ABSTRACT
The last fifteen years or so have witnessed a steady flow of books and articles on the relationship between Keynes’s economic writings and his earlier A Treatise on Probability (CWVIII, henceforth ‘the Treatise’).1 As those who are familiar with it will know, the Treatise is as much a philosophical as it is a technical contribution to the theory of probability and statistics. And as such, it has provided a rich source for the literature focusing on the broader philosophical and methodological foundations of Keynes’s later economic theorising, particularly his views on statistical inference in economics and the nature and impact of uncertainty in economic life. The purpose of the present note is to convey something of the flavour of this literature. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive survey, however, I shall restrict myself to an overview of the two places where Keynes makes explicit reference to the Treatise in The General Theory, in his discussions of long-term expectation and liquidity preference respectively Readers interested in pursuing questions about the possible, but more implicit, impact on Keynes’s economic theorising of the broader philosophical themes discussed in the Treatise are invited to consult Carabelli (1988), Davis (1994b), Lawson (1985) and O’Donnell (1989).
