Deterministic theories have the feature that they forbid some class of events from happening—for instance, the second law of thermodynamics forbids the flow of heat from a cold object to a hot object in an isolated system. The probabilistic component in a theory has no such character, even in principle.
This seems like an odd example to me, since the second law of thermodynamics is itself probabilistic!
This is not true. You can have a model of thermodynamics that is statistical in nature and so has this property, but thermodynamics itself doesn’t tell you what entropy is, and the second law is formulated deterministically.
This seems like an odd example to me, since the second law of thermodynamics is itself probabilistic!
This is not true. You can have a model of thermodynamics that is statistical in nature and so has this property, but thermodynamics itself doesn’t tell you what entropy is, and the second law is formulated deterministically.