Abstract
This paper aims to renew the “deflationary” interpretation of Ramsey’s theory of truth, with respect to his declared “pragmatist tendency,” which was not completely developed due to his premature death. This aim is not only historical-philosophical, but also exquisitely theoretical, since the mediation of pragmatism allowed Ramsey to achieve an original synthesis among different philosophical instances. In order to show this, I pay attention to the debate between Ramsey and some spokespeople of the leading British philosophical traditions at the beginning of the twentieth century (especially Neo-idealism, Neo-empiricism, and Oxford Realism), through which it will stand out how Ramsey’s logical analysis of the truth predicate was embedded within a wider theoretical context, involving a pragmatic theory of knowledge and even a “general psychological theory.” Indeed, the truth of a belief will be defined in relation to mental factors, in so far as they involve a successful disposition to behave.
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Notes
For a genesis of this edition see (Misak, 2020, pp. 382–384).
In the next section, we will see better how Ramsey’s approach to a theory of truth — with regard to this respect — is more near to the neo-idealistic one, than to the neo-empiricist. For, the former, as Ramsey, considers truth within a general theory of knowledge, whereas the latter only as a linguistic or formal problem.
This primacy of ordinary knowledge reminds the concept of “knowledge first” in Cook Wilson, as we will see (Infra, pp. 11–12).
In a short paper that Ramsey read in 1925 to the Cambridge discussion society and that R.B. Braithwaite published as “Epilogue” in (Ramsey, 1931), he spoke about the consequences of the hyper-specialization of scientific knowledge both respect to sciences themselves and to “ordinary conversations.” In both cases, according to Ramsey, the main result of the fact “that we have really settled everything” is that “there is nothing to discuss” anymore (Ibid., p. 287). Indeed, on one hand, “science, history, and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts” (Ibid.); on the other hand, “there never seems to be anything to talk about except shop and people’s private lives” (Ibid., p. 290). Ramsey’s reaction to this sort of cultural incommunicability among sciences and among people is ambivalent. In a sense, Ramsey appears resigned when he says that, “this process in the development of civilization we have each of us to repeat in ourselves” (Ibid., p. 291), accepting that, “there is nothing to know except science” (Ibid., p. 287). But, in another sense, he finally tries to say “not things but life in general. Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical side. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does.” (Ibid., p. 291) Therefore, Ramsey was not reductionist at all: even if he recognized the importance of scientific development and that nowadays knowledge has to be approached in a scientific way, he does not reduce knowledge to science altogether. There would always be space to think about “life in general,” through which sciences themselves can open new questions and generate new progress, far from settling everything once and for all. This openness of scientific research to human experience seems, then, to be the origin of Ramsey’s ability to find wide connections within the complexity of contemporary knowledge and to offer a unitary image of it as the collective challenge of living people. This attempt to reach a unitary account of inquiry is also confirmed and developed, as we will see, by the idea of a “human logic” in Truth and Probability (1931 [1926b], p. 193).
See Supra, p. 4.
This essay corresponds to the first two sections of (Russell, 1906–7) that were reprinted with the title “The Monistic Theory of Truth” in (Russell, 1910, pp. 150–169). Here Russell tried, in turn, to reduce ad absurdum Joachim’s refutation ad absurdum of his correspondence theory of truth (see Supra, pp. 3–4). More precisely, Joachim had supported Bradley’s “axiom of internal relations” by rejecting Russell’s theory of truth as an external relation of correspondence between “independent entities,” maintaining that the neo-empiricist independence between thought and reality has to suppose that, “in sensation we are in direct contact with the Real [and then that] experiencing makes no difference to the facts” (Joachim, 1906, pp. 33 and 39). But, according to Joachim, these assumptions are self-contradictory, because “how, under these circumstances, greenness can yet sometimes so far depart from its sacred aloofness as to be apprehended (sensated or conceived); and how, when this takes place, the sensating or conceiving subject is assured that its immaculate perseitas is still perserved […] this, if it takes place, takes place by a miraculous de facto coincidence” (Ibid., pp. 42 and 44). Ultimately, according to Joachim, the only justification for maintaining the existence of external relations between independent entities cannot be that, “an extreme Occasionalism, without the Deus ex machina to render Occasionalism plausible” (Ibid.). Russell reacted to this refutation of external relations, in turn, by reducing ad absurdum Joachim’s theory of truth as coherence within the thought/reality “significant whole.” In essence, Russell noted that if “[e]very relation is grounded in the natures of the related terms” — as the axiom of internal relations claims — the necessary conclusion is that, “there are no relations and there are not many things, but only one thing” (Russell, 1906–7, pp. 38). But according to Russell, this conclusion is not only absolutely counter-intuitive, but also incompatible with any complex totality as the “significant whole.” As we can see in the final analysis, these refutations ad absurdum completely prevented any possibility for dialogue and argumentation between the rival traditions, whereas, as we will maintain, Ramsey’s moving beyond this kind of refutation, as well as his decision to insert the second chapter mentioned above represent his attempt to reopen the dialogue, and trying to synthetize their best points.
