What Probabilistic Causation Should Be

Irrespective of degrees of belief, there are cases where the world itself seems to work in a probabilistic way. But there are different accounts of what this means. One view is that the facts of probability are fixed ultimately by the relative frequency of an occurrence. A propensity theory, however, says that real-world probabilistic facts are what generate any such frequencies. The latter is associated with epistemic humility: because there is no guarantee that the generated frequencies match the real facts of probability, we cannot know for sure what those probabilities are even if we know all the facts of frequency. Furthermore, the strength of a propensity cannot be probabilistically defined since the former might be doubled indefinitely while probabilities are measured on a bounded scale.