Abstract
Since the birth of modern sciences, the development of statistical thought has run along the evolution of the semantic concept of variability. The variability of the natural and social phenomena was the true challenge that Galilean science has faced substituting the order of scientific laws to the apparent disorder of facts. Those laws tried to combine two objectives: the explanation of phenomena in a causal context, and the forecasting of unknown events. In the twentieth century, the most revolutionary scientific theories have been very powerful as explanatory models, but weak as predictive models with reference to single events. All this because the new theories were first of all statistical ones, for example, the theory of evolution for natural selection, the genetics of population, or the quantum physics. Sciences learned to deal with statistic populations and collective properties. The intrinsic characteristics of this kind of laws were properties concerning a phenomenon as a whole, not its inessential micro components.
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Acknowledgments
The vindication of a “plagiarism.” Dedicated to Italo Scardovi. Addressing the issue of statistics’ epistemological statements at a conference dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Italian Statistics brings immediately to our mind the fundamental methodological contributions made by Italo Scardovi, one of the most notable representatives of the Italian school.
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Monari, P. (2014). The Semantic Role of Variability in the Development of Statistical Thought. In: Crescenzi, F., Mignani, S. (eds) Statistical Methods and Applications from a Historical Perspective. Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05552-7_3
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