their total absence.

Of the contingent event, "there is no definite cause," in Aristotle's opinion, but there is " chance cause, i.e. an indefinite one."

In the chance happening, two lines of action coincide and thereby produce a single result.

This is our ordinary understanding of the way accidents happen.

The chance meeting of old friends who run across each other in a railroad station after a separation of many years is a coincidence coinciding of the two quite separate and independent lines of action which brought each of them to the same station at the same time, coming from different places, going to different places, and proceeding under the influence of different causes or purposes.

That each is there can be explained by the operation of causes.

That both are there cannot be explained by the causes determining their independent paths.

So understood, the chance event exemplifies what Aquinas calls a "clashing of two causes."

And what makes it a matter of chance is the fact that "the clashing of these two causes, inasmuch as it is accidental, has no cause."

Precisely because it is accidental, "this clashing of causes is not to be reduced to a further pre-existing cause from which it follows of necessity."

Contemporary physics affirms a real or objective indeterminism as it does not merely say that the cause of the coincidence is unknown to us, but rather holds that no such cause exists to be known.

A world in which chance exists is remarkably different from a world in which necessity prevails, in which everything is determined by causes and there are no uncaused coincidences.

William James vividly epitomizes their difference by calling the world of absolute necessity or determinism the world of Spinoza or Hegel "block universe" in contrast to what he describes as a "concatenated universe."

Voltaire before him, in his Philosophical Dictionary_, had used the phrase "the concatenation of events" to express the meaning of chance.

The phrase evokes the right image, the picture of a world in which many concurrent lines of causality, exercising no influence on one another, may nevertheless concatenate or be joined together to produce a chance result.

The block universe presents the contrasting picture of a world in which each motion or act determines and is determined by every other in the fixed structure of the whole.

Spinoza claims, for example, that "in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner."

Chance, in other words, does not exist in nature.

A thing is said to be contingent, Spinoza writes, only "with reference to a deficiency in our knowledge.

For if we do not know that the essence of a thing involves a contradiction, or if we actually know that it involves no contradiction, and nevertheless we can affirm nothing with certainty about its existence because the order of causes is concealed from us, that thing can never appear to us either as necessary or impossible, and therefore we call it either contingent or possible.

Hence, for Spinoza, contingency or chance is illusory rather than real projection of the mind ignorance or of its inadequate knowledge of causes.

Just as the theologian must reconcile man free will with God predestination, so must he, if he accepts its reality, also reconcile chance with divine providence, apart from which nothing can happen either necessarily or contingently.

For Augustine it would seem that divine providence leaves no room for chance among natural things.

After noting that causes are sometimes divided into a "fortuitous cause, a natural cause, and a voluntary cause," he dismisses "those causes which are called fortuitous" by saying that they "are not a mere name for the absence of causes, but are only latent, and we attribute them either to the will of the true God, or to that of spirits of some kind or other."

In certain places Aquinas seems to talk in much the same fashion is though chance existed only for our limited intellects and not for God.

"Nothing," he declares, "hinders certain things from happening by luck or chance, if compared to their proximate causes;"

"but not if compared to divine providence, according to which nothing happens at random in the world, as Augustine says."

The example he uses to illustrate his point is that of two servants who have been sent by the master to the same place:

"the meeting of the two servants although to them it appears a chance circumstance, has been fully forseen by their master, who has purposely sent them to meet at one place, in such a way that one has no knowledge of the other."

In such a way also "all things must of necessity come under God's ordering."

In _PART III_ we will examine how the theory of chance bears on the theory of knowledge. We will also look at the moral implications of chance.

The theory of chance has obvious bearings on the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to the distinction between knowledge and opinion and between certainty and probability.

On any view of chance whether it is real or illusory then men call a future event contingent they mean that they cannot predict it with certitude.

So far as human prediction goes, it makes no difference whether the future event is necessarily determined and we lack adequate knowledge of its causes, or the event has a general indeterminacy in the way it is caused or uncaused.

Regardless of what the objective situation is, the assurance with which we predict anything reflects the stateof our knowledge about it.

The ancients who, for the most part, regard chance as real and objective, treat probability as subjective.

For them, the different degrees of probability which men attach to their statements measure the inadequacy of their knowledge and the consequent uncertainty of their opinions about matters which cannot be known but only guessed.

Holding different theories of the distinction between knowledge and opinion, both Plato and Aristotle exclude the accidental and the contingent, along with the particular, from objects of science.

Since in their view certitude belongs to the essence of science or of knowledge contrasted with opinion science for them deals not only with the universal but with the necessary.

"That a science of the accidental is not even possible," he writes, "will be evident if we try to see what the accidental really is."

It is a matter of chance that cold weather occurs during the dog-days, for "this occurs neither always and of necessity, nor for the most part, though it might happen sometimes."

"The accidental, then, is what occurs, but not always nor of necessity, nor for the most part."

"Now . . . it is obvious why there is no science of such a thing."

It is not surprising that the modern theory of probability or, as it was later called by Boole, Venn and others, the "logic of chance" should have its origin in the sphere of practical problems.

Pascal's correspondence with Fermat illustrates the early mathematical speculations concerning formulae for predicting the outcome in games of pure chance.

For Pascal the logic of chance also has moral implications.

If we are willing to risk money at the gaming table on the basis of calculated probabilities, how much more willing should we be to act decisively in the face of life uncertainties even to risking life itself on the chance of eternal salvation.

When we act "on an uncertainty, we act reasonably," Pascal writes, "for we ought to work for an uncertainty according to the doctrine of chance."

If the chance of there being an after-life is equal to the chance of there being none of the equiprobability reflects our equal ignorance of either alternative then, Pascal argues, we ought to wager in favor of immortality and act accordingly.

