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Cambridge Pragmatism
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/20/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/20/2016, SPi
Cambridge
Pragmatism
From Peirce and James to
Ramsey and Wittgenstein
Cheryl Misak
1
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3
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For my parents, Alex and Ruby Misak, for their 80th birthdays
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Reference and Spelling Policy
Permissions
ix
xiii
xv
xix
Introduction1
Part I. Cambridge Massachusetts
1. Peirce
11
11
12
17
23
31
39
48
2. James
52
52
53
60
63
67
73
3. Bridges across the Atlantic
75
75
82
85
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
Introduction
The Pragmatic Maxim: Meaning, Use, Practice
Belief and Disposition
Truth
Experience: Mathematics, Metaphysics, Religion, and Morals
Logic and Probability
Regulative Assumptions and the Principle of Bivalence
Introduction
Psychology: Observation and Experience
Truth and Usefulness
Willing to Believe
Religious Experience
James on Common Sense
3.1 F. C. S. Schiller
3.2 Victoria Welby
3.3 C. K. Ogden
Part II. Cambridge England
4. The Anti-Pragmatism of Pre-War Cambridge
4.1 Introduction
4.2The Revolt against Idealism: The Early Moore and Russell on
Propositions and Reality
4.3 Russell’s Logical Atomism
4.4 Russell’s Attack on Pragmatism
4.5 Moore’s Contribution
4.6 The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus
4.7 Wittgenstein’s Intersections with the Vienna Circle
91
91
94
98
104
113
117
128
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viii
Contents
5. The Pull of Pragmatism on Russell
138
138
141
145
6. Ramsey
155
155
159
162
166
183
189
199
213
5.1 Russell at Harvard
5.2 New Thoughts about Experience, Belief, and Meaning
5.3 The Analysis of Mind
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The Undergraduate Ramsey and the Tractatus
6.3 The Undergraduate Ramsey’s Response to Russell
6.4 The 1927 Ramsey: Belief, Action, Probability, Truth
6.5 Philosophy and Meaninglessness
6.6 ‘General Propositions and Causality’
6.7 On Truth
6.8 Ethics and Pragmatist Naturalism
6.9A Step beyond the Redundancy Theory to
the Pragmatist Theory of Truth
222
7. Wittgenstein: Post-Tractatus231
7.1 Introduction
231
7.2 Wittgenstein and Ramsey, 1929
233
7.3 Wittgenstein’s 1929 Pragmatism
238
7.4 The Primacy of Practice and Meaning as Use
248
7.5 Truth
254
7.6 Rule-Following, Privacy, and Behaviour
258
7.7 Religion, Ethics, and Forms of Life
264
7.8 On Doubt and Certainty
272
Conclusion281
Bibliography
Names Index
Subject Index
289
307
311
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Preface
The aim of this book is to map and explore some unfamiliar but important territory in
the history of analytic philosophy. It concerns the relationship between two intellectual giants of Cambridge Massachusetts, Charles Peirce and William James, and two
intellectual giants of Cambridge England, Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The timeline begins in the mid 1860s, when Peirce and James started to develop the
philosophical position they called pragmatism, and ends with Wittgenstein’s last
works in 1951. There will be special focus on the three decades between 1900 and 1930,
when philosophers in Cambridge England became aware of and took account of the
pragmatism being developed in Cambridge Massachusetts. These were the years in
which Russell was repelled by some of the ideas of the pragmatists and attracted by
others; Ramsey was heavily influenced by Peirce on belief and truth; and Wittgenstein
was influenced by James on religious belief and influenced more generally and more
signficantly by Peirce, through Ramsey.
The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that any domain of inquiry—science,
ethics, mathematics, logic, aesthetics—is human inquiry, and that our philosophical
accounts of truth and knowledge must start with that fact. Our vast store of belief has
developed in a way that is contingent on all sorts of historical accidents—the evolution
of the human brain and sensory apparatus, the way language-users have posed fundamental questions and answered them, the technology made possible by the earth’s raw
materials and by our ingenuity, and so on. As James was fond of putting it, the trail of
the human serpent is over everything (P: 37, VRE: 352). As some put it today, the best
understanding of our concepts is agent-centred.
From this starting point about the human origins of and constraints upon knowledge, pragmatists have made different arguments and drawn different conclusions.
Some argue that it makes little or no sense to speak of truth, falsity, or objectivity, but
only what passes for true, false, or objective in one community or another. The most
prominent proponent of this kind of pragmatism in recent years has been Richard
Rorty. Others argue that the contingency of knowledge, and the allied fact that each of
our beliefs is a fallible interpretation, does not entail that our beliefs are simply determined by—or answerable only to—what our community decides, or that truth and
objectivity are spurious notions. The ideas of truth and objectivity are required if we
are to have beliefs at all. I have argued for this kind of pragmatism, as has Huw Price.1
The pragmatist who wants to retain a place for truth and objectivity must walk a fine
line. The truth-denying pragmatist thinks that the truth-affirming pragmatist will not
be able to keep her balance. Indeed, the truth-denying pragmatist thinks that the
1
See e.g. Misak (2004 [1991], 2013) and Price (2003).
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preface
truth-affirming pragmatist is really walking a plank that will inevitably dump her
under what the truth-affirming pragmatist thinks is the sea of post-modern arbitrariness. But that, in my view, would be an indictment of pragmatism. In the pages that
follow, I will try to show that Peirce and Ramsey manage to keep their balance and have
much to teach contemporary philosophy as we try to work through these difficult matters. Peirce and Ramsey, that is, offer us the best chance of understanding how it is that
beliefs can both be the products of human inquiry and can nonetheless aim at truth.
This will come as a surprise to those who read Ramsey as a redundancy theorist
about truth. It will also come as a surprise to those who read him as an expressivist who
thinks there is a fact-stating discourse and a non-fact-stating discourse of open generalizations, causal laws, conditionals, value statements, etc., and that only the latter
kinds of belief require a pragmatist treatment. My intention is to show that Ramsey’s
equivalence thought (the idea that ‘p is true’ and p are equivalent), which so many have
interpreted as a redundancy theory, was merely a step along the way to a thoroughgoing pragmatist account of truth. That is, Ramsey is best read as a pragmatist, and a
pragmatist not just about open generalizations, causal statements, conditionals, and
value statements. He is a pragmatist about all our beliefs. On his account, however, as
on Peirce’s, that is not to deny that our beliefs aim at truth and objectivity.
The position I trace and recommend here is in step with my 2013 book The American
Pragmatists. There I presented a history of pragmatism and argued that we ought to
follow Peirce and C. I. Lewis in order to rehabilitate the more objective version, after its
successive downward shifts in fortune driven by James, F. C. S. Schiller, and Rorty. In
the present book, I fill in a missing piece of that story. I give an account of the kind of
pragmatism that was gaining strength across the Atlantic, in Cambridge England. That
pragmatism is Ramsey’s pragmatism, which then influenced Wittgenstein. Hence, my
account of Ramsey’s relationship with Wittgenstein is in competition with those who
think of him as the junior partner in Wittgenstein’s project and it is in competition
with the very different narrative that that Wittgenstein’s ideas were diametrically opposed to Ramsey’s. I shall argue that while Wittgenstein was indeed a major influence
on Ramsey, Ramsey was also a major influence on Wittgenstein.
I should say right away that there is much more to James than his sometimes careless
expressions of pragmatism as the thesis that truth is what works for any particular
person or community. But these expressions were what dimmed pragmatism’s prospects in the minds of many, and hence, as in The American Pragmatists, I need to get
this James on the page. Otherwise we will fail to understand the trajectory of pragmatism. It might be true that James’s theories are often presented, for instance by Russell
and Moore, in a wilfully weak way so as to provide an easy stalking horse. But however
much one might admire the more careful James, we shall see that it was his less careful
statements about pragmatism that made an impact across the Atlantic. It is good that
we shall have in the present book more opportunity to look at James’s better-received
work, especially in psychology and the theories of action and perception.
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preface
xi
The debates that absorbed the two sets of Cambridge pragmatists have of course
evolved, and there is a temptation to spread our contemporary terminology and preoccupations onto thinkers in the past. I shall try to resist it.2 To take just one example—
the debate about primary and secondary languages that occupied a good deal of the
attention of Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and the Vienna Circle—I will stick to the
intellectual context they found themselves in, and will only gesture at the way these
debates have continued to unfold. I shall also confine myself to the core issues of pragmatism, and so I will not, for instance, speak to the work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and
Ramsey on the foundations of mathematics; or Frege’s part in the intellectual background against which these three formed their positions; or the role of Mach, Brouwer,
Hertz, and Boltzmann, who did not call themselves pragmatists, but who were sometimes thought to be such by Schlick, Wittgenstein, and others.3
One might well ask whether Oxford was not also influenced by the American pragmatists. The answer, I think, is ‘yes’. Austin, Dummett, McDowell, Ryle, Strawson, and
Wiggins are examples of those who have wanted to link our philosophical concepts to
human practice and action. The pragmatist influence there came mostly through
Wittgenstein, if my account of the impact of pragmatism on Wittgenstein is at all compelling. The reader who is interested in this lineage might want to turn to the volume of
essays arising from the 2014 British Academy Symposium: The Practical Turn:
Pragmatism in the British Long 20th Century.
2
3
David Stern (2007) is superb on the dangers of reading the present into the past.
See Kevin Mulligan (forthcoming) for the beginnings of that last study.
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Acknowledgements
Huw Price has been instrumental to this project in more ways than one. A research
workshop he and Fraser McBride organized in 2012 on ‘Cambridge Pragmatism’
sparked my interest in the topic. In the autumn of 2014, he and I put together a British
Academy Symposium titled ‘The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in the British Long
20th Century’, which provided further fuel, as did the reading group on pragmatism
we organized in Cambridge during Lent Term 2015. Indeed, the book was finished
while I was a very happy Visiting Fellow Commoner at his college, Trinity, home at
various times to Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. All along the way, he has asked
some of the most pressing questions.
The organizers of a conference in 2012 on ‘Truth and Democracy: Themes from
Cheryl Misak’s Work’ at the University of St Andrews, Yann Allard-Tremblay and
Noah Friedman-Biglin, helped keep the flame alive during some heavy but rewarding
lifting as Provost of the University of Toronto. My graduate classes at NYU in 2013 and
the University of Toronto in 2015 on the topic of this book provided much stimulus. So
did audiences at Columbia University; the University of Birmingham; the École
Normale Supérieure; the University of Hertfordshire; The Idea of Pragmatism
Workshop at Sheffield University; the Institute of Education at UCL; the New York
Pragmatist Forum; NYU; the Peirce Centennial Conference; Royal Holloway; Queen’s
University, Kingston; Roma Tre University; the Royal Institute of Philosophy; the
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; the Society for the Study of the
History of Analytic Philosophy; University College Dublin; the University of Vienna;
and three Cambridge groups: the Moral Sciences Club, the Philosophy of Science
Society, and the Serious Metaphysics Society.
