*Frank Ramsey’s Contributions to Probability (and Legal) Theory*

That is the title of my latest article, which was just published in Bocconi Legal Papers; see https://blp.egeaonline.it/it/102/papers. Below is an excerpt with the footnotes omitted:

 Ramsey developed his new approach to chance in a paper titled Truth and Probability, which he presented for the first time at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in November of 1926. In this remarkable paper, which was eventually published posthumously in 1931, Ramsey sketched out an entirely new and revolutionary way of looking at probability. We can summarize Ramsey’s picture of probability in ten words: “probabilities are beliefs and beliefs, in turn, are metaphorical bets”, or to quote Ramsey’s himself, “Whenever we go to the station we are betting that a train will really run, and if we had not a sufficient degree of belief in this [outcome] we should decline this bet and stay at home”. On this subjective view of probability, one can measure the strength of a person’s beliefs in betting terms, or again in Ramsey’s own words: a “probability of 1/3 is clearly related to the kind of belief [that] would lead to a bet of 2 to 1”. Most importantly, Ramsey also showed how one’s bets – i.e., one’s subjective or personal probabilities – should obey the formal axioms of probability theory.

Frank Ramsey: A Giant Among Titans
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About F. E. Guerra-Pujol

When I’m not blogging, I am a business law professor at the University of Central Florida.
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