James Franklin 
The Science of Conjecture:
Evidence and Probability Before Pascal.
Johns Hopkins University Press,
485 pages, $55

 

What do we know, and how surely do we know it? The general answer was given by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics: certainty can be found only in mathematics, all other knowledge being to some degree doubtful. Much evil has been let loose upon the world by defiance of, or exaggeration of, this simple truth: at the one extreme by the belief that absolute certainty can be found in non-mathematical dogmas, at the other by the vulgar conclusion that since certainty is not possible outside mathematics (nor even inside it, according to a few bold theorists), everything we think we know is really just a set of epiphenomenal delusions arising from our personal and social circumstances. The natural fruit of...
 

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