by From Asad Zaman In this sequence of posts, I will go through a recent paper of mine, which explains that BOTH of the currently dominant approaches to probability are deeply, fundamentally, and irreparably flawed. The reason for this is that probability is a real-world phenomenon which is unobservable and unmeasurable. The early 20th Century foundations for probability were built at a time when logical positivism was dominant as the philosophy of science. Furthermore, despite its abandonment by philosophers, its central ideas continue to be widely believed, especially among economists. We will see that both frequentism and subjectivism are attempts to reduce the unobservable to the observable, but this is fundamentally impossible, and all such attempts are doomed to failure.
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from Asad Zaman
In this sequence of posts, I will go through a recent paper of mine, which explains that BOTH of the currently dominant approaches to probability are deeply, fundamentally, and irreparably flawed. The reason for this is that probability is a real-world phenomenon which is unobservable and unmeasurable. The early 20th Century foundations for probability were built at a time when logical positivism was dominant as the philosophy of science. Furthermore, despite its abandonment by philosophers, its central ideas continue to be widely believed, especially among economists. We will see that both frequentism and subjectivism are attempts to reduce the unobservable to the observable, but this is fundamentally impossible, and all such attempts are doomed to failure. Nonetheless, the charm of positivism and empiricism is so strong, that it prevents the formulation of the ideas necessary to see the problems with the current definitions of probability. An alternative method for thinking about probability, based on Critical Realism, will also be offered. Based on my paper draft, I estimate that there will be about ten posts of about 1000 words each, though a few of them might be longer. Here are the first three: