If a scholar says there is an 80% chance that Shakespeare wrote the play Macbeth, what does this most likely mean?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

In this question, we evaluate what it means when a scholar says there is an 80% chance that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.
Option 1: '80% of the words in Macbeth were written by Shakespeare.' This is wrong because probability statements about authorship do not pertain to the proportion of words attributed to a single author; authorship probability is about belief regarding authorship, not word counts.
Option 2: 'By the definition of what Macbeth is, there is an 80% chance that Shakespeare wrote it.' This is flawed because simply defining a work as Macbeth does not assign a probabilistic claim about who wrote it; the statement concerns belief about authorship, not definitional criteria.
Option 3: 'If you were able to run simulations of history, then in 80% of the simulations Shakespeare writes Macbeth.' This misconstrues probability as a frequency across possible histories; genuine probability here reflects a degree of belief given evidence, not a future sampling of historical outcomes.
Option 4: 'The scholar’s degree of belief that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth is 80%.' This aligns with the concept of subjective probability or degree of belief: the scholar is expressing their confidence level about authorship as a probabilistic assessment, not an assertion about objective frequencies.
Option 5: '80% of scholars think that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.' This is about the distribution of opinions among scholars, not the scholar's own degree of belief; the statement misinterprets probability as a consensus proportion rather than an individual belief.
In summary, the correct interpretation is that the 80% reflects the scholar’s own degree of belief about authorship, not counts of words, definitional criteria, simulated histories, or majority opinion among scholars.

ATHK1X01 Practice Quiz (Mastery quiz questions Week 2-13)

If a scholar says there is an 80% chance that Shakespeare wrote the play Macbeth, what does this most likely mean?

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