The Philosophical and Cultural Context for the Emergence of Probability and Statistical Inference

This chapter explores the transformation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought and culture, by way of sketching the context and conditions for the emergence of the modern concepts of probability and statistical inference in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. Philosophically, the profound changes at that time could be summarized as splitting and polarization, externalization and movement toward the surface, and an uprooting and decentering. Widespread monetization had implied that everything could be measured, that the world could be understood in mathematical terms, and that judgment might be replaced by calculation. As a self-sustaining, self-correcting system, the market lent plausibility to mechanistic theories of nature. Aristotelian causes could not be found by empirical methods, which could only determine the frequency of co-occurrence of signs; the connections between things were lost; entities became detachable from their attributes. The new awareness of finitude and epistemological aloneness entailed acute anxiety and an ensuing frantic search for a solid footing. In the midst of that trauma, the formation of the modern dualistic concept of probability at once gave expression to the crisis of knowledge and provided the key to its solution, in the mathematical formalization of all empirical knowledge by statistical inference.