Richard Jeffrey

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Richard C. Jeffrey (5 August 1926 – 9 November 2002) was an American philosopher, logician, and probability theorist. He was a native of Boston, Massachusetts.

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 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 as Gödel's incompleteness theorems 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 Malls" (p. xii).

[edit] Selected bibliography

Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits. 3rd ed. McGraw Hill, 1990. ISBN 0-07-032357-7
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 (with George Boolos and John Burgess). 4th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-00758-5
Subjective Probability: The Real Thing. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-53668-5