A really nice piece on “Words of Estimative Probability” at Sources & Methods.
This is essentially an attempt to address the “weasel word” problem that so many critics lament. As a famous dead white guy once said, “define your terms.” The problem with most critiques of intelligence work is that people have different definitions of “probably” and “possibly” and so on. I do this exercise in my own class and the results illustrate quite plainly that you and I can be very far apart on what “likely” means.
