The language used here suggests that probability, if not exactly a quantity to which numbers can be attached, is at least capable of continuous variation. The early fourteenth century is chiefly known in the history of science for its analysis of the notion of continuous variation, under the name of “the intension and remission of forms.” Buridan and Oresme in Paris and the Merton school in Oxford studied such continuously varying quantities as speed and acceleration (which they were the first to distinguish), heat and the lightness and darkness of surfaces.63 Their discoveries were the
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