Was Adam Smith a closet Bayesian?

According to most accounts of the history of Bayes’s famous theorem (see here and here, for example), the Rev. Thomas Bayes (1701-1761) developed mathematical formulation of his theorem in the 1740s, but he never published his work during his lifetime. Instead, it was his friend, the moral philosopher Richard Price (1723-1791), who communicated his work via a letter to physicist John Canton (1718-1772), who then read Bayes’s paper aloud to the famed Royal Society on Price’s behalf on 23 December 1763. (The French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) made additional contributions to Bayesian probability in the late 1700s; see here.) For his part, Adam Smith’s familiarity with inverse probability is unclear at best. He was not elected a Fellow of the Royal Society until 21 May 1767, and he could not have been present at that 1763 meeting of the Royal Society in which Bayes and Price’s was discussed. Also, although Smith and Price shared mutual friends (e.g.…