Finally, when they are correctly presented, the classical views of Boltzmann perfectly account for macroscopic irreversibility on the basis of deterministic, reversible, microscopic laws.
...
It is widely believed that this implies a fundamental philosophical or conceptual revolution. In particular, it is thought that the classical world-view brilliantly expressed by Laplace in his "Philosophical Essay on Probabilities" has to be rejected. Determinism is no longer defensible. I think this is based on a serious confusion between determinism and predictability.
...
What are chaotic systems? The simplest way to define them is through sensitivity to initial conditions. This means that, for any initial condition of the system, there is some other initial condition, arbitrarily close to the first one so that, if we wait long enough, the two systems will be markedly different.
...
Chaotic dynamical systems are of course unpredictable in practice, at least for long enough times12, since there will always be some error in our measurement of the initial conditions. But this does not have any impact on our discussion of determinism, since we are assuming from the beginning that the system obeys some deterministic law.
...
Even Laplace emphasized this point: after formulating universal determinism, he stresses that we shall always remain "infinitely distant" from the intelligence that he just introduced. After all, why is this determinism stated in a book on probabilities? The reason is obvious: for Laplace, probabilities lead to rational inferences in situations of incomplete knowledge.