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E. T.JAYNES SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS INTRODUCTION When told of the plan to devote an issue of Synthese to the principle of maximum entropy (PME), my first reaction was puzziement as to why philosophers should be so interested in it. Then a plausible reason appeared to be that PME has been perceived (correctly, in my view) as a small but nonnegligible part of a fundamental revolution in thought now taking place. We have the analysis of Kuhn describing how new foundation concepts make their way into science; but today in order to study this one does not nced to go back to the history books to read of epicycles and ellipses. We can observe in our midst the phenomenon of one paradigm in the process of being replaced by another. In one respect, our present revolution is not like those of cosmology, evolution, or relativity — which, however grand their concepts, were specialized to one particular area of science. What we lack in grandness of concept we make up for in generality; the new revolution concerns the principles of all imman inference, and it applies with equal force to ali areas of science. ‘l'he conceptual disorientation and resulting con- troversy arc being exhibited now in the scientific journals of half a dozen different fields. But we have to admit that the spectacle unfolding today teaches us very little that could not have been learned from those history books; it is astonishingly like what happened in the time of Galileo, down to such small details as to give one a spooky feeling. However, this is rot the place to develop that theme. HOW THE REVOLUTION STARTED It should be pointed out that my publications, starting in 1957, make a rather late entry into this movement. Prior to that, many important works - by R. de Finpetti, H. Jellreys, R. T. Cox, C.E. Shannon, IL. J. Good, A. Wald, R. Carnap, L. J. Savage, and D. V. Lindley - had Synthese 63 (1985) 115-138. 0039-7857/85.10 © 1985 hy D. Reidel Publishing Company