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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on January 9, 2006
Philosophia Mathematica 2006 14(3):365-369; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkj018
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Philosophia Mathematica (III), Vol. 14 No. 3 © The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

From Bayesianism to the Epistemic View of Mathematics{dagger}

RICHARD JEFFREY. Subjective Probability: The Real Thing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-82971-2 (hbk), 0-521-53668-5 (pbk). Pp. xvi + 124.

Jon Williamson*

* Department of Philosophy, University of Kent Canterbury CT2 7NF, U.K j.williamson@kent.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Subjective Probability: The Real Thing is the last book written by the late Richard Jeffrey, a key proponent of the Bayesian interpretation of probability.

Bayesians hold that probability is a mental notion: saying that the probability of rain is 0.7 is just saying that you believe it will rain to degree 0.7. Degrees of belief are themselves cashed out in terms of bets—in this case you consider 7:3 to be fair odds for a bet on rain. There are two extreme Bayesian positions. Strict subjectivists think that an agent can adopt whatever degrees of belief she likes, as long as they satisfy the axioms of probability. Thus your degree of belief in rain and degree of belief in no rain must sum to one but are otherwise unconstrained. At the other extreme, objectivists claim that an agent's background knowledge considerably narrows down the choice of appropriate degrees of belief. In . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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