[PEN-L:3260] fwd: Keynes queer birthing...

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

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Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:19:21 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Keynes queer birthing...
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Anyone seen this before
<http://www.middlebury.edu/~cornwall/Keynes.Bayesian2.html>?

Keynes' Queer Birthing of Bayesian Analysis

As outlined by Dennis Lindley [1968], a genealogy of Bayesian analysis can
be traced from Leonard Savage [1972, originally 1954] back to the notion of
subjective probability developed by Frank Ramsey [1960, written 1926] who
developed the intimate connection between subjective probability and
preferences [see Anscombe and Aumann, 1963]. Ramsey was responding to and
sharpening the initial formulation by Maynard Keynes [1943, originally
1921]. A useful overview of literature on Keynes' work on subjective
probability and of its broader implications in economics is given by
Moggridge [1992, ch. 6], Blaug [1994, esp. p. 1208] and Bateman [1987].

We see a close connection between Keynes' birthing of macroeconomics and of
Bayesian analysis, following Jack Amariglio [1990, pp. 30-31], in noting
Keynes' comment [1937, pp. 213-214] :

By "uncertain" knowledge ... I do not mean merely to distinguish what is
known for certain from what is only probable. ... The sense in which I am
using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is
uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest ... About these
matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable
probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity
for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to
overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had
behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective
advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate
probability, waiting to be summed.

This "awkward fact" that "there is no scientific basis on which to form any
calculable probability" combined with "the necessity for action and for
decision" can, I have argued [Cornwall, 1997], be resolved socially through
the use of subjective probabilities which embody cognitive codes or
languages and which are social - rather than individual -
entities/constructions. This type of social evolution of codes for thinking
and perceiving, cognitive codes, can also be related to Michel Foucault's
épistémè [1972], Barbara Ponse's principle of consistency [1978], Jeffrey
Escoffier's master code [1985], Sandra Bem's schema [1981], John R.
Searle's Background [1990, 1992, 1995] and Judith Butler's linguistic norms
[1993].

Jeffrey Escoffier [1995] has argued that this heretical breach of the
modernist credo can plausibly be argued to have been made by Keynes because
he was attempting to create an ethical space for buggery in post religious
ethics; i.e., to articulate an alternative to the then dominant modernist -
and implicitly heterosexist - philosophical vogue which had been offered by
his teacher and a leading English philosopher at that time, G. E. Moore,
which, itself, was an attempt to find a nonreligious basis for ethics.

Keynes [1921, pp. 309-310] is explicit in making the connection of his
innovation of subjective probability to G. E. Moore and Moggridge [1992,
ch. 5, esp. pp. 112-119] adds details for this claim. Escoffier [1995, p.
28-34] notes that Moore's Principia Ethica "was implicitly based on a
frequency interpretation of probability ... [and] [i]n his chapter on
conduct Moore treated the statistical norms of social behavior as the basis
of ethical norms. Keynes was intrigued by this 'curious connexion between
'probable' and 'ought'.' Keynes's work on probability was an original
exploration of the logic of making judgments about the probable
consequences of human actions." Escoffier conjectures that "Keynes and
[Lytton] Strachey were unable to accept Moore's reliance on customary
morals and conventions because it would have led to the disapproval of
their homosexuality".

Keynes as a student lecturing other students, members of the Apostles, at
Cambridge University shortly after the turn of the century in the midst of
the queer panic which dominated thinking in Britain following the trial of
Oscar Wilde, "repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and
traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the
term, immoralists." André Gide's elevation of this term had been printed 17
years before Keynes presented his autobiographical essay, "My early
beliefs," at the Memoir Club from which the preceding quote is taken
[Keynes, 1972]. Some sense of the intensity of the homophobia - the queer
panic - which grew out of the trial of Oscar Wilde and which dominated the
thinking of leading people like Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence can be
gotten from Moggridge's [1992] Appendix 2 to ch. 5, pp. 136-140, especially
where Lawrence writes about a meeting with Keynes: "I never knew what it
meant until I saw K[eynes] ..." and earlier in the same letter: "It is
foolish of you to say it doesn't matter either way - the men loving men. It
doesn't matter in a public way. But it matters so much, ... to the man
himself - at any rate to us northern nations [sic] - that it is like a blow
of triumphant decay, ... It is so wrong, it is unbearable. ... so repulsive
as if it came from a deep inward dirt - a sort of sewer - deep in men like
K[eynes] ... & D[uncan] G[rant]."


References Amariglio, Jack, "Economics as a postmodern discourse," ch. 2,
pp. 15 -46 in Warren J. Samuels, "Economics As Discourse: An Analysis of
the Language of Economists" [1990] Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Anscombe, F. J. and R. J. Aumann, "A definition of subjective probability,"
"Annals of Mathematical Statistics" [1963] 199-205.

Bateman, Bradley W. 1987. Keynes's changing conception of probability.
Economics and Philosophy 3(1): 97-120.

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz, "Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of set
typing,"
"Psychological Review" 88, 4 [1981] 354-364.

Blaug, Mark, "Recent biographies of Keynes," "Journal of Economic Literature"
32, 3 [September 1994] 1204-1215.

Butler, Judith, "Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of 'Sex'"
[1993] New York: Routledge.

Cornwall, Richard R., "deconstructing silence: the queer political economy
of the social  articulation of desire" "Review of Radical Political
Economics" 29, 1 [March 1997]

Escoffier, Jeffrey, "Sexual revolution and the politics of gay identity,"
"Socialist Review" 15  [July-October, 1985] 119-153.

Escoffier, Jeffrey, "John Maynard Keynes" [1995] New York: Chelsea House
Publishers.

Keynes, John Maynard, "My early beliefs," in "Essays in Biography, The
Collected Writings," vol. 10 [1972] London: Macmillan.

Keynes, John Maynard, "The general theory of employment," "Quarterly
Journal of
Economics" 51, 2 [1937] 209-223.

Keynes, John Maynard, "A Treatise on Probability" [1943, originally 1921]
London: Macmillan.

Lindley, Dennis V., "John Maynard Keynes: Contributions to Statistics," pp.
375-376 in vol. 8 of "International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences"
[1968] New York: Macmillan Company & The Free Press.

Moggridge, D. E., "Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography" [1992] London:
Routledge.

Ponse, Barbara, Identities in the Lesbian World [1978] Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.

Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, "Truth and probability," ch. VII, pp. 156-198 in
"The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays" edited by R. B.
Braithwaite, with a preface by G. E. Moore [1960, orig. 1931] Paterson, New
Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.

Savage, Leonard J., "The Foundations of Statistics" [1972, originally 1954]
New York: Dover.

Searle, John R., "The Construction of Social Reality" [1995] New York: The
Free Press.

Searle, John R., "The Rediscovery of the Mind" [1992] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Searle, John R., "Collective intentions and actions," ch. 19, pp. 401-415
in Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack (eds) "Intentions
in Communication" [1990] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Rosser Jr, John Barkley
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