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The objective–subjective dichotomy and its use in

describing probability

Arnold Baise

To cite this article: Arnold Baise (2020) The objective–subjective dichotomy and its
use in describing probability, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 45:2, 174-185, DOI:
10.1080/03080188.2019.1705559

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INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS
2020, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 174–185
https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2019.1705559

The objective–subjective dichotomy and its use in

describing probability
Arnold Baise
Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article reviews the nature of the objective–subjective Received 17 June 2019
dichotomy, first from a general historical point of view, and Revised 23 October 2019
then with regard to the use of these terms over time to Accepted 13 December 2019
describe theories of probability. The different (metaphysical
KEYWORDS
and epistemological) meanings of ‘objective’ and Probability; objective;
‘subjective’ are analysed, and then used to show that all subjective; dichotomy;
probability theories can be divided into three broad classes. objectivity; subjectivity
A formal definition of (epistemological) objectivity is given
and used to clarify this division.

The words ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ have a long history and a number of
different meanings, as shown by their lengthy entries in the Oxford English Dic-
tionary (OED). This article summarizes their use as contrasting concepts, first
from a general historical viewpoint (section 1), and then as applied to theories
of probability from about 1700 to the present day (section 2). In addition, by
using the metaphysical and epistemological meanings of the objective-subjective
terms, and by defining objectivity, any interpretation of probability put forward
over the years is seen to belong to one of three general classes (sections 3 and 4).

1. The dichotomy historically

Consider first the modern understanding of the dichotomy from a metaphysical
point of view. Metaphysics deals with the fundamental nature of what exists, and
in this regard ‘objective’ refers to something that has a real existence in the world
independent of being thought of, whereas ‘subjective’ refers to anything that
depends for its existence on consciousness. Thus an individual has objective
attributes such as weight and height, whereas the person’s honesty and intelli-
gence are subjective. To regard these subjective qualities as attributes that can
be measured is the fallacy of reification.

CONTACT Arnold Baise abaise@usa.net 141 Fulton Ave, 12603, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 175

It is an interesting fact that scholars of the Middle Ages used ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ with meanings that are the exact reverse of those that are used today.
The OED (2019) illustrates this with an untranslated quote in Latin (c. 1325)
from the work of the nominalist William of Ockham. A modern translation is
as follows (Spade 1994, 218):
A universal is not anything real having subjective being [existence], either in the soul
[mind] or outside the soul [mind]. Instead it only has objective being [existence] in the
soul [mind]. It is a kind of fictum [mental picture] having being [existence] in objective
being [existence] like what the external thing has in subjective being [existence].1

Over the succeeding centuries, there was a gradual shift from the scholastic
distinction to its modern form. Lorraine Daston (1994) has described these
changes as reflected in philosophical works and various dictionaries of the
time, writing that ‘the meanings of the terms had, however, already branched
and crisscrossed in the seventeenth century in both Latin and in various verna-
culars, although ‘objective’ still generally modified thoughts rather than external
objects’ (333). She points out that mid-nineteenth-century German and French
dictionaries traced the origin of the newer meanings to Immanuel Kant,
although this has been questioned by Machiel Karskens (1992) in his detailed
study of the use of the dichotomy in the eighteenth century. He writes that
the work of philosopher Adolph Hoffmann2 ‘strongly accentuates in subjective
the internal, particular state of mind in (the consciousness of) the knowing
person or subject,’ and that Hoffmann used ‘object(ive) to refer to the status
of the real existence of the thing or event in itself, apart from intentional acts
of understanding’ (247). Karskens suggests these ideas influenced Kant and
his followers, and led to the ‘final equation of subject with human beings and
of object with extra-mental entities’ (251).
The OED (2019) gives examples from the seventeenth century of both the scho-
lastic and modern meanings of the words, but the scholastic use was gradually dis-
placed. The dictionary gives a good example of the modern sense from the late
eighteenth century (Anonymous 1793, 498): ‘Have the objects, which we consider
as really existing, in fact, a real objective existence, independent of our mode of
perceiving them?’ This usage became more common in English after 1800,
owing perhaps to the work of poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who studied in Germany and was influenced by the ideas of Kant and his fol-
lowers. In his Biographia Literaria ([1817] 1967, 174) he writes:
Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE we will henceforth call NATURE,
confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena

1
The word ‘fictum’ was not translated by Spade. Words added in brackets are suggested replacements taken from
alternative translations, see Ockham (1990, 41) and Karskens (1992, 214).
2
Adolph Friedrich Hoffmann (1707–1741) taught at the University of Leipzig and was a follower of the influential
German philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Their ideas are regarded as anticipating in some ways the
philosophy of Kant. See Klemme and Kuehn (2010).
176 A. BAISE

by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is
SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE.
Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis.

