Teaching only about Keynes’s Contributions in Chapter 1 (Plus Possibly Chapters 2, 3, 6 and 26, if Time Permits) of the A Treatise on Probability Falls Far ,far Short of Providing Students with An Informed Foundation about Keynes’s Analysis of Decisionmaking,rationality and expectations

Abstract

Teaching students about Keynes’s views on decision making ,expectations and rationality requires that the students have had a general introduction and overview of Parts II(interval valued probability), III(finite probabilities)and V(statistics, inexact measurement,and approximation, as discussed by Keynes in Chapter Four of the General Theory on pp.39-40 and 43-44) of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability (1921) and a detailed coverage of chapters 15 and 17 of his Part II of the A Treatise on Probability on the importance of interval valued probability . Keynes argued in Chapter 15 that decision makers in the real world mainly rely on and use interval valued probability in a heuristic manner. They are not relying on the use of ordinal probability which is simply far, far too weak to provide a foundation for rationality. Meeks’ coverage of chapters 1-4 of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability plus her possible excursion into chapters 6 and 26 would fail to provide the basic foundation needed by students to understand Keynes’s views in the Treatise on Probability and General Theory. Any primary source of discussion about the links between the A Treatise on Probability and General Theory MUST incorporate Keynes’s exchanges between himself and Hugh Townshend in 1937 and 1938,followed by the conflict between Tinbergen and Keynes in 1938-40 over Keynes’s imprecise probability(the intervals of Part II of the A Treatise on Probability ) using approximation and inexact measurement and Tinbergen’s approach based on precise probability and exact measurement .Meek’s coverage of these sources is simply nonexistent. Most importantly, Meeks needs to avoid the 1973 ,volume 8 version of the A Treatise on Probability in the CWJMK like the plague, as its editorial foreword by R. Braithwaite is completely flawed and erroneous.