Colin Howson (1945-2020)
Colin Howson died at the age of 74 on 5 January 2020. He had suffered for a short time the effects of an irremediable brain tumour. In his book Objecting to God (2011, CUP), Colin had argued passionately and with logical precision against those who, on religious and other grounds, oppose ‘the principle of self-determination’, that is to say, the right under certain circumstances to determine one’s own end. When he discovered, towards the end of 2019, that his condition was both aggressive and untreatable, he was able, as a permanent resident of Canada, to exercise this right himself, since physician-assisted euthanasia is legal in that country.
Howson was born in London and at a young age moved to Devon with his parents and older sister. He attended Colyton Grammar School, where he became head boy. In 1963 he enrolled at the London School of Economics, and in 1968 was offered a lectureship there just a year after graduating, and shortly after beginning his doctoral studies. From that time until his death he produced a succession of influential books and papers, which won him a formidable international reputation as an authority in the philosophy of probability and logic.
Though a student and a teacher in a department dominated by the philosophical ideas of its founder, Sir Karl Popper, ideas that were continued and developed by Popper’s charismatic successor, Imre Lakatos, Howson was immune to their popular appeal and remained his own man. The second paper that Colin published, entitled ‘Must the Logical Probability of Laws Be Zero?’ (BJPS, 1973, 24, pp. 153–63), showed that in fact they do not necessarily have to be. His thoroughly original argument removed an essential plank from Popper’s ‘falsificationist’ philosophy. From then, Colin’s interest and conviction moved in the direction of Bayesian theory. Bayesian inductive reasoning, which before the twentieth century was fairly standard, had by this time not just dropped out of fashion but had sunk into obloquy, and few and brave were its defenders.
But the 1990s saw signs of a radical turnaround, so that today Bayesian methodology is treated with renewed respect by philosophers and is increasingly influential amongst statisticians and scientists, notably medical epidemiologists. Howson contributed to this revival through the many articles he published defending a probabilistic basis of inductive reasoning, and by his altogether original exposition of the axioms of probability as laws of consistency and rational discourse, comparable, as he argued, to the laws of deductive logic. His book (co-authored with Peter Urbach) Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach (Open Court), which went through three editions between 1989 and 2005, is widely cited, and is considered the canonical philosophical defence of Bayesian reasoning.
Logic with Trees, published in 1997 by Routledge, is an introduction to first-order logic, in which Colin also discussed related philosophical issues, such as truth, modal logic, and Gödel’s and Church’s theorems.
Colin addressed David Hume’s famous problem of induction in his Hume’s Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief (2000, OUP). The problem is that logic cannot justify our natural tendency to take past empirical observations as a guide to what we may observe in the future, yet this is exactly what scientists and indeed all of us regularly do. Howson again drew on Bayesian, probabilistic philosophy to illuminate the significance of Hume’s problem and provide what is now widely viewed as a persuasive solution.
In his final book, referred to earlier, Colin applied his logical expertise against what he saw as the illogic and obscurantism in much religious discourse. One characteristic remark is this: ‘There is a profound moral issue in the elevation of faith over evidence. Impartial evidence is the defence of honest people against imposters and frauds.’.
Apart from the four books already mentioned, Colin published some ninety articles in learned journals, including The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science; Philosophy of Science; The Journal of Applied Logic; Synthese; and Nature.
Much of Colin’s research concerned the foundations of probability theory, its justification as the basis for induction, and the status of the axiom of countable additivity. His final two published papers, dealing with Timothy Williamson’s much-discussed coin-flipping argument, appeared in Philosophy of Science in 2018 and in Erkenntnis in 2019.
Shortly before he died, Colin submitted for publication a paper on the Dutch book argument for the axiom of countable additivity for subjective probability functions. Although de Finetti famously rejected the axiom, Dubins showed this to have strongly paradoxical consequences that a weaker rule than countable additivity blocks. Colin argued that Dubins’s weaker rule, which also prohibits the de Finetti lottery, has powerful independent support from a desirable closure principle. Although the Dutch book argument has generated a voluminous literature, no one has shown why Dubins’ weaker rule should be adopted and what its implications are. The paper’s originality and significance are sure to make it a classic in the foundations of probability literature.
In 1997, Howson was appointed Professor of Logic at LSE and served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1999 to 2006. He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science from 2003–05 and previously served as an Assistant Editor for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, from 1971–73 and again from 1974–78. On his retirement from LSE in 2008, he was offered and accepted a position in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he joined his Canadian wife, the philosopher Margaret Morrison, who survives him. He retired in 2014.
