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Is it practical and useful to distinguish aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty?

stat.berkeley.edu · 1,521 words · saved by 1 readers

In Hacking's An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic, the brief chapter on philosophical interpretations of probability concludes with the following comments. Note that these two sources of uncertainty are qualitatively distinct. The first reflects the President's lack of confidence in his knowledge of a fact (i.e., whether or not bin Laden was residing at the compound). The second reflects variability in possible realizations of an event that is largely stochastic in nature -- if the mission were to be run several times it would succeed on some occasions and fail on others due to unpredictable causes (e.g., performance of mechanical equipment, effectiveness of U.S. troops and bin Laden's defenders on a particular night). The second case involves a model for sports or games -- for simplicity a 2-team (or 2-person) game ending in win/lose. In the model each team is assumed to have a numerical ability (skill) level, and the probability that A will beat B is assumed to be a giv

Ale Epi Is it practical and useful to distinguish aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty? Introduction Philosophers have long emphasized a distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Epistemic refers to lack of knowledge -- something we could in principle know for sure -- in contrast to aleatoric "intrinsic randomness" involved in which of possible futures will actually occur. As a basic iconic example of the distinction between these two categories, consider whether the top card of a deck will be an Ace after I shuffle and look at it. The uncertainty here is aleatoric before I shuff

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