To re-fashion a remark made about Wittgenstein, one should not threaten visiting
philosophers with early drafts of books. I’m glad I broke that rule with four of my own
house guests—Hugh Mellor in Toronto, Anna Boncompagni in New York, and David
Bakhurst and Nils-Eric Sahlin in Cambridge. They each read the entire manuscript at
different stages and improved it immeasurably, as did Arif Ahmed, Steven Methven,
Griffin Klemick, and two anonymous readers for OUP. Cora Diamond, Peter GodfreySmith, Andrew Howat, Tom Hurka, Henry Jackman, Jeff Kasser, Ed Mares, Michael
Potter, Ian Proops, Ian Rumfitt, Joachim Schulte, David Stern, Sergio Tenenbaum,
Thomas Uebel, David Wiggins, and Jessica Wright were very kind to comment on individual chapters, much to the benefit of the evolving manuscript. That is an astonishing
amount of high-end help, and yet errors will remain, for which I take sole responsibility.
Thanks also must go to three dedicated and knowledgeable archivists: Patricia McGuire
at King’s College, Jonathan Smith at Trinity’s Wren Library, and especially my old friend
Jacky Cox at the Cambridge University Library.
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xiv Acknowledgements
Griffin Klemick and Jessica Wright, Ph.D students at the University of Toronto, were
superb research assistants, as well as substantial commentators throughout the writing
of the book, and Cherie Braden and Leo Lepiano, students in my 2015 graduate seminar, did some excellent last-minute commenting and correcting. Jeremy Langworthy
was a supererogatory copy-editor, as he was with my last book. Peter Momtchiloff, my
editor at OUP, also went above and beyond the call of duty.
Peter Lofts found the wonderful photo for the cover. It is of Great Gate, Trinity College,
home at various times to Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. It was taken by the
Cambridge studio of Ramsey and Muspratt, the former being Lettice Ramsey, Frank
Ramsey’s widow. Finally, I’m happy to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for necessary material support for this project and my
family, David, Alex, and Sophie, for even more i­ mportant immaterial support.
I have written on certain of these topics before, and while some of the material in
this book draws and expands on that earlier work, all changes should be taken as
improvements—at least, that is how they are intended.
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Reference and Spelling Policy
Given that this book crosses back and forth over the Atlantic, I will spell words as they
were printed—‘behaviour’ and ‘behavior’, for instance, a word that even Russell uses in
both spellings. In Canada, we also switch back and forth, but when using my own voice
in this book, I consistently go the UK way. Normally, there would be a comma between
‘Cambridge, England’ and ‘Cambridge, Massachusetts’. These places are part of my
subject matter and I will slow the tsunami of commas by not following normal usage in
this regard.
References to the works of William James
References to James’s correspondence refer to The Correspondence of William James
and take the form ‘CWJ n: m, year,’ where n is the volume number and m the page
number. Abbreviations for others of James’s works are as follows. Full details of these
works can be found in the bibliography.
ERE
Essays in Radical Empiricism
MT
The Meaning of Truth
P
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
PP
The Principles of Psychology
PU
A Pluralistic Universe
SPP
Some Problems of Philosophy
TTP
Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
VRE
The Varieties of Religious Experience
WB
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Reference to the works of C. S. Peirce
References to Peirce’s unpublished material are to the Charles S. Peirce Papers, Hougton
Library, Harvard University: MS: n, where n is the manuscript number.
References to Peirce’s published material are as follows. If a passage occurs in the
new Writings of Charles S. Peirce: Chronological Edition, I cite that source as ‘W n: m year’
where n is the volume, m the page number. If it is not in the Writings, but in the older
Collected Papers, the citation is ‘CP n. m year’ where n is the volume number, m the
paragraph number. If it appears in print only in New Elements of Mathematics, the citation
is ‘NE n: m, year’, where n is the volume number and m the page number. If it occurs in
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xvi
Reference and Spelling Policy
Peirce’s contributions to The Nation, I cite it as ‘N n: m, year,’ where n is the volume
number and m is the page number in the Ketner and Cook edition of those contributions. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
References to the works of Frank Ramsey
References to Ramsey’s unpublished papers are to the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Papers,
1920–1930, ASP.1983.01, Archives of Scientific Philosophy, Special Collections
Department, University of Pittsburgh, RP n-m-o, where m is the box number, n is the
folder number and o is the page number.
Abbreviations for Ramsey’s published and collected papers are as follows. Full
details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
CN
Critical Notice of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
DS
‘On There Being No Discussable Subject’
FM
‘The Foundations of Mathematics’
FP
‘Facts and Propositions’
GC
‘General Propositions and Causality’
K
‘Knowledge’
ML
‘Mathematical Logic’
MM
‘Review of Ogden and Richards’ Meaning of Meaning’
NP
‘The Nature of Propositions’
NPPM
Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics
OT
On Truth
P
‘Philosophy’
RB
‘Reasonable Degree of Belief ’
Th
‘Theories’
TP
‘Truth and Probability’
U
‘Universals’
References to the works of Bertrand Russell
References to Russell’s unpublished material are to the McMaster University Archives,
BR n, where n is the record number.
References to The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell take the form ‘CP n: m, year’,
where n is the volume number, m the page number. Abbreviations for others of
Russell’s works are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the
bibliography.
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Reference and Spelling Policy
A
Autobiography
AM
The Analysis of Mind
F
‘Foreword to An Introduction to Peirce’s Philosophy Interpreted as a
System’
FMW
‘The Free Man’s Worship’
IMP
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
IPM 2
‘Introduction to the Second Edition of Principia Mathematica’
JCT
‘William James’s Conception of Truth’
KEW
Our Knowledge of the External World
MPD
My Philosophical Development
P
‘Pragmatism’
PoM
The Principles of Mathematics
PLA
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
RSP
‘The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics’
WIB
‘What I Believe’
xvii
Reference to the works of Victoria Welby
References to the works of Welby are in the form WA: n, where n is the manuscript
number in the Welby Fonds, York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and
Special Collections.
References to the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein
References to Wittgenstein’s unpublished papers are in the form MS: n, where n is the
manuscript number. Abbreviations for Wittgenstein’s published material are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
References to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are in the form T: n.m where n is paragraph number and m is subparagraph number.
BB
The Blue and Brown Books
BT
The Big Typescript
CV
Culture and Value
LAPR
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religion
LC1
Cambridge Lectures 1930–2
LC2
Cambridge Lectures 1932–5
N
Notebooks 1914–16
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xviii
Reference and Spelling Policy
OC
On Certainty
PG
Philosophical Grammar
PI
Philosophical Investigations
PPF
Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment
PR
Philosophical Remarks
RFM
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
RPP I/II
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2
WVC
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by
Friedrich Waismann
Z
Zettel
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Permissions
I have endeavoured to trace holders of copyright and request permission to quote
when required. I thank the following: Stephen Burch for permission to quote from the
unpublished Ramsey letters and diaries; the University of Pittsburgh for permission to
quote from the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Papers; the Provost and Scholars of King’s
College Cambridge for permission to quote from the unpublished writings of J. M.
Keynes; the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, for permission to quote from the
Wittgenstein writings; McMaster University Library, William Ready Archives, for permission to quote from the Bertrand Russell letters; the Officers and Secretaries of the
Moral Sciences Club for permission to quote from its minutes; Thamar MacIver for
permission to quote from the unpublished diary of Arthur MacIver; York University
Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, for permission with respect
to the Lady Victoria Welby fonds; and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library
for permission to quote from the materials in its collections for which it holds
copyright.
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Introduction
Pragmatism came into being in 1867 in Cambridge Massachusetts, in a discussion
group that included philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and lawyers. In 1906
C. S. Peirce, one of the primary contributors, reminisced about its birth:
It was in the earliest seventies that a knot of us young men in . . . Cambridge, calling ourselves,
half-ironically, half-defiantly, ‘The Metaphysical Club,’—for agnosticism was then riding its
high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics—used to meet, sometimes in my
study, sometimes in that of William James.
[CP 5. 12]
In the year Peirce made this remark, James gave his Lowell lectures. They were published in 1907 as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, which Paul
Carus said appeared ‘cometlike on our intellectual horizon’ (2000 [1911]: 44). James’s
fame was not restricted to America. He delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in
1901 and the Hibbert Lectures in Oxford in 1908. Pragmatism was the talk of the town
not just in Cambridge Massachusetts, but also in Cambridge England.
During this period, both Cambridges were in the most illustrious periods in their
great philosophical histories. In the English Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore,
Frank Ramsey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were setting the tone of philosophy for decades to come. In the Massachusetts Cambridge, America’s homegrown philosophy,
pragmatism, was being developed by William James, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright,
and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The standard story has it that Russell, Moore, and, to a
lesser extent, Wittgenstein, savaged pragmatism, leaving it never to fully recover.1 The
standard story also has Ramsey and especially Wittgenstein putting forward novel
positions, drawing upon few influences outside their tight local circle. On this account,
true genius flowered on the banks of the Cam, untouched by non-native species. Von
Wright makes the assertion for the later Wittgenstein:
The young Wittgenstein had learned from Frege and Russell. His problems were in part theirs.
The later Wittgenstein, in my view, has no ancestors in the history of thought. His work signals
a radical departure from previously existing paths of philosophy.
[1982: 27]2
1
2
Indeed, I have been one of those who have told part of the standard story. See Misak (2008).
See also Hacker (1996: 100).
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2
Cambridge Pragmatism
Suppes makes the assertion for Ramsey: he was ‘much too caught up in the writings
of those at or close to Cambridge’ to have been familiar with much of the literature
produced elsewhere (2006: 37).3
I shall argue that both parts of the standard story are mistaken. Far from nearly
killing off American pragmatism, Ramsey and Wittgenstein were strongly influenced
by it, and even Russell took important cues from it. I hope that by the end of this book,
the reader will find these surprising claims uncontentious.4 Perhaps more contentious
will be my argument that Ramsey should be viewed not only as a vital part of the pragmatist tradition, but as a proponent of the most compelling version of it, and that
Ramsey’s pragmatist objections to Wittgenstein’s early position were largely responsible for Wittgenstein’s turn away from the Tractatus and toward ordinary language.
The standard story does acknowledge that Ramsey was interested in Peirce—after
all, he prefaced one of his most famous papers, ‘Truth and Probability’, with a quote
from Peirce, and declared the final section ‘almost entirely based on the writings of
C. S. Peirce’ (TP: 90). But it has not been altogether clear whether the intellectual
connection was deep or superficial. Ramsey muddied the waters by claiming: ‘My
pragmatism is derived from Mr. Russell’ (FP: 51). His friend and colleague Richard
Braithwaite repeats the claim in his obituary of Ramsey: ‘Recently (in company with
Bertrand Russell) he had been descending the slippery path to a sort of pragmatism’
(Braithwaite 1930: 216). This will seem astounding to scholars of American pragmatism, as Russell produced the most damaging critiques of pragmatism. Indeed, we
shall see that Russell vociferously objected to the pragmatist account of truth and
that Ramsey, in turn, objected to Russell’s logical atomist theory of truth (as any
pragmatist would). So how could Russell be taken by Ramsey to be his source
for pragmatism?
