“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis … to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
I have always regarded such statements as hyperbolic, deliberately provocative if you will, especially from folks as smart as LaPlace. Remember LaPlace was the foremost exponent of Bayesian reasoning until the field was "rediscovered" in the later part of the 20th century. He was acutely aware of the uncertainty of knowledge and did remarkable work applying Bayesian reasoning to problems like the estimation of the mass of Jupiter.
I'm inclined to agree with you there, ModelBreaker. I think Laplace probably had a pretty wild sense of humor.
However, the (humorless, I'd even say grim) logical positivists seem to have seized on Laplace's statement as the model for their own method.
But as you say, truly Laplace was a world-class thinker, and his work on Bayesian probability theory was truly foundational.
Thank you so much for writing, and for your kind words!