- Richard Jeffrey
Richard C. Jeffrey (
5 August 1926 –9 November 2002 ) was an Americanphilosopher ,logician , and probability theorist. He was a native ofBoston, Massachusetts .Jeffrey served in the
U.S. Navy duringWorld War II . As a graduate student he studied underRudolf Carnap ,Kurt Gödel , andCarl Hempel . He received his M.A. from theUniversity of Chicago in 1952 and hisPh.D. from Princeton in 1957. After holding academic positions atCity College of New York ,Stanford University , and theUniversity of Pennsylvania , he joined the faculty ofPrinceton University in 1974 and became a professoremeritus there in 1999. He was also a visiting professor at theUniversity of California, Irvine .As a philosopher, Jeffrey specialized in
epistemology anddecision theory . He is perhaps best known for defending and developing the Bayesian approach to probability—specifically, for inventing "Jeffrey conditioning " (which he referred to as "probability kinematics"), a way of modeling the change in theprobability of aproposition in light of newevidence .Jeffrey also wrote or co-wrote two widely used and influential
logic textbooks: "Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits", a basic introduction to logic, and "Computability and Logic", a more advanced text dealing with, among other things, the famous negative results of twentieth century logic such asGödel's incompleteness theorems andTarski's indefinability theorem .Jeffrey, who died of
lung cancer at the age of 76, was known for his sense of humor, which often came through in his breezy writing style. In the preface of his posthumously published "Subjective Probability", he refers to himself as "a fond foolish old fart dying of a surfeit of Pall Malls" (p. xii).Selected bibliography
* "Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits". 3rd ed. McGraw Hill, 1990. ISBN 0-07-032357-7
* "Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits". 4th ed., John P. Burgess (editor), Hackett Publishing, 2006, ISBN-10: 0872208133; ISBN-13: 978-0872208131
* "The Logic of Decision". 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1990. ISBN 0-226-39582-0
* "Probability and the Art of Judgment". Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-39770-7
* "Computability and Logic" (withGeorge Boolos andJohn P. Burgess ). 4th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-00758-5
* "Subjective Probability: The Real Thing". Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-53668-5External links
* [http://www.princeton.edu/~bayesway/ His website at Princeton; includes several manuscripts, including "Subjective Probability"]
* [http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/philosophy/jeffrey.html Bibliography]
* [http://www.princeton.edu/~bayesway/VITA.html Curriculum Vitae]
* [http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~mrisse/jeffrey.htm Page devoted to the memory of Richard Jeffrey]
* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Bayes' Theorem] (discusses Jeffrey conditioning)
* [http://philosophy.wisc.edu/PSA/Jeffrey.htm Tribute, by Brian Skyrms]
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