In addition to this metaphysical view of the objective-subjective terms, there is

also an epistemological dichotomy, which refers basically to whether one is
impartial (or not) when making judgments. The OED (2019) shows that this
usage in English dates from the nineteenth century, with some examples for
‘subjective’ from the eighteenth century. This dichotomy is discussed further
in section 3.

2. The dichotomy and probability

The systematic treatment of probability is usually regarded as beginning in the
second half of the seventeenth century. This period saw the famous correspon-
dence between Pascal and Fermat in 1654, the publication of Christiaan Huygens’s
book on games of chance (1657), and John Graunt’s analysis of the data in weekly
bills of mortality (1662). At the same time there emerged the idea of the dual
nature of probability, as described by Hacking (2006, 12): ‘On the one side it is
statistical, concerning itself with stochastic laws of chance processes. On the
other side it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing reasonable degrees of
belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical background.’ With hindsight
one can identify this difference, but probability theorists up to the mid-nineteenth
century did not distinguish explicitly between the two approaches.
Various descriptions have been used for this duality, such as objective versus
epistemic, or frequency-type versus belief-type; in this article it is referred to as
the metaphysical objective-subjective dichotomy. Thus if probability is regarded
as an actual physical property of a system, existing independent of consciousness
and estimated by measurements of some kind, then it is ‘metaphysically objec-
tive,’ otherwise it is ‘metaphysically subjective,’ that is, dependent on conscious-
ness and having a value assigned (not measured) to represent a state of
knowledge. The two probability classes are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
In the 1680s Jacob Bernoulli worked on his important book Ars Conjectandi,
but it was published posthumously only in 1713. In it he writes ([1713] 2006,
315, emphasis in original):
The certainty of anything is considered either objectively and in itself or subjectively
and in relation to us. Objectively, certainty means nothing else than the truth of the
present or future existence of the thing. Subjectively, certainty is the measure of our
knowledge concerning this truth. In themselves and objectively, all things under the
sun, which are, were, or will be, always have the highest certainty.

Bernoulli was a determinist; he believed that what happens in the future ‘will
occur with certainty’ as a result of ‘the highest Creator’s omniscience and omni-
potence’ (315). This is what Bernoulli called objective certainty, whereas the
 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 177

certainty of we mortals is subjective, limited by our incomplete knowledge of the

future. This leads to the concept of probability (315, emphasis in original): ‘Prob-
ability, indeed, is degree of certainty, and differs from the latter as a part differs
from the whole.’ Although he did not describe probability as objective or subjec-
tive, his approach is generally in accord with the metaphysical distinction intro-
duced above: that ‘objective’ means independent of human cognition, whereas
‘subjective’ refers to one’s state of knowledge. Regarding Bernoulli’s analysis,
Hacking (2006, 145) writes that ‘for the first time a ‘subjective’ conception of
probability is explicitly avowed.’
One hundred years later one finds Laplace ([1814] 1995, 2) expressing a
similar determinism:
All events, even those that on account of their rarity seem not to obey the great laws of
nature, are as necessary a consequence of these laws as the revolutions of the sun. …
We ought then to consider the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous
state and as the cause of that which is to follow.

