FOM: Boole, Probability, and Material Implication

Steve Stevenson steve at cs.clemson.edu
Thu Jun 21 10:07:57 EDT 2001


Good morning:

Theodore's Hailperin in *Boole's Logic and Probability* makes the
point that Boole seemed confused over the difference between
conditional probability and the probability of a implication
statement. If he did, he probably inherited it from Bayes and
Laplace. 

E. T. Jayne in his "cult", on-line probability text
*Probability Theory: The Logic Of Science* at
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob.html also discusses this issue of
confusion over conditional probabilty and implication statements.

Does anyone have references to discussions of this issue. My naive
contention is that Bayes rule is not a proper translation of material
implication although it is proper for subjective implication.

Any comments gratefully accepted.

steve





More information about the FOM mailing list