What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability?
From the beginning of chaos research until today, the unpredictability of chaos has been a central theme. It is widely believed and claimed by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists alike that chaos has a new implication for unpredictability, meaning that chaotic systems are unpredictable in a way that other deterministic systems are not. Hence, one might expect that the question ‘What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability?’ has already been answered in a satisfactory way. However, this is not the case. I will critically evaluate the existing answers and argue that they do not fit the bill. Then I will approach this question by showing that chaos can be defined via mixing, which has never before been explicitly argued for. Based on this insight, I will propose that the sought-after new implication of chaos for unpredictability is the following: for predicting any event, all sufficiently past events are approximately probabilistically irrelevant.
| Item Type | Article |
|---|---|
| Copyright holders | © 2009 The Author |
| Departments | LSE > Academic Departments > Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method |
| DOI | 10.1093/bjps/axn053 |
| Date Deposited | 4 January 2011 |
| URI | https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/31098 |
Explore Further
- http://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/people/charlotte-werndl.aspx (Author)
- https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/60849109939 (Scopus publication)
- http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/ (Official URL)