- Michael Brady
- Adjunct Lecturer, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Consider Zappia’s 2021 comment
in the History of Economic Ideas on D. Gillies’ paper (2021), which is
representative of the work of J.B. Davis, O’Donnell and J. Runde supporting the
claims made by Ramsey that Keynes’s logical relations did not exist . Zappia’s conclusion demonstrates that he is an advocate/supporter of the Ramsey position
, which was constructed elaborately by
Richard B. Braithwaite from 1931 to his death in 1990.Braithwaite claimed that
there were no such things as the objective ,logical, probability relations
between propositions that were specified
by Keynes in Chapter I of the A treatise on Probability on pages 4,8 and 9.
Zappia draws the following
deeply flawed conclusion:
“An important historical issue
in the literature on Keynes is whether he yielded to Ramsey’s critique, namely,
whether his was a complete acceptance of the idea that degrees of belief are
purely subjective. Gillies and Letto-Gillies (1991) noted that Keynes may have
accepted Ramsey’s criticism only partially, something other scholars objected
to because they saw in Keynes’s memoir about his early beliefs a total retreat
from the epistemology of the TP (Bateman 1996). Gillies’s point is that it is
difficult to say to what extent Keynes changed his mind, since he never
undertook the task of modifying his original theory of probability. Instead of
distinguishing from an epistemology, Keynes may have considered outdated and
the technical theory of probability ensuing from this epistemology − as other
commentators have done to save the TP from oblivion (Runde 1994) − Gillies
suggests to follow Chapter 12 insights and to examine the kind of probability
theory they may accord with.” (Zappia,2021, p.149).
This paper will demonstrate that there is no textual evidence in Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability supporting either Ramsey, Gillies, Zappia or any other Post Keynesian, Heterodox or Institutionalist economist or philosopher who has written on Keynes and his logical theory of probability
