Keynes's Philosophical Development.

• Author: Prasch, Robert E.

Did Keynes abandon or maintain his early philosophical commitments in the course of his later economic studies? Over the past fifteen years, the majority of professional opinion has concluded that a continuity exists between Keynes's early and later work [3, 74-89]. Professor John Davis represents an important exception to this rule. He is convinced that the continuity-discontinuity duality is sterile. He proposes that Keynes's thought underwent a genuine development in which some positions were reinforced, others dropped, and still others readopted. Drawing upon a close study of Keynes's early philosophical papers, Davis reconsiders the relationship between the Treatise on Probability and The General Theory. He advances an original interpretation of Keynes's philosophical development based upon his own extensive understanding of the history of analytic philosophy and a close rereading of Keynes in light of Keynes's early philosophical papers.

Davis presents some persuasive circumstantial evidence to counter the majority "continuity" position. To begin with, Cambridge philosophy went through three major changes during Keynes's lifetime. Particular attention must be accorded to the criticism of G. E. Moore and Keynes himself advanced by subjectivists such as Frank Ramsey and the early logical positivists. Another important consideration is the fact that Keynes turned his attention to economics, a discipline with its own unique set of issues and methods [pp. 174-75]. Finally, Davis points to Keynes's willingness to change his mind on matters pertaining to economic theory.

Around the turn of the century, Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, in opposition to the idealists, made the claim that some predicates were inherently knowable, even as they defied definition [2, ch. 1]. In a manner reminiscent of Thomas Reid, Moore argued that we must depend on our Common Sense to make predicates such as "good" clear to us through the exercise of our "intuition." Davis observes that Keynes's early papers were critical of Moore's claim that individual judgment was based on a pure sense of "intuition." Specifically, he thought that Moore's formulation of the category of "intuition" lacked a social dimension [pp. 70-71]. Moreover, Keynes thought that Moore had artificially restricted the applicability of ethical theory through his reliance on a frequency theory of probability. In the case of a changing world, people could not distinguish good actions from bad.

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