I’m a native English speaker, and I think of ‘plausible’ as connoting higher probability than ‘possible’ - I think I’d use it to mean something like ‘not totally crazy’.
I think if I have a space of hypotheses, I’ll label ‘probable’ the ones that have >50% probability, and ‘plausible’ the ones that are clearly in the running to become ‘probable’. The plausible options are the ‘contenders for probableness’; they’re competitive hypotheses.
E.g., if I’m drawing numbered balls from an urn at random, and there are one hundred balls, then it’s ‘plausible’ I could draw ball #23 even though it’s only 1% likely, because 1% is pretty good when none of the other atomic hypotheses are higher than 1%.
On the other hand, if I have 33 cyan balls in an urn, 33 magenta balls, 33 yellow balls, and 1 black ball, then I wouldn’t normally say ‘it’s plausible that I’ll draw a black ball’, because I’m partitioning the balls by color and ‘black’ isn’t one of the main contender colors.
See this is exactly the situation where I would say ‘plausible.’ To me ‘plausible’ implies a soon-to-be-followed ‘but’: “It is plausible that I would draw a black ball, but it is unlikely.” It is nearly synonymous with ‘possible’ in my mind.
I’m a native English speaker, and I think of ‘plausible’ as connoting higher probability than ‘possible’ - I think I’d use it to mean something like ‘not totally crazy’.
(I think this is how I use it)
I think if I have a space of hypotheses, I’ll label ‘probable’ the ones that have >50% probability, and ‘plausible’ the ones that are clearly in the running to become ‘probable’. The plausible options are the ‘contenders for probableness’; they’re competitive hypotheses.
E.g., if I’m drawing numbered balls from an urn at random, and there are one hundred balls, then it’s ‘plausible’ I could draw ball #23 even though it’s only 1% likely, because 1% is pretty good when none of the other atomic hypotheses are higher than 1%.
On the other hand, if I have 33 cyan balls in an urn, 33 magenta balls, 33 yellow balls, and 1 black ball, then I wouldn’t normally say ‘it’s plausible that I’ll draw a black ball’, because I’m partitioning the balls by color and ‘black’ isn’t one of the main contender colors.
See this is exactly the situation where I would say ‘plausible.’ To me ‘plausible’ implies a soon-to-be-followed ‘but’: “It is plausible that I would draw a black ball, but it is unlikely.” It is nearly synonymous with ‘possible’ in my mind.