Numerical Probabilities as Metaphorical Expressions

In an earlier post I argued that assigning numerical probability to what has been a constantly changing environment can be a dangerous undertaking because this either depends on presumptive omniscience or requires heavy reliance on unrealistic assumptions that replaces people’s choice.

I would like to add the allegation where numerical probabilities serve as “framework for communication” does not improve the efficacy of numerical based probabilities because the basis of such communication would be ABSTRACTION.

Professor Ludwig von Mises calls this metaphorical expression(bold emphasis mine)

It is a metaphorical expression. Most of the metaphors used in daily speech imaginatively identify an abstract object with another object that can be apprehended directly by the senses. Yet this is not a necessary feature of metaphorical language, but merely a consequence of the fact that the concrete is as a rule more familiar to us than the abstract. As metaphors aim at an explanation of something which is less well known by comparing it with something better known, they consist for the most part in identifying something abstract with a better-known concrete. The specific mark of our case is that it is an attempt to elucidate a complicated state of affairs by resorting to an analogy borrowed from a branch of higher mathematics, the calculus of probability. As it happens, this mathematical discipline is more popular than the analysis of the epistemological nature of understanding.

There is no use in applying the yardstick of logic to a critique of metaphorical language. Analogies and metaphors are always defective and logically unsatisfactory. It is usual to search for the underlying tertium comparationis. But even this is not permissible with regard to the metaphor we are dealing with. For the comparison is based on a conception which is in itself faulty in the very frame of the calculus of probability, namely the gambler's fallacy.

In short, numerical probabilities serve to gratify one’s cognitive biases which in essence is a form of self-entertainment rather than a dependable methodology for risk analysis.