Bayesianism is one of the most influential recent accounts of human learning. It’s named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth-century theologian and pioneer of probability theory. Bayesians think that learning is much like scientific progress. We consider a range of different hypotheses, different pictures of how the world might work. Some of the hypotheses may be more likely than others, but none of them are absolutely sure to be true. When we say that we believe a hypothesis is true, what we really mean is that, right now, it’s the best guess we’ve got.
