https://jhaponline.org/jhap <p>JHAP aims to promote research in and discussion of the history of analytical philosophy. <a href="/jhap/about">Read more ...</a></p> McMaster University en-US Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 2159-0303 <p>The Public Knowledge Project recommends the use of the Creative Commons license. The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy requires authors to agree to a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution /Non-commercial license</a>. Authors who publish with the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy agree to the following terms:</p> <ol> <li class="show">Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">Creative Commons BY-NC license</a>.</li> <li class="show">Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li> <li class="show">Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access)</li> </ol> <p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/" rel="license"><img style="border-width: 0;" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/3.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License"></a><br>This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License</a>.</p> https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/5781 <p>At the end of Frank Ramsey’s “General Propositions and Causality” ([1929b] 1990), he offers an enigmatic footnote that briefly describes his philosophy of science as a “forecasting theory”. What he means by this and by a “forecast” is unclear. However, elsewhere in his unpublished notes, he uses the term sporadically. An examination of those notes reveals the skeleton of a behavioral theory of mind. Ramsey held that all actions are at root driven by the sum total of a person’s dispositions or habits. These habits operate in an unconscious process that produces psychological expectations about the realization of desires. When those expectations are frustrated, the violation is registered consciously to the individual as a proposition, and the offending habit is identified. Humans can then regulate and change those habits by the conscious application of logic through deliberation. The applicable logic is Ramsey’s decision theory, which aims to make beliefs probabilistically coherent by adopting the laws and chances that signify the habits people might use for guiding behavior. The outcome of this deliberation is to refashion psychological expectations as mathematical expectations on laws and chances. These mathematical expectations are forecasts, and a forecasting theory of science takes scientific theories to provide forecasts.</p> Bruce Rushing Copyright (c) 2024 Bruce Rushing 2024-09-18 2024-09-18 12 7