Colin Howson had an immense charm, a razor-sharp mind, exceptional intelligence, open-mindedness and an ever-inventive wit. His many successful doctoral students remember him as a patient and encouraging mentor. And for many colleagues and for his collaborators he was a wise and a good friend.
Peter Urbach
COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Howson, C. (ed.) [1977]: Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howson, C. [1997]: Logic with Trees, London: Routledge.
Howson, C. [2000]: Hume’s Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howson, C. [2011]: Objecting to God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howson, C. and Urbach, P. [1989]: Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach, Chicago, IL: Open Court (second edition [1993], third edition [2006]).
Chapters
Howson, C. [1976]: The Development of Logical Probability’, in R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyerabend, M. W. Wartofsky (eds), Essays in Honour of Imre Lakatos, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 222–98.
Howson, C. [1979]: ‘Methodology in Non-empirical Disciplines’, in G. Radnitzky and G. Anderson (eds), The Structure and Development of Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 257–66.
Howson, C. [1990]: ‘Fitting your theory to the facts: probably not such a bad thing after all’, in C. Wade Savage (ed.), Discovery, Justification, and Evolution of Scientific Theories, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 224–45.
Howson, C. [1992]: ‘Mathematics in Philosophy’, in J. Echeverria, A. Ibarra and T. Mormann (eds), The Space of Mathematics: Philosophical, Epistemological, and Historical Explorations, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 192–201.
Howson, C. [1993]: ‘Personalistic Bayesianism’, in J. Dubucs (ed.), Philosophy of Probability, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1–12.
Howson, C. [1994]: ‘Que es y que no es la probabilidad inductiva’, in E. de Bustos, J. C. Garcia-Bermejo, E. Perez Sedeno, A. Rivadulla, J. Urrutia and J. L. Zofio (eds), Perspectivas Actuales de Logica y Filosofia de la Ciencia, Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, pp. 417–25.
Howson, C. [1995]: ‘Bernoulli’s Theorem’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howson, C. [1995]: ‘Satisfaction’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howson, C. [1995]: ‘Alfred Tarski’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howson, C. [1995]: ‘Snow Is White’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘Bayesian Rules of Updating’, in D. Costantitini and M. C. Galavotti (eds), Probability, Dynamics, and Causality: Essays in Honor of Richard Jeffrey, Berlin: Springer, pp. 55–69.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘Error Probabilities in Error’, Proceedings of the Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association, 64, pp. S185–94.
Howson, C. [1998]: ‘The Bayesian Approach’, in D. Gabbay and P. Smets (eds), Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems: Quantified Representation of Uncertainty and Imprecision, Vol. 1, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 111–35.
Howson, C. [2000]: ‘Evidence and Confirmation’, in W. H. Newton-Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 108–16.
Howson, C. [2000]: ‘Induction and the Uniformity of Nature’, in W. H. Newton-Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 181–3.
Howson, C. [2001]: ‘The Logic of Personal Probability’, in D. Corfield and J. Williamson (eds), The Foundations of Bayesianism, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 137–61.
Howson, C. [2002]: ‘Bayesianism in Statistics’, in R. Swinburne (ed.), Bayes’s Theorem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39–71.
Howson, C. [2009]: ‘Logic and Finite Additivity: Mutual Supports in Bruno de Finetti’s Probability Theory’, in M. C. Galavotti (ed.), Proceedings of the 2006 Bologna Workshop to Celebrate the Centenary of Bruno de Finetti’s Birth, London: College Publications, pp. 41–59.
Howson, C. [2003]: ‘Bayesian Evidence’, in M. Galavotti (ed.), Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 301–21.
Howson, C. [2005]: ‘Ramsey’s Big Idea’, in M. J. Frapolli (ed.), F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments, London: Continuum Press, pp. 139–61.
Howson, C. [2006]: ‘Scientific Reasoning and the Bayesian Interpretation of Probability’, in J. Alcolea and W. Gonzalez (eds), Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy and Methodology of Science, Perillo-Oleiros, A Coruña: Netbiblo, pp. 31–47.
Howson, C. [2005]: ‘Some Formal Analogies between Logic and Probability: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’, We Will Show Them: Essays in Honour of Dov Gabbay, London: College Publications.
Howson, C. [2008]: ‘Bayesianism’, in M. Curd and S. Psillos (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge, pp. 123–34.
Howson, C. [2009]: ‘Degrees of Belief as Subjective Probabilities’, in F. Huber and C. Schmidt-Petri (eds), Degrees of Belief, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 97–119.
Howson, C. [2011]: ‘Bayesianism as a Pure Logic of Inference’, in P. Bandyopadhyay and M. Forster (eds), Philosophy of Statistics, London: North Holland.
