Some Historical Remarks on the Baconian Conception of Probability

According to Ian Hacking, Francis Bacon had “no concern with probability” and “does not aim at inference under uncertainty.”2 I believe this to be an important mistake, though such mistakes are rare in Hacking’s fascinating book. In fact Bacon, and later writers influenced by him, were very much concerned with probabilities, though not with probabilities structured in accordance with the mathematical calculus of chance. I shall call the latter “Pascalian probabilities,” in tribute to one of the great mathematical pioneers in this area; and my object will be to demonstrate not only Bacon’s own concern with a non-Pascalian probability, but also the existence of a long line of philosophical or methodological reflections about such a probability, stretching at least from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century.