This chapter and Chapter 13 are concerned with the history of the subject rather than its present status. There is a complex and fascinating history before 1900, recounted by Stigler (1986c), but we are concerned now with more recent developments. In the period from about 1900 to 1970, one school of thought dominated the field so completely that it has come to be called ‘orthodox statistics’. It is necessary for us to understand it, because it is what most working statisticians active today were taught, and its ideas are still being taught, and advocated vigorously, in many textbooks and universities.

In Chapter 17 we want to examine the ‘orthodox’ statistical practice thus developed and compare its technical performance with that of the ‘probability as logic’ approach expounded here. But first, to understand this weird course of events, we need to know something about the problems faced then, the sociology that evolved to deal with them, the roles and personalities of the principal figures, and the general attitude toward scientific inference that orthodoxy represents.