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Preface to the special issue on developments of the concepts of randomness, statistics and probability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

GIUSEPPE LONGO
Affiliation:
Informatique, CNRS – Ecole Normale Supérieure et CREA, Paris, France Email: Giuseppe.Longo@ens.fr
MIOARA MUGUR-SCHÄCHTER
Affiliation:
CeSEF (Centre pour la Synthèse d'une Epistémologie Formalisee) adMCR (association pour le développement de la Méthode de Conceptualisation Relativisée), 47 Boulevard Georges Seurat, 92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Email: mms@noos.fr
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Under a variety of names, and in a more or less explicit form, the concept that we now call ‘probability’ must have taken shape in the mind of human beings since the dawn of thought, as a nuance added to the idea of chance (randomness) or unpredictability, though chance may not be exactly the right word. Some time later, the concepts of what we now describe as ‘statistics’ and ‘statistically stable’, moved away from the idea of ‘chance’ and came closer to something else, which was called ‘probability’ and has been fuzzily conceived as being, in some sense, abstract and ‘ideal’. Throughout history it has been felt that unpredictability can have degrees, and that it can be measured using probabilities.

Type
Editorial Preface
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014