POISSON, Simeon Denis.

£3,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Recherches sur la Probabilité des Jugements First edition of Poisson's important work on the probability of criminal and civil verdicts, "in large part a treatise on probability theory after the manner of Laplace, with an emphasis on the behaviour of means of large numbers of measurements" (Stigler, pp. 182-3)."The legitimacy of the application of the calculus to areas relating to the moral order, that is to say within the broad area of what is now called the humanistic sciences, was bitterly disputed beginning in 1820 in politically conservative circles as well as by Saint-Simonians and by such philosophers as Auguste Comte. Poisson was bold enough to take pen in hand to defend the universality of the probabilistic thesis and to demonstrate the conformability to the order of nature of the regularities that the calculus of probability, without recourse to hidden causes, reveals when things are subjected to a great number of observations. It is to Poisson that we owe the term 'law of large numbers'. He improved Laplace's work by relating it explicitly to Jacob Bernoulli's fundamental theorem and by showing that the invariance in the prior probabilities of mutually exclusive events is not a necessary condition for calculating the approximate probabilities. It is also from Poisson that we derive the study of a problem that Laplace had passed over, the case of great asymmetry between opposite events, such that the prior probability of either event is very small" (DSB).The copy of

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