Objective Possibility and Adequate Cause

Abstract

John Venn is traditionally regarded as the founder of the relative frequency interpretation of probability, but this tradition is misleading, both historically and textually. In The Logic of Chance, Venn was skeptical about such concepts as propensities, which he regarded as unmeaning restatements of descriptive statements of empirical relative frequencies. But while he often said that particular relations described by probabilities or rates are ‘nothing but’ expressions of the relative frequency of occurrences within a class (1866, p. 34) — a literally true characterization of such things as crime rates — he did not elevate this into a ‘theory’ of distinct probability, as writers such as Richard von Mises were to do in the period after the First World War. The German probability writing that arose out of the reaction to Quetelet was based on a kind of skepticism as well.