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Irving John Good , "Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and Its Applications"

Reader's review:

Summary: Good understands that Keynes's probabilities were intervals

Good does an excellent job ,when compared to the rest of the philosophers,economists,and psychologists who have written on Keynes's views on probability,in realizing that Keynes's probabilities were fundamentally intervals(upper-lower limits or bounds) defined by inequality constraints.Unfortunately,Good never specifies where ,in Keynes's 1921 A Treatise on Probability(TP),that Keynes does this.The answer is in chapters 15 and 17 of the TP.Keynes then applies this approach in chapters 20 and 22.Again, Good is correct in stating that Keynes's treatment, in chapter 20 of the TP on analogy and induction, provides the best mathematical-logical treatment of the subject(TP,pp.235-37,254-257).Good never takes Ramsey to task for his completely false characterizations and claims about Keynes's nonnumerical,non-comparable,indeterminate probabilities approach supposedly not using any numbers at all.It is incredible that this blunder has been universally accepted by economists,philosophers ,and psychologists for over 80 years.Similarly,Good fails to state that Keynes's approach is an improved and modified version of Boole's original interval estimate approach contained in chapters 16-21 of Boole's 1854 The Laws of Thought.Lastly,Good overlooks the work of Theodore Hailperin, who showed that all of the Boole-Keynes problems could be restated and solved using linear programming solutions techniques.

Good does correctly show that Ramsey's theory only works if all the probabilities are " sharp"(unique,precise,exact,single number answers)and is severely constrained in the cases where probabilities are not " sharp".

I recommend this book.It at least demonstrates a satisfactory,though not full and complete, understanding of Keynes's contributions to the logic of probability.

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123