Thus Laplace believed that the laws of physics determine the future of the phys-
ical world. It is only because of our lack of all the knowledge required to apply
these laws that the future cannot be predicted, hence the need for probability, a
measure of uncertainty: ‘Probability is relative in part to this ignorance and in
part to our knowledge’ (3). Laplace did not use the words ‘objective’ or ‘subjec-
tive’ in his writings, but he and Bernoulli shared a similar subjective view, their
views therefore being classified as metaphysically subjective, using the terminol-
ogy introduced earlier. As Daston (1994, 330) has commented, the possibility of
an objective probability ‘would have been an oxymoron for classical probabilists
such as Jakob Bernoulli and Pierre Simon Laplace.’
By the early 1800s the modern version of the dichotomy had replaced the
scholastic view, and the words began to enter the language of probability.
Daston (1994) has shown that around 1840 at least six probability theorists,
apparently independently, began emphasizing the dual nature of probability,
although they did not all use the objective-subjective terminology. Thus
Poisson, writing in 1837, used the French words chance and probabilité to
describe the duality, but it was Cournot (1843, v) who first introduced the fam-
iliar terms, when he wrote that it was necessary for him to use ‘les deux épithètes
d’objective et de subjective’ in order to discuss the meaning of probability3
(emphasis in original). Cournot’s work led to the development of the frequentist
theory, although Daston (336) writes that neither he nor the other probabilists
‘went so far as to identify probabilities baldly with frequencies.’ Hacking (1990,
97) has pointed out that this frequentist emphasis coincided with the increasing
availability of statistical data, that ‘the world teemed with frequencies, and the
‘objective’ notion would come to seem more important than the ‘subjective’

3
For details of Cournot’s analysis of probability, see Zabell (2011, 1154–1157).
178 A. BAISE

one for the rest of the century – simply because there were so many more fre-
quencies to be known.’
The logician John Venn certainly described probability in terms of a fre-
quency in his influential The Logic of Chance, first published in 1866. A prob-
ability was obtained in principle from an infinitely long series of proportions:
‘As we keep on taking more terms of the series we shall find the proportion
still fluctuating a little, but its fluctuations will grow less. The proportion, in
fact, will gradually approach towards some fixed numerical value’ (1888, 164).
Venn clearly has in mind here that probability is a property that one measures,
although he doesn’t use the word ‘objective’ to describe it.4 He uses that term,
however, in his criticism of Bernoulli’s well-known limit theorem (Bernoulli
[1713] 2006, 328–335), which he writes ‘is generally expressed somewhat as
follows: in the long run all events will tend to occur with a relative frequency
proportional to their objective probabilities’ (91). But Venn adds that the
basis on which the theorem depends for its proof is faulty, since there is
‘really nothing which we can with propriety call an objective probability’ (91).
Here Venn is criticizing the idea that one can obtain knowledge of probability
without reference to experience, see the comment by Wesley Salmon (1981,
132): ‘Since Venn is convinced that the only kinds of probabilities are frequen-
cies, he objects to the notion of ‘objective probability’ as another manifestation of
unwarranted a priorism.’5
Frequentists in the early twentieth century, on the other hand, were explicit in
regarding probability as being ‘objective.’ One finds, for example, Richard von
Mises (1964, 332) claiming the following (emphasis in original): ‘Bayesian
approach is often connected with a ‘subjective’ or ‘personal’ probability concept.
Our probability concept is and remains ‘objective’.’ In addition, he writes that
this means probability is a measurable property (1981, 14, emphasis in original):
The probability of a 6 is a physical property of a given die and is a property analogous
to its mass, specific heat, or electrical resistance. Similarly, for a given pair of dice
(including of course the total setup) the probability of a ‘double 6’ is a characteristic
property, a physical constant belonging to the experiment as a whole and comparable
with all its other physical properties. The theory of probability is only concerned with
relations existing between physical quantities of this kind.

R. A. Fisher was the pre-eminent frequentist of this era and he agreed with the
Mises view. For example, see the critical comment he made regarding the work
of Harold Jeffreys: ‘It will be noticed that the idea that a probability can have an
objective value, independent of the state of our information, in the sense that the

4
Fisher (1956, 25) writes that Venn ‘was developing the concept of probability as an objective fact, verifiable by
observations of frequency.’
5
An anonymous reviewer has supplied a relevant reference dealing with objective and subjective probability, in
particular with regard to the British probabilists de Morgan, Mill, Boole, Ellis, and Venn (Verburgt 2015). Verburgt
discusses in detail the difficulties involved in classifying their work from an objective or subjective point of view,
which arise partly from their varying use of these terms. With regard to Venn, he argues that Venn was a fre-
quentist but should not be regarded as advocating an objective probability.
 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 179

