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This paper aims to reply to Dequech's comment in the International Journal of Social Economics on the analysis of the formation of conventional expectations under strong uncertainty, which was proposed in the present author's 2004 article in the International Journal of Social Economics.

The scope of this reply is to evaluate through a theoretical examination the validity of Dequech's claim contained in his comment that his initial analytical scheme of the state of expectations presented in his 1999 article was general enough to accommodate the psychological considerations, which were raised in the present author's 2004 article and which were associated with Keynes's analysis as well as with developments in the field of social psychology.

The paper demonstrates that both Dequech's initial article of the state of expectations and his subsequent comment on the present author's contribution on the conventional formation of expectations under strong uncertainty in the International Journal of Social Economics overlooked the psychological nature of the process of inferences, a fundamental factor in Keynes's discussion of the formation of conventional expectations. However, when social psychology considerations are introduced in the analysis (as it was the case with the present author's approach) and when the remarkable theoretical and empirical progress in the field of social psychology is taken into account, Dequech's claim of the generality of his framework is not justifiable because both the specific nature and the substantive impact of the social psychology issues associated with the role of inferences are overlooked across his analysis. It is proposed that a theoretical scheme that uses the wealth of evidence of contemporary social psychology is more promising for a rigorous development of a theory of expectations under strong uncertainty.

The paper sheds further light on expectancy theory.

This article develops an analysis of the conventional formation of expectations by means of introducing an overlooked factor in the analysis: the role of inference. Individual inferences and changes in evidential weight of beliefs and in the state of confidence are integrated with an analysis of the conventional character of expectations in a manner that is consistent with evidence provided by research in social psychology. This approach provides the link between the “agency” approach and the “structure” approach in Keynesian analysis that has been stressed as an important development. It also improves our understanding of the mechanisms underlying economic behavior under uncertainty such as liquidity‐preference in different social and cultural settings.

This paper comments on Theodore Koutsobinas's recent contribution to the debate on the formation of expectations in situations of strong uncertainty.

The set of comments focuses not on doctrinal‐historical issues, but on Koutsobinas's theoretical framework, which is, in turn, a modified version of the analytical scheme of the state of expectations presented in the present author's 1999 article in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics.

The paper demonstrates that the original framework developed in the 1999 “Expectations and confidence” article is general enough to accommodate Koutsobinas's concern with conventional expectations. It also shows that some ways of using that framework to discuss conventions have already been explored in subsequent work. The interesting points made by Professor Koutsobinas can thus be investigated with the original framework, without the changes he suggests.

The paper clarifies some elements of the theory of expectations and confidence formation and its use to study conventional and unconventional behaviour.