Abstract
This entry starts by defining probability, followed by a review of the historical context of probabilistic thinking. It continues with a brief commentary on experimental classical research on probabilistic thinking, heuristics, and biases research program. It then focuses on the main critical perspectives to this paradigm, the frequentist and the pragmatic approaches, which have reinterpreted the so-called cognitive illusions. These perspectives lead to a further exploration of the concept of probabilistic thinking, which opens the way toward a more genuinely psychological and comprehensive conception of “possible” and “uncertain.”
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Notes
- 1.
As in most Book bag-and-poker chip problems, the starting point of subjective estimation is specifically set by the prior probability procedure, but the point at which participants decide to stop revising their estimate, according to us, seems in most cases not too far from likelihood.
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Macchi, L., Caravona, L., Aimo, N., Cucchiarini, V. (2022). Probabilistic Thinking. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_208-1
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