belief
Subjective degree of belief
Posted January 28th, 2008 by hauke
We have seen in The logical view: probability as objective degree of belief that "logical" probability, defined as a degree of belief which it is rational and objective to hold given the available evidence, can give rise to some contradictory results. However, in the 1920s Frank Ramsey in Cambridge [1] and Bruno de Finetti in Italy [2] independently proposed a radically different interpretation of probability which avoids these paradoxes by asserting that probability is a subjective degree of belief.
References
- Truth and Probability, , The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays, London, (1926)
- Probabilism (English translation, 1989), , Erkenntnis, Volume 31, p.169-223, (1931)
The logical view: probability as objective degree of belief
Posted January 28th, 2008 by hauke
The view of probability as an objective degree of belief was developed in the early 20th century by people such as Harold Jeffreys and the the young John Maynard Keynes [1], and was later adopted by the influential philosopher of science, Rudolf Carnap [2]. This view is not widely held these days, either by statisticians or philosophers, though there seems to be something of recent revival (see for example Williamson 2005 [3].
References
- A Treatise on Probability, , (1921)
- Logical Foundations of Probability, , (1950)
- Bayesian nets and causality: philosophical and computational foundations, , Milton Keynes, (2005)
