The Logician in the Archive: John Venn’s Diagrams and Victorian Historical Thinking

Venn's intellectual world are all objects of large literatures, but the coherence that gave them meaning together in his projects remains obscured from a perspective focused on any individual element. Historiographic interest in Venn has primarily concerned his philosophy of probability, in particular his articulation of a position known as the frequency interpretation (a label popularized by John Maynard Keynes; "frequentism" is an interchangeable variant). 2 The frequency interpretation holds that probability describes proportions of outcomes among specific series of events rather than an observer's quantified confidence that a given event did or will occur (the so-called degree-of-belief interpretation). Venn's name is familiar to a far wider audience through his eponymous logic diagrams (figure Though Venn's diligent work as a collegiate historian is not unknown, scholars of Victorian historiography have so far paid him 2