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
indeed seems not merely questionable, but almost certainly
impossible; for these conditions partaking of the nature of
what we term generally, Progress and Civilization, cannot be
expected to show any permanent disposition to hover about
an average.
16. The reader who is familiar with Probability is of
course acquainted with the celebrated theorem of James
Bernoulli. This theorem, of which the examples just adduced
are merely particular cases, is generally expressed
somewhat as follows:--in the long run all events will tend
to occur with a relative frequency proportional to their
objective probabilities. With the mathematical proof of this
theorem we need not trouble ourselves, as it lies outside the
province of this work; but indeed if there is any value in the
foregoing criticism, the basis on which the mathematics rest
is faulty, owing to there being really nothing which we can
with propriety call an objective probability.
If one might judge by the interpretation and uses to
which this theorem is sometimes exposed, we should regard
it as one of the last remaining relics of Realism, which after
being banished elsewhere still manages to linger in the remote
province of Probability. It would be an illustration of
the inveterate tendency to objectify our conceptions, even in
cases where the conceptions had no right to exist at all. A
uniformity is observed; sometimes, as in games of chance, it
is found to be so connected with the physical constitution of
the bodies employed as to be capable of being inferred beforehand;
though even here the connection is by no means
so necessary as is commonly supposed, owing to the fact that
in addition to these bodies themselves we have also to take
into account their relation to the agencies which influence
them. This constitution is then converted into an 'objective
probability', supposed to develop into the sequence which
exhibits the uniformity. Finally, this very questionable objective
probability is assumed to exist, with the same faculty
of development, in all the cases in which uniformity is observed,
however little resemblance there may be between
these and games of chance.
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