Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 07:08:52 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Cc: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: Re: Foundations of Probability



Popper is not the first to produce a realist version of probability.
Already Poisson and Cournot distinguished between subjective
probability which they called probabilite, and objective probability
which they called chance.  Apparently both writers came to make this
distinction independently, at about the same time.  As Ian Hacking
writes in "The Taming of Chance", p. 96:

Probability would mean credibility, or degree of reasonable belief:
"The Probability of an event is the reason that we have for
thinking that the event did or will take place."
But chance will denote an objective property of an event,
the `facility' with which it can occur:
"Thus an event will have, by its very nature, a larger or
smaller chance, known or unknown"
(Quotations are from Cournot's 1843 work on chance and
probability).

Thank you for your contributions to the topic.  I think it is a step
backwards that the objective "chance" aspect is now usually called the
"frequentist" interpretation.  The relative frequency of the occurence
of an event is one way how the facility of this event can become
empirically manifest, but even events which only happen once may have
had a certain the facility to do so.  Collapsing facility into
frequency is the error of empirical realism: facility is real even in
cases in which it is not empirical.  (Actually I should have written
"actual" instead of "empirical" but I think you know what I mean.)

I have the hunch that if one pursues this further, one will end up
with the notion that all probabilities are inherently conditional
probabilities.  A monograph which starts with the concept of
conditional probability instead of the usual unconditional probability
is Alfred Renyi's 1970 "Foundations of Probability".

Hans E.



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