Epistemic Risk and the Transcendental Case Against Determinism

Abstract

A familiar intuition holds that determinism creates an epistemically adverse context. This paper formalizes this intuition by developing a new epistemic transcendental argument grounded in epistemic risk. We define risk over a set W of possible worlds using two distance functions, D and N, encoding modal closeness and normalcy, respectively. We argue that these functions better capture our intuitions about risk than traditional similarity-based accounts. Building on this framework, we articulate an argument based on five philosophically motivated axioms. We verify their independence and consistency in Z3 and carry out all the derivations in Lean 4.