Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T04:42:08.642Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Science, Probability, and the Proposition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Bas C. van Fraassen
Bas C. van Fraassen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Traditionally, philosophy of science has focused on the product of science: the scientific hypothesis, principle, law, or more grandiosely, the theory. Using logician's license I'll think of hypotheses and theories as ‘little’ and ‘big’ (or ‘weak’ and ‘strong’) propositions. The tradition spoke of the product as (scientific) knowledge; the more recent phrase “current scientific opinion” carries the same connotation of uniqueness. For this to make sense, something is required: a proposition must be capable of being true or false, capable of being fully believed or disbelieved (and if you like, known).

Probabilism requires us to look at every aspect of science in a new way. In his radical brand of probabilism, Richard Jeffrey told us to reconceptualize knowledge as 'probable knowledge’ and propositions as ‘probasitions’—and never to resolve doubt but simply to quantify it, keeping all possibilities in play.

Type
Part XI. Probability and the Art of Judgment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 338 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

All technical details for this paper can be found in my “Fine- grained opinion, conditional probability, and the logic of full belief, in the Journal of Philosophical Logic (1995). The present adaptation of those results is offered on behalf of the contention that general epistemology and scientific methodology are each other writ small and writ large respectively (not necessarily in that order).

References

Birkhoff, G. (1967), Lattice Theory, 3rd ed. Providence: AMS.Google Scholar
Blume, L., Brandenburger, A., and Deckel, E. (1991a), “Lexicographic probabilities and choice under uncertainty”, Econometrica 59: 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blume, L. (1991b), “Lexicographic probabilities and equilibrium refinements”, Econometrica 59: 81–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Finetti, B. (1936), “Les probabilités nulles”, Bulletin des sciences mathématiques: 275-288.Google Scholar
De Finetti, B. (1972), Theory of Probability (2 vols.). New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Field, H. (1972), “Logic, meaning and conceptual role”, Journal of Philosophy 74: 374–409.Google Scholar
Hajek, A. (1992), “The conditional construal of conditional probability”. Ph.D. Diss. Princeton University.Google Scholar
Harper, W.L. (1976), “Rational belief change, Popper functions, and counter-factuals” in Hooker, C. and Harper, W. (eds.) Foundations of Probability Theory, vol. 1: 73–112.Google Scholar
Kappos, D.A. (1969), Probability Algebras and Stochastic Spaces. New York.Google Scholar
Levi, I. (1980), The Enterprise of Knowledge. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Maher, P. (1990), “Acceptance without Belief” PSA 1990, volume 1, 381–392.Google Scholar
McGee, V. (1994), “Learning the impossible”, in (Skyrms, 1994).Google Scholar
Popper, K. (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Renyi, A. (1959), “On a new axiomatic theory of probability”, Acta Mathematica Hungarica 6: 285–333.Google Scholar
Renyi, A. (1970a), Foundations of Probability. San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970.Google Scholar
Renyi, A. (1970b), Probability Theory. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Skirms, B. (1983), “Three ways to give a probability function a memory”, pp. 157-161 in Earman, J. (ed.) Testing Scientific Theories (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol X). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Skyrms, B. and Eels, E. (1995), Probabilities and Conditionals: Believ Revision and Rational Decision. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Vickers, John M. (1988), Chance and Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
van Fraassen, B.C. (1979), “Foundations of probability: a modal frequency interpretation”, in G. Toraldo di Francia (ed.) Problems in the Foundations of Physics (1979), pp. 344-387.Google Scholar
van Fraassen, B.C. (1981a), “Probabilistic semantics objectified: I. Postulates and logics” Journal of Philosophical Logic 10: 371–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B.C. (1981b), “Probabilistic semantics objectified: II. Implications in probabilistic model sets” Journal of Philosophical Logic 10: 495–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B.C. (1995), “Fine-grained opinion, probability, and the logic of belief”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 24 (1995), pp. 349–377.CrossRefGoogle Scholar