ABSTRACT
In his The Taming of Chance Ian Hacking (1990) locates the decade around 1660 as the birthtime of probability-the point at which chance was tamed. From then onward, one might say, the capriciousness of events was overcome, and almost all types of occurrence were reinterpreted so as to make them appear calculable and predictable. Naturally, the first forms of chance to be precisely tamed were the games of chance (Hacking, 1975). So whereas, for example, in the early modern world the fall of the dice and the choice of a playing card were things that appeared to be unpredictable and random in every sense of the word, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries such events came to be regarded as predictable and calculable ones. Thus, the probability of throwing two consecutive sixes with one die came to be calculated as 1/36. And the probability of, say, drawing a playing card with a face value of less than five from a full pack as 4/13.
