ABSTRACT

Keynes's views on speculation and investment in financial markets as put forth in the General Theory are related to his concept of uncertainty, which is in turn related to the notion of weight of arguments contained in the Treatise on Probability. The theory of probability that Keynes redeployed in his economic theorising during the 1930s had been born much earlier, well before its publication in 1921. The weight of arguments is a kind of second dimension of probability, which Keynes introduced to separate the rationality of an argument from the degree of confidence with which a rational agent can use it as a guide for action. Keynes's financial activities failed to attract any serious consideration in the literature. Everybody knew that Keynes had taken an active interest in financial markets since his undergraduate days.’ Investment is an irrational activity, a non-rational one’. Winslow is an exposition of a similar argument in which Keynes's economic agents are, and cannot help being, irrational.