probabilistn.adj.

1657 J. Sergeant Schism Dispach't 93 Then indeed I shall not refuse to..rank them [sc. men who call us Papists] in Dr. H's Predicament of Probablists.

1728 E. Chambers Cycl. Probabilists, a Sect, or Division, among the Romanists,..holding, that a Man is not always obliged to take the more probable side, but may take the less probable, if it be but barely probable.

1768 G. Baretti Acct. Manners & Customs Italy II. 49 The vain disputes between the..Probabilists and the Probabiliorists, have long divided our friars into nearly equal parties.

1851 Encycl. Americana 210/1 Next arose the question, whether it was permitted to follow the probable meaning, in preference to the more probable. The probabilists answered in the affirmative.

1884 P. Schaff et al. Relig. Encycl. III. 1931 In 1665 Alexander VII felt compelled to disavow a number of the propositions of the Probabilists.

1912 Catholic Encycl. XIV. 701/1 Medina and St. Antoninus are claimed by the Probabilists.

1982 Stud. Eng. Lit. 1500–1900 22 160 Ordinarily, the majority opinion would rule, but probabilists held out the possibility that a less common opinion might be the right one.

1847 Webster's Amer. Dict. Eng. Lang. Probabilist. 1. A term applied to those who maintain that certainty is impossible, and that probability alone is to govern our faith and actions.

1877 Mind 2 381 If we had to characterise M. Cournot in a single word, he might most accurately be called a probabilist. He is related among the ancients to the representatives of the New Academy.

1953 Philos. Rev. 62 142 Plato was therefore no realist, for he subordinated existence to essence. This definition leads the author to identify the realist with the liberal and the ‘probabilist’.

1965 H. Sprout & M. Sprout Ecol. Perspective vi. 107 The common-sense probabilist assumes that the individual applies his environmental knowledge rationally to the choice of ends achievable.

1993 R. Foley Working without Net iv. 147 It would be convenient for probabilists to be able to declare that you have a precise degree of belief in every proposition that you understand.

1891 Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. 54 454 De Morgan himself, walking in the way of the older classical probabilists, calculated a rule for the same error.

1953 Math. Mag. 26 237 The present-day mathematical probabilists wanted to axiomatize their discipline.

1973 Nature 1 June p. i/1 (advt.) Forty-six leading probabilists are represented.

1988 I. Peterson Math. Tourist vii. 189 Mathematicians, particularly probabilists, are interested in how the process depends on the probability of transmission from one cell to another.

1993 B. Kosko Fuzzy Thinking (1994) ix. 149 The second criticism came from the probability school. Zadeh used numbers between 0 and 1 to describe vagueness or matters of degree. Probabilists felt they did the same thing.

1878 Catholic World Nov. 284/1 The aforesaid propositions..were never received by the school of Probabilist theologians.

1895 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 5 328 Sanchez was followed by the probabilist theologians, whose teachings were rapidly becoming predominant.

1930 F. S. Flint & D. F. Tait tr. R. Feülöp-Miller Power & Secret of Jesuits iv. 193 To the Jesuits, in their efforts to minimize the number and gravity of all sins, the Probabilist system must naturally have been uncommonly useful.

2005 in tr. J.-Y. Lacoste Encycl. Christian Theol. I. 263/2 On three occasions (1665, 1666, 1679), the Church condemned the laxity of the conclusions of certain probabilist arguments.

1938 Jrnl. Philos. 35 496 The author appeals..to the historical argument..to defend the probabilist thesis assimilated most probably by his reading the recent works of the pragmatists, realists, and scientists.

1960 K. M. Delavenay & E. Delavenay Introd. Machine Transl. vi. 93 Linguists who become automatic translation programmers will have to be trained on probabilist methods.

1970 L. J. Cohen Implications of Induction i. 29 The attack mounted here against probabilist theories of inductive syntax.

1991 Mind 100 150 The first is van Fraassen's provocative sketch of what he calls a probabilist epistemology, which he sees as stemming from Pascal as an underground stream, emerging into the mainstream in the work of Frank Ramsey.