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
3. So much must undoubtedly be granted; but must
the same admission be made as regards the succession of the
individual events? Can causation, in the sense of invariable
succession (for we are here shifting on to this narrower
ground), be denied, not indeed without suspicion of scientific
heterodoxy, but at any rate without throwing uncertainty
upon the foundations of Probability? De Morgan, as we
have seen, strongly maintains that this cannot be so. I find
myself unable to agree with him here, but this disagreement
springs not so much from differences of detail, as from those
of the point of view in which we regard the science. He
always appears to incline to the opinion that the individual
judgment in probability is to admit of justification;
that when we say, for instance, that the odds in favour of
some event are three to two, that we can explain and justify
our statement without any necessary reference to a series or
class of such events. It is not easy to see how this can be
done in any case, but the obstacles would doubtless be
greater even than they are, if knowledge of the individual
event were not merely unattained, but, owing to the absence
of any causal connection, essentially unattainable. On the
theory adopted in this work we simply postulate ignorance
of the details, but it is not regarded as of any importance
on what sort of grounds this ignorance is based. It may
be that knowledge is out of the question from the nature
of the case, the causative link, so to say, being missing. It
may be that such links are known to exist, but that either
we cannot ascertain them, or should find it troublesome to
do so. It is the fact of this ignorance that makes us appeal
to the theory of Probability, the grounds of it are of no
importance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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