Abstract
Inductive behavior vs. inductive inference: Neyman and Fisher. A dramatics meeting of the Royal Statistical Society occurred on December 18,1934, when R. A. Fisher — already at the height of his fame although not universally popular — presented a paper on The Logic Of Inference . He stated that it was concerned with the problem of drawing inferences from the particular to the general or, in statistical language, from the sample to the population. He pointed out that deductive arguments based on probability were not adequate for such inferences, “for reasoning of a genuinely inductive kind,” unless one used the theory of inverse probability [i.e. Bayesian inference] thereby “making it a deduction from the general to the particular.” He then advanced the ambitious claim that truly inductive reasoning could be based on his concept of likelihood, which appeared “to take its place as a measure of rational belief when we are reasoning from the sample to the population,” and proceeded to develop some of its properties.
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Lehmann, E.L. (2012). Neyman’s Statistical Philosophy. In: Rojo, J. (eds) Selected Works of E. L. Lehmann. Selected Works in Probability and Statistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1412-4_90
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