How Probabilities Came to Be Objective and Subjective

Abstract

Between 1837 and 1842 at least six mathematicians and philosophers, writing in French, English, and German, and working independently of one another, introduced distinctions between two kinds of probability. Although the grounds, contents, and implications of these distinctions differed significantly from author to author, all revolved around a philosophical distinction between "objective" and "subjective" which had emerged ca. 1840. It was this new philosophical distinction which permitted the revisionist probabilists to conceive of the possibility of "objective probabilities," which would have been an oxymoron for classical probabilists such as Jakob Bernoulli and Pierre Simon Laplace. Without relinquishing the rigid determinism of the classical probabilists, the revisionists were nonetheless able to grant chance an objective status in the world by opposing it to the subjective variability of the mind. © 1994 Academic Press. All rights reserved.