ABSTRACT
For over 50 years, there has been a consensus among philosophers, statisticians, and other probabilists about how to think about probability and its applications. According to this consensus, probability is first of all a theory in pure mathematics, based on Kolmogorov’s axioms and definitions. Different interpretations of these axioms are possible, and the usefulness of each interpretation can be debated, but the mathematical theory of probability stands above the debate. As the historian Lorraine Daston (1988) put it, “The mathematical theory itself preserves full conceptual independence from these interpretations, however successful any or all of them may prove as descriptions of reality” (pp. 3–4).
