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To what is Mises referring?

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Lewis S. Posted: Wed, Dec 1 2010 4:40 PM

HA, page 22:

The treatment accorded to the problem of causality in the last decades has been, due to a confusion brought about by some eminent physicists, rather unsatisfactory. We may hope that this unpleasant chapter in the history of philosophy will be a warning to future philosophers.

Knowing nothing about physics, I was left to wonder what he was talking about.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.

 

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thelion replied on Wed, Dec 1 2010 6:32 PM

Probably he meant people who reject all causality on quantum physics grounds or people who are logical positivists.

Actually, Dirac himself never rejected causality and he uses probability merely for lack of better knowledge of prior causes/underlying processes (he stated this explicitly in the book he introduced Dirac functions in--I have it here somewhere in my library--so he would have agreed with Quetelet and Bailey and De Morgan and Jevons and Mises). Dirac justified it by stating that probability and superposition gives in large sample good agreement with data.

It is other physicists and economists who then, also eminent, misrepresented this back then.

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doesn't Bell's Theorem say that causality is dead?

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It's easy to refute an argument if you first misrepresent it. William Keizer

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