The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Ideas in Context, Series Number 12)

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.

This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance have transformed the natural and social sciences as well as everyday life over the past three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling, and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact on biology, physics, and psychology. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centers on how these technical innovations recreated our conceptions of nature, mind, and society.

Classical Probabilities, 1660-1840 -- Statistical Probabilities, 1820-1900 -- The Inference Experts -- Chance And Life: Controversies In Modern Biology -- The Probabilistic Revolution In Physics -- Statistics Of The Mind -- Numbers Rule The World -- The Implications Of Chance. Gerd Gigerenzer ... [et Al.]. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 293-326) And Indexes. This book attempts to explain how quantative ideas of chance have transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life, over the past three centuries. The work centres on how technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society In July of 1654 Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre Fermat about a gambling problem which came to be known as the Problem of Points: Two players are interrupted in the midst of a game of chance, with the score uneven at that point. This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life, over the past three centuries