Many statisticians adopt an eclectic view of the debate between proponents of the frequency interpretation of probability and proponents of personal probability. These eclectics say in essence, "if it walks like a duck...". They are willing to consider any phenomena which obey the axioms of probability theory as a reasonable interpretation. Sometimes they will use methods associated with frequentists and at other times, they use Bayesian methods.
Some philosophers of probability support eclectic probability as a principled, rather than pragmatic, view. They argue that different interpretations of probability are independent of one another, applying in different contexts. For example, one might accept a frequency interpretation of probability for repeatable experiments, a logical interpretation of probability for a single-case event with highly specific prior information, and a personal interpretation of probability for dealing with epistemic uncertainty, all without committing an inconsistency.
Nov 21, 2006 12:31:42 AM For a liberally-minded blog, the probability of 0.5 should be adjusted to 0.499, to allow for the finite probability that one of the children may be deeply disatisfied with their current gender identity.
"I agree with you, the probability is 1/2.
The only way the probability of a boy-girl family would be 2/3 is if every mother of a boy-girl family walks around with the girl 100% of the time and never walks around with the boy, so any time you see her out walking, you are guaranteed to see the girl rather than the boy.
This is, of course, the ultimate aim of any textual critic, but the eclectic method, by using different criteria and by working from a different standpoint, tries to arrive at the true reading, untrammeled by discussion about the weight of ms.
This kind of "eclecticism" becomes the great leveller—all variants are equals and equally candidates for the original text, regardless of date, residence, lineage, or textual context.
The practice of pure eclecticism seems to imply either despair that the original wording can be recovered on the basis of external evidence, or an unwillingness to undertake the hard work of reconstructing the history of the text, or both.
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