From Rationality and Consistency to Bayesian Probability

Abstract

The presentation by Jaynes of Bayesian probability theory, among other things, served to unify and strengthen the earlier work of Cox and Polya. While the above approach to probability theory is well-known to many proponents of maximum-entropy and Bayesian methods, it deserves to be more widely promulgated and studied. This paper is a tutorial introduction to the Cox-Polya-Jaynes consistency and rationality requirements as the basis of Bayesian probability theory.