Chloé de Canson (London School of Economics)
There is widespread excitement in the literature about the method of arbitrary functions: many believe that it might provide a novel objective basis for non-trivial probabilities against a background of determinism. In this paper, I argue that it cannot. I begin with a detailed presentation of the method. I then explore what sort of philosophical significance one might hope to extract from it, and formulate some criteria for objective probabilities that describe phenomena like coin tosses and statistical mechanics. There are braodly two possible approaches, a frequentist approach and a subjectivist approach, both of which I argue cannot fulfil these criteria.
