212 Reviews HM7

and excessive background discussions of dubious relevance to the

history of statistics. The editor's introduction, moreover,
fails to present Pearson's history in a critical framework, while
the editorial comments scattered through the text regrettably do
as much to clutter an already complicated format as to provide
illumination.
Because of the editor's own personal eminence in the field
of statistics, practicing statisticians may well welcome this
volume at least partly owing to their interest in these same edi-
torial amplifications as well as in the elder Pearson's exten-
sive statistical analyses. General historians, on the other
hand, as well as historians of science with only broad interests
in the statistical past, will find the subject covered much more
succinctly in standard histories of statistics than in these dif-
fuse lectures. For their part, historians of mathematics and
statistics should examine this intriguing artifact despite its
manifest imperfections, at least in order to compare it with
the other histories of statistics that were written during the
early 20th century.

IAN HACKING: THE EMERGENCE OF PROBABILITY. Cambridge. 1975. 209 S.

Reviewed by Eberhard Knobloch

Institut fiir Philosophie, Wissenschafstheorie
Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte der Technischen Universith't
Berlin, Germany

During the last ten years, the history of probability theo-

ry has been the object of numerous studies, notably in articles
by 0. B. Sheynin Ill; in monographs by L. E. Maistrov and Pierre
Raymond [2]; in two collections [3] of essays, edited by E. S.
Pearson, M. G. Kendall, and R. L. Plackett; and in B. L. van der
Waerden's short historical precis 141 contained in the collected
works of James Bernoulli.
Whereas most of these studies intended to emphasize a mathe-
matician's specific contribution to the development of probabi-
lity theory, it was Maistrov's intention to provide an explana-
tion of why, around the middle of the 17th century, probability
suddenly coalesced into an acknowledged science. Allegedly, ac-
cording to Maistrov's explanation, economic reasons were mainly
responsible.
The English translation of Maistrov's work appeared in 1974,
i.e., one year before the book under review. Hacking wrote a
preface to Maistrov's book, in which he sketched his own con-
trasting views. Actually, Hacking's own study does not concen-
trate on a purely historical account of specific mathematical
contributions; instead, its distinguishing feature is an exten-
sive philosophical analysis of the early ideas about probability,

Copyright 0 1980 by Academic Press, Inc.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
HM7 Reviews 213

induction, and statistical inference, from the 15th to the 17th

century, and in doing this he goes far beyond Raymond's work
published in the same year.
Hacking's story of the emergence of probability ends with the
publication of James Bernoulli's "Ars conjectandi" in 1713
(p. 166). Bernoulli's book consists of 19 chapters, arranged in
a logical rather than a chronological order. They deal with: An
absent family of ideas, Duality, Opinion, Evidence, Signs, The
first calculations, The Roannez circle (16541, The great decision
(1658?), The art of thinking (1662), Probability and the law
(16651, Expectation (16571, Political arithmetic (1662), Annui-
ties (1671), Equipossibility (1678), Inductive logic, The art
of conjecturing (1692 (?), published 1713), The first limit
theorem, Design, and finally, Induction (1737).
Hacking begins with some methodological remarks. Probability
emerging around 1660 is Janus-faced. On the one hand, it is
statistical, dealing with stochastic laws of chance processes;
on the other hand, it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing
reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of any
statistical background. This duality of probability is confirmed
through a detailed study of its history between 1650 and 1700.
Hacking's approach contains a series of implications: "TO
begin with, the probability to be described is autonomous, with
a life of its own. It exists in discourse and not in the mind
of speakers. We are concerned not with the authors but with the
sentences they have uttered and left for us to read.... We are
not concerned with who wrote, but with what was said.... I am
more interested when the same idea crops up everywhere, on the
pens of people who have never heard of each other" (p. 16-17).
Probability proper, for Hacking, begins about 1660, the time
before that being what may be called the prehistory of probability
First, he works out the etymology of the word "probabilitas."
He finds that "opinio," opinion, was the companion of probability
in medieval epistemology. Another important and more empirical
concept is the sign (from the Stoic conception of siqna, p. 47)
which is indicative, as smoke is a "sign" of fire. It is this
concept of signs, together with the frequency of their correct-
ness, which provided the base from which the concept of probabi-
lity was to emerge.
One of the prerequisites for probability was the forming of
the concept of evidence. To explain this, Hacking briefly refers
to the "debate among historians of science as to the roots of the
experimental method" (pp. 35-37). Making a clear distinction
between evidence and experiment, he argues that both probability
and the new understanding of experiment had as their precondition
a transformation of the old concept of sign into a new concept
of evidence, a concept which is found not in the so-called high
sciences (optics, astronomy, and mechanics) and their demonstra-
tive knowledge, but in the work of the purveyors of opinion, the
214 Reviews HM7

