Barkley Rosser has written:

"Given how well known Keynes's work is, quite aside from all this
earlier work that is less well known, I find it bizarre that someone
would assert that "we all know" that the distinction was due to Knight."


Since in none of the postings has anyone asserted any such thing, I
worry that this may be a misreading of what I did originally ask. So
before this thread goes off in a wrong direction, I will repeat what I
asked:

"I have a query in regard to a paper I am writing. We know that the
explicit distinction between risk and uncertainty is found in Frank
Knight's "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit" first published in 1921. What
I would like to know is whether this explicit distinction is found
amongst economists before its use by Knight, whether the term
"uncertainty" was used by economists prior to Knight's use, and
whether the concepts surrounding uncertainty have an older provenance
in the economic literature under a different name."


Pat Gunning did correctly ask whether my question was whether one part
of my interest was with the word "uncertainty" itself. I have found all
of the postings very instructive and intend to follow each one up but am
still curious about the provenance of the word. Who used it first which
basically means, pace Rosser, was the word "uncertainty" used in the
economic literature before it was used by Knight?

Steven Kates