Prior Knowledge and Ornithology

Summary

Most biologists think that the concept of probability is indisputable. Here, subjective inference is introduced as a possible alternative to frequentist statistical inference. The philosophy supporting subjective inference is presented, followed by some examples of the subjective inference of bird ringing data; the data were obtained from a computer simulation of an avian population. The paper concludes with some problems and prospects concerning the introduction of subjective inference in bird ringing analysis.