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Frank Ramsey

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I have written before in this blog about the 'Bayesian' interpretation of probability. I have even discussed a construction of quantum mechanics that draws on Bayesianism.

What I'd like to add today is a little bit of history. Bayesianism doesn't come from the Reverend Thomas Bayes. No more than Christianity comes from Jesus. No one seems to have thought Bayes' 18th century contributions to probability theory (real though they were) had a lot of philosophical weight until the early 20th century. It was Frank Ramsey who made that leap, who served as the Apostle Paul of our analogy.

In the mid 1920s and through the early 1930s, Ramsey worked to axiomize a Bayesian/subjectivist approach to probability. [Ramsey is a relevant figure in the history of epistemology as well: he pioneered the minimalist account of truth.]

H wrote, "[w]e have the authority both of ordinary language and of many great thinkers for discussing under the heading of probability what appears to be quite a different subject, the logic of partial belief."

The then-dominant frequency-theory of probability tried to reduce "partial belief" to a matter of frequency,  but Ramsey (after examining in some detail the logic of one such reductionist effort) said delicately that it was "not so completely satisfactory as to render futile any attempt to treat the subject from a rather different point of view."

The tendency of Bayesianism ever since has been, not only to resist the reduction of partial belief to frequency, but to replace the latter with the former. That's the "different point of view" desired.

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  1. HenryDecember 8, 2017 at 4:57 AM

    That was the VERY early 1930s. Ramsey died on January 19, 1930, a month short of 27.

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