The key to unlocking this mystery lies in the fact that by 1926 Russell had in
fact adopted some pragmatist claims about the link between belief and behaviour. He
could not, however, enrol fully in the pragmatist project, since he took this to require
endorsement of the pragmatist theory of truth that James was inclined to articulate.
Russell understood that pragmatist theory of truth as the claim that truth is what
‘works’, and he found the idea an abomination. Nevertheless, Russell’s new account of
belief was pragmatist in spirit, and it provided a pragmatist steer for Ramsey. But as
Braithwaite indicated, Ramsey was on the path also to a pragmatist account of truth, a
path Braithwaite thought would result in a slide to relativism. Russell was not the inspiration for that.
It is Peirce who was responsible for Ramsey’s taking the step from the linkage of
­belief to behaviour to the linkage of truth to the success of behaviour. Ramsey had
Suppes, though, makes the claim only for Ramsey on the theory of measurement.
Not everyone will be surprised. Sahlin (1997), Tiercelin (2004), Hookway (2005), and Boncompagni
(forthcoming a, forthcoming b) also argue for the influence of Peircean pragmatism on Ramsey and the
influence of Ramsey’s pragmatism on Wittgenstein.
3
4
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introduction
3
discovered Peirce in 1924 and was drawing upon Peirce’s non-Jamesian, more objective pragmatist account of belief and truth. That is, he was making his way down that
slippery path to a stable pragmatist patch of ground. I shall show that Ramsey had
forged a deep connection with some key ideas of Peirce’s: that a belief is a disposition
to behave; that we evaluate beliefs in terms of whether they serve us well; and that an
understanding of truth as correspondence is not in competition with a pragmatist
conception of truth, but is in harmony with it.
It is a reasonable question to ask how the standard story has seemed so plausible
all these years. The answer lies in two sets of facts. The first concerns Peirce and James.
Not only was Peirce’s writing technical and difficult, but as his brother rued, he was
‘erratic in his judgment & temperament’ (CWJ 8: 17, 1895). In the introduction to
Peirce’s first volume of collected essays, Chance, Love and Logic, editor Morris Raphael
Cohen characterized him as one of those ‘restless pioneer souls with the fatal gift of
genuine originality’ (1923: viii). In a similar vein, Carus wrote to Victoria Welby in
1898, igniting what would become a long and fruitful correspondence between Welby
and Peirce:
Charles S. Peirce . . . is a man of unusual ability, and one of the greatest logicians in the
world . . . The sole drawback with him is that he is unmanageable in his private relations, and
has thus been frustrated in his career; instead of holding a chair at the university, which would
have been the place for him he is sitting on a little farm in Pennsylvania, dissatisfied with all the
world, and sometimes even in straightened circumstances . . .
[York University, Clara Thomas Archives 1970-003/6].
The upshot was that Peirce was almost entirely locked out of academia. He published
very little, and his name was frequently misspelled—even on proofs of his own essays
and in the American Philosophical Association’s minutes recording his death.
He was virtually unknown at home and abroad—except to Ramsey and a small
handful of others. (That small handful includes C. I. Lewis, whose work was also
known to Ramsey.)
One of my aims is to uncover the way in which Ramsey found out about Peirce, a
route that lies almost hidden from sight. As a preview, Ramsey discovered Peirce
through C. K. Ogden, who had known Ramsey from the time he was a schoolboy.
Ogden knew about Peirce through one of those relatively few people who had read his
work—the independent scholar Lady Victoria Welby. Ogden was so keen on this
unknown American pragmatist that he published Chance, Love and Logic simultaneously with the Harcourt Brace edition in 1923 and put it in Ramsey’s hands.
James was the opposite of Peirce—charming, personable, and an accessible writer.
But he ignited the philosophical rage of the hard-headed realists Russell and Moore
by seeming to suggest in his ‘The Will to Believe’ and ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’
that if the hypothesis of God’s existence makes one’s life more bearable, then that is a
kind of evidence that God exists. James argued that a live hypothesis for an individual thinker is one that he acts upon. That is the dispositional account of belief shared
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Cambridge Pragmatism
by all pragmatists. He goes on to maintain that if the effects of believing in the
hypothesis of God’s existence are good for the individual, then she should believe.
James made Russell and Moore only more cross by contending more generally in
Pragmatism that:
Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part
of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor; is . . . true instrumentally.
(P: 34)
‘Satisfactorily’, he says, ‘means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will
emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic’ (P: 35).
George Santayana, a fellow pragmatist traveller, says that the thesis of ‘The Will
to Believe’ is ‘a thought typical of James at his worst—a worst in which there is
­always a good side’ (2009 [1920]: 60). We shall see that the good side of James is very
good indeed. Unfortunately, in Cambridge England the focus was on the worst side
of James, partly due to his own sharp way of putting his point and partly due to his
disciple in Oxford—the extreme and undiplomatic F. C. S. Schiller, whose ‘Humanism’
or ‘Personalism’ had it that truth and reality are ‘wholly plastic’. Wittgenstein
read Schiller’s ‘The Value of Formal Logic’ (1932) and pronounced it philosophical
nonsense.5 And here is Russell, in a 1912 letter to Ottoline Morrell, venting about
Schiller:
I am in a state of fury because Schiller has sent me a book on Formal Logic which he has had
the impertinence to write. He neither knows nor respects the subject, and of course writes
offensive rot. I am already thinking of all the jokes I will make about the book if I have to
­review it.
[CP 6: 292, 1912]
In the 1919 printing of Pragmatism that is still on the shelves of Ramsey’s King’s College
Cambridge library, James’s preface advises the reader that ‘the best statements’ of
­pragmatism to use as an introduction are Schiller’s (1919 [1907]: viii). The preface
mentions Dewey as well, but not Peirce. It is entirely understandable why Russell,
Wittgenstein, and Ramsey would have worried that James’s more Schillerian statements were the essence of pragmatism.
James died in 1910 and Peirce in 1914. At that point, pragmatism was viewed with a
great deal of suspicion, both in America and across the Atlantic, and was identified
with James’s less careful accounts. Russell’s harsh verdict, although unfair, was not
uncommon: ‘The skepticism embodied in pragmatism is that which says “Since all
5
Britton (1967 [1955]: 58). O. K. Bouwsma (1986: 28–9) reports that Wittgenstein was also scathing
about Dewey:
[LW:] Dewey—was Dewey still living?
[OB:] Yes.
[LW:] Ought not to be.
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introduction
5
beliefs are absurd, we may as well believe what is most convenient” ’ (JCT: 280). We
shall see that Ramsey distanced himself from James’s account of truth and tried to find
his way to a better pragmatist position. At the time he made the remark about getting
his pragmatism from Russell, Ramsey was much happier nailing his colours to Russell’s
reputable mast, and Peirce’s unknown one, rather than the less reputable Jamesian one.
The second set of facts that has allowed the standard story to thrive concerns
Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Ramsey’s work was unfinished, under tragic circumstances.
He died just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday in 1930. In that brief life, he managed
to figure out how to measure partial belief and hence lay the groundwork for decision
theory and Bayesian statistics; found one branch of mathematics and two branches
of economics; and make huge contributions to logic, the foundations of mathematics,
semantics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and truth theory. At the time of
his death, he was in the midst of a substantial book titled On Truth. When Braithwaite
collected and edited Ramsey’s papers for posthumous publication as The Foundations
of Mathematics and other Logical Essays, he declined to include anything from that
manuscript. The material is still largely overlooked, or at best underemphasized. It
was edited and published only in 1991 by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer. Had
Ramsey’s life not been cut so short, had he finished the book before his death, or
even had the unfinished manuscript been published in a timely fashion, the direction
and reputation of pragmatism would have been radically altered. Lytton Strachey
wrote to a friend after Ramsey’s death that the deprivation to the world of learning
was as if Newton had died at the age of 26 (Holroyd 2011: 655). I submit that one
thing that would have transpired had Ramsey lived to Newton’s age is that his pragmatist account of belief and truth would have been well known and would have
provided us with an excellent version of pragmatism to compete with Dewey’s and
complement Lewis’s.
Wittgenstein, for his part, was not keen on making transparent the impact of pragmatism on his thought. It has been noticed by many that his later work seems pragmatist, with his interest in philosophy as method rather than as a body of truths; his
focus on the primacy of practice and meaning as use; his positive regard for those
propositions which we do not doubt; and his concern to describe the complex detail
of human language and life.6 But Wittgenstein seemed uninterested in the history of
philosophy and was remarkable for not talking much about the work of others.
Ramsey reports that Wittgenstein ‘doesn’t like reading, being too lazy ever to try to
understand a book, but only occasionally using one as a text for his own reflections’.7
James was one of the few philosophers he would admit to having read. A. C. Jackson
reported that for a time James’s Principles of Psychology was the only book on
Wittgenstein’s shelf, and that in the 1940s he ‘very frequently referred to James in his
6
7
See e.g. Brandom (1994, ch. 1), Putnam (1995, ch. 2), and Goodman (2002).
Paul (2012: 212); see also Monk (1996: 251) and Ryle (1970:11).
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Cambridge Pragmatism
lectures, even making on one occasion—to everybody’s astonishment—a precise
­reference to a page-number!’8
But while we shall see that James’s thoughts on religion influenced Wittgenstein, his
thoughts on truth often appear in Wittgenstein’s writing as an exemplar of error. I shall
argue that it was Ramsey who was the strong pragmatist influence on Wittgenstein’s
epistemology, to use a term that Wittgenstein himself would not have liked. Careful
excavation of the pathways of influence are required here. Although Ramsey was one
of the very few people with whom Wittgenstein cared to discuss philosophy (both in
his years of isolation as a schoolteacher after the First World War and when he
returned to Cambridge in January 1929 in what turned out to be the last year of
Ramsey’s life), they had an intense, on-again, off-again relationship, and disagreed
about how to approach philosophy. I shall argue that this disagreement resulted in
two different kinds of pragmatism, and that the Ramseyan kind is better.
Thus, the standard story has been allowed to remain largely unchallenged all these
decades not only because while Peirce was alive he had very little influence and was
unable to provide a counterweight to James’s shaping of the public face of pragmatism.
We also need to bring into the causal account the facts that Ramsey’s life was cut short,
leaving pivotal portions of his later work unfinished and unread, and that Wittgenstein
was wary of acknowledging Ramsey, given that he felt there were fundamental differences in perspective between them. The aim of this book is to fill these gaps in the
telling of the history of analytic philosophy. The reader who is familiar with or not
interested in the details of the philosophical background might understandably want
to go directly to the parts of the book that fill those gaps: Chapter 3, where I show how
knowledge of Peirce arrived in Cambridge England through Welby and Ogden; the
parts of Chapter 4 that show how Wittgenstein’s Tractatus set the stage for Ramsey’s
pragmatist rebellion (§§4.6 and 4.7); the sections of Chapter 5 where I show how
Russell not only knew a fair bit about Peirce, but was attracted to pragmatism’s dispositional account of belief (§§5.1 and 5.3); Chapter 6, where Ramsey’s important pragmatist theory is articulated; and Chapter 7, where we see some ­surprising and novel
evidence that Wittgenstein was significantly influenced by Ramsey’s pragmatism.
