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Statistical syllogism
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==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."<ref>Aristotle, ''[[Prior Analytics]]'' 70a4-7.</ref><ref name=Frabook>{{cite book |last=Franklin |first=James |date=2001 |title=The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1zDECQAAQBAJ |location=Baltimore |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |pages=113, 116, 118, 200 |isbn=0-8018-6569-7}}</ref> The ancient Jewish law of the [[Talmud]] used a "follow the majority" rule to resolve cases of doubt.<ref name=Frabook /> {{rp|172โ5}} 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, โIt 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 thingsโ, 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.<ref>J. Venn,''The Logic of Chance'' (2nd ed, 1876), 194.</ref> 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.
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