The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal | 
 enlarge | Author: James Franklin
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $65.00
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 649910
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0801865697
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.209
EAN: 9780801865695
Publication Date: June 22, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654, how did we make reliable predictions? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? In The Science of Conjecture, James Franklin examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. Sometimes this type of reasoning avoided numbers entirely, as in the legal standard of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"; at other times it involved rough numerical estimates, as in gambling odds or the level of risk in chance events. The Science of Conjecture provides a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty. Everyone can take a rough account of risk, Franklin argues, but understanding the principles of probability and using them to improve performance poses serious problems, the solution to which we have only learned over many generations and after much trial and error. This study explores the coming to consciousness of the human understanding of risk.
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A great read on the development of our modern thinking September 10, 2001
T. Donnelly (New York, NY United States)
33 out of 33 found this review helpful
If you read "Sophies World" by Jostein Gaardner and wanted something with more bite, this book is it. It's one of the few truly intellectual books I've read without being academic or boring. I had no idea how much we take certain things in our 21st century thinking for granted. One example is juries and innocence until proven guilty. The book is a marvelous history of legal and ethical thinking and how we came to civilized methods to deal with charges of guilt. It makes me aware of the manipulative power of different styles of logical arguments. Buts it's not only about law. The author explains why Islam is fundamental (God can't be wrong) so why bother considering pros and cons of situations. Christianity was lucky to have the reformation and counter-reformation to challenge why there is probability/chance or unknowing. There are great sections on scientific theory - reasoning for hard sciences like physics and astronomy. Why cannot astrology be a science? Because there are no hard rules; too much depends on the art or experience of interpreters who "explain" exceptions to rules, because so many situations don't follow their rules. The sections on soft science describe biology and medicine, and the impact of clinical trials. How did we arrive at "scientific thinking" to establish proofs? Its all here. I'm not into mathematics and the title sounded so boring to me - mathematics and before the 16th century ie Pascal. If ever there was a case for "don't judge a book by its cover" this is it. Its solid reading, but it is also deeply satisfying and fascinating in understanding a little bit more about how and why we think like do in the 21st century. As an aside the author is also a Latin scholar who translates many texts, correcting false interpretations. But he does it in subtle ways; nothing show-off. James Franklin dazzles us with his humility one moment and superb, accessible writing on complicated subjects the next moment. I never knew that "like" and "probably" were introduced from Greek. Medieval Europeans did not have sophisticated languages that included "like" or "probably" but with medieval enlightment they were introduced. What an impact these two words had. The author corrects cultural misthinking of how poor medieval thinking was. It was an explosion of brilliance in virtually a person's lifetime from 1150-1200. The Renaissance was mild in comparison. This book touches and explains our human development of consciousness and thinking in so many fields eg law, medicine, science, ethics. The author draws on Ancient Greek texts, Roman texts, the Talmud, Jewish philosophers, Islamic philosophers, Christian theologians and even Sanskrit writings. The subjects discussed heavily affect my daily life and thinking. Understanding a little bit of what we take for granted, makes me reconsider glib, slick arguments I'm confronted with in newspapers and television every day. If you buy the book, it's a great read over 1-2 months that can be savored and sipped like a great wine.
Extraordinarily lucid account of abstruse subjects October 11, 2002
R. J. Stove (Gardenvale, Victoria Australia)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is the sort of book whose indispensability creeps up on you: you start it without any idea that you'll require it to broaden your mind, but it insidiously works its magic. Totally unclassifiable -- it mixes the disciplines of history, mathematics, philosophy and jurisprudence -- it also happens to be a rivettingly lucid read, notwithstanding the outwardly abstruse nature of its materials.
Brilliant and Dazzling September 8, 2005
Michael Emmett Brady (Bellflower, California ,United States)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Franklin has done a brilliant job of showing that the concept of probability used by practically all civilizations throughout history[for instance,Hebrew(Talmud),Greek(Aristotle),Medieval(Scholastics),etc.],prior to Pascal's attempt to mathematicalize the meaning of the term probability so as to help out some French noblemen who were trying to find a way to get an edge in certain types of gambling ,was the inductive,qualitative,comparative concept based on recognizing probability as being a primarily nonnumerical,vague concept that could not be precisely defined.Its usage was built into the common languages that human beings developed over time.Franklin's book supports the original logical interpretation of probability first put forth in published form in 1921 in the A Treatise on Probability(TP) by John Maynard Keynes.Keynes's theory is a general theory which analyzes probability from the most general use of the term(qualitative,nonnumerical,comparative) to its most specialized forms(quantitative,numerical,interval,mathematical,statistical,frequency,subjective).There are a few places in this book where the author could have given a substantially better analysis.One place is where he discusses Keynes's concept of the weight of the evidence.He bases his discussion only on chapter 6 of the TP,ignoring Keynes's additional discussions in chapter 14,section 3 and chapter 26,where Keynes became the first scholar in history to both define weight,w,on the unit interval between 0 and 1,and to invent a decision rule,his conventional coefficient of risk and weight,c,which solves a number of the paradoxes of decision theory, as well as a number of the anomalies rediscovered by Tversky and Kahneman.Franklin also fails to point out Keynes's original development of an interval valued approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of the TP.The scholar who comes closest to Keynes in incorporating a clearcut role for a vague,comparative,qualitative understanding of probability is D.Ellsberg.
 The science of common sense. September 23, 2001
gerald isaac (houston, texas USA)
11 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book is about common sense: the way ordinary people have reasoned about the world since the beginning of recorded history. It is a compendium of anecdotes, about anecdotal thinking. I find the insights engrossing, entertaining, and scholarly-if not scientific. This book hopes to rigorously analyze the processes that thinkers have followed throughout recorded history in order to reach rational conclusions. These processes are interesting in their history of use as official rules of thumb, but they are fatally flawed. The fundamental flaw is that the nonscientific processes are not reasoning- they are persuasion, as in rhetoric. Being nonscientific in nature, "The Science of Conjecture" is misnamed, but quite worthwhile to those of us who would like to understand the lawyer and jurors' mind.
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