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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on September 26, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):749-790; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi138
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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@oxfordjournals.org

Randomness Is Unpredictability

Antony Eagle

Exeter College and Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3DP, UK, antony.eagle{at}philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, 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 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
    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-Löf 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
[R]andomness ... is going to be a concept which is relative to our body of knowledge, which will somehow reflect what we know and what we don't know. Henry E. Kyburg, Jr ([1974], p. 217)

Phenomena that we cannot predict must be judged random. Patrick Suppes ([1984], p. 32)


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C. Werndl
What Are the New Implications of Chaos for Unpredictability?
Brit J Philos Sci, March 1, 2009; 60(1): 195 - 220.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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