Allan Birnbaum died in London in the early summer of 1976. He was 53. Although he was by training and profession a statistician, his intellectual interests were more philosophical than mathematical. During the past fifteen years most of his efforts were devoted to the foundations of statistics. His paper on the Neyman-Pearson Theory (Birnbaum [41]) is only the latest, though now unfortunately the last, of several papers developing a point of view that Birnbaum thought to represent both the theory and practice of the majority of reflective theoretical statisticians. In the following pages I will outline the development of Birnbaum's views on statistical inference. I hope this will help those unfamiliar with the earlier papers better to understand this last paper and also provide additional motivation for looking at the earlier papers as well.
Birnbaum was unusual among statisticians in that he actively sought intellectual contact with philosophers as well as with methodologists in various sciences. Thus several of his papers, especially the later ones, were written so as to require relatively little technical expertise in statistics. They must be read very carefully, however, for they are written in a style that is sometimes complex and usually understates the significance of the point being made. The style is an accurate reflection of the man.