belief

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Subjective degree of belief

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 Ramsey1926 and Bruno de Finetti in Italy DeFinetti1931 independently proposed a radically different interpretation of probability which avoids these paradoxes by asserting that probability is a subjective degree of belief.

The logical view: probability as objective degree of belief

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 Keynes1921, and was later adopted by the influential philosopher of science, Rudolf Carnap Carnap1950. 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 Williamson2005.

Subscribe to RSS - belief