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Stability and Chance

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Part of the book series: The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science ((WONS,volume 49))

Abstract

In Probabilismo (1931) de Finetti sketched a subjectivist treatment of the discourse of objective chance. Possible chances were to be taken as degrees of belief conditional on a specification of the chance set up, and the individuation of the chance set up was to be chosen with a certain kind of stability in mind. These leading ideas can be given a natural development using the notions of probability conditional on a partition or sigma algebra, and using the ergodic decomposition of invariant measures. The resulting theory casts some light on the nature of principles relating degree-of-belief and chance.

“The probability of an event is the relative to our degree of ignorance; but one can still think that it has an objective value in a certain sense”

Bruno de Finetti Probabilisismo Sec.9

This paper was first read at a symposium on de Finetti’s Probabilismo at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in March of 1990.

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© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Skyrms, B. (1991). Stability and Chance. In: Spohn, W., Van Fraassen, B.C., Skyrms, B. (eds) Existence and Explanation. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3244-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3244-2_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5430-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3244-2

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