Why Is Clive Bell, an Artist With No Training in Logic, Mathematics, Statistics or Probability, Being Cited as an Expert on J M Keynes’s a Treatise on Probability?

Keynes had already answered Ramsey’s incoherent( bizarre?) criticism that “… the obvious one is that there really do not seem to be any such things as the probability relations he describes ..."on page 36 of the A Treatise on Probability BEFORE Ramsey ever made his criticism. Keynes pointed out that the “…analogy between orders of similarity and probability is so great that its apprehension will greatly assist that of the ideas I wish to convey.” Ramsey completely failed to grasp the analogy between similarity and probability before criticizing Keynes. No where does Ramsey show that he understands the analogy between probability and similarity that Keynes is using. Nor has any philosopher, economist, psychologist, sociologist, historian or decision theorist demonstrated any understanding of Keynes’s argument in the 20th or 21st century. Only in the writings of cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists is their evidence that Keynes’s position has been understood. I know of NO such specialist who has critiqued Keynes’s position. This means that Ramsey’s critique is based on ignorance on his part.

Before one can rationally criticize any argument of any type, the person doing the critique MUST demonstrate that he understands the position he is critiquing.

Keynes’s introductory comments on p.36 were then explored in Part III of the A Treatise on Probability in far, far, far greater depth and detail by Keynes. Keynes’s objective probability relations are simply objective similarity relations existing between old known situations and new unknown situations. Human pattern recognition skills involve using resemblance functions based on past memory that projects past knowledge of old situations into new situations, where there are similarities that are seen to exist between the old, known situation and a new, unexplored situation by SOME researchers. One then can come up with a rational degree of belief regarding how some new situation will play out, given the similarities between the old and new situations.

Herbert Simon independently rediscovered some parts of Keynes’s Part III analysis in the A Treatise on Probability that dealt with the connection between intuition and induction when he started to analyze the decision making capabilities of tournament chess players in Over the Board competition, where the players must make decisions under time constrain(a clock),in the 1950’s. Simon was a part of the developing fields of Cognitive Science and cognitive psychology that started in the 1950’s.Keynes ‘s positions on intuition, induction, similarity (dissimilarity), resemblances, analogy and pattern recognition are all accepted basic conclusions in these fields. Ramsey’s concept that supposed humans were capable of calculating exact, precise probabilities, using the purely mathematical laws of the probability calculus to make decisions, is completely rejected except as very special case. One very special case would be correspondence (postal) chess where games can last for years. Another special case would be chess computers, like Deep Blue, that were allowed to bring their “book” knowledge of opening, middle, and end game positions (gigantic libraries containing all known variations of past played games) with them to the chess board. Garry Kasparov, the then World Chess champion, defeated Deep Blue 4-2 in 1996 and lost a rematch 2.5-3.5 in 1997.

No cognitive scientist or cognitive psychologist would accept Ramsey’s claims about decision making by humans, be it in 1950 or 2020, because all of the empirical and experimental evidence is completely against Ramsey’s position on the ability of humans to use precise probability.

It is very annoying to find in recent reviewers of Misak’s book, including Misak’s own commentary on Ramsey, a reliance on a completely and technically ignorant artist friend of Keynes, Clive Bell, who had no idea about what Keynes was doing in the A Treatise on Probability.The reason is simply because he was completely illiterate of any knowledge of mathematics statistics logic, and probability. I find it bizarre that he is considered a legitimate source that supposedly validates Ramsey’s silly, ignorant comments about Keynes’s “objective probability relations”.

The argument seems to go like this ,where (a) ,(b) and (c) are the premises of the argument and (d) is the conclusion of the argument:

(a) Ramsey was a great mathematical and logical genius (b) Clive Bell lived and talked with Keynes (c) Clive Bell stated that Ramsey’s critique demolished Keynes’s logical theory of probability (d) Ramsey’s critique demolished Keynes’s logical theory of probability

This is what Misak’s argument amounts to.