Chance versus Randomness

Randomness, as we ordinarily think of it, exists when some outcomes occur haphazardly, unpredictably, or by chance. These latter three notions are all distinct, but all have some kind of close connection to probability. Notoriously, there are many kinds of probability: subjective probabilities (‘degrees of belief’), evidential probabilities, and objective chances, to name a few (Hájek 2012), and we might enquire into the connections between randomness and any of these species of probability. In this entry, we focus on the potential connections between randomness and chance, or physical probability. The ordinary way that the word ‘random’ gets used is more or less interchangeable with ‘chancy’, which suggests this Commonplace Thesis—a useful claim to target in our discussion:

The Commonplace Thesis, and the close connection between randomness and chance it proposes, appears also to be endorsed in the scientific literature, as in this example from a popular textbook on evolution (which also throws in the notion of unpredictability for good measure):

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