weight of an object, and the resistance of a conductor have objective values, is

here completely abandoned’ (1934, 4).
Mises and Fisher are the best-known advocates of the metaphysically objec-
tive view. The opposing metaphysically subjective view that was developed at
this time branched in two directions. These are associated mainly with John
Maynard Keynes and Harold Jeffreys on the one hand, and with Frank
Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, and Leonard J. Savage on the other. They are often
referred to as logical and personalist theories respectively. In this paper they
are called epistemologically objective and epistemologically subjective; these
terms are discussed further in section 3.
The logical view was described by Keynes in A Treatise on Probability, pub-
lished in 1921 but written before World War I. He regarded probability as a
degree of belief, but stressed the need to avoid personal bias. For him, probability
was ‘concerned with the degree of belief which it is rational to entertain in given
conditions, and not merely with the actual beliefs of particular individuals,
which may or may not be rational’ (1921, 4, emphasis in original). Furthermore,
probability was interpreted as a logical relation between propositions, written (in
current notation) as a conditional probability P(A|E), which is the extent to
which proposition A is logically implied by the evidence E. Keynes stressed
that ‘when once the facts are given which determine our knowledge, what is
probable or improbable in these circumstances has been fixed objectively, and
is independent of our opinion’ (4). So for Keynes ‘objectivity’ meant that,
given prior information E, the probability of A would be the same for everyone
who is rational.
Harold Jeffreys’s book Theory of Probability, first published in 1939, was a
defense of Bayesian methods in probability, and his views were similar to
those of Keynes. Thus he regarded probability as a reasonable degree of belief,
which should always be considered as conditional on some prior information
(1961, 406):
It is argued that because P(p|q) depends on both p and q it cannot be an objective state-
ment, since different persons with different knowledge would assess different probabil-
ities of p. … The probability of a proposition irrespective of the data has no meaning
and is simply an unattainable ideal. On the other hand, two people both following the
rules would arrive at the same value of P(p|q). It is a fact that the probabilities of a
proposition with respect to different data will in general differ, and people with
different data will make different assessments. But this is no contradiction, but
merely the recognition of an obvious fact. They will arrive at consistent assessments
if they tell each other their data and follow the rules.

E. T. Jaynes was a strong supporter of the Keynes-Jeffreys approach, although

he regarded objectivity as a goal to be reached: ‘Our goal is that inferences are to
be completely ‘objective’ in the sense that two persons with the same prior infor-
mation must assign the same prior probabilities’ (2003, 373). But Jaynes under-
stood the difficulty involved, since he also wrote: ‘There is no single universal
180 A. BAISE

rule for assigning priors – the conversion of verbal prior information into
numerical prior probabilities is an open-ended problem of logical analysis’
(88). As a result, his goal of achieving objectivity is surely unlikely to be realized.
This, however, is an incorrect view of what objectivity means, as discussed in
section 3.
An alternative to the logical theory is the personalist approach, where prob-
ability is also regarded as a degree of belief, but a purely personal one. It is a
measure of ‘the confidence that a particular individual has in the truth of a par-
ticular proposition’ (Savage 1972, 3). On this view, two people ‘faced with the
same evidence may have different degrees of confidence in the truth of the
same proposition’ (3), since a person determines a probability ‘by interrogating
himself, not by reference to the external world’ (51). This is an epistemologically
subjective view, in direct contrast to the logical view. The probabilities assigned
cannot be completely arbitrary, of course, since they must be coherent, that is,
obey the standard rules of probability.
The probability theories discussed above are obviously important in data
analysis, but they also feature prominently in modern physics, especially in
statistical mechanics and in quantum mechanics. Application of statistical
mechanics to a gas, for example, assumes that its constituent atoms or mol-
ecules obey the laws of classical physics, so that their behaviour is, in prin-
ciple, predictable (see the discussion of Laplace in section 2). Quantum
mechanical systems, on the other hand, are regarded as inherently non-deter-
ministic, with experimental outcomes that are not completely predictable.
This situation is clearly summarized by physicist J. M. Jauch (1974, 131,
emphasis in original):
The probabilities which occur in classical physics are interpreted as being due to an
incomplete specification of the systems under consideration, caused by the limitations
of our knowledge of the detailed structure and development of these systems. Thus
these probabilities should be interpreted as being of a subjective nature.

