Henry E. Kyburg

Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. (1928–2007) was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida. His first faculty posts were at Rockefeller Institute, University of Denver, Wesleyan College, and Wayne State University.

Kyburg worked in probability and logic, and is known for his Lottery Paradox (1961). Kyburg also edited Studies in Subjective Probability (1964) with Howard Smokler. Because of this collection's relation to Bayesian probability, Kyburg is often misunderstood to be a Bayesian. His own theory of probability is outlined in Logical Foundations of Statistical Inference (1974), a theory that first found form in his 1961 book Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief (in turn, a work closely related to his doctoral thesis). Kyburg describes his theory as Keynesian and Fisherian (see John Maynard Keynes and Ronald Fisher), a delivery on the promises of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach for a logical probability based on reference classes, a reaction to Neyman–Pearson statistics (see Jerzy Neyman, Egon Pearson, and Neyman–Pearson lemma), and neutral with respect to Bayesian confirmational conditionalization. On the latter subject, Kyburg had extended discussion in the literature with lifelong friend and colleague Isaac Levi.

Kyburg's later major works include Epistemology and Inference (1983), a collection of essays; Theory and Measurement (1984), a response to Krantz–Luce–Suppes–Tversky's Foundations of Measurement; and Science and Reason (1990), which seeks to allay Karl Popper's and Bruno de Finetti's concerns that empirical data could not confirm a universally quantified scientific axiom (e.g., F = ma).

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