Why the warnings of B. Russell (1922), R. Carnap (1955), J. Franklin (2001) and H. Kyburg (2003) about Ramsey’s “interpretation” of logical probability failed: None of the warnings identified Ramsey explicitly by name
Author: Michael Emmett Brady*
Adjunct Lecturer, California State University, Dominguez Hills, College of Business Administration and Public Policy, Department of Operations Management, 1000 East Victoria St, Carson, California, 90747, USA.
Published Date: 2024-08-22
Keywords: Boolean logic, algebra and probability, Keynes’s Boolean relational, propositional logic, the logical, objective probability relation, imprecise probability, non-additive probability, interval valued probability, upper-lower bounds
Abstract:
Ramsey’s fictional, fictitious definitions concerning Keynes’s logical theory of probability do not exist in the A Treatise on Probability. Ramsey simply made them up and invented them out of thin air. No philosopher, historian, economist, social scientist or academician in either the 20th or 21st centuries has been able to come to this conclusion. Ramsey’s entire position is that Keynes’s relational, propositional logic, as presented in his A Treatise on Probability, involves the logical analysis of unrelated, irrelevant propositions. This is simply pure nonsense ,since the very title of Keynes’s approach, as defined by Boole in chapter I of his The Laws of Thought in 1854,requires the propositions to be related .Ramsey’s “My carpet is blue; Napoleon was a great general “is made up of two unrelated propositions and is, hence, eliminated from consideration.
However, four philosophers did publish warnings that demonstrated that the basic foundation of Ramsey’s critique of logical probability was based on absurdities like the carpet, Napoleon example above. Unfortunately, they never explicitly identified Ramsey as the target of their warning. Therefore, readers of the works containing their warnings had no idea about who was being identified.
The result is that Ramsey’s nutty types of examples that supposedly demonstrate the severe problems with logical probability, such as “My carpet is blue, Napoleon was a great general” or “This is round, that is red”, became unanimously accepted examples of what was wrong with logical probability. The best, most recent, examples of this are in Clarke (2023) and Gerrard (2023).
I believe that it is highly probable that the Ramsey Myth ,as constructed by R B Braithwaite and published by the intellectually deficient economist ,Donald Moggridge, as an editorial foreword placed at the very front of the 1973 CWJMK edition of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability, could have been stopped dead in its tracks if Ramsey had been clearly identified as the writer making up absurdities like “My carpet is blue, Napoleon was a great general.” as being representative of logical probability constructs.