In quantum mechanics this interpretation of the probability statements has failed to

yield any useful insight, because it has not been possible to define an infrastructure
whose knowledge would yield an explanation for the occurrence of probabilities on
the observational level. Although such theories with ‘hidden variables’ have been envi-
saged by many physicists, no useful result has come from such attempts. I therefore
take here the opposite point of view which holds that the probabilities in quantum
mechanics are of a fundamental nature deeply rooted in the objective structure of
the real world. We may therefore call them objective probabilities.6

Comparing Jauch’s analysis with that given in this paper, one would classify the
probability used in statistical mechanics as metaphysically subjective, and the

6
The ‘hidden variables’ referred to by Jauch are variables that would allow one, in principle, to predict the future of
a quantum system if only they could be accessed experimentally. In other words, a quantum system would then
be regarded as deterministic and predictable, i.e. described by a metaphysically subjective probability.
 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 181

quantum mechanical probability as metaphysically objective.7 Further detailed

discussions of these probabilities can be found in the volume edited by Beisbart
and Hartmann (2011).
The sometimes confusing use of the objective and subjective terms has led
some writers to suggest avoiding them altogether. In his introductory textbook
on probability and induction, Hacking (2001, 131) writes: ‘If you read a lot about
probability, you will often read about ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ probabilities.
These are terrible terms, loaded with ideology.’ Jeffreys avoided using the dichot-
omy when discussing probability, and he wrote that the terms ‘have been used in
so many senses that they have become a source of confusion,’ and ‘the less the
words are used the better’ (1973, 210). But the words continue to be used, and
numerous attempts have been made to analyse their different meanings, see for
example Gillies (2000) and Zabell (2011). In this connection Gillies (20) has
commented as follows: ‘The analysis of the notion of objectivity is a difficult
matter. Indeed, one could say that it is one of the most fundamental problems
in philosophy.’ What appears to be lacking is a formal definition of objectivity,
an issue addressed in the next section.

3. Definition of objectivity
In recent years there have been several uses of the term ‘objective’ to describe a
form of Bayesian analysis. For example, the nature of the prior probability one
should use has been emphasized by Berger (2006, 387), who writes that ‘the most
familiar element of the objective Bayesian school is the use of objective prior dis-
tributions, designed to be minimally informative in some sense.’ Another
example is that of Williamson (2010, 1), who gives a number of criteria that
qualify his approach as a ‘version of objective Bayesianism,’ namely ‘the view
that an agent’s degrees of belief should be probabilities, should respect con-
straints imposed by empirical evidence, but should otherwise equivocate
between basic propositions.’ But without a definition of the word ‘objective’
being given, it is not clear why the approaches of these authors deserve that
description.
In the metaphysical dichotomy used in section 2 to characterize the dual
nature of probability, ‘subjective’ refers to a state of knowledge, and the question
then arises as to how one acquires this knowledge. This gives rise to another
(epistemological) dichotomy: one acquires knowledge either objectively or sub-
jectively. Subjective knowledge (or, more correctly, subjective belief) is generally
described as being partial or biased or prejudiced, or based on arbitrary assump-
tions or personal feelings; objective knowledge is then inferred by contrast, as
impartial or unbiased or not prejudiced, and so on. Whenever possible,
7
This description of objective probability resembles Karl Popper’s propensity theory, which was intended, in part, to
handle the interpretation of probability in quantum theory, see Gillies (2000, 113–136).
182 A. BAISE

however, one should define a concept by what it is rather than by what it is not,
but one will be hard-pressed to find such a definition of objectivity. One writer
on objectivity (Gaukroger 2012, 3) declines to define it, since ‘many difficulties
are generated in the search for a definition, because ‘objectivity’ can be under-
stood in different ways.’
For a positive analysis of objectivity, consider the work of novelist-philoso-
pher Ayn Rand, whose philosophy relies strongly on this concept (1990, 18):
Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the
relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of
the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologi-
cally, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must
acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain
rules (logic).

