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Date: | Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:44:57 -0500 |
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There have been many unfortunate (and incorrect) statements made
already in this fledgling discussion about risk and uncertainty. I
have often felt that the discussions on this list are of such a low
(and often anti-scholarly) character that it is simply useless to get
involved. There is already a large and complex literature on many of
the questions being discussed here and I am uncertain how to begin
addressing the many aspects of that literature that could bear on the
discussion.
I admire Ross Emmet for joining in the discussion, however, and
trying to bring a more serious and informed tone to it.
Thus, it is out of my respect for his work and his effort to improve
this discussion that I write to say that he is simply wrong that
Keynes's theory of probability in his Treatise on Probability was
disconnected from action (unlike Knight's). Keynes began his study of
probability because of a question in ethics raised by the moral
philosopher G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica. Keynes does develop a
much more sophisticated (philosophically sophisticated) theory of
probability than Knight (even if Keynes did abandon it later in the
face of criticism from Frank Ramsey), but this is not because it is
somehow about epistemology or driven by "philosophy" whereas Knight
was just a "pragmatic economist" dealing with "actual human
decisions". Keynes was keenly interested in human actions and their
ethical ramifications and that's why he developed his theory of
probability. To use Ross's vocabulary, it is just as important to
Keynes that his theory address the needs of the ACTOR as it is that
it address the needs of the OBSERVER.
I have written about this in many places (as have others), but the
easiest place to see the full ethical argument that Keynes was
involved in trying to investigate and how he believed he had solved
it would be in my book Keynes's Uncertain Revolution. While there is
a healthy and robust secondary literature on Keynes's theory of
probability , and my own interpretation is only one of many, I do not
believe that there is any serious dispute about the ethical problem
that Keynes was trying to solve when he first undertook to study
probability or the fact that he felt that his theory had provided
answers that would allow for more ethical ACTIONS.
Brad Bateman
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