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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
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Subject: Re: this is philosophy ??!!?
Keywords: I can't believe it
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Date: 9 May 88 14:12:39 GMT
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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
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Subject: Re: this is philosophy ??!!?
Keywords: I can't believe it
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Date: 9 May 88 14:12:39 GMT
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In article  byerly@cars.rutgers.edu
(Boyce Byerly ) writes:
>
>Perhaps the logical deduction of western philosophy needs to take a
>back seat for a bit and let less sensitive, more probalistic
>rationalities drive for a while.
>
I have a favoire paper which I always like to recommend when folks like Boyce
propose putting probabilistic reasoning "in the driver's seat:"

	Alvan R. Feinstein
	Clinical biostatistics XXXIX.  The haze of Bayes, the aerial palaces
		of decision analysis, and the computerized Ouija board.
	CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY AND THERAPUTICS
	Vol. 21, No. 4
	pp. 482-496

This is an excellent (as well as entertaining) exposition of many of the
pitfalls of such reasoning written by a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
at the Yale University School of Medicine.  I do not wish this endorsement to
be interpreted as a wholesale condemnation of the use of probabilities . . .
just a warning that they can lead to just as much trouble as an attempt to
reduce the entire world of first-order predicate calculus.  We DEFINITELY
need abstractions better than such logical constructs to deal with issues
such as uncertainty and belief, but it is most unclear that probability
theory is going to provide those abstractions.  More likely, we should
be investigating the shortcomings of natural deduction as a set of rules
which represent the control of reasoning and consider, instead, possibilities
of alternative rules, as well as the possibility that there is no one rule
set which is used universally but that different sets of rules are engaged
under different circumstances.