In addition, she defined ‘reason’ as ‘the faculty that identifies and integrates the
material provided by man’s senses’ (Peikoff 1991, 152), and stressed that the
exercise of reason is volitional and not automatic. So her description of epis-
temological objectivity can be rephrased as a formal definition (Baise 2017,
231): Objectivity is a method of thought by means of which one acquires knowl-
edge of reality by the volitional use of reason in accordance with the rules of
logic. Having defined objectivity in this way, it is not unreasonable to violate
the rule given above by defining ‘subjective’ as ‘not objective,’ that is, by what
it is not, since objectivity involves a specific way of thinking, whereas it is sub-
jectivity that ‘can be understood in different ways.’ In short, if one’s method
of thought is not objective then it is subjective; the two methods can be
thought of as dividing the metaphysically subjective class of probability theories
into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive subclasses, namely epistemologically
objective and epistemologically subjective.
One can see now the problem with the interpretation of objectivity by writers
such as Keynes, Jeffreys and Jaynes, in which a unique probability is supposedly
obtainable from given prior information, although how one does it is not made
clear. Objectivity, however, is properly understood as a method of thought, in
which reason and logic are used to reach a conclusion. So two individuals,
given the same information, can both be objective yet assign different prior prob-
abilities for an event or a hypothesis by making rationally and logically justified
different assumptions. Jaynes was a leading developer of methods for estimating
prior probabilities, and he used, for example, maximum entropy calculations
and also transformation groups, but he acknowledged (1983, 129) that these pro-
cedures ‘are not necessarily applicable to all problems, and so it remains an open
question whether other approaches may be as good or better.’ But they surely
qualify as objective probability assignments.
As an example of the importance of the assignment of Bayesian prior prob-
abilities, consider a widely-used area of artificial intelligence (AI), namely
 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 183

Bayesian networks. Probability was little used in AI prior to the 1980s, but that
changed with the development of Bayesian networks, which are now the stan-
dard for handling reasoning with uncertainty. For example, one important
development of this approach is the creation of expert systems, such as those
used in aiding medical diagnosis.
Briefly, a Bayesian network is represented graphically by a set of nodes joined
by links. Nodes represent variables of interest, and the links generally represent
causal relationships between the variables of any two nodes. A simple example of
a two-node network is a root node consisting of a variable V representing a virus
that is (or is not) present in a patient, and a non-root node consisting of a vari-
able T that indicates whether a test for the virus is positive or negative. Bayes’s
theorem is used to relate the two nodes by calculating, for example, the prob-
ability that the virus is present given that the test is positive. A Bayesian
network can consist of hundreds of nodes, and whenever new information is
obtained the whole network of probabilities can be updated using Bayes’s
theorem. For an introductory discussion of such networks, see Neapolitan and
Jiang (2016).
The important point here is that for every root node one needs to assign a
prior probability in order to use Bayes’s theorem initially, so the process of
choosing priors is important in network construction. It is often claimed that
the problem with Bayesian calculations is that the choice of a prior is subjective.
As shown above, however, prior probabilities can be objective provided one
understands what is meant by that term. Since objectivity as a method of
thought is volitional and not automatic, any probability analysis may not be con-
sistently objective, but the means of achieving objectivity is clear, namely by
rational and logical analysis rather than by subjective introspection.

4. Conclusion
This article presented a review of the objective-subjective dichotomy, which has
been used historically in a number of different ways to describe the nature of
probability. In addition to giving the historical data, it has been shown that
the various interpretations of probability can be classified by considering the
dichotomy from two points of view: metaphysical and epistemological. The
result is that probability theories can be divided into the following three
classes (along with some prominent advocates): metaphysically objective (von
Mises, Fisher), epistemologically objective (Keynes, Jeffreys, Jaynes), and episte-
mologically subjective (de Finetti, Savage), the last two classes being mutually
exclusive and exhaustive subclasses of the metaphysically subjective class.
An advantage of this classification is that it eliminates any confusion some-
times seen in the literature regarding the use of the objective-subjective terms.
For example, ‘objective’ has been used to describe the work of frequentists like
von Mises and the work of Bayesians like Jeffreys, while ‘subjective’ has been
184 A. BAISE

used for classical probabilists like Laplace and for Bayesians like de Finetti and
Savage. The classification also shows that a theory of probability can be both sub-
jective and objective by being subjective metaphysically but objective epistemo-
logically. Furthermore, by giving a formal definition of (epistemological)
objectivity, the proper meaning of objective Bayesianism is suggested, overriding
the unsupported claims of Bayesians referred to in the paper (Section 3).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Arnold Baise is an independent scholar. Formerly a research chemist, he obtained a PhD in
Physical Chemistry from the University of Wales before moving to the USA. There he
worked for IBM, doing research on the materials used in making microelectronic com-
ponents. After retiring, he became interested in studying probability and statistics, in particu-
lar the historical development of theories of probability.

ORCID
Arnold Baise http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7718-3835

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