Randomness Is Unpredictability
Abstract
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
1.1Random systems
1.2Random behaviour
1.3Random sampling
1.4Caprice, arbitrariness and noise
2. Concepts of randomness
2.1Von Mises/Church/Martin-Löf randomness
2.2KCS-randomness
3. Randomness is unpredictability: preliminaries
3.1Process and product randomness
3.2Randomness is indeterminism?
4. Predictability
4.1Epistemic constraints on prediction
4.2Computational constraints on prediction
4.3Pragmatic constraints on prediction
4.4Prediction defined
5. Unpredictability
6. Randomness is unpredictability
6.1Clarification of the definition of randomness
6.2Randomness and probability
6.3Subjectivity 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)
