Statistical Syllogism - History

History

Ancient writers on logic and rhetoric approved arguments from "what happens for the most part". For example Aristotle writes "that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, mostly in a particular way, is likely, for example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate."

The ancient Jewish law of the Talmud used a "follow the majority" rule to resolve cases of doubt.

From the invention of insurance in the 14th century, insurance rates were based on estimates (often intuitive) of the frequencies of the events insured against, which involves an implicit use of a statistical syllogism. John Venn pointed out in 1876 that this leads to a reference class problem of deciding in what class containing the individual case to take frequencies in. He writes, “It is obvious that every single thing or event has an indefinite number of properties or attributes observable in it, and might therefore be considered as belonging to an indefinite number of different classes of things”, leading to problems with how to assign probabilities to a single case, for example the probability that John Smith, a consumptive Englishman aged fifty, will live to sixty-one.

In the 20th century, clinical trials were designed to find the proportion of cases of disease cured by a drug, in order that the drug can be applied confidently to an individual patient with the disease.