Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Unpredictability.
- noun Philosophy The doctrine that there are some events, particularly some human actions or decisions, which have no cause.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The doctrine that, though the will is somewhat influenced by motives, it is not entirely governed by them, but has a certain freedom and spontaneity.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun ethics, religion, uncountable The
doctrine that all human actions are not so much determined by the preceding events, conditions, causes orkarma as by deliberate choice orfree will .
Etymologies
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Examples
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Professor Koch told BBC News that "it is entirely possible that 'indeterminism' - under certain conditions - is a useful trait - but not usually: when you drive your car at high speeds down the freeway, you want to be highly deterministic."
BBC News - Home 2010
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Thus the indeterminism is a direct product of the substantivalist viewpoint.
The Hole Argument Norton, John D. 2008
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The evidence is even less decisive with respect to whether there is the kind of indeterminism located in exactly the places required by one or another incompatibilist account.
Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will Clarke, Randolph 2008
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If there is a breakdown of determinism in chaotic systems, that can only occur if there is some kind of indeterminism introduced such that the property of unique evolution is rendered false
Chaos Bishop, Robert 2008
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Even many humans stopped attending to grammatical gender, word endings were dropped, declinations disappeared; our golden youth neglected to say r properly and learned to lisp; few educated people were any longer certain what was meant by 'indeterminism' or
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I wonder if determinism and indeterminism represent two explanatory categories into which so much can be fit that we are too quick to assume that these categories are all-encompassing.
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: Is Free Will A Mystery? Ph.D Karl Giberson 2011
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Between the determinism understood so clearly on one end of the spectrum, and the quantum indeterminism on the other -- neither of which can accommodate any meaningful concept of free will -- lies a theoretical no-man's land where those two incompatible aspects of our world overlap.
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: Is Free Will A Mystery? Ph.D Karl Giberson 2011
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To hold a belief in a libertarian freewill is to hold to an indeterminism at a much higher level than the quantum mechanical, namely, the neural.
Testing the Freedom to Choose, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses.
Boing Boing 2009
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The indeterminism of what is ‘rational’ cuts both ways, consumers and companies all the way up to regulators.
The Volokh Conspiracy » More on Behavioral Economics and Regulatory Policy: 2010
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