Daniel Ellsberg was a strategic analyst with the RAND Corporation, and a defense department and state department official who served in Vietnam. He later revealed to the U.S. Senate and the press the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000 page top secret study of U.S. decision making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. For this he faced a trial and a sentence of 115 years in prison, but all charges were dismissed on grounds of gross governmental misconduct against him, which led to the conviction of a number of White House aids and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Acknowledgments; Note to Reader; Foreword, Isaac Levi ; 1. Ambiguity and Risk; Vagueness, Confidence, and the Weight of Arguments; The Nature and Uses of Normative Theory; The Validation of Normative Propositions; The Utility Axioms as Norms; Normative Theory and Empirical Research; 2. The Bernoulli Proposition; A Possible Counterexample: Are there Uncertainties that are Not Risks?; Vulgar Evaluations of Risk; 3. The Measurement of Definite Opinions; von Neumann-Morgenstern Utilities; Probability as Price; "Coherence" and "Definiteness" of Probability-Prices; Appendix to Chapter Three; On Making a Fool of Oneself: The Requirement of Coherence; Acceptable Odds: Definite, Coherent, and Otherwise; 4. Opinions and Actions: Which Come First?; The Logic of Degrees of Belief; Opinions that Make Horse Races; Postulate 2: the "Sure-Thing Principle"; Intuitive Probabilities and "Vagueness"; Appendix to Chapter Four; The Savage Postulates; The Koopman Axioms; 5. Uncertainties that are Not Risks; The "Three-Color Urn" Example; Vulgar Evaluations of Ambiguity; Appendix to Chapter Five; 6. Why Are Some Uncertainties Not Risks?; Decision Criteria for "Complete Ignorance"; Decision Criteria for "Partial Ignorance"; 7. The "Restricted Hurwicz Criterion"; The "Restricted Bayes/Hurwicz Criterion"; Boldness and Prudence: the "n-Color Urn" Example; Ignorance, Probability, and Varieties of Gamblers; 8. Ambiguity and the Utility Axioms; The Pratt/Raiffa Criticisms and the Value of Randomization; Rubin's Axiom; Allais and the Sure-Thing Principle; Winning at Russian Roulette; Bibliography