Abstract:

Keynes realized that Boole had started the project of creating a logical foundation for the mathematical theory of probability. Boole made great progress in doing so in his 1854 The Laws of Thought. Unfortunately, he died at the early age of 49, having left his theory uncompleted.
Hailperin (1986) has pointed out that Boole’s project was an unfinished one. The goal of Keynes’s research program was to complete Boole’s project. Keynes added further results in his research program by providing a much more detailed, propositional, relational logic to support probability theory, as well as introducing a new ,logical relation, which he designated as V, the evidential weight of the Argument. Keynes also provided an introductory, first order (predicate) logic supporting both the Principle of Indifference and Statistics.
The only economists, who realized what Keynes’s goal was, was I. Hishiyama (1969, 2010). Unfortunately, Hishiyama did not have the skill set to pursue the question of how was it that Keynes was able to proceed and extend Boole’s system in the manner that he did.
Starting in the late 1970’s,academicians,especially philosophers and economists, who were ignorant of Hishiyama’s point that there was a very dangerous, blind spot in the existing past and present assessments and interpretations of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability and General Theory, due to the failure of academicians to read Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability in its entirety, started to consider what the connection was, if any, between the A Treatise on Probability and the General Theory and what was the nature of Keynes’s accomplishments in the A Treatise on Probability. Unfortunately, the failure to absorb Hishiyama’s point led the vast majority of academicians working on Keynes’s 1921 book to ignore Keynes’s Boolean framework and accept Ramsey’s false claims. Current Keynes scholarship is infected by the belief that Ramsey had shown basic and fundamental flaws in the foundations of Keynes’s relational, propositionallogic.

Keywords:

Keynes’s (Boole’s) relational, propositional logic, Keynes’s (Boole’s) objective, logical, probability relation, Keynes’s (Boole’s) interval valued probability, relevance-irrelevance logic, Russell, Ramsey, Braithwaite.

How to Cite:

Michael Emmett Brady. The Keynes Discontinuity Hypothesis, that J M Keynes Rejected his own Logical Theory of Probability and Accepted F P Ramsey’s Subjective Theory, is based on the Myths Created by R B Braithwaite. [ref]: vol.20.2022. available at: https://refpress.org/ref-vol20-a144/