Abstract
Life is an uncertain business. We can seldom be sure that our plans will work out as we intend, and are thus conditioned from an early age to think in terms of the likelihood that certain events will occur, and which are ‘more likely’ than others. Turning this vague description into a probability model amounts to the construction of a rational framework for thinking about uncertainty. The framework ought to be a general one, which enables us to handle equally situations where we have to sift a great deal of prior information, and those where we have little to go on. Some degree of judgement is needed in all cases; but we seek an orderly theoretical framework and methodology which enables us to formulate general laws in quantitative terms.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Capiński, M., Kopp, P.E. (2004). Motivation and preliminaries. In: Measure, Integral and Probability. Springer Undergraduate Mathematics Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0645-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0645-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-781-0
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