What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Classical probabilists from Jakob Bernoulli through Pierre-Simon Laplace intended their theory as an answer to this question—as “nothing more at bottom than good sense reduced to a calculus,” in Laplace’s words. In terms that can be easily grasped by nonmathematicians, Lorraine Daston demonstrates how this view profoundly shaped the internal development of probability theory and defined its applications.
