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Quotation of the week
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Frank Ramsey
by
Peter Cave
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a big man, big in body, in intellect and in breadth of interests -
but small in life-span. He was born in 1903 and died in 1930, aged 26. Despite his short life -
and the consequent small output of papers - Ramsey remains an influential figure, having left
his mark not solely on philosophy (especially philosophical logic, probability theory and
attempts to derive mathematics from logic), but also on economics and mathematics proper.
Ramsey breathed Cambridge college life. His father was president of Magdalene and the young
Ramsey studied at Trinity, became a fellow of King's and lectured in mathematics. His brother
was to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Ramsey, as a student and young don, impressed G
E Moore, the great economist John Maynard Keynes (despite demolishing his theory of
probability) and - an unusual achievement here - even the anguished genius, Wittgenstein.
Indeed, Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Investigations, how Ramsey helped him - to a
degree he is hardly able to estimate - to realise earlier mistakes. It was the young Ramsey
who, with C K Ogden, first translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus, providing the wonderfully
elusive last proposition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent". In
criticism of the implied mysticism, Ramsey quipped, "But what we can't say we can't say, and
we can't whistle it either."
Ramsey, himself influenced by Russell and Wittgenstein, sought an account of how it is that we
can speak of the world - an account which avoided the early Wittgensteinian nonsense of some
nonsense being important nonsense.
Someone asserts, 'Jemima is growling.' How do those words come to represent the world?
Well, we might say that the speaker expresses a proposition which is true when it corresponds
to the fact that Jemima is growling; but we now have: propositions, facts, Jemima, the
growling and the property of being true. How do they intermesh? Things get worse. Consider:
'Jemima is not growling' and 'Jemima is sitting on the mat or on the cat'. Must there be, then,
negative facts and disjunctive facts? Do 'not' and 'or' designate odd worldly items?
Ramsey sought to avoid mistaking accidental linguistic features for worldly structures. While
we might assert a relation to hold between Jemima and the mat, not is no relation holding
between Jemima, sitting and mat. Negation could be expressed by a sentence being written as
a mirror image; double negation would then be seen to be no different from the original. Thus
we avoid an infinity of negative facts. As for truth and falsehood, well, they too are 'deflated'.
To say that it is true that Jemima is growling is just to say that Jemima is growling, albeit with
different stylistic emphases. This redundancy theory of truth, with one frill or another, has
much to commend it; and gives some explanation of why paradoxical statements such as 'This
is not true' are ill-formed.
Ramsey does not stop there in puncturing pretensions of grammar. Many of us can still spot
the subject-predicate form, whereby 'Jemima' is subject and 'is growling' is predicate; but does
this show a world populated by irreducible categories of particulars and universals? Ramsey
answers, 'No'. We might have said, 'Growling is a characteristic of Jemima'. The differences
between our two sentences are accounted for by differing human interests. What is it, though,
for someone to believe that Jemima is growling? Ramsey's gesture was pragmatic - explaining
in terms of actions, dispositions to act, causes and effects. These days, this popular approach
in the philosophy of mind is labelled 'functionalism'. In the philosophy of science, Ramsey also
spotted a good idea - in seeing theoretical terms as enmeshed within a theory and its
development and confrontation with new circumstances.
Links with action - behaviour and consequences - are frequently present in Ramsey's
approach. Consider laws of nature. 'All growling tigers are hungry.' This is no conjunction of:
this growling tiger is hungry, that one is…that one is etc. Ramsey's solution is that it is akin to
holding the rule: if I meet growling tigers, I shall regard them as hungry. Depending on your
system of beliefs and desires, swift flight from the scene might follow. Do you believe the
counterfactual, 'Had that tiger been growling, it would have eaten me?' Well, modify your
belief system so you hold the antecedent belief, then do you believe the consequent?
Believing, of course, is a matter of degree; and one measure of that degree which Ramsey
considers is your willingness to place bets.
Ramsey was no showman; he was somewhat lazy. He was unimpressed by the vastness of the
skies, valuing, instead, humanity, thinking and love - and managing to do so without the
tortured moods of a Wittgenstein or the womanising of a Russell; but then he had few years in
which to acquire those human, all too human, dispositions to act.
Frank Ramsey
Engelsk for gymnasiet
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