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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on May 16, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(2):303-319; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi118
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Articles

Should We Care about Fine-Tuning?

Jeffrey Koperski

Department of Philosophy, Saginaw Valley State University, 7400 Bay Road, University Center, MI 48710, USA, koperski{at}svsu.edu

There is an ongoing debate over cosmological fine-tuning between those holding that design is the best explanation and those who favor a multiverse. A small group of critics has recently challenged both sides, charging that their probabilistic intuitions are unfounded. If the critics are correct, then a growing literature in both philosophy and physics lacks a mathematical foundation. In this paper, I show that just such a foundation exists. Cosmologists are now providing the kinds of measure-theoretic arguments needed to make the case for fine-tuning.

  1. Introduction
  2. Probability and infinite sets
    2.1 No probability function
    2.2 Arbitrary and wrong probability functions

  3. The measure of the universe
  4. The coarse-tuning objection
  5. Arbitrariness and error
  6. Conclusion


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