Philosophical Lectures on Probability

Book excerpt: Bruno de Finetti (1906–1985) is the founder of the subjective interpretation of probability, together with the British philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey. His related notion of “exchangeability” revolutionized the statistical methodology. This book (based on a course held in 1979) explains in a language accessible also to non-mathematicians the fundamental tenets and implications of subjectivism, according to which the probability of any well specified fact F refers to the degree of belief actually held by someone, on the ground of her whole knowledge, on the truth of the assertion that F obtains.