Gerrard, B orcid.org/0000-0002-5078-8911 (2023) Keynes, Ramsey, and Pragmatism. Journal of the History of Economic Thought. ISSN 1053-8372
Abstract
In his recent paper in this journal, Bradley Bateman (2021) breaks with the “standard view” of Frank Ramsey’s influence on Jahn Maynard Keynes and argues that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophical thought underpinned both Keynes’s acceptance of Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability and Keynes’s adoption of a narrative theory of the role of confidence in economic fluctuations in the General Theory. In this paper it is argued that Bateman is right both in emphasizing the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy on Keynes’s thought during the development of the General Theory and afterwards and in arguing that the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy partly explains Keynes’s emphasis on the importance of the state of confidence in Chapter 12 of the General Theory. However, it is argued that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy had a much greater influence on Keynes than acknowledged by Bateman. Furthermore, contra Bateman, Keynes’s move to a more pragmatist philosophical position does not imply that Keynes accepted Ramsey’s subjective theory of (measurable) probability.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s), 2023. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Management Division (LUBS) (Leeds) > Management Division Decision Research (LUBS) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 20 Jul 2022 16:12 |
Last Modified: | 21 May 2023 04:00 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S1053837222000311 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:189264 |