I shall also fill a gap in the telling of the history of naturalism, of which pragmatism
is a variety. Each of the four great naturalists I will examine in detail—Peirce, James,
Ramsey, and the post-1929 Wittgenstein—struggles with one of the most pressing
questions for philosophy. How can we make sense of normative notions such as truth,
rightness, necessity, consistency, following a rule, rationality, and progress, given that
we are beings in the natural world who cannot step outside our beliefs and practices to
determine whether those beliefs and practices line up with objective facts? Each of
these four great naturalists, in his own way, answers the challenge by linking the
­normative with successful behaviour.
8
See Passmore (1966: 434). See also the references to James in the notes of Wittgenstein’s 1946–7
Lectures on Philosophical Psychology.
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introduction
7
It will be clear that I think of ‘naturalism’ broadly, not in the narrow sense in which
science is the source of all knowledge. Those who have been in the grip of the narrow
characterization have spent much time on what are, in my view, fruitless debates,
exemplified by the old Popperian and positivist arguments about how we might
­demarcate science from non-science. My aim is not to avoid the hard questions.
Naturalists have to say something about how to characterize genuine belief, assertion, or inquiry. But I try not to start off by begging all the questions about
what counts as knowledge, a candidate for truth, or a suitably objective domain of
­inquiry. I try to start with an epistemology that does not exclude, from the outset,
beliefs about unobservable entities, ethics, and so on from being candidates for
truth and knowledge.
By the end of the book, I will have offered an answer to a question that occupies
many a contemporary pragmatist. Does pragmatism hold across the board, as a general account of belief and truth, or does it hold for only some kinds of beliefs? We
shall see that the question of whether there is a bifurcation between discourses that
are straightforwardly descriptive and those that should receive a pragmatist treatment is one that occupied both Wittgenstein and Ramsey.9 It is still a live question
today, with local pragmatists or expressivists arguing that only certain domains of
discourse are to be construed pragmatically. I shall throw my lot in with global pragmatists, who argue that pragmatist notions of belief and truth hold across the board.
Peirce was a straightforward global pragmatist. I shall interpret Ramsey, especially
in On Truth, as opting for the global position and influencing Wittgenstein to do so
as well. I shall suggest, however, that the particular version of the global position
Wittgenstein settled on would not have pleased Ramsey. Some Ramsey scholars will
prefer the ‘early’ Ramsey, who may have thought that only some discourses or
­statement-types are to be construed pragmatically. The persistence of this debate—
and especially the way that Ramsey, like so many pragmatists, found himself moving
between the two positions—indicates that it too is one of the profound questions
for philosophy. I do not expect to win over all those with opposing inclinations.
But I will suggest that the ‘later’ Ramsey felt the pull of the global position, and in
examining both his reasons and those of the classical pragmatists, I suggest that we,
too, should feel their weight.
Along the way, I hope also to shed light on other contemporary substantive questions for pragmatists, without going into those contemporary debates in too much
­detail. For instance, it is sometimes said that pragmatists place too much emphasis on
language and not enough emphasis on the relationship between thought and action.10
An underlying theme in the pages that follow is that it is an important insight of pragmatism that the two matters cannot be neatly pulled apart.
9
10
The language of ‘bifurcation’ is due to Kraut (1990).
See e.g. Godfrey-Smith (2014).
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PA RT I
Cambridge Massachusetts
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1
Peirce
1.1 Introduction
It is hard to get a grip on Peirce’s works as a whole, even now. The Writings of Charles
Sanders Peirce, a chronological compilation, is currently in the midst of what will be a
staggeringly long publication period. Volume 1 appeared in 1982. Volume 8, the most
recent to reach publication, appeared in 2009, with a projected twenty-three more volumes to come (including Volume 7). In order to get the full scope of Peirce’s corpus,
one has to go through thousands of handwritten pages, the microfilm of which was
only recently digitized. It was even more difficult to get a grip on Peirce’s work in his
lifetime. As he said: ‘In the little I have published (in default of a publisher) I have been
grievously hampered by having to address a public of magazine-readers.’1 That magazine was Popular Science Monthly, and Peirce’s affiliation in the six articles he published
there in 1877–8, is ‘Assistant in the United States Coast Survey’. These papers, with the
general title Illustrations of the Logic of Science, were reprinted in Chance, Love and
Logic, and they treat topics that would stay with Peirce for the rest of his life: belief,
doubt, meaning, truth, logic, and probability. While Peirce was in frequent discussion
about publishing a book that would revise and expand upon those Popular Science
Monthly articles, he never managed to find a publisher and make it materialize. The
two titles he favoured for his proposed book were How to Reason and Grand Logic.
It is thus completely understandable that, early on, Russell and Moore would not
know of his version of pragmatism. I say ‘early on’ because first, as we shall see, Russell
had access to Peirce’s thought during his stay at Harvard in 1914, and secondly, after
1923, when Ogden published Chance, Love and Logic and Ramsey became a fan of
Peirce’s, there was no excuse for ignorance, feigned or otherwise.
It is important as we go through the papers in Chance, Love and Logic to understand
that Peirce saw his purpose as providing a guide to the method of inquiry, not as giving
us a metaphysics, a transcendental argument about truth, or some other such grand
thing. This is not to deny that Peirce makes metaphysical commitments in developing
his guide to inquiry. Still, he is suspicious of metaphysically laden answers to philosophical problems, opting for less-inflated solutions where feasible. This anti-metaphysical
stance is partly constitutive of what it is to be a pragmatist.
1
Letter reprinted in Scott (1973: 376).
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Cambridge Pragmatism
Peirce, we shall see, was an empiricist and was especially attracted to the work of
Alexander Bain, founder of Mind. But he leavened British empiricism with insights
from Kant. His overarching project was to try to show that, despite our inability to
inquire into the world’s character without relying on antecedently accepted beliefs and
practices, we nonetheless have (a very limited) access to the world as it is independently of human purpose. Peirce took that access to be indexical, and we shall see that he
thought that even this access was mediated by interpretation.2
In articulating Peirce’s position, I will focus upon Illustrations of the Logic of Science,
‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’, and his letters to Victoria Welby. In
this material, one gets Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, inquiry-centred account of truth,
and formal logic—the existential graphs and their extension to modalities and intentions. These were the materials that were accessible in 1923 to Russell, Ramsey, and
Wittgenstein.
1.2 The Pragmatic Maxim: Meaning, Use, Practice
The 1878 article ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ is one of the essays in Illustrations of
the Logic of Science, and it contains the best-known, if not the most felicitous, statement of the pragmatic maxim. Peirce was not happy with his expression of the maxim
in this paper and tried very hard, throughout the rest of his life, to correct and modify
the impression he made.3
The pragmatic maxim requires our beliefs, theories, and concepts to be linked to
experience, practice, expectations, or consequences. Peirce focused on one or another
of these four things as he modified the maxim and as he tried to articulate it within
different contexts—for instance, his theory of signs, his logic, his theory of probability,
and so on. While Peirce’s later amendments never saw a lot of daylight, the careful
reader could get much of what Peirce intended from ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’.
In that paper, Peirce’s aim is to tell us what we need to do to arrive at clear concepts.
He takes himself to be making an important contribution to an old debate. Here are the
first two sentences:
Whoever has looked into a modern treatise on logic of the common sort, will doubtless remember
the two distinctions between clear and obscure conceptions, and between distinct and confused
conceptions. They have lain in the books now for nigh two centuries, unimproved and unmodified,
and are generally reckoned by logicians as among the gems of their doctrine.
[W 3: 257–8, 1878]
2
While I mostly articulated the point properly in The American Pragmatists, in one instance (p. 248)
I mistakenly said that the pragmatist says that experience cannot give us objective access to the world. What
I should have said is that the pragmatist says we cannot have purely unmediated access to the world. I thank
Hugh Mellor for pointing out the error.
3
Perhaps the misunderstandings arose because he wrote some of these papers first in French. See de
Waal (2014: 14), both on this particular issue and, more generally, for a first-rate scholarly account of the
context surrounding the writing of Illustrations.
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13
The books, he says, ‘are right in making familiarity with a notion the first step toward
clearness of apprehension, and the defining of it the second’ (W 3: 260, 1878). But he
wants to add an important third ‘grade of clearness’ or grade of apprehension of the
meanings of words (W 3: 266, 1878). For one thing, ‘Nothing new can ever be learned
by analyzing definitions.’ Something more is required for our concepts to be really
clear to us or for us to ‘know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning’
(W 3: 260, 1878). He wants to add ‘a far higher grade’ of clarity to the standard two: he
wants to add knowledge of what to expect if beliefs containing the concept are true
(W 3: 261, 1878).
His first suggestion for that higher grade of clarity is that the meaning of a belief is
the ‘habits it produces’ (W 3: 265, 1878). As we shall see, James also employs this idea,
to less than happy effect. During the time Peirce was writing ‘How to Make Our Ideas
Clear’, James was arguing that if the belief ‘God exists’ produces certain habits in me
and different habits in you, it means different things to each of us, and he was unclear
on whether it has any meaning that might stand independently of our subjective habits.
But Peirce is clear that he does not want to have the third grade of clarity reside entirely
in what habits you or I might have. He starts with the following thought, one which is
consistent with James’s:
Thus, we come down to what is tangible and practical as the root of every real distinction of
thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to
consist in anything but a possible difference in practice.
[W 3: 265, 1878]
What makes Peirce’s criterion more robust than James’s is that with respect to a question such as God’s existence, sensory effects must come into play. At the heart of the
expression of the pragmatic maxim in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ is the linking of
meaning with ‘effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses’ (W 3: 266, 1878). The example that immediately follows in Peirce’s text concerns the doctrine of transubstantiation. Catholics and Protestants seem to have the same observable habits with the
bread and wine, yet only Catholics maintain that although their wafer cakes and
diluted wine have all the sensible properties of ordinary wafer cakes and wine, they are
something more—they are literally the body and blood of Christ. Peirce objects: ‘we
can . . . mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our
senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being
in reality blood, is senseless jargon’ (W 3: 266, 1878). Peirce’s cumbersome attempt to
get this idea into a maxim is as follows:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of
our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception
of the object.
[W 3: 266, 1878]
He asks what we mean when we call a thing ‘hard’, and answers ‘it will not be scratched
by many other substances’ (W 3: 266, 1878). He says, setting pragmatism up for trouble
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14 Cambridge Pragmatism
for generations: ‘There is absolutely no difference between a hard thing and a soft thing
so long as they are not brought to the test. Suppose, then, that a diamond could be crystallized in the midst of a cushion of soft cotton, and should remain there until it was
finally burned up’ (W 3: 266, 1878). His view in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ seems
to be that it is false to speak of such a diamond as being hard.
