Keynes, Ramsey, and Pragmatism: A Comment

In his response to my essay in the recent symposium celebrating the centenary of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (Bateman 2021), Bill Gerrard (2022) offers a comprehensive critique of my argument that Keynes was influenced by Frank Ramsey’s turn to pragmatism. Gerrard’s comments cut both ways: on the one hand, he agrees that Ramsey’s turn to pragmatism influenced Keynes, but argues that I do not go far enough in articulating the extent of the influence; on the other hand, Gerrard argues that Keynes’s embrace of Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability has nothing to do with his acceptance of Ramsey’s pragmatism. The purpose of this short comment, however, is neither to rehearse the many ways in which I agree with Gerrard, nor to elaborate each way in which we disagree. The purpose of this comment is to address just one of my disagreements with Gerrard and to use this clarification to reiterate Keynes’s embrace of pragmatism. The disagreement on which I focus concerns the question of whether Keynes employed mathematical expectation in The General Theory. In particular, it stems from my focus on the distinction between the way that expectations about future profit are handled in Chapters Eleven and Twelve of The General Theory.