See, for instance, Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 4:
The events to be described are ingredients for understanding probability
and for grasping why it has been such an incredible success story.
Success story ? A quadruple success: metaphysical, epistemological, logical
and ethical.
Metaphysics is the science of the ultimate states of the universe.
There, the probabilities of quantum mechanics have displaced universal
Cartesian causation.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge and belief. Nowadays
we use evidence, analyse data, design experiments and assess credibility
in terms of probabilities.
Logic is the theory of inference and argument. For this purpose
we use the deductive and often tautological unravelling of axioms provided
by pure mathematics, but also, and for most practical affairs, we now employ
- sometimes precisely, sometimes informally - the logic of statistical
inference.
Ethics is in part the study of what to do. Probability
cannot dictate values, but it now lies at the basis of all reasonable choice
made by officials. No public decision, no risk analysis, no environmental
impact, no military strategy can be conducted without decision theory couched
in terms of probabilities. By covering opinion with a veneer of objectivity,
we replace judgement by computation.
Probability is, then, the philosophical success story of the
first half of the twentieth century.
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