Greek paideia and terms of probability

Abstract

This paper addresses three aspects of the conceptual framework for a doctoral dissertation research in process in the field of Mathematics Education, in particular, in the subfield of teaching and learning basic concepts of Probability Theory at the College level. It intends to contrast, sustain and elucidate the central statement that the meanings of some of these basic terms used in Probability Theory were not formally defined by any specific theory but relate to primordial ideas developed in Western culture from Ancient Greek myths. The first aspect deals with the notion of uncertainty, with that Greek thinkers described several archaic gods and goddesses of Destiny, like Parcas and Moiras, often personified in the goddess Tyche—Fortuna for the Romans—, as regarded in Werner Jaeger’s “Paideia”. The second aspect treats the idea of hazard from two different approaches: the first approach deals with hazard, denoted by Plato with the already demythologized term ‘tyche’ from the viewpoint of innate knowledge, as Jaeger points out. The second approach deals with hazard from a perspective that could be called “phenomenological”, from which Aristotle attempted to articulate uncertainty with a discourse based on the hypothesis of causality. The term ‘causal’ was opposed both to ‘casual’ and to ‘spontaneous’ (as used in the expression “spontaneous generation”), attributing uncertainty to ignorance of the future, thus respecting causal flow. The third aspect treated in the paper refers to some definitions and etymologies of some other modern words that have become technical terms in current Probability Theory, confirming the above-mentioned main proposition of this paper.

Keywords

• paideia
• indeterminismo
• incertidumbre
• probabilidad
• aleatoriedad
• estocástico