Sentence examples for chance contingency from inspiring English sources

Concepts of chance, contingency, and probability became permanent fixtures in the West's understanding of how the world works.

But for the historians who contribute, the value of the counterfactual is its strike against the determinism and inevitability allegedly present in Marxist history or social history, in favour of chance, contingency and the role of individual choice.

This they lament: a proper appreciation of the darkness of human hearts has "ruinously yielded in our time to chance, contingency, democracy, rationality, religious disenchantment and a callow progressivism".

But when historical events seem to be the result of very, very close calls where it could have gone the other way very easily, it is easy to imagine that chance contingency could have played an important role.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for" became a psychological proposition, as William James made clear in "The Will to Believe" (1896), even as he defended that stance and worried about faith trying to express itself "in the language of the gaming-table". As James well-knew, the devout understandably want to view their faith as inevitable -- as existing beyond chance, contingency and debate.

Together these analyses help resolve an apparent empirical discord between of convergence and non-convergence and offer a promising approach for improving our ability to determine the roles of chance, contingency and determinism in adaptive radiation.

These factors, he says, quoting Rawls, are "prior distribution of natural talents and abilities as these have been developed over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune". Notice, says Nozick, that Rawls is concerned with things that are not up to us.

Consider, for instance, Rawls' remark that "Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors [i.e., social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune] so arbitrary from a moral point of view" (Rawls 1971, 71).

How could evolutionary genetics produce something so odd that it fails to fit, not only the classic adaptationist paradigm, but also the reformed constraints-chance-contingency paradigm?

Is it all chance and contingency, though?

To the knowing they provide reassurance that the future is not just chance and contingency.