Contrary to T. Hirai, Ramsey’s Critiques of Keynes in 1922 and 1926 Were Completely Wrong

Abstract

This paper covers Harai’s analysis, contained in his section, titled “Keynes as a philosopher”, of Keynes’s logical theory of probability. Harai spends too much of his time repeating Ramsey’s claims about having uncovered serious errors in the structure of Keynes’s relational propositional theory.

.For 100 years, Keynes’s logical theory has been interpreted and misevaluated through the eyes of an ignorant 18 year old teenager. The result has been the proliferation and spread of what can be called the “Ramsey myth”.

The “Ramsey myth” is that an 18 year old teenager appeared at Cambridge University in 1921.This 18 year old teenager was a genius who wrote a three page review in the Jan., 1922 issue of Cambridge Magazine, which supposedly destroyed, devastated and demolished the logical foundations of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability, which was his relational, propositional logic founded on Boole’s relational, propositional logic. Russell countered this in his review, but was ignored (See Brady, 2016a). In 1931, it is further supposed that Keynes then capitulated to Ramsey and repudiated his own logical theory of probability, accepting some version of Ramsey’s subjectivist theory. This myth is what Hirai’s paper is based on. It was false in 1921 and it is false today in 2022.