The first half of the 20th century was a crucial time for the creation of modern conceptions of probability and statistics. In the 1920s and 1930s, J. Neyman and E. Pearson were developing hypothesis testing and B. de Finnetti was laying down the foundations of the subjective interpretation of probability. In Cambridge, F. Ramsey also developed his own subjectivist position. In 1921, J.M. Keynes published A Treatise on Probability, setting stage for the logical account of probability that would culminate in R. Carnap’s inductive logic started in the 1940s.
Right in the middle of all this activity there was a philosopher who was connected in some way to nearly all of its facets: her name was Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum. As a prolific philosopher who was on top of the developments in her discipline, she interacted personally or philosophically with all of the above main players in this field. Yet, the major texts in the history of analytic philosophy do not mention her, and in more narrowly specialist literature she had been delegated mainly to footnotes.
This talk will serve as an introduction and a primer to Hosiasson’s philosophical work, focussing on how she can be seen as a figure connecting philosophically and geographically diverse traditions. I will show how Hosiasson was able to develop her probabilistic logic of rational belief precisely because she was both a member of the Lvov-Warsaw School of philosophy (and had close ties with the Warsaw school of logic), and at the same time felt philosophically at home in Ramsey’s Cambridge. I highlighting those of her contributions that were the most ahead of her time, I will address the possible causes them going unnoticed—and talk more generally about the practice of intellectual recovery in the history of philosophy.
Marta Sznajder is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna. She specialises in the history of inductive logic and has led research projects on Carnap’s late inductive logic (NWO Veni, University of Groningen) and Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum’s philosophical career (MSCA Fellowship, University of Vienna).