Peirce improved his account of the pragmatic maxim during the following decades.
He saw, for instance, that the use of the indicative conditional—if brought into contact
with other substances, it will not be scratched—was highly problematic. He was adamant that the ‘will be’ must be replaced by a ‘would be’:
But I desire to express with emphatic grief that in those original papers I fell into a grievous
error. Looking into the future and thinking of what would take place, I overlooked the great
truth that the future, as living, always is more or less general, and I thought that what would be
could be resolved into what will be . . .
[MS 289: 17–18]
By then he had turned his back on all things nominalist and was a realist about
­universals, dispositions, and subjunctive conditionals. He says of the unscratched
diamond: ‘it is a real fact that it would resist pressure’ (CP 8. 208, 1905). The pragmatic maxim must be expressed with a subjunctive, not an indicative, conditional.
Hence the pragmatic meaning of ‘this diamond is hard’ is not ‘if you scratch it, it will
resist’, but rather ‘if you were to scratch it, it would resist’. Otherwise, diamonds
stuck forever on the ocean floor would not be hard, a conclusion Peirce eventually
was rightly loath to embrace (CP 8. 208, 1905). The practical effects that pragmatism is concerned with are those that would occur under certain circumstances, not
those that will actually occur.
He also tried to correct the mistaken impression that in ‘How to Make Our Ideas
Clear’ he had suggested that the whole of a term’s meaning could be found in its practical effects, leaving no role for the two traditional grades of clearness. Indeed, even a
precursor piece puts the pragmatic maxim in a better way, just by staying away from
the word ‘whole’:
Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do
they not? Then let them be distinguished.
[W 2: 483, 1871]
In 1910 he says:
I believe I made my own opinion quite clear to any attentive Reader, that the pragmaticistic
grade of clearness could no more supersede the Definitiary or Analytic grade than this latter
grade could supersede the first. That is to say, if the Maxim of Pragmaticism be acknowledged,
although Definition can no longer be regarded as the supreme mode of clear Apprehension; yet
it retains all the absolute importance it ever had, still remaining indispensable to all Exact
Reasoning.
[MS 647: 2, 1910]
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peirce
15
Peirce is right: an attentive reader can pick up from ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ that
he is not articulating a totalizing semantic criterion on which meaning consists only in
anticipated sensory experiences. His account of meaning has multiple dimensions and
is not crassly empiricist. As the title of the paper suggests, Peirce took the maxim to be
about achieving clarity, and he is explicit in the first part of the paper that the maxim is
designed to capture just one, albeit very important, aspect of what it is to understand
something. One has to know how to give an analytic definition of a concept and how to
pick out instances of it, but one also has to know what to expect if beliefs containing the
concept are true or false. If a belief has no consequences, then it lacks a dimension we
would have had to get right were we to fully understand the concept.
Peirce did argue that the pragmatic grade of clarity is a higher grade than the other
two because it plays a special role in inquiry. If a belief has no consequences—if there is
nothing we would expect to be different were it true rather than false—then it is useless
for inquiry and deliberation. We have no way of inquiring into it. The maxim thus
determines ‘the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses’ (CP 5. 196, 1903).
Another way of putting this is to say that the pragmatic maxim is a method that is especially useful in clarifying the concepts to be used in inquiry and argument aimed
at truth:
I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the meanings, not of all ideas, but
only of what I call ‘intellectual concepts,’ that is to say, of those upon the structure of which,
arguments concerning objective fact may hinge . . . [T]he whole meaning of an intellectual
predicate is that certain kinds of events would happen, once in so often, in the course of experience, under certain kinds of existential conditions.
[CP 5. 467–8, 1907]
We will want to keep this version of the maxim in mind when we turn to Ramsey.
Peirce also expressed the pragmatic maxim in the following ways. We ‘must look to
the upshot of our concepts in order to rightly apprehend them’ (CP 5. 3, 1902). In order
to get a complete grasp of a concept, we must connect it to that with which we have
‘dealings’ (CP 5. 416, 1906). There is a lesson for philosophy embedded in this account
of meaning: ‘we must not begin by talking of pure ideas—vagabond thoughts that
tramp the public roads without any human habitation—but must begin with men and
their conversation’ (CP 8. 112, 1900). Peirce’s central idea about meaning is nicely
summed up by David Wiggins (2002: 316): When a concept is ‘already fundamental to
human thought and long since possessed of an autonomous interest’, it is pointless to
take our task to be one of definition. Rather, we ought to attempt to get leverage on the
concept, or a fix on it, by exploring its connections with practice.
That Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is not designed to capture a totalizing account of
meaning can be seen through a different lens—by taking an excursion into his theory
of signs.4 Ramsey had access to that theory of signs through ‘Prolegomena to an
4
See Misak (1991) and Short (2007) for more extensive accounts of Peirce’s theory of signs.
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Cambridge Pragmatism
Apology for Pragmaticism’, which Ogden had made extensive notes on and placed in
Ramsey’s hands,5 as well as via the letters between Welby and Ogden, both of whom were
especially interested in signs. On the first page of those notes, Ogden writes: ‘Relevant
portions of Peirce’s Monist Article 1906. [No copies in England]?’ (RP 007-05-01).6
In ‘Prolegomena’, Peirce introduces the type-token distinction into the literature, a
distinction that Ramsey picked up and for which he came to be known.7 Peirce says:
A common mode of estimating the amount of matter in a . . . printed book is to count the number
of words. There will ordinarily be about twenty the’s on a page, and of course they count as
twenty words. In another sense of the word ‘word,’ however, there is but one word ‘the’ in the
English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on a page, or be heard in
any voice . . . Such a . . . Form, I propose to term a Type. A . . . single object . . . such as this or that
word on a single line of a single page of a single copy of a book, I will venture to call a Token.
[CP 5. 537, 1906]
Peirce’s overarching aim in his theory of signs is to develop an account of what it is
to understand all the very many kinds of signs human beings use. The idea of interpretation, which is in part the effect that a sign has on its interpreter, is central to his
theory. In it, the pragmatic maxim figures in just one, albeit important, ‘interpretant’
of signs. Representation, Peirce argues, is triadic: it involves a sign, an object, and an
interpreter. Each aspect of this representation relation corresponds to one of the
elements in Peirce’s primary division of signs into icons, indices, and symbols. Icons
are signs that represent their objects by virtue of a similarity or resemblance: a portrait is an icon of the person it portrays and a map is an icon of a certain geographic
area. Indices are signs that point to their object by ‘being really connected with it’
(W 2: 56, 1867): a pointing finger, or a demonstrative pronoun such as ‘this’ or ‘that’, for
instance, draws the interpreter’s attention to the object. Smoke, for a similar reason,
is an index of fire. A symbol is a word, proposition, or argument that depends on
conventional or habitual rules; a symbol is a sign ‘because it is used and understood
as such’ (CP 2. 307, 1901). The utterer of a symbol intends to cause a certain effect in
the interpreter. He can do this only if we have some reason to believe that a symbol
has more or less the same effect from interpreter to interpreter, abstracting from
their different collateral beliefs or different preferences. Peirce does not attempt to
tell us how we might do that, but we shall see that Ramsey does. For Peirce, everything present to our mind is interpreted—all our thoughts are in symbols. We will
see in §1.5 that while we are able to employ the medieval machinery of abstraction
It currently resides in the Ramsey papers at the University of Pittsburgh.
After ‘[No copies in England]?’ we find ‘[Except Greenstreet’].
7
For instance, when Moore talks about Ramsey in his lectures, he often talks about the type/token distinction: ‘I want to consider Ramsey’s prop[osition] . . . : “A prop is a type when instances consist of all token
sentences which have in common a certain sense” ’ (Cambridge University Library Add 8875 13/39/21-2, 56).
See also Add 8875 13/39/31/50. Ramsey also relies on the distinction in his 1923 critical notice of the
Tractatus.
5
6
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to gesture at what is given to us prior to interpretation, as soon as we form a belief or
a thought, we have interpreted what impinged upon us (CP 1. 357, 1890).
One conclusion we can draw from this brief account of Peirce’s theory of signs is
that, again, he is not at all interested in reducing meaning to action, or to any other
thing. Peirce does indeed argue that meaning involves the effects of the sign on the
subject, but that does not entail that he is putting forward an early functionalist or
behaviourist account of meaning. We must not anachronistically point to the
extreme views expressed in later decades, on which meaning reduces to effects or
behaviour, or system-inputs and system-outputs. It is better to call Peirce’s theory a
pragmatist account of meaning—one that says that effects or behaviour must
be part of the analysis of meaning. We shall see this idea manifest itself in
Ramsey’s position in one way, and Wittgenstein’s in another. When we turn to these
later v­ersions of pragmatism, we will want to remember Peirce’s wariness of
reductionism.
We might think of Peirce’s account of signs and meaning as saying that a sign’s
meaning is not essentially subjective or private. (This, for instance, will bring to mind
the later Wittgenstein.) It resides in part in its interpretant or the effect a sign has on its
interpreter. Peirce catalogues many varieties of interpretants, from the simple reaction
of one who turns his head at the indexical shout of ‘look!’ to sophisticated responses to
propositions. The highest kind of meaning, he thinks, consists in the effects of the
acceptance of a proposition on the interpreter’s train of thought and action. While
much work needs to be done to articulate what kinds of effect count, so that the merest
associations don’t amount to meaning, it is this liberalization that also distinguishes
pragmatism from cruder behaviourisms, on which meaning and mental states are
explained in terms of observable behaviour (whether of subjects or of worldly objects).
It also distinguishes Peirce’s view from the verificationism of the Vienna Circle that
was to follow. For Peirce, meaning is partially about effects on the interpreter. And
these effects can be effects on the interpreter’s physical behaviour or on the interpreter’s
cognitive behaviour. We shall see in Chapter 2 that herein lies a signal difference
between Peirce and James. And we will see in §1.5 how this thought enables Peirce to
give us an account of inquiry that is truly holist. Science, mathematics, and ethics are
all legitimate forms of inquiry on Peirce’s brand of pragmatism, and they are all responsive to the force of experience.
1.3 Belief and Disposition
One of Peirce’s main contributions to the study of belief is to argue that our background
beliefs are not subject to Cartesian, ‘paper’, or ‘tin’ doubts. Such doubts are not genuine
and cannot motivate inquiry. An inquirer has a body of settled belief that is not in fact
in doubt, against which to assess new evidence and hypotheses, and on which to act.
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The mere possibility of being mistaken about what one believes is not sufficient to give
rise to a living doubt. He says:
there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out’, namely, the very state of mind in
which you actually find yourself at the time you do ‘set out’—a state in which you are laden with
an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you
would . . . Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt
has nothing to do with any serious business.
