From the Emergence of Probability to the Erosion of Determinism

Abstract

In terms of scholarship, imagination and sheer skill of exposition the papers by Fagot and Schneider are models for us all. I shall address specific remarks to each of them, and to the commentaries by Nový, Kostiouk and Cohen, * but first a few general observations. We are all of us engaged in different enterprises which I regard as entirely collaborative. Schneider is an historian of mathematics. Fagot is qualified as a medical doctor and is at present teaching at an Institute for the history of knowledge and ideas. I am a philosopher who subtitled The Emergence of Probability not a “history” but a “philosophical study” of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference. We all have our own guild battles to fight. Schneider shows in his paper that he disagrees, on certain points, with his celebrated colleague van der Waerden. Fagot has some difficulty convincing the medical profession that her archaeological enquiries into the causes of death could teach one anything about the idea of a cause of death. And philosophers doubt that my work contributes to the analysis of the concept of probability. I am asked, “you’re supposed to work on the logic of statistical inference!”