The need for a hypothesis as to how the relations might fit actual actions rendered the evaluation of the action merely probable even though the rightness and wrongness to which the action was to conform — the eternal fitness — was known certainly.
In the fifteenth and final chapter, Pomponazzi takes the surprising tack of stating that the philosophical conclusions which he has developed and explored throughout the treatise are merely probable, in contrast to the certain truth taught by Church doctrine, which maintains that the human soul is immortal.
Demea opposes him, maintaining that the argument's merely probable conclusion demeans God's mystery and majesty.
The stronger kind resembles demonstration but the connection between ideas is merely probable.
Research during the past ten years has revealed the existence of a diverse pool of coronaviruses circulating among various bat species and other animals, suggesting that further introductions of highly pathogenic coronaviruses into the human population are not merely probable, but inevitable.
Crucially, topical arguments were originally seen as merely probable, contrasting with the necessary truth-preservation of syllogisms.
On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate rather than adventitious, (3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry.
Wherever disagreement was licit and impossible to extirpate by argument, the claims of all sides counted as merely probable.
This issue is a hot one, thanks to Royal Dutch/Shell's continuing crisis over the reclassification in January of one-fifth of its "proven" reserves as merely "probable".
Perhaps the most skeptical of the philosophes was the great French mathematician Condorcet (1743 94), who held that mathematics, physics, and moral philosophies were all merely probable.
