The Cancelling Out of Chance

Abstract

In this article, I question how mathematical probabilities can make sense of the empirical world. Because of their abstract nature, probabilities exhibit an extreme conceptual mobility in that they are prone to being deployed in various scientific domains that tackle diverse scales and realities, from the hyper-local to the hyper-global. In this sense, probability, and mathematics more generally, is an enticing vector to articulate worldviews whose aim is to explicate what the world is and/or how it acts/performs. That said, mathematics—in itself—knows nothing of the conundrums of the empirical world. A proof or demonstration in mathematics is radically different than an experiment in any given empirical science. A number or equation does not necessarily need to denotate an empirical entity for it to make sense mathematically speaking. Thus, what kind of sense does the empirical world acquire when the theorematic import of mathematics is traced onto it? I approach this question by formally addressing some of the principal theorems of probability (Law of Large Numbers, Bayes-Laplace, De Finetti) and examining how these have been used to articulate metaphysical and epistemological worldviews about how we ought to predict and know the world. At the centre of my interrogation is the notion of chance (hazard), which I take as being the indeterminate moment between past and future that is typically harnessed by probabilities that strive to make the unknown known. I examine how certain interpretations of probability aim at cancelling chance outright. David Hume’s scepticism regarding the conflation of (formal) mathematical and empirical reasoning forms the backdrop against which I problematise such interpretations. In turn, instead of rendering a notion of pluriversality from the conundrums of probabilities, I derive one from the conceptual personages that are the sophist and the sceptic who can act as operators to defy the dogmatic and exclusionary instituting of univocal worldviews.