Indeterminacy – The Mapped, the Navigable and the Uncharted

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the concepts of indeterminacy and indeterminability and the distinctions between the two.

Formal thinking about certainty/uncertainty gained greater focus in scientific domains with the advent of particle physics and quantum mechanics. Concern with the exact predictability of events under guidance from scientific determinism led to speculation, then acknowledgement of quantum indeterminacy. But distinctions were made between what is physically indeterminate out there and what is indeterminable by human observation or in human action–over here, on the inside, right now. The implications of these insights into indeterminacy and indeterminabilities for practical and theoretical knowledge span physics, philosophy, ontology, causality, and the philosophy of mind. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines consider the concept of indeterminacy and a few varieties of indeterminability, with attention to the distinctions between the two phenomena, appropriate approaches for examining both, and the differences vis-à-vis uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity.