An Examination of Ramsey's Critique: The Lack of Support in Dismissing Keynes's Logical Theory of Probability

Michael Emmett Brady
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Michael Emmett Brady: College of Business Administration and Public Policy, California State University, Dominguez Hills, USA

Economic Analysis Letters, 2023, vol. 2, issue 2, 17-22

Abstract: In his 1922 review for Cambridge Magazine of Keynes's A Treatise on Probability, and again in his 1926 review "Truth and Probability" (published in 1931 and republished in Kyburg and Smokler's 1980 edition), Ramsey provided examples critiquing Keynes's logical theory of probability. However, these examples do not disprove Keynes's theory as all of them are flawed. The flaws arise because all the pairs of propositions that Ramsey used to substantiate his criticisms are irrelevant to each other. Such irrelevant propositions are explicitly excluded from Keynes's theory in pages 4-6 of his A Treatise on Probability. This paper highlights that Ramsey's examples, which involve irrelevant propositions, do not disprove Keynes's Boolean, relational logic. The only other defense of Keynes's theory, put forth by Watt in 1989, was found to be deficient by Brady in 2022.

Keywords: Boolean logic; relational; propositional logic; premises; conclusions; argument form; conditional probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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