Reply to thread

Despite dealing with something as fascinating as "what could be or happen," Probability as a discipline tends to be short on an appreciation of the miraculous, and by this I don't intend to invoke the rigid binaries of religion vs science or enchantment vs enlightenment. Though it has been argued that the enlightenment has engendered a different kind of enchantment--an enchantment with scientific progress, the efforts to number, quantify, and order reality. Ordering reality thus is one way to examine it, and it means that reality can be usefully examined this way, but it doesn't follow that reality itself in intrinsically, fundamentally ordered. To make the latter leap is to make an erroneous transductive claim. Similarly, one cannot say that "events with sufficiently small probability will never occur"; the statement is both transductive and contradictory; unless of course one means that "events with sufficiently small probability may never occur in one's lifetime." This modification might be more accurate.