reader with an average familiarity with received ideas on intellectual history is asked to make a small number of reorientations, at least provisionally. The first concerns probability specifically. Two points should be made, to avoid perceptions that early writers are indulging merely in confused “anticipations” of later mathematical discoveries. The first is that the process of discovering the principles of uncertain reasoning is far from over. It can sometimes appear that, beginning with Fermat and Pascal’s success with dice in 1654, there has been a successful colonization of all areas of
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