EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Keynes and probability: An assessment

Alessandro Roncaglia

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2009, vol. 16, issue 3, 489-510

Abstract: Most interpreters agree that Keynes had a wide-ranging, complex, 'vision of the world', which underlies his theoretical contributions. Whenever this is forgotten, as happens in the so-called neoclassical synthesis, not only the original Keynesian spirit goes lost but also, and especially, we lose substantive bricks for our theoretical constructions. The paper considers an important instance of this general rule; namely Keynes's views on the logic of probability, meant as the field concerning human behaviour in an uncertain world (hence connected to, but distinct from, the pure theory of probability, meant as a field of mathematics). The paper begins by recalling the main aspects of the classical and frequentist approaches to probability and the main criticisms they received, pertaining among other things to the limits of their applicability. We then consider Keynes's own views, stressing three aspects: the definition of probability as pertaining to the field of logic, the notion of uncertainty and of the 'weight of the argument', the 'theory of groups'. We then discuss the subjective approach of de Finetti, Ramsey and Savage, and contrast it with Keynes's own views. Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for the interpretation of Keynes's General Theory, and of his attitude towards econometrics.

Keywords: J. M. Keynes; probability; risk; uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672560903101369 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:eujhet:v:16:y:2009:i:3:p:489-510

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672560903101369

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:16:y:2009:i:3:p:489-510