A Philosophical Guide to Chance

The philosophical literature on chance often seems to favour quite dense and technical exposition. For A Philosophical Guide to Chance, Handfield should be thoroughly congratulated for resisting this. This book is remarkably clear and unfailingly accessible, and will undoubtedly have its place on undergraduate reading lists. Typically, reviews begin with a brief summary of topics within the book. This is difficult due to the unwavering breadth present here. Though primarily concerned with chance, Handfield also produces a clear introduction to issues within the philosophy of physics—there are instructive discussions of classical physics, and of statistical and quantum mechanics; there are also useful contributions about degrees of belief, laws, propositions, counterfactuals, non-cognitivism, personal identity, moral norms, and more. Certainly, this book can be used as a guide to how to comprehensively engage with a topic, without loss of comprehensibility. The book though is not only an introduction. Handfield seeks to incorporate novel and critically engaged analysis of chance alongside lucid exposition. Three of Handfield's major contributions stand out: (i) an account of our ordinary use of the term ‘chance’; (ii) a critique of how some have assessed probabilities in many-world interpretations as chances; and (iii) arguments in favour of an anti-realist account of chance. In the remainder of this review, I will focus on some of these contributions to the literature that Handfield makes, and leave to one side the more pedagogical aspects of the book.

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Counterfactual conditional · Counterfactual thinking · Epistemology · Exposition (narrative) · Sociology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment