This is a collection of Ramsey’s papers, written while a fellow at King’s College from 1925 until his death in 1930. The book begins with his essay “Philosophy” from 1929. Ramsey states, “Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions.” After this injunction, Ramsey gets a little cheeky, playfully contradicting his chief sparring partner, Ludwig Wittgenstein. “The chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense.” Ramsey continues in a more serious vein, “Essentially a philosophy is a system of definitions or, only too often, a system of descriptions of how definitions might be given…. We are driven to philosophize because we do not know clearly what we mean.” He concludes with a warning against scientism, “The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.”
Ramsey continues his probing of philosophy and meaning in his essay “Universals”, which deals with particulars and universals in the world. Defining meaning, he states, “Now it seems to me as clear as anything can be in philosophy that the two sentences ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Wisdom is a characteristic of Socrates’ assert the same fact and express the same proposition. They are not, of course, the same sentence, but they have the same meaning, just as two sentences in two different languages can have the same meaning.” Ramsey is not concerned with language games, but the underlying truth behind the words. “The whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language.” Ramsey states that he is “interested not so much in sentences themselves, as in what they mean, from which we hope to discover the logical nature of reality.”
In his paper “Facts and Propositions”, Ramsey lays out his theory of beliefs. He begins, “I prefer to deal with those beliefs which are expressed in words, or possibly images or other symbols, consciously asserted or denied; for these beliefs, in my view, are the most proper subject for logical criticism…. The mental factors of such a belief I take to be words, spoken aloud or to oneself or merely imagined, connected together and accompanied by a feeling or feelings of belief or disbelief…. It is evident that the importance of beliefs and disbeliefs lies not in their intrinsic nature, but in their causal properties.” Ramsey concludes with an endorsement of Peirce’s pragmatism, “The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain.”
Ramsey tries to dig into the idea of partial beliefs in his essay “Truth and Probability”. He claims “that we act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desires, so that a person’s actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions.” Beliefs are manifest in actions. He continues, “The theory I propose to adopt is that we seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people’s pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our actions are such as we think most likely to realize these goods.” Ramsey next breaks down the differences in deductive and inductive reasoning. “Our opinions can be divided into those we hold immediately as a result of perception or memory, and those which we derive from the former by argument…. Logic as a science of argument and inference is traditionally and rightly divided into deductive and inductive…. A formal deduction does not increase our knowledge, but only brings out clearly what we already know in another form…. We are bound to accept its validity on pain of being inconsistent with ourselves. The logical relation which justifies the inference is that the sense or import of the conclusion is contained in that of the premisses…. We can divide arguments into two radically different kinds, which we can distinguish in the words of Peirce as (1) ‘explicative, analytic, or deductive’ and (2) ‘amplifiative, synthetic, or (loosely speaking) inductive’. Arguments of the second type are from an important point of view much closer to memories and perceptions than to deductive arguments. We can regard perception, memory and induction as the three fundamental ways of acquiring knowledge…. We have the lesser logic, which is the logic of consistency, or formal logic; and the larger logic, which is the logic of discovery, or inductive logic.” Following Peirce’s pragmatism, Ramsey explains why it makes sense to base our partial beliefs on inductive processes. “We are all convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true opinions…. This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work.”
Mellor chooses to conclude this collection with an “Epilogue”, which was actually a speech Ramsey prepared for the Apostles’ Club at Cambridge in 1925. Ramsey cheekily challenges the view that the debating club has anything to talk about anymore. Ramsey teases, “I do not wish to maintain that there never has been anything to discuss, but only that there is no longer; that we have really settled everything by realizing that there is nothing to know except science…. Science, history, and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts…. Then there is philosophy; this, too, has become too technical for the layman.” He can’t resist poking a little fun at Wittgenstein, who by 1925 had quit the Apostles in disgust at their flippant musings. Ramsey half-jokes, “The conclusion of the greatest modern philosopher is that there is no such subject as philosophy; that it is an activity, not a doctrine; and that, instead of answering questions, it aims merely at curing headaches.” Ramsey concludes in a much more serious vein, “Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. 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…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.”
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