Open Access Journal Article

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

by Michael Emmett Brady a,* orcid
a
College of Business Administration and Public Policy, California State University, Dominguez Hills, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
EAL  2023 2(2):21; https://doi.org/10.58567/eal02020003
Received: 25 March 2023 / Accepted: 7 May 2023 / Published Online: 15 May 2023
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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;
Copyright: © 2023 by Emmett Brady. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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ACS Style
Emmett Brady, M. An Examination of Ramsey's Critique: The Lack of Support in Dismissing Keynes's Logical Theory of Probability. Economic Analysis Letters, 2023, 2, 21. https://doi.org/10.58567/eal02020003
AMA Style
Emmett Brady M. An Examination of Ramsey's Critique: The Lack of Support in Dismissing Keynes's Logical Theory of Probability. Economic Analysis Letters; 2023, 2(2):21. https://doi.org/10.58567/eal02020003
Chicago/Turabian Style
Emmett Brady, Michael 2023. "An Examination of Ramsey's Critique: The Lack of Support in Dismissing Keynes's Logical Theory of Probability" Economic Analysis Letters 2, no.2:21. https://doi.org/10.58567/eal02020003
APA style
Emmett Brady, M. (2023). An Examination of Ramsey's Critique: The Lack of Support in Dismissing Keynes's Logical Theory of Probability. Economic Analysis Letters, 2(2), 21. https://doi.org/10.58567/eal02020003

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