Keynes, Ramsey and Pragmatism

Bill Gerrard

No astpj, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: In his recent paper in this journal, Bateman (2021) breaks with the “Standard View” of Ramsey’s influence on Keynes and argues that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophical thought underpinned both Keynes’s acceptance of Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability, and Keynes’s adoption of a narrative theory of the role of confidence in economic fluctuations in the General Theory. In this paper it is argued that Bateman is right both in emphasizing the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy on Keynes’s thought during the development of the General Theory and afterwards, and in arguing that the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy partly explains Keynes’s emphasis on the importance of the state of confidence in Chapter 12 of the General Theory. However, it is argued that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy had a much greater influence on Keynes than acknowledged by Bateman. Furthermore, contra Bateman, Keynes’s move to a more pragmatist philosophical position does not imply that Keynes’s accepted Ramsey’s subjective theory of (measurable) probability.

Date: 2022-07-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/62e1081b27b74630990ac03f/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:astpj

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/astpj

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().