The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy

Probability theory is a key tool of the physical, mathematical, and social sciences. It has also been playing an increasingly significant role in philosophy: in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of religion, and elsewhere. A case can be made that probability is as vital a part of the philosopher's toolkit as logic. Moreover, there is a fruitful two-way street between probability theory and philosophy: the theory informs much of the work of philosophers, and philosophical inquiry, in turn, has shed considerable light on the theory. This Handbook encapsulates and furthers the influence of philosophy on probability, and of probability on philosophy. Nearly forty articles summarise the state of play and present new insights in various areas of research at the intersection of these two fields. The articles will be of special interest to practitioners of probability who seek a greater understanding of its mathematical and conceptual foundations, and to philosophers who want to get up to speed on the cutting edge of research in this area. There is plenty here to entice philosophical readers who don't work especially on probability but who want to learn more about it and its applications. Indeed, this volume should appeal to the intellectually curious generally; after all, there is much here to be curious about. We do not expect all of this volume's audience to have a thorough training in probability theory. And while probability is relevant to the work of many philosophers, they often do not have much of a background in its formalism. With this in mind, we begin with 'Probability for Everyone--Even Philosophers', a primer on those parts of probability theory that we believe are most important for philosophers to know. The rest of the volume is divided into seven main sections: History; Formalism; Alternatives to Standard Probability Theory; Interpretations and Interpretive Issues; Probabilistic Judgment and Its Applications; Applications of Probability: Science; and Applications of Probability: Philosophy.

1 - Probability for Everyone--Even Philosophers
2 - Pre-history of Probability
3 - Probability in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Continental Europe from the Perspective of Jacob Bernoulli's Art of Conjecturing
4 - Probability and its Application in Britain during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
5 - A Brief History of Probability Theory from 1810 to 1940
6 - The Origins of Modern Statistics: The English Statistical School
7 - The Origins of Probabilistic Epistemology: Some leading philosophers of probability in the 20th century
8 - Kolmogorov's Axiomatization and its Discontents
9 - Conditional Probability
10 - The Bayesian Network Story
11 - Alternatives to Standard Probability and their Motivation
12 - Probability and Non-classical Logic
13 - A Logic of Comparative Support: Qualitative Conditional Probability Relations Representable by Popper Functions
14 - Imprecise probabilities
15 - Symmetry Arguments in Probability
16 - Frequentism in Probability Theory
17 - Subjectivism in Probability Theory
18 - Bayesianism vs. Frequentism in Statistical Inference
19 - The Propensity Interpretation of Probability
20 - Best System Approaches to Chance
21 - Probability and Randomness
22 - Chance and Determinism
23 - Human Understandings of Probability
24 - Probability Elicitation
25 - Probabilistic Opinion Pooling
26 - Quantum Probability
27 - Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics
28 - Probability in Biology: The Case of Fitness
29 - Probability in Epistemology
30 - Confirmation Theory
31 - Self-Locating Credences
32 - Probability in Logic
33 - Probability in Ethics
34 - Probability and the Philosophy of Religion
35 - Probability in Philosophy of Language
36 - Decision Theory
37 - Probabilistic Causation

Alan Hájek is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. ; Christopher Hitchcock is J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of Philosophy in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology.