R. B Braithwaite’s Editorial Foreword to the 1973 Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Edition of Keynes’s a Treatise on Probability Is ‘…Very Puzzling, indeed.’ (Skidelsky, 1992, p.71)

Abstract

It is ‘…quite puzzling,indeed’(Skidelsky,1992p.71) how a paper as extremely poor and deficient as R. B. Braithwaite’s editorial foreword could have been selected to appear at the beginning of the 1973 Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 8, version of the A Treatise on Probability. Cheryl Misak presents the following testament from Braithwaite on page 114 of her 2020 biography of Ramsey concerning Keynes’s A treatise on Probability as “evidence” that Ramsey had demolished Keynes’s logical theory of probability,which is silly: “Braithwaite’s reaction [author's note-Braithwaite's reaction to Ramsey's critique of Keynes] indicates how effective it was. He recalled that he read Keynes’s Treatise in the long vacation, immediately after it came out, and said that he swallowed it whole.” It is simply impossible for anyone to have read Keynes’s book that quickly. The great French mathematician, Emile Borel, was very explicit about Part II of the A Treatise on Probability in his 1924 book review. Borel later changed his mind in 1939. He apologized to Keynes (and Bertrand Russell, who had helped Keynes, along with W E Johnson and C D Broad,write Part II) for skipping Part II, even though he realized and acknowledged that this was the most important part of the book for Keynes, which it was because it contains his demonstration that the addition rule(additivity) is a special case only in chapters 10-14 while chapters 15-17 contain Keynes's theory of imprecise A similar happening occurred in 1934 when E.B. Wilson acknowledged that Keynes had indeed put forth an interval valued approach to deal with uncertainty. In fact, Braithwaite never read the A Treatise on Probability, as we will demonstrate using the claims made by Braithwaite himself in his 1973 editorial foreword to Volume 8 of the CWJMK that make absolutely no sense if he had, in fact, read the A Treatise on Probability as he claimed he did during a “long vacation” in 1921.