The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Lakatos Award, which goes to Carl Hoefer for his book ‘Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance’ (Oxford University Press, 2019).

The Lakatos Award was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, in memory of the former LSE professor Imre Lakatos. It is administered by an international Management Committee, which is organised from the LSE but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the Award competition on the basis of advice from an anonymous panel of selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books.

The prize winner will receive their Award and deliver their prize lecture at the LSE at a time and location to be confirmed later. The lecture will be open to the public.

About the book

Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance is praised by the selectors of the Lakatos Award as “a terrific book, thorough, detailed, and persuasive”, and as work of which “it’s not hard to see that it will become the sort of book that no one working on the interpretation of probability will be able to ignore”. The book is “has succeeded in producing the definitive version of the Lewisian theory of chance”, and it has done so in a way that “leads to a number of interesting and original claims about the relation of macroscopic chances and causes to the micro-world”.

About Carl Hoefer

Carl Hoefer is an ICREA Research Professor and currently the Scientific Director of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP), which recently became a María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence with funding for 2023-2026. His research interests include topics such as scientific realism (i.e., should we take our best scientific theories to be giving us objective truth about the world?); how to understand quantum non-locality; and the connection between the descriptions of the world given in physics and the descriptions familiar from higher-level sciences and everyday experience.

About the Lakatos Award

The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the current year or the previous five years. More about the award.

Call for nominations for the 2025 Lakatos Award are now open! Submit your nomination by 1 September 2024.