A Treatise On Probability
A Treatise on Probability ,[1] published by John Maynard Keynes in 1921, provides a much more general logic of uncertainty than the more familiar and straightforward ‘classical’ theories of probability. [notes 1][3][notes 2] This has since become known as a “logical-relationist” approach,[5][notes 3] and become regarded as the seminal and still classic account of the logical interpretation of probability (or probabilistic logic), a view of probability that has been continued by such later works as Carnap‘s Logical Foundations of Probability and E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.[8]
Keynes’s conception of this generalised notion of probability is that it is a strictly logical relation between evidence and hypothesis, a degree of partial implication. It was in part pre-empted by Bertrand Russell’s use of an unpublished version.[9][notes 4]
In a 1922 review, Bertrand Russell, the co-author of Principia Mathematica, called it “undoubtedly the most important work on probability that has appeared for a very long time,” and said that the “book as a whole is one which it is impossible to praise too highly.”[17] [notes 5]
With recent developments in machine learning to enable ‘artificial intelligence‘ and behavioural economics the need for a logical approach that neither assumes some unattainable ‘objectivity’ nor relies on the subjective views of its designers or policy-makers has become more appreciated, and there has been a renewed interest in Keynes’s work.[20][21]
