Abstract

This book would be very important indeed if Mr. Spencer Brown had substantiated his claims “that the concept of probability used in statistical science is meaningless in its own terms” , and that confirming this is the only significance of experiments in psychical research. The six short introductory chapters need not be discussed here. It is in Chapters VII to IX that the author develops his thesis that the concept of randomness is self–contradictory, and the statistician's concept of probability consequently meaningless. I shall examine what I take to be the central argument leading to this conclusion. This is developed from a distinction between “primary chance or randomness” and “secondary chance or randomness” . The former concept is to be applicable only to individual events and is to depend upon their “unexpectedness or unpredictability”; the latter concept, applicable only to a series as such, is denned as “possessing no discernible pattern” . The definition of “primary randomness” is amplified, but not clarified, on page 49: “An event is primarily random in so far as... one cannot be sure of its occurrence... The only relevant criterion is that we are able to guess ”. We are then told that primary randomness “admits of analysis in subjective terms”, since the same event may be predictable by one person but unpredictable by another; whereas secondary randomness is “a more objective concept”