so-called low scientists. In this sense, probability emerged

from the low science. To exemplify the new style, Hacking focuses
on Paracelsus (born 1493).
In the decades following, there was much talk about sign-as-
evidence, sign and probability, demonstration and "influences,"
and philosophers of the time had to take a stand in the waning
distinction between high and low science. Descartes, for in-
stance, "opted for the high, and thereby determined the course
of his philosophy" (p. 46). Probability, consequently, had no
place in his schematism. Hobbes, on the other hand, has a para-
graph in his "Human Nature," in which "conjectural signs," ex-
perience, and frequency-counts together form (though not in name)
the raw material from which the new concept of probability was
soon to emerge.
In what follows, Hacking turns his attention to the well-
known first probability calculations by Galilei and Cardano.
Poisson had ascribed the foundation of the probability calculus
to the famous correspondence between Pascal and Fez-mat about the
game of dice. Hacking agrees, not because the problems them-
selves were new, nor because other problems had not been solved
by earlier generations, but because there was now a completely new
standard of excellence for probability calculations. This stand-
point may be accepted; but it may be added that it presupposes
a certain attitude toward the understanding of a mathematical
theory which I have called the methodological-teleological cri-
terion. There are other criteria that are equally acceptable [5].
What is now, in the philosophy of science, called "probability
and induction," starts out with the Port Royal Logic, which Hacking
discusses by contrasting it with Francis Bacon's Novum Organum.
Besides problems of induction, however, the Logic also contains
a rule used in all subsequent discussions of miracles, admittedly
a controversial topic for Fathers of the Church and philosophers
alike: how probable are improbable events? The distinction
between "internal" and "external" as outlined in the Logic's
rule (p. 79) and later to be taken up by Hume in his essay
"On Miracles" becomes crucial: it is one of Hacking's main theses
to show that "probability became possible only when signs were
turned into internal evidence."
As for Leibniz, the "first philosopher of probability" (p- 185),
Hacking rightly states that Leibniz did not contribute to the
mathematical corpus proper of probability, but that his conceptual
analysis of probability did have a lasting impact, which is de-
scribed by Hacking within the context of Leibniz' taking the Law
as a model for other disciplines (p- 86).
"Statistics," writes Hacking (p. 102), "began as the syste-
matic study of quantitative facts about the state." Hacking
tries to find an answer to the question of why this did not
happen before 1662 when John Graunt wrote his Natural and
Political Observations. One factor is that there were few data
HM7 Reviews 215

(London kept a weekly tally of christenings and burials from

1603 on; Paris started its tabulations in 1667); another, that
demographic knowledge was of less value to a feudal society than
to an industrial one. What was needed above all, however, was
somebody with a new conceptual device capable of surveying and
organizing available data into a new discipline, which we now
call probability and statistics.
Also very instructive is Hacking's comparison of Graunt's,
Petty's, de Witt's, and Hudde's methods for mortality tables
(summed up on p. 121), a topic leading to the concept of equi-
possibility. Equipossibility was used by Leibniz as early as
1678 in his definition of probability as the ratio of the number
of favorable cases to that of equally possible cases--anticipat-
ing Laplace.
Hacking explains the successful career of so dubious a concept
as equipossibility by the essential duality of probability, which
is, as mentioned before, both epistemic and aleatory. He gives
an interesting survey of the history of this influential concept
through the 18th century. The idea of equipossibility made it
possible for Leibniz to conceive probability theory as an integral
part of his metaphysics and epistemology, and in this he fore-
shadowed philosophical programs carried out later by Keynes,
Jeffreys, and Carnap. So Hacking's discussion of Leibniz' Uni-
versal Characteristic and inductive logic also includes some side-
lights on modern theories.
James Bernoulli's Ars conjectandi represents the most decisive
conceptual innovations in the early history of probability. Upon
its publication in 1713, probability had fully emerged: probabi-
lities are no longer degrees of belief but degrees of certainty.
Hacking points out also that, although Newton's direct contribu-
tion to the understanding of probability was insignificant, his
scientific authority had a lasting effect on theological questions,
e-g., on proofs of an omnipresent deity by means of probabilistic
arguments (pp. 171-175). The turn of causation into “mere regular-
ity" is a final ingredient for the skeptical problem of induction,
undermining the status of knowledge.
More specifically, Hacking asks in the last chapter: How did
probability and the problem of induction arise? Induction was
a result of a transformation of the old knowledge of high science,
"scientia"; probability emerged from the transformation of "opinio";
and the combined result was a new concept of internal evidence and
the transference of causality from the realm of knowledge to that
of opinion. "Thus although the emergence of probability is a
transformation in opinion, the emergence of 'probability-and-induc-
tion' is a more complete event depending on parallel transforma-
tions in high science and low science" (p. 185).
Hacking's book shows a thorough knowledge of all the relevant
original works pertaining to the emergence of probability, and
of the scholarship in English, French, German, and Latin. The
216 Reviews HM7

book is full of new ideas and insights, and very original and
persuasive in its main thesis, which in my opinion is more con-
vincing than Maistrov's. Furthermore, Hacking's philosophical
analysis proves that answering the question of the emergence
and development of a mathematical theory should not be restricted
solely to mathematical criteria.

NOTES
1. Papers which have appeared up to 1973 are cited in Hacking,
p. 200, and in Maistrov, L. E., 1974, Probability theory: A
historical sketch (translated and edited by S. Katz), New York/
London, pp. 272-274. The following may be added:
On the prehistory of the theory of probability, Archive for
History of exact Sciences 12 (1974), 97-141.
P. S. Laplace work on probability, Archive for History of Exact
Sciences 16 (19761, 137-187.
Laplace's theory of errors, Archive for History of exact Sciences
17 (19771, l-61.
Early history of the theory of probability, Archive for History
of Exact Sciences 17 (19771, 202-259.
S. D. Poisson's work in probability, Archive for History of Exact
Science 18 (19781, 245-300.
C. F. Gauss and the theory of errors, Archive for History of Exact
Sciences 20 (19791, 21-72.

2. As to Maistrov see footnote

1; Raymond, Pierre, 1975, De
la combinatoire aux probabilit&, Paris.
3. Pearson, E. S., and Kendall, M. G. (eds.), 1970, Studies
in the history of statistics and probability, Vol. I, London:
Kendall, M. G., and Plackett, R. L. teds.), 1977, Studies in the
history of statistics and probability, Vol. II, London.
4. Bernoulli, Jakob, 1975, Werke, Vol. III, Basel, pp. l-18.
5. Knobloch, E, On the founders of a mathematical theory:
The case of determinants, Annals of Science, in preparation.