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Statistical Laws and Personal Propensities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Brian Skyrms
Brian Skyrms*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

By “Propensities” I mean the kind of probabilities that figure in laws of nature. Propensities might be (i) relative frequencies, finite or long run, de facto or modalized, or (ii) reflections of our epistemic probabilities or (iii) sui generus theoretical notions. I believe that the whole family of relative frequency proposals (i) are inadequate. As an alternative I wish to suggest (ii) an epistemic account of propensities and of nomic force in general, in the spirit of Hume, Mill, DeFinetti, Ayer, Suppes and Jeffrey. Whether accounts of the third kind differ in substance or in name only from the sort of account that I am proposing is a nice question, to which. I will devote some brief closing remarks.

Type
Part XIII. Conditionals
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 550 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted to Nancy Cartwright, Allan Gibbard, Richard Jeffrey, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker for illuminating discussion of the issues discussed in this paper. My views on these and related matters are discussed more fully in my [25].

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