Key Doctrines Concerning Probability

Abstract

3.1.1. Keynes’s view of probability, whose basic aspects were considered in the previous chapter, was centred on some general key doctrines. As I have already noted, these doctrines were not always explicit and expressed in univocal and coherent form. Hence the necessity not only of a close reading of Keynes’s text, but also of a sort of systematic reconstruction of Keynes’s approach to key epistemological topics, together with an attempt to clarify his position within its historical intellectual context. Such a task, which will be attempted in the present section, will enable one, for instance, to grasp the fact overlooked in a superficial reading of the Treatise, that Keynes (as we will see in Chapter 8) did not usually adopt the term ‘logical’ in the sense of formal logic, but in the sense of ordinary language logic, that is, in a sense which was actually antithetical to it. This explains the above-mentioned uncritical ranking of Keynes within the so-called logicist approach to probability.