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Ignorance and Equiprobability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Douglas Odegard
Affiliation:
University of Guelph

Extract

Keynes introduces three different principles under the single title “the principle of indifference”. The first is Bernoulli's princple of non-sufficient reason.

If there is no known reason for predicating of our subject one rather than another of several alternatives, then relatively to such knowledge the assertions of each of these alternatives have an equal probability. Thus equal probabilities must be assigned to each of several arguments, if there is an absence of positive ground for assigning unequal ones.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1981

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References

NOTES

1 Keynes, J.M., A Treatise on Probability (London, 1921), Ch. 4, p. 42Google Scholar. References to Keynes are all to this chapter.

2 Kneale, William, Probability and Induction (Oxford, 1949), pp. 172–73.Google Scholar

3 Blackburn, Compare Simon, Reason and Prediction (Cambridge, 1973), Ch. 6.Google Scholar

4 Lewis, Compare C.I., An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, 1946), Ch. 10.Google Scholar

5 See Hacking, I., Logic of Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 1965), p. 207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Salmon, W.C., The Foundations of Scientific Inference (Pittsburgh, 1966), p. 66.Google Scholar

7 Lehrer, Contrast Keith, “Reason and Consistency”, in , Lehrer (ed.), Analysis and Metaphysics (Dordrecht, 1975), pp. 93128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Mackie, J.L., Truth, Probability and Paradox (Oxford, 1973), p. 201.Google Scholar