Emergent chance

This article offers a new argument for the claim that there can be nondegenerate objective chance in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, the article shows how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, the present argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level chance does not collapse into epistemic probability, despite higher-level properties supervening on lower-level ones. The article demonstrates that the distinction between objective chance and epistemic probability can be drawn, and operationalized, at every level of description. There is, therefore, not a single distinction between objective and epistemic probability but a family of such distinctions