Sometimes probability is a measure of our ignorance. If you give me a quarter with the instruction to hide it in one of my fisted hands while your eyes are closed (and I do as you say), then you'll not know which hand holds the coin. (I will know, I can feel it.) So you can only assign probabilities because you lack knowledge. In other cases, probability is objective. If current physics is right, then some processes in nature are in principle unpredictable or such that their outcome is uncertain. Yes, this suggests some reference to a knower: it means that it's impossible for there to be someone who can predict or be certain about the outcome. But why should this be problematic? The fact that a black hole emits no light can be expressed by saying that black holes are invisible - and yet the fact is "intrinsic to reality," involves no essential reference to beings with eyes.

Wouldn't it be nice if mathematics could be brought down so easily! But, sorry, no cigar this time. It is indeed true that the probability that you are holding the fat or meager envelope is 50/50. Here are the two cases: 1. If you are holding the meager envelope, then switching gets you from x to 2x for a gain of x. 2. If you are holding the fat envelope, then switching gets you from x to 1/2 x for a loss of 1/2 x. But note that the "x" in these two cases does not signify the same amount of money. In Case 1, x is the smaller amount. In Case 2, x is the larger amount. In Case 1, your gain from switching is the smaller amount. In Case 2, your loss from switching is 1/2 the larger amount (equal to the smaller amount). The illusion arises because, at first blush, the situation seems similar to another where someone offers to give you 50/50 odds on either doubling or halving some fixed amount of money you have. There your reasoning goes through and you are well-advised to accept. Your...

You should distinguish here between the inductive method of extrapolating from observed cases to as yet unobserved cases, on the one hand, and particular extrapolations derived by using this method, on the other hand. Particular extrapolations are a posteriori. They depend on what has actually been observed. The method, however, has certain a priori elements, esp. in the very “clean” and somewhat artificial stories you will have encountered in your statistics class. One such story might be this. You are faced with a large urn which you know contains many marbles all of which you know to be either white or red. On n occasions one marble was randomly selected from the urn, its color was recorded, and it was then mixed back in. Of these randomly selected marbles, 70 percent were white and 30 percent red. At the end of the story, you are then asked what we can learn from the random drawings about the color composition of the marbles in the urn. In this...

As you make finer and finer measurements in the way you suggest, the probability declines each time by a factor of 10. As you go on and on, it shrinks below any value no matter how small. But, no matter how long you go on, it will never be zero, it will always be more than zero. (This is analogous to how, when you count, you'd eventually surpass any number anyone cares to specify but never reach infinity.) OK, so far no paradox. But mathematics also recognizes numbers whose decimal extensions are infinitely long. And if you express each person's height as such a number, then your paradox does indeed arise. And I am not surprised, as there are other paradoxes involving infinite numbers as well, for instance, that there are as many even numbers as there are natural numbers, as demonstrable by a one-to-one mapping. Still, this is a nice addition (at least to my stock)! Let's see what others think.

I think the terms in your first question are generally used in a sense that's relative to our (human) knowledge. But this need not mean that this use reflects our ignorance of causes. For there may be real chance and randomness in nature (here the words "real" and "in nature" indicate that "chance" and"randomness" are used in their more unusual sense). The currently accepted view in physics holds that this is in fact the case at least in regard to subatomic particles. The word "infinite" is generally used to refer to what really is infinite, mostly things in mathematics and geometry (the set of all natural numbers, Euclidean space). The mere fact that we don't know whether a thing has limits does not justify calling it infinite in any normal sense.

One might think that (bad) luck does not exist because the universe is deterministic (running like clockwork according to strict physical laws). I assume this is not your concern. The (bad) luck label might then be attached to things happening to an agent insofar as these things (however causally determined) are better or worse than she could have predicted. In this sense, clearly, luck and bad luck do occur. To be sure, agents will invoke bad luck as an excuse. But this is no reason to reject the very idea of bad luck. After all, such excuses are sometimes valid -- as when the sole copy of your typescript is destroyed by a fire (something that very nearly happened to John Rawls's ATheory of Justice !). And when such excuses are lousy, this can be shown even when bad luck is accepted in principle: We can point out that the outcome was not really worse than the agent could have predicted or that the agent failed to take sufficient account of the risk. For example, we can tell the notorious drunk...