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The Infinite Ballot Box of Nature: De Morgan, Boole, and Jevons on Probability and the Logic of Induction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

John V. Strong
John V. Strong*
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

Nature is to us like an infinite ballot box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves ([12], p. 150).

The project of formulating an account of scientific inference in terms of concepts drawn from probability theory, and based on the programmatic belief that inductive logic (that is, the theory of the principles of inductive reasoning) is the same as probability logic, is one usually associated in our own day with the names of such twentieth-century philosophers of science as John Maynard Keynes, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap ([13], [27], [3]).

Type
Part VI. Induction and Probability
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 197 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third Hunt Foundation Workshop in History and Philosophy of Science, Morgantown, West Virginia, April 10-13, 1975. I am grateful to the other participants in the workshop, and in particular to Larry Laudan and Edward Madden, for their suggestions and criticisms.

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