The probability calculus was created in 1654 by Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. The philosophy of probability is the philosophical inquiry into the semantic and epistemic properties of this mathematical calculus. The question at the center of the philosophical debate is what it means to say that the probability of an event or proposition equals a certain numerical value, or in other words, what the truth-conditions for a probabilistic statement are. There is significant disagreement about this, and there are two major camps in the debate, viz., objectivists and subjectivists.
Objectivists maintain that statements about probability refer to some features of the external world, such as the relative frequency of some event. Probabilistic statements are thus objectively true or false, depending on whether they correctly describe the relevant features of the external world. For example, some objectivists maintain that it is true that the probability that a coin will land heads is 1 ∕ 2...
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References and Further Reading
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Peterson, M. (2011). Philosophy of Probability. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_49
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