Probable reasoning and its novelties

Ian Hacking

pp. 177-192

in: Theodore Arabatzis, Jürgen Renn, Ana Simoes (eds), Relocating the history of science, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

The historian A. C. Crombie identified six styles of reasoning in the history of the sciences. Crombie's idea, motivated by history, suggested to me a philosophical programme for thinking anew about Scientific Reason. My interest in the present paper is not to defend the older parts of the styles of reasoning project, but to develop a further aspect of the programme. In particular, this paper turns to the fifth style in Crombie's list, probable reasoning (or statistical inquiry). I shall show that one of the novelties connected with probable reasoning, is a new kind of object, the population. At the end of this paper I shall suggest many a novelty that accompanied the evolution of probability and statistics as a way of reasoning and finding out.