[CP 5. 416, 1905]
Inquiry ‘is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can
only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give
way’ (CP 5. 589, 1898). When it gives way, the ground merely shifts, rather than opening
up underneath us. We can doubt one belief and inquire about it, but we cannot doubt
all our beliefs and inquire about them all at once. Some things have to be held constant.
Our body of background belief is susceptible to doubt on a piecemeal basis, so long as
that doubt is prompted by ‘some positive reason’ (CP 5. 51, 1903)—such as a surprising
or recalcitrant experience. We must regard our background beliefs as true, until
experience throws one or some group of them into doubt. The inquirer ‘is under a
compulsion to believe just what he does believe . . . as time goes on, the man’s belief
usually changes in a manner which he cannot resist . . . this force which changes a man’s
belief in spite of any effort of his may be, in all cases, called a gain of experience’
(MS 1342: 2; undated).
Peirce called this view ‘critical commonsensism’. He married it to a resolute fallibilism. While maintaining that real doubt does not arise from the mere possibility of
being mistaken about what one believes, he also denies that there are any beliefs that
are, in principle, immune to real doubt. We cannot start with doubting everything, nor
can we start with indubitable propositions. We must start where we find ourselves,
with a body of beliefs already settled and where one (or some relatively small subset) of
them is thrown into doubt. Nor is our aim to arrive at indubitable propositions, but
simply to resettle belief so that it is no longer in doubt.
So on the Peircean epistemology, an inquirer has a fallible background of ‘commonsense’ belief that is not in fact in doubt. Only against such a background can a belief be
put into doubt and a new, better belief be accepted. All our beliefs are fallible but they
do not come into doubt all at once. Those which inquiry has not thrown into doubt are
stable, and we should retain them until a reason to doubt arises. Peirce is happy with
the idea that, ‘[p]ractically speaking’, many things are ‘substantially certain’ (CP 1. 152,
1897). Practical certainty must be distinguished from absolute certainty. The former
can be had, while the latter cannot.
The second major contribution of pragmatism to the study of belief is to take
­seriously Alexander Bain’s idea that a belief is a disposition to act. Bain, a contemporary of the early American pragmatists who knew at least one of them (Holmes), had
broken with traditional British empiricism. Bain rejected the idea that a belief was a
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certain intensity or vividness in the mind, and had argued that belief was, rather, a
disposition to behave:
It will be readily admitted that the state of mind called Belief is, in many cases, a concomitant
of our activity. But I mean to go farther than this, and to affirm that belief has no meaning,
except in reference to our actions; the essence, or import of it is such as to place it under the
region of the will.
[Bain 1865 [1859]: 524]
The difference between mere conceiving or imagining, with or without strong feeling, and
belief, is acting, or being prepared to act, when the occasion arises.
[Bain 1868: 372]
Peirce expands on this idea, arguing that a belief is a habit of action, which means that
it need not issue in a particular action, but in ways of acting:
Every natural or inbred belief manifests itself in natural or inbred ways of acting, which in fact
constitute it a belief-habit. (I need not repeat that I do not say that it is the single deeds that
constitute the habit. It is the single ‘ways,’ which are conditional propositions, each general).
[CP 5. 510, 1905]
A belief is an habitual connection of ideas. For example, to say that I believe prussic acid is a
poison is to say that when the idea of drinking it occurs to me, the idea of it as a poison with
all the other ideas which follow in the train of this will arise in my mind. Among these ideas,
or objects present to me, is the sense of refusing to drink it. This, if I am in a normal condition, will be followed by an action of the nerves when needed which will remove the cup
from my lips. It seems probable that every habitual connection of ideas may produce such an
effect upon the will. If this is actually so, a belief and an habitual connection of ideas are one
and the same.
[CP 7. 359, 1873]
But despite the apparent identification of belief and habit in that last sentence, Peirce
was not willing to go all the way with a pure dispositional account of belief.
In ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, he asserted that the disposition to behave, when
circumstances were appropriate, is but one ‘property’ of belief—others being that
belief is something we are aware of and that it quells the irritation of doubt (W 3: 263,
1878). This is another way in which Peirce’s pragmatism is distinguished from that of
the strong behaviourists, who want to drop all reference to inner subjective states.
Peirce (and, we shall see, Ramsey8) thought the theory of belief requires both. It requires
inner states (such as mental awareness with a certain qualitative character) as well as
external states (such as publicly observable behaviour), even if the pragmatist is going
to emphasize the latter. Thus Peirce is not open to a problem associated with many
8
It is not clear whether Ramsey had access to the two passages of Peirce’s quoted directly above. But he
did have access to Peirce’s non-reductionist dispositional account of belief in ‘How to Make Our Ideas
Clear’ and ‘The Fixation of Belief ’.
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dispositionalist theories: that the electrical circuitry in a room might be taken to have
a belief, because the lights are disposed to come on whenever the switch is flicked.
Peirce does not want to invest too much in mental or inner states. He thinks that we
will not get very far in philosophy by focusing our inquiry on them. Indeed, from 1868,
he had argued against the idea that we have special access to our mental states. In an
attack on Cartesianism published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, titled ‘Some
Consequences of Four Incapacities’, he argued that we have no special power of
introspection or intuition. We cannot ground knowledge in individual consciousness.
Nonetheless, he did not want to suggest that there were no such things as inner states.
We have seen that Peircean pragmatism is also distinguished from cruder behaviourisms in that meaning and mental states are explained not just in terms of observable
behaviour, but in terms of more complex behaviour, including making inferences.
This too is an important feature of any defensible dispositional account of belief: one
needs to explain how someone with, for instance, locked-in s­ yndrome can have dispositions to behave, when they cannot perform any observable actions. The explanation
derived from a more liberal, Peircean dispositionalism is that they are committed to
making appropriate inferences and having their beliefs manifest themselves in their
trains of thought.
Nonetheless, Bain’s insight that belief must have consequences for action is at the
very heart of pragmatism. The pragmatist account of truth, Peirce says, is ‘scarce more
than a corollary’ of it (CP 5. 12, 1906). A belief is in part a habit of action or a commitment to conduct oneself in certain ways under certain circumstances, and doubt is the
absence of such a habit. A habit, Peirce says, is a ‘general law’ and hence the ascription
of a habit ‘refers to the indefinite future’ (CP 2. 148, 1902): in adopting a belief, we dispose ourselves to act in particular ways in indefinitely many possible circumstances. In
‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, he sets out the nature of belief as follows. Belief has
three ‘properties’: ‘First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule or action,
or, say for short, a habit’ (W 3: 263). We shall see Ramsey adopt this view wholesale,
although he was more subtle about the whether or not we have to be aware of belief.
In ‘The Fixation of Belief ’, another of those papers in Illustrations of the Logic
of Science, Peirce sets out a conception of belief and inquiry that leads to his account of
truth. He does so in a provocative way he later claimed was misunderstood. The start of
his argument is straightforward: we make inferences on the basis of ‘habits of mind’,
which are ‘good or otherwise’ according to whether they produce true conclusions
from true premises. A principle that captures a habit—such as ‘what is true of one piece
of copper is true of another’—is a ‘guiding principle of inference’. These principles are
‘safe’ or otherwise (W 3: 245, 1877). They too can be evaluated. Peirce argues that
simply by asking a question, we assume ‘that there are such states of mind as doubt and
belief—that a passage from one to the other is possible . . . and that this transition is
subject to some rules which all minds are alike bound by’ (W 3: 246, 1877). These rules
or norms are the subject matter of the rest of his paper.
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Peirce notes that one difference between doubt and belief is that they feel different.
But there is a ‘practical difference’ as well:
Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions. The Assassins, or followers of the Old Man
of the Mountain, used to rush into death at his least command, because they believed that
obedience to him would insure everlasting felicity. Had they doubted this, they would not have
acted as they did. So it is with every belief, according to its degree.
[W 3: 247, 1877]
One must add that our desires also shape our actions, even if we think, as Peirce did,
that they should not be the primary guide of our beliefs. The Assassins might have
failed to rush toward their deaths even if they believed that obedience to the Old Man
of the Mountain’s commands would secure their everlasting felicity; they also had to
desire everlasting felicity. Peirce was simply taking that for granted.
We will see later how Peirce started to employ something like degrees of belief in his
account of inquiry. For now, let us stick to considering how his argument works with
full belief. The principal effect of doubt, Peirce argues, is that we try to escape it and
regain a state of belief. For when we are in doubt, we are paralysed, as far as action goes.
As he puts it in his later work, if an inquirer has an end in view and two different lines of
action present themselves, action is brought to a halt: ‘he waits at the fork for an indication, and kicks his heels . . . A true doubt is accordingly a doubt which really interferes
with the smooth working of the belief-habit’ (CP 5. 510, 1905). Doubt is problematic
because we don’t know what to do. We need to regain a state of belief, which is a ‘determination’ or rule for action. In ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Peirce notes that ‘belief ’
and ‘doubt’ seem to give the impression of describing the phenomena ‘under a mental
microscope’. Nonetheless, he will continue to use the terms:
to designate the starting of any question, no matter how small or how great, and the resolution
of it. If, for instance, in a horse-car, I pull out my purse and find a five-cent nickel and five
­coppers, I decide, while my hand is going to the purse, in which way I will pay my fare . . . [I]f
there is the least hesitation . . . (as there will be sure to be, unless I act from some previously
contracted habit in the matter) . . . I am excited to such small mental activity as may be necessary to deciding how I shall act.
[W 3: 261–2, 1878]
In the absence of a belief or a habit (and in the presence of caring about the matter),
we are motivated to inquire. In the 1905 Monist article ‘What Pragmatism Is’, he is just
as clear:
Belief is not a momentary mode of consciousness; it is a habit of mind essentially enduring for
some time, and mostly (at least) unconscious; and like other habits, it is (until it meets with
some surprise that begins its dissolution) perfectly self-satisfied. Doubt is of an altogether contrary genus. It is not a habit, but the privation of a habit. Now a privation of a habit, in order to
be anything at all, must be a condition of erratic activity that in some way must get superseded
by a habit.
[CP 5. 417, 1905]
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Desires, or feelings that something is wanted, are not, for Peirce, sufficient to be
the spring of self-controlled or deliberate action. Desires—or perhaps we might
call them ‘cravings’—can be indicators of a disposition to behave, but they are not
on their own always vital for belief and action (CP 1. 593, 1903). What is more
important are the ideals we adopt. They govern our dispositions to behave much
more strongly than desires, which are general and variable and can be overridden
by all sorts of considerations, including other desires. For Peirce, self-controlled
action involves an ideal and an intention to formulate rules of action so as to live
up to it.
Peirce calls the struggle to move from the state of doubt to the state of belief ‘inquiry’,
although that ‘is sometimes not a very apt designation’ (W 3: 247, 1877). An inquirer
has a body of settled beliefs, which are in fact not doubted. Such beliefs take a variety of
forms: they may be ordinary empirically confirmed beliefs, regulative assumptions
that act as working hypotheses in conducting the business of life, or even deeply
engrained beliefs whose origins are intangible. When something happens to throw a
belief into doubt, the inquirer struggles to escape that unhappy state. Inquiry is the
struggle to regain belief. It is ignited by a doubt and ceases only when a new belief or
‘habit of expectation’ is re-established (CP 6. 469, 1908).
