Abstract
The first serious attempts to base the theory of non-demonstrative scientific inference upon the notion of probability were presented by philosophers of science in the 1870’s. In his Principles of Science (1874), Stanley Jevons argued that the Laplacean doctrine of inverse probability could be applied to determine the probability of a scientific hypothesis relative to the data or evidence supporting it.1 In ‘The Doctrine of Chance’ (1878), Charles S. Peirce defined—referring to Locke the probability associated with a mode of argument, as the proportion of cases in which it carries truth with it. While Jevons attributed probability to the conclusion of an inductive argument, Peirce regarded inductive probabilities as truth-frequencies that may be displayed in repeated applications of a (non-demonstrative) mode of argument.
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Niiniluoto, I. (1976). Inductive Logic and Theoretical Concepts. In: Przełęcki, M., Szaniawski, K., Wójcicki, R., Malinowski, G. (eds) Formal Methods in the Methodology of Empirical Sciences. Synthese Library, vol 103. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1135-8_6
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