A Note on Induction and Probability in the 19th Century

Abstract

This short chapter addresses itself to two of the more puzzling features of the historical development of the philosophy of science; first, why did it take so long for philosophers of science to bring the techniques of the mathematical theory of probability to bear on the logic of scientific inference? Why did we have to wait for Stanley Jevons, and C. S. Peirce, writing in the 1870s, rather than Hume in the 1740s or Mill in the 1840s, to find someone systematically arguing that inductive logic is based on probability theory? Still more curious is the fact that Jevons’ well-publicized attempt to ‘reduce’ induction to probability was repudiated by the great majority of the ‘inductive logicians’ of his day (Peirce being the major exception), and that his program lay dormant for half a century until it was resurrected by Keynes, Carnap and Reichenbach in the 1920s and 1930s. What sort of obstacles made it impossible for our forebears to accept what many philosophers of science today view as the self-evident commonplace that probability theory provides the language for inductive logic? In this chapter, I want to suggest some tentative answers to these very complex historical puzzles.

Had John Strong (who was writing the definitive study of these issues) not met such an untimely death, this chapter would have been suppressed — for it would have been completely superceded by his work.