Here is where the argument gets less straightforward. If the ‘sole object of inquiry
is the settlement of opinion’ (W 3: 248, 1877), then it seems that a belief that is permanently settled satisfies that object entirely. If we take it as a platitude that truth is the
aim of inquiry, it appears to follow that there can be nothing more to truth than the
settlement of opinion. Much of ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ is taken up with addressing
the objection that wants to leap off the page: what if a belief were to be permanently
settled by torture or by a totalitarian regime? Would such a belief thereby be true?
Peirce, in a rather complex argument, answers ‘no’. He examines the method of tenacity (holding onto our beliefs, come what may), the method of authority (letting a
powerful regime or religion determine what the people will believe), and the a priori
method (believing that which is agreeable to reason, regardless of experience). His
provocative claim is that if any of these methods were capable of permanently fixing
belief, then those permanently settled beliefs would indeed be true. His strategy is to
show that these methods cannot permanently fix our beliefs: they will eventually be
assailed by doubt. Some of those reasons turn on purported facts about inquirers—
for example, when they see that others don’t share their belief, they will be thrown
into doubt.
One crucial reason in play in ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ arises with respect to the a
priori method. This method, Peirce argues, is a ‘failure’, for:
It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is
always more or less a matter of fashion . . . [and] I cannot help seeing that . . . sentiments in their
development will be very greatly determined by accidental causes. Now, there are some people,
among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be found, who, when they see that any belief
of theirs is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not
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merely admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it
ceases to be a belief.
[W 3: 253, 1877, emphasis added]
It might seem that Peirce is arguing that if we permanently settle doubts about any
belief, then it is indeed entirely satisfactory and true. But his argument is in fact that it
is very hard to really settle doubts about our beliefs. If they are genuine beliefs, they
resign in the face of recalcitrant experience or in the knowledge that they were put in
place by a method that ignored experience. What we want is not merely to resettle
belief; we want to resettle belief so it agrees with experience.
He reiterates this point in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, summarizing the point of
‘The Fixation of Belief ’: ‘A person who arbitrarily chooses the propositions which he
will adopt can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his determination to hold on to his choice’ (W 3: 272, 1878). Notice that he refuses to use the word
‘belief ’ for such a mental state. He is adamant in both ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ and ‘How
to Make Our Ideas Clear’ that those who adopt a method such as the a priori method
do not pursue beliefs aimed at truth:
In contenting themselves with fixing their own opinions by a method which would lead another
man to a different result, they betray their feeble hold of the conception of what truth is.
[W 3: 273, 1878]
In 1911, he tries to correct the ‘illogical obstinacy’ that some thought he displayed in
‘Fixation’ and argues that what he meant was that it is part of the very nature of belief
that it is responsive to experience. He says: ‘it is one of the essentials of belief, without
which it would not be belief . . . that a man could hardly be considered sane who should
wish that though the facts should remain lamentable, he should believe them to be
such as he would wish them to be’ (MS 673: 11, 1911).9 This is a poke at James, for we
shall see that Peirce read James’s ‘The Will to Believe’ as suggesting that if one could not
bear it to be the case that p, one could believe –p. Peirce thinks, on the contrary, that it
is a constitutive norm of belief that a belief is responsive to arguments and evidence for
or against it. This thought appears explicitly only in an inaccessible manuscript, and
hence Ramsey did not see it. But his point is made clear enough on a careful reading of
‘The Fixation of Belief ’, and we shall see that while Ramsey might not have accepted
that a complete disregard for the facts disqualified a belief from being a belief, he did
share Peirce’s conviction that beliefs are answerable to the facts and that those who
settle belief by a method that fails to take account of experience adopt a method that is
aimed at something other than truth.
1.4 Truth
We have seen that, for Peirce, the inquirer is not merely after any old settled belief. The
inquirer is after beliefs that are settled in a way that is connected with reasons and
9
See also MS 675, sheets marked ‘8’.
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evidence—beliefs that will serve him well in the future; will not disappoint; will guide
action on a safe course; will continue to fit with experience, evidence, and argument—
for only such beliefs are really settled, after all. It is not so easy to end the irritation of
doubt. It is not so easy to fix belief. But when a belief is successfully fixed—when it is
really ‘indefeasible’—it is true. He says, setting up a contrast of his position with
James’s: ‘if Truth consists in satisfaction, it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must
be the satisfaction which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its
ultimate and indefeasible issue’ (CP 6. 485, 1908). But even on Peirce’s more robust
account, we are immediately taken to a set of difficulties in unpacking the concept of
successful action or conduct that would tend to satisfy our desires. For one thing, if my
desire is for an unreflective, quiet, peaceful life, perhaps successful action for me would
be that I acquire beliefs of the Ostrich head-in-the-sand variety. For another, being
confident (even over-confident) in your beliefs can make you more successful in
action. Peirce owes us an account of how we can pick out the right notions of practical
success if we cannot appeal to the uninterpreted world, facts, or how things are. In this
and the next section, I will indicate how he tries to provide that account.
In Peirce’s view, a belief is true if it would not be improved upon; would never lead
to disappointment; or would forever meet the challenges of reasons, argument, and
evidence. A true belief is the belief we would come to were we to inquire as far as we
could on a matter. He was a little worried that his focus on belief ran the risk of basing
the logic of inquiry on psychology.10 After all, ‘man could alter his nature, or his environment would alter it . . . if the impulse were not what was advantageous or fitting’
(CP 5. 28, 1903): the fact of our psychological makeup does not explain its fittingness.
He had from the beginning taken logic to be a normative science. It is not based on
what our beliefs happen to be, but on what they ought to be. Logic is all about evaluating belief or evaluating habits. Peirce says in a passage that will resonate when we
turn to Ramsey:
A decapitated frog almost reasons. The habit that is in his cerebellum serves as a major premiss.
The excitation of a drop of acid is his minor premiss. And his conclusion is the act of wiping it
away. All that is of any value in the operation of ratiocination is there, except only one thing.
What he lacks is the power of preparatory meditation.
[CP 6. 286, 1893]
Instinct, for Peirce, is very close to belief. It too is a habit or rule for behaviour. The
emotion of surprise ‘is merely the instinctive indication of the logical situation. It is
evolution . . . that has provided us with the emotion’ (CP 7. 190, 1901).
But the evaluation of belief involves reference to things external to the believer’s
perhaps idiosyncratic psychology and habits of action. Peirce thus suggests that our
focus should be on the kind of belief that is judgement or assertion. These notions
10
See Hookway (2012: 12).
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involve the critical evaluation of reasons and evidence for our belief and the taking of
responsibility for what we judge or assert.11 His view of assertion is as follows:
If a man desires to assert anything very solemnly, he takes such steps as will enable him to go
before a magistrate or notary and take a binding oath to it. Taking an oath is . . . not mere saying,
but is doing . . . [I]t would be followed by very real effects, in case the substance of what is asserted
should be proved untrue. This ingredient, the assuming of responsibility, which is so prominent
in solemn assertion, must be present in every genuine assertion. For clearly, every assertion
involves an effort to make the intended interpreter believe what is asserted, to which end a reason
for believing it must be furnished . . . Nobody takes any positive stock in those conventional utterances, such as ‘I am perfectly delighted to see you,’ upon whose falsehood no punishment at all is
visited . . . [E]ven in solitary meditation every judgment is an effort to press home, upon the self of
the immediate future and of the general future, some truth. It is a genuine assertion, just as the
vernacular phrase represents it . . . Consequently it must be equally true that here too there is
contained an element of assuming responsibility, of ‘taking the consequences.’
[CP 5. 546, 1908; see also 5. 30, 1903]
An assertion must be such that the speaker is held to account if what she says is false.
What one forfeits upon the utterance of a falsehood is not ‘definite’, but the forfeit is ‘no
smaller for being unnamed’ (CP 5. 543, 1902). Norms, standards, and aims (to describe
things as they are, to reach the truth) are built into assertion.
He summarizes, distinguishing between stating, doubting, judging, and asserting:12
A proposition may be stated without being asserted. I may state it to myself and worry as to
whether I shall embrace it or reject it, being dissatisfied with the idea of doing either. In that
case, I doubt the proposition. I may state it to you and endeavor to stimulate you to advise me
whether to accept or reject it: in which [case] I put it interrogatively. I may state it to myself;
and be deliberately satisfied to base my action on it whenever occasion may arise: in which case
I judge it. I may state it to you and assume a responsibility for it: in which case I assert it.
[MS 75: 43–5]
The following explanation of his dispositional account of these acts appears in Peirce’s
Lowell lectures, which Welby knew. It links assertion with betting, a theme that will be
of interest when we turn to Ramsey:
What is the difference between making an assertion and laying a wager? Both are acts whereby
the agent deliberately subjects himself to evil consequences if a certain proposition is not true.
Only when he offers to bet he hopes the other man will make himself responsible in the same
way for the truth of the contrary proposition; while when he makes an assertion he always
(or almost always) wishes the man to whom he makes it to be led to do what he does.
[CP 5. 31, 1903]
11
See Atkins (2011), Boyd (forthcoming), Heney (2015), Short (2007), and Hookway (2012: 14f) for
accounts of Peirce’s theory of assertion.
12
At times, Peirce distinguished theoretical belief, a state in which we do not need to act on the belief ’s
content urgently, from practical belief, a state in which we do need act on the content urgently. See Misak
(2004 [1991]: 172ff.) for a discussion.
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To return to the fork in the road metaphor for belief, Peirce is clear that we can adopt a
number of attitudes to, say, the proposition that the left fork will take us to our destination. He speaks of ‘modalities’, while we shall see that Ramsey chooses the expression
‘degrees of belief ’ to describe a similar phenomenon. Peirce says:
An assertion has its modality, or measure of assurance, and a question generally involves
as part of it an assertion of emphatically low modality. In addition to that, it is intended to
stimulate the hearer to make an answer. This is a rhetorical function which needs no special
grammatical form. If in wandering about the country, I wish to inquire the way to town, I can
perfectly do so by assertion, without drawing upon the interrogative form of syntax. Thus I may
say, ‘This road leads, perhaps, to the city. I wish to know what you think about it.’ The most
suitable way of expressing a question would, from a logical point of view, seem to be by an
interjection: ‘This road leads, perhaps, to the city, eh?’
