Towards a theory of limited indeterminism in branching space-times

Abstract

Branching space-times (BST; Belnap, Synthese 92:385-434, 1992) is the most advanced formal framework for representing indeterminism. BST is however based on continuous partial orderings, while our natural way of describing indeterministic scenarios may be called discrete. This paper establishes a theorem providing a discrete data format for BST: it is proved that a discrete representation of indeterministic scenarios leading to BST models is possible in an important subclass of cases. This result enables the representation of limited indeterminism in BST and hopefully paves the way for the representation of substances with capacities in that framework. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.