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| | Autobiography of Patrick Suppes, p. 10 |
 | | The move from events to extended indicator functions is especially interesting philosophically, because the choice of the right objects to consider in formulating a given theory is, more often than I originally thought, mistaken in first efforts and, as these first efforts become crystallized and familiar, difficult to move away from. |
 | | To each event there is a corresponding indicator function for that event, with the indicator function having the value one when a possible outcome lies in the event and the outcome zero otherwise—as is apparent, in this standard formulation events are sets of possible outcomes, that is, sets of points in the probability space. |
 | | However, if we replace the event A by its indicator function Ac, then AcB is just the indicator function restricted to the set B, and we can express in a simple and natural way the operation of function addition of two such partial functions having the same domain. |
| www.stanford.edu /~psuppes/autobio10.html (868 words) |
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