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112

If you carefully examine the line of thought of
these writers, you will find that they assume throughout,
that we must at all times be in a condition
to know what the probability of a future occurrence
is. Now if probability is to be anything but a delusion
it must have some objective meaning. To know a
probability must be to know something. To know that
the probability of a coin turning up heads is ½ must
be to know, in a positive (I do not say in an infallible)
sense that it will turn up heads half the time
in the course of our future experience. Yet Laplace, the
master of those writers, founds his whole theory on
the express assumption that if we know nothing about a
coin or even as he remarks if we know it is loaded one way or the other
the probability that it will turn up heads is
½, so long as we do not know which way it is loaded.
This is the πρῶτον ψεῦδος of their whole

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