Abstract

The movies of Alfred Hitchcock provide continuous plot twists and surprising revelations. But what exactly makes an event improbable? Examples from Hitchcock movies are used to demonstrate how we might talk about different kinds of probability. A larger discussion of evidential probability then follows in which the movie Rear Window is used to illustrate methods of induction. More specifically, the reasoning process of Jimmy Stewart's character involves him asking the very questions that Bayes Theorem calls us to ask, as we evaluate evidential probability.