The Logic of Chance, 3rd edition: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability, With Especial Reference to Its Logical Bearings and Its Application to Moral and Social Science and to StatisticsVenn, John
Philosophy
The Logic of Chance, 3rd edition: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability, With Especial Reference to Its Logical Bearings and Its Application to Moral and Social Science and to Statistics
Venn, John
Chance; Logic, Symbolic and mathematical; Probabilities; Science -- Methodology
It is in this circumstance that we find an extension of the
practical justification of the measure of our belief. A man,
say, buys a life annuity, insures his life on a railway journey,
puts into a lottery, and so on. Now we may make a series
out of these acts of his, though each is in itself a single event
which he may never intend to repeat. His conduct, and therefore
his belief, measured by the result in each individual
instance, will not be justified, but the reverse, as shown in §19.
Could he indeed repeat each kind of action often
enough it would be justified; but from this, by the conditions
of life, he is debarred. Now it is perfectly conceivable that
in the new series, formed by his successive acts of different
kinds, there should be no regularity. As a matter of fact,
however, it is found that there is regularity. In this way the
equalization of his gains and losses, for which he cannot hope
in annuities, insurances, and lotteries taken separately, may
yet be secured to him out of these events taken collectively.
If in each case he values his chance at its right proportion
(and acts accordingly) he will in the course of his life neither
gain nor lose. And in the same way if, whenever he has the
alternative of different courses of conduct, he acts in accordance
with the estimate of his belief described above, i.e.
chooses the event whose chance is the best, he will in the end
gain more in this way than by any other course. By the existence,
therefore, of these _cross-series_, as we may term them,
there is an immense addition to the number of actions which
may be fairly considered to belong to those courses of conduct
which offer many successive opportunities of equalizing
gains and losses. All these cases then may be regarded as
admitting of justification in the way now under discussion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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