Introduction

The first sentence of I. R. Savage’s book, Statistics: Uncertainty and Behav­ ior (1968), is: “Probabilities are quantitative expressions of uncertainty.” Thus, for Savage, the term uncertainty denotes a more general concept than the principle of quantum mechanics that earned W. K. Heisenberg a 1932 Nobel Prize. But what exactly is statistical uncertainty? One of the many possible answers to this question concerns what Savage calls “quantitative expressions.”