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The Rhetoric of Probability Mathematics
Author: Terri Palmer
Degree: Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005
This dissertation discusses the rhetorical aspects of mathematical
theory about the probable from a historical perspective. While today the
term "probability" is considered a mathematical term, this is an historically recent development; before the mid-seventeenth century or so, the term
was used extensively in forensic rhetoric but had no mathematical
definition at all. I discuss the uses of this
term as a specifically rhetorical term and then go on to discuss the
history of probability mathematics, focusing on the earliest works of true
probability mathematics, the mid-seventeenth century The Art of
Thinking and Jakob Bernoulli's early eighteenth-century Ars Conjectandi.
My contention is that handbooks of forensic rhetoric (such as the Ad
Herennium, De Inventione, and parts of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria)
bore striking resemblances to the use of probability in Bernoulli and the
Port-Royalists' texts and were texts that both parties were familiar with.
My dissertation builds on previous research by arguing that these
similarities are much more striking than had previously been noted. |