A reflection on the subjective interpretation of the philosophy of probability: probabilistic cognition and non-probabilistic perception

The subjective interpretation, as one of the four conventional interpretations of the philosophy of probability, was introduced by Frank Ramsey and Bruno De Finetti to overcome some problems of Bayesianism. This interpretation has fans today and is of interest to many Bayesians. The epistemological feature of the Bayesian framework is subjective trust (or credence). The purpose of this article is to further investigate the subjective interpretation of the philosophy of probability, from the perspective of the tension between probabilistic cognition and non-probabilistic perception. The meaning of probabilistic cognition is knowledge based on mathematical relationships and especially the Bayesian formula, which provides the level of certainty of an event by using credits (degrees of belief). On the other hand, non-probability perception is the result of individual interpretations or any other type of probability assignment without considering the mathematics of probability. The investigations will show that this tension is real, and the solution presented in this article is that in predicting events based on subjective interpretation, non-probability perception cannot be ignored.