Abstract

To introduce Keynes’s Treatise on Probability in a short time I shall emphasize its remarkable scholarship; its debt to Russell’s logicism; and its pervasive scepticism about the possibility of applying mathematics to its subject. I then briefly consider the departure from logicism due to Frank Ramsey, and Keynes’s own generous, if unconvinced, reaction to Ramsey’s criticisms.

A workshop to commemorate the centenary of publication of Frank Knight’s "Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit" and John Maynard Keynes’ “A Treatise on Probability”

This workshop is organised by the University of Oxford and supported by The Alan Turing Institute. For further details and regular updates, please visit the official event website

About the event

The year 2021 marks the centenary of two monumental publications in economics and probability theory, namely Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit by Frank Hyneman Knight and A Treatise on Probability by John Maynard Keynes.

In Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Knight put forward the vital difference between risk, where empirical evaluation of unknown outcomes can still be applicable, and uncertainty, where no quantified measurement is valid but subjective estimate. In A Treatise on Probability, Keynes argued that the concept of probability should be about the logical implication from premises to hypotheses, in contrast to the classical quantified perspective of probability.

The fundamental uncertainty proposed in both works has then deeply influenced the development of economic and probability theory in the past century and it still resonates with our lives today, considering the ups and downs that the world economy is experiencing.

This workshop is a tribute to their invaluable legacy.

Speakers:

Professor Dr Francesca Biagini, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Professor Sara Biagini, LUISS Guido Carli

Professor Simon Blackburn, Trinity College, Cambridge

Professor Dr Paul Embrechts, ETH Zurich

Professor Itzhak Gilboa, HEC Paris

Professor Lars Hansen, University of Chicago

Professor Fabio Maccheroni, Bocconi University

Professor Massimo Marinacci, Bocconi University

Professor Marcel Nutz, Columbia University

Professor Shige Peng, Shandong University

Professor Dr Frank Riedel, Bielefeld University

Professor Ross Emmett, Arizona State University

Organizers:

Sam Cohen, Lars Hansen, Tomasz R. Bielecki, Igor Cialenco, Mike Tehranchi and Haoyang Cao