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A Logic of Induction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Colin Howson
Colin Howson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science
*
†Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE.
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Extract

1. Probabilism. Statistics is probably the last discipline the ordinary person would associate with ideological wars, but one has been raging there for the last thirty years and more. Until recently the Classical, also known as Frequentist, theory of statistical inference dominated. But gradually a quite different approach has attracted adherents. This, named the Bayesian theory after the eighteenth-century English clergyman, Thomas Bayes, is a phoenix, reborn from the theory of inductive inference dominant from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, which said that the measure of confidence proper to employ in an uncertain proposition is its probability (the idea goes back well beyond Bayes; in his great Ars Conjectandi, published posthumously in 1715, James Bernoulli stated that probability is degree of certainty (Part IV, Chapter II)).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 268 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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