|
 Philosopher
of the Month
August
2003 - Frank Ramsey
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.
Suggested
reading
The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays,
F P Ramsey (Routledge)
'Frank Ramsey', D H Mellor, in Cambridge Philosophers, ed.
A O'Hear (St Augustine's Press)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid September 2003
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