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Levi, Petersen, and Direct Inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Henry E. Kyburg Jr.*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester

Extract

In (1981), Levi has laid out the issues involving chances, frequencies, and direct inference with admirable precision. Nevertheless, puzzles remain. The chief puzzle to which I wish to draw attention is this: Under certain circumstances, we can combine knowledge of chances and knowledge of frequencies to yield new knowledge of chances. If Petersen is “drawn at random” from among Swedes, and we also know that the proportion of Protestants among Swedes is 0.9, then we can say that the chance that Petersen is a Protestant is 0.9. But if we apply this principle generally, we are led to generally trivial results: direct inference yields probabilities constrained only to lie in a broad interval like [0, 1]. On the other hand, if we can't always combine knowledge of chances and knowledge of frequencies to get new knowledge of chances, or if this knowledge can be overridden by other considerations, how do we know when we can usefully apply direct inference?

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1983

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References

Levi, Isaac (1980), The Enterprise of Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levi, Isaac (1981), “Direct Inference and Confirmational Conditionalization”, Philosophy of Science 48: 532552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar