A Treatise On Probability by John Maynard Keynes

Author:John Maynard Keynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 1958-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

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1 This formula has, in fact, been disproved in recent times, e.g. 225 + 1 = 4, 294, 967, 297 = 641 × 6, 700, 417. Thus it is no longer so good an illustration as it would have been a hundred years ago.

2 Pp. 229-231 (one volume edition). Jevons uses these illustrations, not for the purpose to which I am here putting them, but to demonstrate the fallibility of empirical laws.

3 See Jevons, loc. cil. p. 231.

4 Golden Bough, p. 174.

5 “This is animism, or that sense of something in Nature which to the enlightened or civilised man is not there, and in the civilised man’s child, if it be admitted that he has it at all, is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind. And by animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature, but the tendency or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more powerful in all visible things” (Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, pp. 224-5). This ‘tendency or impulse or instinct,’ refined by reason and enlarged by experience, may be required, in the shape of an intuitive à priori probability, if some of those universal conclusions of common sense, which the most sceptical do not kick away, are to be supported with rational foundations.

6 Yet if every inhabitant of the world, Grimsehl has calculated, were to toss a coin every second, day and night, this latter event would only occur once on the average in every twenty billion years.

7 Is this interpretation of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature affected by the Doctrine of Relativity?

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