A Study of the Many, Many Conflicting ‘Tower of Babel’-Like Interpretations of Part I of Keynes’s a Treatise on Probability Made by Heterodox Economists: None of These ‘Interpretations’ Deal With Parts II-V of Keynes’s a Treatise on Probability

Abstract

The failure of all heterodox economists to read Parts II-V of the A Treatise on Probability, especially Part II, since Part III depends on Part II and Part V depends on Part III, explains the many, many different and conflicting types of probabilities that are climes to exist in the A Treatise on Probability, as well as the many, many different definitions of uncertainty concocted by ignorant heterodox economists whose work directly contradicts and conflicts with Keynes’s explicit definitions of uncertainty in the A Treatise on Probability on pp.309-315 and in the General Theory on pages 148 and 240, definitions which Keynes himself reemphasized and reinforced to H. Townshend in their correspondence in 1937 and 1938. A reading of this correspondence leads directly to the rejection of all current claims made about so called different types of probabilities (non comparable, non numerical, non measurable, incommensurable, unknown, ordinal, comparative, qualitative, rank ordered, etc.) and uncertainty (fundamental uncertainty, irreducible uncertainty, reducible uncertainty, strong uncertainty, weak uncertainty, genuine uncertainty, deep uncertainty, radical uncertainty, nonergodic, etc.) by any and all heterodox economists, whose different, differing and conflicting discussions lead to a rambling, incoherent and incomprehensible chaos of babble that makes even the possibility of rational discussion an impossibility.

What accounts for this baffling, bewildering, befuddling and puzzling situation? There are three answers. The first answer is the reliance of all heterodox economists on the many, many false claims made by Richard B. Braithwaite that were published by D. Moggridge and Elizabeth Johnson as the Introduction to CWJMK, Volume 8, edition of the A treatise on Probability. This edition has been required reading for any and all undergraduate and graduate students in the departments of economics and philosophy at Cambridge University, who express an interest in working on Keynes’s theory of probability or economics, since its appearance in 1973. The second answer is that no heterodox economist has ever read Part II of the A Treatise on Probability. The third is the queer, bizarre belief that an 18 year old teenage boy genius, Frank Ramsey, showed up at Cambridge University in 1921 and convinced Keynes to acknowledge that his logical theory of probability was riddled with error and conflicts by 1922, which Keynes formally acknowledged in 1931. All three reasons are self reinforcing.

In early January, 1981, one of my dissertation supervisors, who had actually worked with and under Keynes in 1944 and 1945, asked me to deal with Braithwaite’s introduction as a preliminary defense of my dissertation topic for him alone. I agreed and xeroxed chapters 15-17 of Keynes’s book,as well as the two Edgeworth reviews, Bertrand Russell review, CD Broad’s review and the crushing Edwin Bidwell Wilson paper, published in 1934 in JASA, acknowledging that Keynes's book was built on interval valued probability using two numbers, a lower bound and an upper bound, and that this was what Keynes meant by uncertainty, although Wilson stated that he did not understand how there could be missing data or information and why uncertainty would matter or be important.

The upshot was that this supervisor agreed to allow my dissertation to proceed now that he could see, but not follow or understand the mathematical analysis, that Keynes’s theory was based on inexact measurement and approximation. He also told me that he would write to Braithwaite , send him the materials that I had given him for comment, and pass those comments on to me for use in my dissertation. No reply or comments were ever passed on to me during the time I was doing my dissertation. Of course, I knew that Braithwaite would not comment in any letter on the materials sent to him for comment because they completely demolished and destroyed the entire intellectual foundation and edifice for his introduction to the 1973 CWJMK ‘s edition of A Treatise on Probability.

The materials also demonstrated that Ramsey had never understood Keynes’s theory, and showed that neither Braithwaite nor Ramsey had ever read Part II of the A Treatise on Probability. All that I was told was that there were two students at Cambridge also pursuing dissertations on Keynes and the A treatise on Probability.

It will be quite impossible for any heterodox economist to ever grasp Keynes’s theory until Part II of the A treatise on Probability is read and it is recognized that Keynes’s “mysterious, mystical nonnumerical probabilities", non comparable probabilities, nonmeasurable probabilities and incommensurable probabilities are just interval valued probabilities.