Eight centuries ago, Thomas Aquinas clearly differentiated between probability and uncertainty in decision making. He viewed probability eclectically as having elements that involved propositions about events, frequency of events, and single events. He found an important role in his approach for...

The Townshend–Keynes exchanges over decision making, weight of the argument (evidence), non numerical probabilities (Keynes’s term for Boole’s constituent probabilities, used in The Laws of Thought in 1854, that appears on page 163 of the A Treatise on Probability in chapter 15 on inexact...

Adam Smith was the first economist, philosopher or mathematician in history to give a clear and specific definition of what the term “uncertainty” meant and to apply it consistently in his analysis of decision making in the Wealth of Nations. The term uncertainty for Smith, as it was for...

Smith, Keynes, and Knight, in that order, made seminal contributions to decision making which emphasized uncertainty and indeterminate probabilities, as opposed to mere imprecision. De Finetti’s views on uncertainty are diametrically opposed to those of Smith, Keynes, and Knight once the clear...

Smith was the first economist and/or philosopher to understand how uncertainty; (a) was different from risk calculations based on fair/unfair lotteries where there was a large amount of evidence; (b) would have to be represented mathematically by intervals; (c) that uncertainty came in degrees or...

Adam Smith was the first academic in history to make an explicit, detailed Uncertainty – Risk distinction and apply it clearly in a number of worked out examples and applications consistently in his analysis of decision making in the Wealth of Nations on occupational choice, businesses such as...