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Article: The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 American Statistical Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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James FRANKLIN. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-0818-6569-7. xiii +497 pp. $55.00.
James Franklin has written a well-documented look at the history of arguments about evidence as they apply to law, religion, philosophy, and science. The Science of Conjecture is not essentially mathematical, although Franklin is a mathematician. It is instead an extended discussion of the ways in which people thought about and wrote about uncertainty before the development of the branch of mathematics that we now call probability. The ideas are important today, when most decision makers still have only a limited and perhaps mistaken understanding of ...