The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal

by James Franklin

The conclusions, stated baldly (as they are by Nicholas), are unusual. A little meditation on them will show that principles very like them are assumed time and time again, without being explicitly stated. Of course, it is true that no modern philosopher (or almost none)76 would state anything so optimistic as “everything is well-disposed.” But at a lower level of generality, things are otherwise. There are Ockham’s Razor, for instance, the currently fashionable “inference to the best explanation,” and various older “principles of least action.” Certain modern philosophers have been happy, in unguarded moments, to admit to a preference for desert landscapes, as if this were an intellectual virtue that all would commend. It appears to be, as William James says in another context, “a sort of philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from an aesthetic demand.”77 And the popularity of the theory of evolution in philosophical circles is surely partly attributable to its licensing of speculations about the supposed advantages of anything whatsoever in the living world. What are all these but particular versions of Nicholas of Autrecourt’s “all entities of the universe are rightly disposed”? At least he states this explicitly as a probable principle, and at least his theory contains a God, whose tastes may be conjectured to lean toward a classical simplicity. The rational support for the modern versions of his principle is not so clear.