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A scientific theory is originally based on a particular set of observations. How can it be extended to apply outside this original range of cases? This question, which is fundamental to natural philosophy, is considered in detail in this book, which was originally published in 1931, and first published as this third edition in 1973. Sir Harold begins with the principle that 'it is possible to learn from experience and to make inferences from beyond the data directly known to sensation'. He goes on to analyse this principle, discuss its status and investigate its logical consequences. The result is a book of importance to anyone interested in the foundations of modern scientific method. His thesis provides a consistent account of how the theories proposed by physicists have been derived from, and are supported by, experimental data. ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Robert Were Fox the Younger, Harold Jeffreys, Sydney Chapman, Nigel Anstey, Sir James Hall, 4th Baronet, Edward Bullard, Kirsty Mccabe, Bob White, Keith Runcorn, Herbert Hall Turner, Herman Shaw, Maurice Hill, Joe Farman. Excerpt:Robert White is Professor of Geophysics in the Earth Sciences department at Cambridge University (since 1989) and was elected a FRS in 1994. Biography White is also a Fellow of the Geological Society , and a member of the American Geophysical Union and several other professional bodies; he serves on numerous of their committees. He leads a research group investigating the Earth s dynamic crust: in particular the way in which enormous volumes of volcanic rock are produced when continents and oceans rift apart. He has organised fieldwork and supervised 38 PhD students at Cambridge, many of whom are now prominent in academia, industry, government and education. His work at sea has taken him to the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans and his research group is currently investigating the internal structure of volcanoes in Iceland, New Zealand, the Faroes and the Atlantic margin. His scientific work is published in over 250 papers and articles. He is on the committee of Christians in Science , and is a director of the John Ray Initiative, an educational charity that works to develop and communicate a Christian understanding of the environment. Since 1988 he has been a Fellow of St Edmund s College, Cambridge , prior to which he was a student and Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge . He is Associate Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion . Publications Selected Science-Religion Publications Selected Scientific Publications A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Edward Bullard item Born: 21 September 1907 Norwich item Died:... ... Read more

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The main objective of this volume is to honour Sir Harold Jeffreys for the major theoretical and applied contributions he made to Bayesian analysis. Leading experts in the field, such as S. Geisser, I.J. Good and D.V. Lindley review and comment on these contributions. ... Read more

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This book is a study of the concept of probability as it has been used and applied across a number of scientific disciplines from genetics to geophysics. Probability has a dual aspect: sometimes it is a numerical ratio; sometimes, in the Bayesian interpretation, a degree of belief.David Howie examines probabilistic theories of scientific knowledge, and asks how, despite being adopted by many scientists and statisticians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bayesianism was discredited as a theory of scientific inference during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a close examination of a dispute between two British scientists, the author argues that a choice between the two interpretations of probability is not forced by pure logic, or the mathematics of the situation, but depends on the experiences and aims of the individuals involved, and their views of the correct form of scientific inquiry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

In general,an excellent book on the history of probability
Howie has written a superb book on the three main controversies that occurred in the period 1910-1935 that essentially revolves around the meaning of different interpretations about what probability means.I highly recommend that any reader interested in any way about the history/historical development of probability and statistics buy this book.You will not be disappointed.The three controversies were the Keynes-Ramsey controversy over Keynes's position that most probabilities were"nonnumerical"(this is the term that Keynes used to describe his interval(set theoretic) estimate approachto probability that he combined with a logic of partial entailment),the Fisher-Neyman-(Pearson) controversy over what a confidence interval meant,and the Fisher-Jeffreys controversy over the use of inverse probabilities. The controversies portion of the book primarily focuses on the Fisher-Jeffreys exchange,with Fisher being opposed to basing scientific statistical analysis on the need to specify the apriori distribution.Fisher, instead,favored a frequency analysis of the existing data to obtain operational probabilities and a hypothesis test based on significance levels and p-value tests. Jeffreys favored the standard Bayesian approach that required the specification of an a priori distribution that would be based on the existing initial data.Howie spends a moderate degree of time on the controversy between Fisher and Neyman(Pearson) over the logical meaning and operational nature of a confidence interval.This debate should have been won hands down by Fisher since the Neyman(Pearson)argument doesn't make any sense.Neyman was a strict frequentist whose claim that the interpretation of what a confidence interval meant was up to each individual researcher's belief directly contradicts his approach.The meaning of,say,a 95 % confidence interval for a sample meanfor a specific data subset can't be the frequentist claim that the researcher does a thought experiment in which he visualizes a 100 repetitions of the confidence level calculation in which 95 of the intervals contain that sample mean.Since only 1 calculation is in fact made,the probability of locating the sample statistic inside the confidence interval is either 0 or 1.This confusion of what a confidence interval means can still be found in quite a few statistics and econometrics books even today.Howie does a good job in discussing this controversy.I deducted one star from my rating because of the very poor coverage in section 4.6.3(pp.96-101;see also p.151) of the third controversy between John Maynard Keynes and Frank P Ramsey concerning Keynes's logical theory of probability and its operational capabilities.It is apparent that Howie has just accepted the conclusions of the two extremely poor book reviews made by Ramsey in 1922 and 1926 at face value.Howie accepts the unsupported claim , a claim that is generally accepted by the vast majority of philosophers and logicians in 2005,that Ramsey not only completely destoyed and devastated the logical structure of Keynes's theory and its operational applicability,but that Keynes himself accepted the critique of the boy genius and capitulated completely in the face of Ramsey's overwhelming argument.Based on his acceptance of the conventional wisdom,Howie claims that,a)Keynes accepted Ramsey's argument that all probabilities can be estimated by using precise single numbers,b)that Keynes claimed in the A Treatise on Probability(1921)that probabilities are often incalculable,c)that Keynes claimed that the ability to perceive the values of logical probabilities was intuitive.Nowhere in the A Treatise on Probability or in any book or paper published in his lifetime did Keynes EVER make any of these claims.In fact,all of these misstatements can be traced back to the wild and unsubstantiated claims of Ramsey that by the terms "nonnumerical"or"nonmeasurable"Keynes was arguing that the quantification and estimation of probabilities was ,in general ,not possible.Supposedly, all a decision maker could do,at best, was to partially ordinally rank some of the alternatives some of the time.All of these conclusions ,on the part of Ramsey and his adherents today, are false,since they are based on Ramsey's reviews,not of the entire A Treatise on Probability,but only of one chapter,chapter 3 of the TP,which is taken out of context.In chapters 15 and 17, Keynes develops and applies an interval valued approach to probability that Keynes makes the foundation of all of Part III of the TP.Thus, by "nonnumerical",Keynes meant that in general it took two numbers,not one,to estimate and quantify probabilities.These two numbers are composed of a lower bound(greatest lower bound)and an upper bound(least upper bound).Howie might consider writing another book on why the boy genius got it all wrong in this particular case .Especially interesting would be an examinationof the logical consistency of Ramsey's acceptance that "Ramsey numbers"were usually intervals,but probabilities could not be intervals. ... 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