Richard Jeffrey

Jeffrey served in the U.S. Navy during World War II . As a graduate student he studied under Rudolf Carnap , Kurt Gödel , and Carl Hempel . He received his M.A. from the University Of Chicago in 1952 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1957. After holding academic positions at City College Of New York , Stanford University , and the University Of Pennsylvania , he joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1974 and became a professor Emeritus there in 1999. He was also a visiting professor at the University Of California, Irvine .

As a philosopher, Jeffrey specialized in Epistemology and Decision 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 the Probability of a Proposition in light of new Evidence .

Jeffrey also wrote or co-wrote two widely used and influential and Tarski'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 Mall s" (p. xii).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

''Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits''. 3rd ed. McGraw Hill, 1990. ISBN 0070323577

''The Logic of Decision''. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1990. ISBN 0226395820

''Probability and the Art of Judgment''. Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0521397707

''Computability and Logic'' (with George Boolos and John Burgess ). 4th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521007585

''Subjective Probability: The Real Thing''. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521536685

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	CATEGORIES ABOUT RICHARD JEFFREY

	1926 births

	2002 deaths

	american logicians

	people from boston

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