Howson, C. [2011]: ‘Truth and the Liar’, in P. Clark, D. DeVidi and M. Hallett (eds), Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, Vintage Enthusiasms: Essays in Honour of J. L. Bell, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 115–35.
Howson, C. and Urbach, P. [1994]: ‘Probability, Uncertainty, and the Practice of Statistics’, in G. Wright and P. Ayton (eds), Subjective Probability, Chichester: John Wiley, pp. 39–53.
Articles
Franklin, A. and Howson, C. [1984]: ‘Why Do Scientists Prefer to Vary Their Experiments?’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 15, pp. 51–62.
Franklin, A. and Howson, C. [1985]: ‘Newton and Kepler’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 16, pp. 379–85.
Franklin, A. and Howson, C. [1989]: ‘It Probably Is a Valid Experimental Result: A Bayesian Approach to the Epistemology of Experiment’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 19, pp. 419–27.
Franklin, A. and Howson, C [1998]: ‘Comment on “The Structure of a Scientific Paper” by Frederick Suppe’, Philosophy of Science, 65, pp. 411–6.
Howson, C. [1972]: ‘The Plain Man’s Guide to Probability’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 23, pp. 157–70.
Howson, C. [1973]: ‘Must the Logical Probability of Laws Be Zero?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 24, pp. 153–63.
Howson, C. [1975]: ‘The End of the Road for Inductive Logic?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 26, pp. 143–9.
Howson, C. [1975]: ‘The Rule of Succession, Inductive Logic, and Probability Logic’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 26, pp. 187–98.
Howson, C. [1977]: ‘Why Once May Be Enough’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 55, pp. 142–7.
Howson, C. [1978]: ‘The Prehistory of Chance’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 29, pp. 274–80.
Howson, C. [1982]: ‘More about the Liar’, Erkenntnis, 17, pp. 263–5.
Howson, C. [1983]: ‘Statistical Explanation and Statistical Support’, Erkenntnis, 18, pp. 61–78.
Howson, C. [1984]: ‘Popper’s Solution of the Problem of Induction’, Philosophical Quarterly, 34, pp. 143–7.
Howson, C. [1984]: ‘Bayesianism and Support by Novel Facts’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 35, pp. 245–51.
Howson, C. [1984]: ‘Probabilities, Propensities, and Chances’, Erkenntnis, 20, pp. 279–93.
Howson, C. [1985]: ‘Some Recent Objections to the Bayesian Theory of Support’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 36, pp. 305–9.
Howson, C. [1987]: ‘Popper, Prior Probabilities, and Inductive Inference’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 38, pp. 207–24. Reprinted in O’Hear, A. [2003]: Karl Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, London: Routledge.
Howson, C. [1988]: ‘On the Consistency of Jeffreys’s Simplicity Postulate, and Its Role in Bayesian Inference’, Philosophical Quarterly, 38, pp. 68–83.
Howson, C. [1988]: ‘On an Argument for the Impossibility of a Statistical Explanation of Single Events, and a Defence of a Modified Form of Hempel’s Theory of Statistical Explanation’, Erkenntnis, 29, pp. 113–24.
Howson, C. [1988]: ‘Accommodation, Prediction, and Bayesian Confirmation Theory’, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 65, pp. 381–93. Reprinted in Lipton, P. [1995]: Theory, Evidence, and Explanation, Aldershot: Dartmouth.
Howson, C. [1989]: ‘Subjective Probabilities and Betting Quotients’, Synthese, 81, pp. 1–8.
Howson, C. [1989]: ‘On a Recent Objection to Popper’s and Miller’s “Disproof” of Probabilistic Induction’, Philosophy of Science, 56, pp. 675–80.
Howson, C. [1990]: ‘The Poverty of Historicism’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21, pp. 173–9.
Howson, C. [1990]: ‘Some Further Reflections on Popper’s and Miller’s “Disproof” of Probabilistic Induction’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 68, pp. 221–8.
Howson, C. [1991]: ‘The Last Word on Induction?’, Erkenntnis, 34, pp. 73–82.
Howson, C. [1991]: ‘The “Old Evidence” Problem’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 42, pp. 547–55.
Howson, C. [1992]: ‘Dutch Book Arguments and Consistency’, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Conference, 1992, pp. 161–8.
Howson, C. [1993]: ‘Discussion: The Case against Frequentism’, Statistics in Medicine, 12, pp. 1415–17.
Howson, C. [1995]: ‘Theories of Probability’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 46, pp. 1–32. Reprinted in Sklar, L. [2000]: The Philosophy of Science, New York: Garland.
Howson, C. [1996]: ‘Bayesian Updating’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 70, pp. S64–77.
