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Whenever this condition cannot be satisfied, the determination of the probability will have only a subjective value. Cournot’s probabilistic epistemology 33 Statistics and economics The analysis presented above nevertheless raises a problem. When he turned his attention to statistics, Cournot gave it a field of application as extensive as the one he attributed to probability calculus.  125). Yet the role he gave to economic and social events in Exposition was limited, only touching on demography, insurance theory and legal statistics.

Thus, after languishing in the wilderness of obscurity during the mid-nineteenth century, Cournot’s economic theories underwent a period of criticism and rejection at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most glaring defects in the theory of markets were brought to light and considered reason enough to reject the whole body of work (Magnan de Bornier, 2000). To a greater or lesser degree, the many works on imperfect competition that appeared during the late 1920s and the 1930s – a very fertile period in economic theory – all relegated the Cournotian approach to the category of errors of the past (Robinson, 1969; Chamberlin, 1933).

For Cournot, it was not a question of choosing one or the other representation, but of ascribing the conditions and limits of the applicability of the calculus, and therefore of differentiating between the situations in which probability can possess an objective significance and those where it can only be subjectively valid. We should note that attributing a subjective significance to probability did not lead Cournot to define it as a ‘degree of confidence’, as the proponents of a ‘subjectivist’ interpretation, such as Bruno de Finetti and Frank Ramsey, were later to do.