"There is here the infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance to gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite."

Like Pascal, Hume thinks that we must be content with the probability as a basis of action.

"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of skepticism," he writes, "is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life."

But unlike the ancients, Hume also thinks we should be content with probabilities in the sphere of the natural sciences.

Certitude is attainable only by the mathematician who deals with the relations between ideas.

Since the natural sciences deal with matters of fact of real existence, and since to know such things we must rely entirely upon our experience of cause and effect, we cannot reach better than probable conclusions.

Hume applies the logic of chance to weighing the evidence against and the testimony in favor of miracles, as well as to contrary hypotheses in science.

As much as Spinoza, he denies the existence of chance or contingency in the order of nature.

Chance is entirely subjective.

It is identical with the probability of our opinions.

In the throw of dice, the mind, he says, "considers the turning up of each side as alike probable; and this is the very nature of chance, to render all the particular events, comprehended in it, entirely equal."

But there may also be "a probability, which arises from a superiority of chances on any side, and according as this superiority increases, and surpasses the opposite chances, the probability receives a proportionate increase . . . The case," Hume asserts, "is the same with the probability of causes, as with that of chance."

Since Hume's day, the theory of probability has become an essential ingredient of empirical science.

The development of thermodynamics in the 19th century would have been impossible without it.

This is also true of the quantum mechanics and atomic physics of our own time.

But like the doctrine of chance, the theory of probability tends in one of two directions: either_ toward the subjective view that probability is only a quality of our judgments, measuring the degree of our ignorance of the real causes which leave nothing in nature undetermined;

Or_ toward the objective view that there is genuine indeterminism in nature and that mathematical calculations of probability estimate the real chance of an event occurring.

In _PART IV_ we will discuss the theory of chance and how it bears on the theory of art. We will also discuss the concept of fortune.

The hypothesis of the melody which a kitten might compose while walking on a keyboard, is obviously intended to contrast a product of chance with a work of art.

The competent musician knows with certainty that he can do what the meandering kitten has only one chance of many millions of accomplishing.

In proportion as an art is developed, and to the degree that its rules represent a mastery of the medium in which the artist works, chance is excluded from its productions.

This point is strikingly exemplified in the history of medicine.

"If there had been no such thing as medicine," Hippocrates suggests, "and if nothing had been investigated or found out in it," all practicioners, "would have been equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and everything concerning the sick would have been directed by chance."

On the same principle, Galen distinguishes the physician from the empiric, who, "without knowing the cause, "pretends that he is, "able to rectify the failures of function."

The empiric works by trial and error the very opposite of art and science, for trial and error can succeed only by chance.

The physician, learned and skilled in medicine, works from a knowledge of causes and by rules of art which tend to eliminate chance.

In the realm of human affairs in morals, politics, and history the factor if chance is usually discussed in terms of good and bad fortune.

The word "fortune" is may be seen in the root which it shares with "fortuitous" has the same connotations as "chance."

Aristotle treats fortune as the kind of chance that operates in the sphere of human action rather than natural change.

Fortune, he thinks, can be attributed properly only to intelligent beings capable of deliberate choice.

The sense of this distinction between chance and fortune seems to be borne out by the fact that fortune, unlike chance, receives personification in myth and legend.

Fortune is a goddess or, like the Fates whom she combats, a power with which even the gods must reckon.

The doctrine of chance occupies an important place in moral theory

Aristotle's classification of goods tends to identify external goods with goods of fortune the goods which, unlike knowledge and virtue, we cannot obtain merely by the exercise of our will and faculties.

Considering the elements of happiness, Aquinas groups together wealth, honor, fame, and power as goods of the same sort because they are "due to external causes and in most cases to fortune."

The goods of fortune, as well as its ills, consist in things beyond man's power to command and, in consequence, to deserve.

Recognizing the unpredictable operation of fortune, Epictetus, the Stoic, argues that "we must make the best of those things that are in our power, and take the rest as nature gives it."

We have "the power to deal rightly with our own impressions."

Hence the Stoics advise us to control our reactions to things even though we cannot control the things themselves.

Yet men will always ask, as Hamlet does, "Whether is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"

The fact that the goods and ills of fortune are beyond our power to control raises the further question of man's responsibility regarding them.

We can hardly be held responsible for everything that happens to us, but only for those things which are subject to our will.

This traditional moral distinction between the good or evil which befalls us by fortune and that which we willfully obtain or accomplish, parallels the legal distinction between accidental and intentional wrongdoing.

What is true of the individual life seems to apply to history the life of states and the development of civilization generally.

For the most part, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Gibbon mind fortune a useful principle of interpretation.

To Machiavelli history seems to be so full of accidents and contingencies" great changes in affairs . . . beyond all human conjecture" that he tries to advise the prince how to make use of fortune in order to avoid being ruined by it.

Such advice can be followed because, in his opinion, "Fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."

Hegel, on the contrary, does not admit chance or fortune in his view of world history as a "necessary development out of the concept of the mind freedom alone."

For Tolstoy also, either necessity or freedom rules the affairs of men.

Chance, he writes, does "not denote any really existing thing, but only "a certain stage of understanding of phenomena."

Once we succeed in calculating the composition of forces in the mass movements of men, "we shall not be obliged to have recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made those people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small events were inevitable."

As the contingent is opposed to the necessary, as that which happens by chance is opposed to that which is fully determined by causes, so fortune is opposed to fate or destiny.

This opposition is most evident in the great poems, especially the tragedies, which depict man's efforts to direct his own destiny, now pitting his freedom against both fate and fortune, now courting fortune in his struggle against fate.

Source: Philosophy-irc.org.