Howson, C. [1996]: ‘Bayesian Rules of Updating’, Erkenntnis, 45, pp. 195–208.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘On Chihara’s “The Howson–Urbach Proofs of Bayesian Principles”’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48, pp. 83–90.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘A Logic of Induction’, Philosophy of Science, 64, pp. 268–90.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘Rules versus Models: Comments on Evans and Over’, Current Psychology of Cognition, 16, pp. 391–9.
Howson, C. [1997]: ‘Logic and Probability’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48, pp. 517–31.
Howson, C. [2003]: ‘Probability and Logic’, Journal of Applied Logic, 1, pp. 151–65.
Howson, C. [2006]: ‘The Logic of Probable Inference’, in Bulletin of Death and Life Studies, 2, pp. 67–83.
Howson, C. [2007]: ‘Reply to Hudson: “Howson on Novel Prediction”’, Logic and Philosophy of Science, 5, pp. 9–15.
Howson, C. [2007]: ‘Logic with Numbers’, Synthese, 156, pp. 491–512.
Howson, C. [2008]: ‘Can Probability Be Combined with Logic? Probably’, Journal of Applied Logic, 5, pp. 1–12.
Howson, C. [2008]: ‘De Finetti, Countable Additivity, Consistency, and Coherence’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 59, pp. 1–23.
Howson, C. [2009]: ‘Sorites Is No Threat to Modus Ponens: Reply to Kochan’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 23, pp. 209–13.
Howson, C. [2011]: ‘No Answer to Hume’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 25, pp. 279–84.
Howson, C. [2012]: ‘Modelling Uncertain Inference’, Synthese, 186, pp. 475–92.
Howson, C. [2013]: ‘Exhuming the No-Miracles Argument’, Analysis, 73, pp. 205–11.
Howson, C. [2013]: ‘Hume’s Theorem’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, pp. 339–46.
Howson, C. [2014]: ‘Finite Additivity, Another Lottery Paradox, and Conditionalisation’, Synthese, 191, pp. 989–1012.
Howson, C. [2014]: ‘A Continuum-Valued Logic of Degrees of Probability’, Erkenntnis, 79, pp. 1001–13.
Howson, C. [2015]: ‘David Hume’s No-Miracles Argument Begets a Valid No-Miracles Argument’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 54, pp. 41–5.
Howson, C. [2015]: ‘What Probability Probably Isn’t’, Analysis, 75, pp. 53–9.
Howson, C. [2015]: ‘Does Information Inform Confirmation?’, Synthese, 193, pp. 2307–21.
Howson, C. [2016]: ‘Repelling a Prussian Charge with the Solution to a Paradox of Dubins’, Synthese, 195, pp. 225–33.
Howson, C. [2016]: ‘How Pseudo-hypotheses Defeat a Non-Bayesian Theory of Evidence: Reply to Bandyopadhyay, Taper, and Brittan’, International Studies in Philosophy of Science, 30, pp. 299–306.
Howson, C. [2017]: ‘Regularity and Infinitely Tossed Coins’, European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 7, pp. 97–102.
Howson, C. [2017]: ‘Putting on the Garber-Style? Better Not’, Philosophy of Science, 84, pp. 659–76.
Howson, C. [2018]: ‘The Curious Case of Frank Ramsey’s Proof of the Multiplication Theorem of Probability’, Analysis, 78, pp. 431–9.
Howson, C. [2018]: ‘A Better Way of Framing Williamson’s Coin-Tossing Argument; but It Still Doesn’t Work’, Philosophy of Science, 86, pp. 366–74.
Howson, C. [forthcoming]: ‘Timothy Williamson’s Coin-Flipping Argument: Refuted before It Was Published?’, Erkenntnis, available at .
Howson, C. and Franklin, A. [1985]: ‘A Bayesian Analysis of Excess Content and the Localisation of Support’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 36, pp. 425–31.
Howson, C. and Franklin, A. [1991]: ‘Maher, Mendeleev, and Bayesianism’, Philosophy of Science, 58, pp. 574–85.
Howson, C. and Franklin, A. [1994]: ‘Bayesian Conditionalization and Probability Kinematics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 45, pp. 451–66.
Howson, C. and Oddie, G. [1979]: ‘Miller’s So-Called Paradox of Information’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 30, pp. 253–61.
Howson, C. and Urbach, P. [1991]: ‘Bayesian Reasoning in Science’, Nature, 350, pp. 371–4.
Misc
Howson, C. [2002]: ‘Why Are We Here?’, in M. Munroe (ed.), The Times Brief Letters to The Editor, London: Times Books.
Howson, C. and Beale, N. [1998]: ‘God and Science’, Prospect Magazine.
Williamson, J. [2007]: ‘An Interview with Colin Howson’, The Reasoner, 1, pp. 1–3.