A General Theory of Evidence and Proof
A General Theory of Evidence and Proof: Forming Beliefs in Truth
English | 2024 | ISBN: 3031665511 | 241 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 5 MB
English | 2024 | ISBN: 3031665511 | 241 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 5 MB
This book reframes the fundamentals of decisionmaking under uncertainty. For almost a century, theorists have spoken of truth-finding in terms of probability. They have said things like some past fact was 51% certain or proclaimed that in a civil dispute a fact must be shown to exceed a 50% likelihood. But such talk is a misleading misconception. The reason is that traditional probability fails to distinguish epistemic uncertainty from aleatory uncertainty. This conflation leads to mistakes such as invoking probability’s product rules, which calculate a conjunction’s likelihood as being low. From there, the theorists have argued that in a myriad of ways, the law violates the probability calculus unforgivably.