Before these charges that Neo-idealism is abstract and abstruse, it is right to point out that Joachim, too, denounced the great distance between the neo-empiricist “philosophical insight” and that of the “plain man” (Joachim, 1906, p. 42). Indeed, the plain man gains a unitary experience of sensation, without pulverizing it through technical expedients such as Russellian “unique relations”: “Who shall say that his is the insight of a lying prophet, whilst yours bears the divine stamp of truth?” (Ibid.) By invoking the philosophical relevance of the “plain man” ordinary experience antecedent to any formal and technical superstructure, Joachim’s philosophical approach seems near to Ramsey’s taking the “common man” view, but also, as we will see (Infra, pp. 11–12), to the primacy of knowledge according to Cook Wilson. On the other hand, however, Joachim and Cook Wilson seem nearer to Russell’s conception of experience, since they both conceive it in a theoretical way, whereas Ramsey’s conception of experience involves praxis. In any case, beyond the results of this comparison, what is important overall is to underline the criteria by which we can identify each position, each of which seems ultimately to concern the relationship between ordinary experience and formal knowledge, on one hand, and the theoretical and/or practical interpretation of experience, on the other. Applying these criteria, we will claim that Ramsey positions himself in the “middle,” by interpreting the empiricist conception of experience pragmatically, and thus being able to affirm the primacy and the unity of ordinary experience, too.
From this point of view, the propositional reference seems reminiscent of the concept of intentionality seen from a logical perspective and not from a transcendental one, as Husserl instead did in 1900–1901. On the other hand, as we will see, Ramsey was directly influenced by Cook Wilson, the founder of “Oxford Realism.” Recently, Marion (2011) has noticed that Cook Wilson, like the members of the Brentano School, maintained a form of direct realism according to which every act of knowing, prior to any theorization, is objective knowledge in itself, since “our experience of knowing [is] the presupposition of any inquiry” (Cook Wilson, 1926, p. 39). Whereas the Brentanians developed this primacy of knowledge and the immediacy of its objectivity primarily through the theory of intentionality, Cook Wilson tried to overcome philosophical jargon and achieve “knowledge first” through the analysis of ordinary language, which was, however — as the Oxonian Ryle (1971, p. 176) had already recognized in the Twenties — very close to Brentanian descriptive psychology. Considering that, as we will see, Wilsonian analysis of ordinary language would also be adopted by Ramsey, it is possible that Ramsey’s idea of propositional reference could be indirectly influenced by the idea of intentionality, reinterpreted from a mere logical perspective.
Here, as well as throughout this paper, I have preferred to use the more general adjective “pragmatic” (or “practical”) rather than “pragmatist,” since Ramsey had explicitly referred to Pragmatist tradition by declaring his “pragmatist tendency” specifically in relation to the “Pragmatic Maxim” (Peirce, 1878), agreeing “that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead” (Ramsey, 1931 [1927], p. 155), and also in relation to Peircean inductive logic (1877), which Ramsey developed in Truth and Probability (1931 [1926b], pp. 194–198). Since there are no explicit and precise references to Pragmatism in Ramsey’s analysis of the use of the term “knowledge” in ordinary language — and actually none to Cook Wilson, who, as we are going to see, really established this method — I believe it is more prudent to define such analysis as “pragmatic,” given that it refers generically to our linguistic practices, and not specifically to action, even if, of course, they may obviously be conceived as actions themselves.
Cook Wilson, beyond being considered the founder of “Oxford Realism,” also inspired the “ordinary language philosophy” established through the “linguistic turn” of the late Twentieth Century. For a general survey on the relevance of Cook Wilson in the developments of analytic philosophy see Marion (2011).
For more details see (Supra, p. 11, note 10).
On this matter, see (Galavotti, 2019).
More precisely, according to Ramsey, human logic “is not merely independent of but sometimes actually incompatible with formal logic” (Ibid., p. 191).
This attitude of Ramsey’s was highlighted above (Supra, p. 8, note 6).
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Lizzadri, A. Truth and Knowledge in F. P. Ramsey’s Essays: a Pragmatic Overview. Acta Anal 37, 489–505 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00502-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00502-z