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
8. It should be remembered also that this state of
things, thus characteristic of Probability, is _permanent_ there.
So long as they remain under the treatment of that science
our conjectures, or whatever we like to call them, never
develop into facts. I calculate, for instance, the chance that
a die will give ace, or that a man will live beyond a certain
age. Such an approximation to knowledge as is thus acquired
is as much as we can ever afterwards hope to get,
unless we resort to other methods of enquiry. We do not, as
in Induction, feel ourselves on the brink of some experimental
or other proof which at any moment may raise it
into certainty. It is nothing but a conjecture of a certain
degree of strength, and such it will ever remain, so long as
Probability is left to deal with it. If anything more is ever
to be made out of it we must appeal to direct experience, or
to some kind of inductive proof. As we have so often said,
individual facts can never be determined here, but merely
ultimate tendencies and averages of many events. I may,
indeed, by a second appeal to Probability improve the
character of my conjecture, through being able to refer it to
a narrower and better class of statistics; but its essential
nature remains throughout what it was.
It appears to me therefore that the account of the Materialist
view of logic indicated at the commencement of this
chapter, though substantially sound, needs some slight reconsideration
and re-statement. It answers admirably so far as
ordinary Induction is concerned, but needs some revision
if it is to be equally applicable to that wider view of
the nature and processes of acquiring knowledge wherein
the science of logic is considered to involve Probability
also as well as Induction.
9. Briefly then it is this. We regard the scientific
thinker, whether he be the original investigator who discovers,
or the logician who analyses and describes the proofs
that may be offered, as surrounded by a world of objective
phenomena extending indefinitely both ways in time, and in
every direction in space. Most of them are, and always will
remain, unknown. If we speak of them as facts we mean
that they are potential objects of human knowledge, that
under appropriate circumstances men could come to determinate
and final agreement about them. The scientific or
material logician has to superintend the process of converting
as much as possible of these unknown phenomena into what
are known, of aggregating them, as we have said above, about
the nucleus of certain data which experience and observation
had to start with. In so doing his principal resources are
the Methods of Induction, of which something has been
said in a former chapter; another resource is found in the
Theory of Probability, and another in Deduction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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