At a deeper cultural level, Anna Wierzbicka’s English: Meaning and Culture describes how John Locke’s writings on probability, reasonableness, and moderation became ingrained in the English language. The words “reasonable” and “probably” appear in modern English with a frequency and range of application very much higher than their cognates in other European languages, as do words indicating hedges relating to degrees of evidence such as “presumably,” “apparently,” “clearly.” These phenomena indicate an Anglophone mindset that particularly values attention to the uncertainties of evidence.
