Possibility and probability judgments in different cultures

Abstract

Ways of presenting opinions depend on mental cultures which include i.a. styles of forming judgments on possibility and on probability of events and of states of affairs. Research on a large multilingual corpus of texts in several West-European languages and in Russian shows that the possibility statements are used more than twice as often as the probability statements.
The term ‘possibility’ in Latin and in modern languages denotes a physicalist attitude towards states of affairs. This term was coined much later than the term ‘probability’, originally connected to the human aspects of evaluation. The term ‘probabilis’ itself in Latin was a cognate of ‘probare’, which meant ‘approving’ and/or ‘controlling’ events. Additionally, in modern Romance languages, judgments of doubt and hope, i. e. sentences conveying speaker’s distancing from alien and non-actual opinions, usually contain verbs in a special ‘conjunctive mood’. Creating alternative ‘possible worlds’ as a figure of speech for ‘conjecture’ originated and was extensively used in writings by Leibniz in French, who used this figure in accordance with French grammar. The same ideas formulated in Russian or in German lack the ‘subjunctive’ mood, whereas it is obligatory in French.