History versus hacking on probability

The history of the problem of induction is a large topic, and the half dozen chapters devoted to it in Ian Hacking’s book The Emergence of Probability’ attracted a corresponding large amount of critical comment from original reviewers of that volume. Larry Laudan, for example, suggested that Hacking had put forward three important ‘historical theses’. The first is that until the midseventeenth century there was no concept of inductive evidence available with which to state the problem of induction. The second is that, in Hacking’s words,