Thoughts on Jun Otsuka’s Thinking about Statistics – the Philosphical Foundations

Jun Otsuka’s excellent book, Thinking about Statistics - the Philosophical Foundations (Otsuka 2023) is mostly organized around the idea that different statistical approaches can be illuminated by linking them to different ideas in general epistemology. Otsuka connects Bayesianism to internalism and foundationalism, frequentism to reliabilism, and the Akaike Information Criterion in model selection theory to instrumentalism. This useful mapping doesn’t cover all the interesting ideas he presents. His discussions of causal inference and machine learning are philosophically insightful, as is his idea that statisticians embrace an assumption that is similar to Hume’s Principle of the Uniformity of Nature. I discuss these topics in what follows, sometimes disagreeing with details while at other times adding ideas that complement those presented in the book.