All Academics, Especially Philosophers and Economists, Need to Stop Citing Ramsey’s January, 1922 Paper in the Cambridge Magazine : Ramsey’s ‘My Carpet Is Blue’ and ‘Napoleon Was a Great General’ Example Is Simply Nonsense

Page 1 of Ramsey’s 1922 very brief note(see also Mellor’s republication in the Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 40 (1989), 219-222) attempted to review Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability in the January 1922 issue of Cambridge Magazine on pp.3-5, contains a silly, stupid, and foolish example of what Ramsey claims is an application that follows from Keynes’s logical theory of probability as contained in the A Treatise on Probability. In fact, Ramsey’s example has absolutely nothing to do with anything written by Keynes on probability or in the A Treatise on Probability in his lifetime. The Ramsey example consists of two propositions. My carpet is blue and Napoleon was a great general. Neither proposition contains any relevant evidence,h, that could be used to support a conclusion,a, with regard to the other. Ramsey presents an analysis that “…, for example between 'My carpet is blue' and 'Napoleon was a great general'…”(Ramsey,1922,p.3;1989, pp. 219-220) makes no sense and is certainly not brilliant. Keynes’s theoretical exposition of propositions for use in his logical theory of probability, as detailed on pages 4, 11,40,119, and in axiom (i) on page 135 of the A Treatise on Probability, is that there exists a logical relation, P, between propositions h, which contain the relevant evidence that serves as the premises of our(Keynes’s italics,p.4) argument, and proposition a, which is the conclusion of the argument based on the h propositions that can be written as P(a/h)=α, where α is between 0 and 1,0≤α≤1. Keynes also uses the notation (a/h)=α, suppressing P which stands for probability relation. See his discussion on p.119.We will show that Ramsey’s discussion of this example will establish that he probably read-only paragraph two on page 11 of the A Treatise on Probability