[CP 4. 57, 1893]
We are now in a position to see why pragmatism is ‘scarcely more than a corollary’ of
the connection Bain draws between belief and action. While Peirce did not accept the
metaphysics of mind that some dispositionalists adopt, he did maintain that we
believe, judge, and assert a proposition only if we are disposed to act on it. The disposition to act is necessary, just as it is necessary, on Peirce’s view, that a belief must have
practical consequences for it to have content. As we shall see, Peirce thought a belief ’s
consequences for action are central not only to constituting it but also to determining
its normative status. For the fundamental norm of belief is truth, and, for Peirce,
roughly, beliefs are true if they would lead to successful action and false if they would
not. I say ‘roughly’, for the unpacking of this idea is a site of contention between Peirce
and James, a contest that indicates just how difficult it is to properly understand the
idea of a belief ’s being ‘successful’. In what follows, I shall give Peirce’s account of the
matter, and in the next chapter I shall give James’s.
Peirce, more so than James, was wary of being cornered into a form of linguistic
idealism. His idea that true beliefs are those on which there would be agreement
requires that the agreement be warranted by how things are. He did not hold that truth
depends on some finite collection of finite beings happening to agree that p is the case
at some point in time. He is something of a realist about truth. He says in ‘The Fixation
of Belief ’:
It is true that we generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false,
though we could not resist the tendency to believe it.
[W 3: 244, 1877]
And again, in a later work:
It is a damnable absurdity indeed to say that one thing is true in theology and another in
science. But it is perfectly true that the belief which I shall do well to embrace in my practical
affairs, such as my religion, may not accord with the proposition which a sound scientific
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method requires me provisionally to adopt at this stage of my investigation. Later, both the one
proposition and the other may very likely be modified; but how, or which comes nearer to the
ultimate conclusion, not being a prophet or a magician, I cannot yet say.
[CP 6. 216, 1898]
When we are talking about the world (for instance, whether God exists and influences
the course of affairs), we must assume that there is one truth of the matter, not one
truth in science and another truth for my life.
But Peirce’s is a realism that insists that true beliefs cannot be a mirror of reality. As
I have hinted, and as we shall see more fully in the next section, he argues that as soon
as we form a belief about what is real, we form an interpretation. Those realisms that
employ a metaphor in which parts of a sentence hook onto parts of reality are rejected
by Peirce. For any attempt to unpack that metaphor results in absurdities about what
kinds of things are in the world and what kinds of entities represent them. The relationship between our beliefs and the world needs to be specified more vaguely than certain
kinds of correspondence theories would have it. We shall see that Ramsey also wants to
affirm the existence of a world independent of our beliefs about it, while rejecting the
picture in which sentences represent the world in a way that is somehow independent
of our inquiries. Both Peirce and Ramsey want to maintain a sort of realism in which
truth doesn’t depend entirely on what you or I or any others may think about it. They
want ‘how things are’ to exert independent normative force on belief, despite the fact
that we understand ‘how things are’ only in terms of beliefs, their practical success,
their coherence with other of our mental states, and so on.
Another route to Peirce’s account of truth is via the pragmatic maxim. When he
turns that principle on the concept of truth, the upshot is an aversion to what he calls
‘transcendental’ accounts of truth, such as the correspondence theory, in which a true
belief is one that corresponds to, or gets right, or mirrors the believer-independent
world (CP 5. 572, 1901). It is a mark of pragmatism to reject such theories of truth and
replace them with something more human. We shall see this rejection appear in
Ramsey and in Wittgenstein’s mature view. Peirce’s rejection is sparked by the thought
that transcendental accounts of truth are examples of those ‘vagabond thoughts that
tramp the public roads without any human habitation’. They make truth the subject of
empty metaphysics. For the very idea of a world, independent of believers, and of the
items within it to which beliefs or sentences might correspond, seems graspable only if
we could somehow step outside our corpus of belief, our practices, or that with which
we have dealings.
The correspondence account of truth, that is, is missing the dimension required to
make it suitable for inquiry. It fails to make ‘readily comprehensible’ the idea of our
aiming at the truth or at getting things right (CP 1. 578, 1902). How could anyone
aim for a truth that goes beyond what we can experience or beyond the best that
inquiry could do? How could an inquirer adopt a methodology so as to achieve
that aim? The correspondence theory makes truth ‘a useless word’. Peirce counsels
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that, ‘having no use for this meaning of the word “truth”, we had better use the word
in another sense’ (CP 5. 553, 1905). That sense is a lower-profile sense—closer to
practical human life and farther away from metaphysical notions than that of the
correspondence theory.
Peirce is set against representationalist theories of truth—theories that take truth to
be about words representing, mirroring, or copying reality. He is happy with the claim
that truth is ‘the correspondence of a representation with its object’ as a ‘nominal’ definition, useful only to those who have never encountered the word before (CP 5. 553,
1906). But we want a robust or full account of truth—one that is useful in inquiry and
to those who already are familiar with the concept. Hence, we need to provide a pragmatic elucidation—an account of the role the concept plays in practical endeavours.
We need to illuminate the concept of truth by considering its linkages with inquiry,
assertion, and the acquisition of belief. For those are the human dealings relevant
to truth.
When we inquire, give reasons, or believe, we take ourselves to be aiming at truth.
We want to know, for instance, what methods might get us true belief; whether it is
worth our time and energy to inquire into certain kinds of questions; whether a discourse such as ethics aims at truth, or whether it is a radically subjective matter within
which statements lack truth-values. Once we see that truth and assertion are intimately connected—once we see that to assert that p is true is to assert p—we can look to
our practices of assertion to see what commitments they entail. As David Wiggins
(2004: §§XII–XIII) puts it, hard on the heels of the thought that truth is internally
related to assertion comes the thought that truth is also internally related to inquiry,
reasons, evidence, and standards of good belief. If we unpack the commitments we
incur when we assert, we find that we have imported all these notions.
Peirce, we have seen, was very careful not simply to define truth as that which satisfies
our aims in inquiry. A dispute about definition, he says, is usually a ‘profitless discussion’
(CP 8. 100, 1900). Wiggins sees his point clearly when he suggests that the pragmatist
seeks not to define, but to ‘elucidate truth in its relations with the notion of inquiry’, and
argues that, moreover, this ‘need not . . . represent any concession at all to the idea that
truth is itself an “epistemic notion” ’ (2002: 318).13 The pragmatist draws connections to
shed light on the idea of truth. When a concept is fundamental to our way of thinking
and living, this seems to be all that is possible and required to enable us to grasp it clearly.
Many have interpreted Peirce as not just defining truth, but defining it as that which
is destined to be believed at the end of inquiry.14 Indeed, Peirce sometimes expresses his
account of truth in the following unhelpful way: a true belief is one that would be
agreed upon at the hypothetical or ‘fated’ end of inquiry (W 3: 273, 1878). If this is
See also Sellars (1962: 29).
Methven, for instance, is inclined to read Peirce as ‘committed to a uniquely determined body of opinion “fated” to be eventually agreed upon by all inquirers’ (2015: 71). This leads him to a view of the relationship between Peirce and Ramsey that is different from my own.
13
14
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taken literally, difficulties quickly arise. How would we know when we reached the end
of inquiry? What if human beings were to suddenly perish—is that the destined end of
inquiry? Or if the end of inquiry is characterized normatively, in terms of the destined
or ideal epistemic community, isn’t this simply question-begging?
But Peirce is clear that he does not mean that there is a literally fated answer to our
questions. For one thing, there ‘cannot be a scintilla of evidence to show that at some
time all living beings shall not be annihilated at once’ (W 2: 271, 1869). For another, we
have seen that in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ Peirce was set against the project of
providing a definition of truth. When he uses the unfortunate language of destiny, he
uses it not as a definiens, but as an analogy: ‘This activity of thought by which we are
carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny’
(W 3: 273, 1878). The point that Peirce is amplifying is innocent enough: ‘All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed
far enough, will give one certain solution to every question to which they can be
applied’ (W 3: 273, 1878).
He also emphasizes in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ that although the pragmatic
account of the concept of reality approaches reality through its role as the object of
‘final opinion’ (and hence it ‘depends on what opinion is’), that does not mean that
reality depends on ‘what you or I or any man thinks’ (W 3: 274, 1878). Trying to distance himself from what he thought was James’s view, he says:
Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might
even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the
human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone
could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our
race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion
must be the one which they would ultimately come to.
[W 3: 274, 1878]
For Peirce, a true belief is one that really would be indefeasible or really would not be
defeated by experiences and reasons. Since we cannot know, with certainty, what really
would be indefeasible, we must be fallibilists about our beliefs.
Philip Kitcher (forthcoming) has distinguished between teleological progress, in
which we are moving toward some ideal state, and pragmatic progress, in which we
are moving from one state of belief to a better state. He gets the distinction from
Dewey, but it is also embedded in Peirce’s work. It leads Peirce to the thought that,
with the regulative ideal that a true belief is a belief that really would stand up to all
the evidence and argument in place, we are to attend to moving from one settled
belief to a better one. Peirce would argue that while we need not, for instance, be
interested in being able to compare any two societies by the lodestar of an ideal, we
still need the idea that there is ‘better and worse’ in order to make any kinds of judgements of progress. That ideal is provided by having inquiry aim at the truth.
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As Hookway (2000: 57) has helpfully added, in order to account for the evolution of
theories, Peirce argues that when we assert or believe that p, we commit ourselves to
believing that experience will fall in line with p or with some successor of it. We expect
that p, in some form, will survive the rigours of inquiry and prove indefeasible, but
what will be undefeated is in all probability some refined version of p. In this way, an
inquirer can assert something she thinks is not precisely true.15
So let us stay away from the language of destiny and stick to the account of truth
we find in ‘The Fixation of Belief ’: a true belief is such that it would withstand doubt
were we to inquire as far as we could into the issue. A true belief is such that, no
matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, it would not be overturned by experience and argument. On Peirce’s view, we aim at beliefs that would
be forever stable. Toward that end, we aim at getting the best beliefs we can, as
measured against the standards of our many theoretical virtues. We have in our
various inquiries and deliberations a multiplicity of local aims—empirical adequacy,
coherence with other beliefs, simplicity, explanatory power, serving as a reliable
guide to action, fruitfulness for other research, enabling greater understanding of
others, and the like. When we say that we aim at the truth, what we mean is that,
were a belief really to satisfy all our local aims in inquiry, then that belief would be
true. There is no precise sense to be made of wanting something over and above
the fulfillment of those aims, something metaphysical. Truth is not some transcendent,
mystical thing.
I have made a number of attempts at arguing that one way of understanding Peirce’s
account of truth is to see it as sharing an insight with modern deflationism or minimalism.16 Peirce and the deflationist both think that what we do when we assert that p is
true is nothing more than assert that p. There is nothing more with which to build up
the concept of truth than the materials out of which we construct our accounts of belief
or assertion. There is nothing more to say about truth other than what one can say
about the role of ‘true’ in inquiry. But in characterizing this role, the classical deflationist will not go beyond appealing to the equivalence thesis: ‘p is true if and only if p’.17
The classical deflationist restricts himself to the utility of the truth predicate for
affirming generalizations and opaque nominalizations. But Peirce, rightly, would want
an argument about why that is the whole of our interest in the concept of the truth
predicate. He would take another step and argue that when we assert that p (and hence,
assert that p is true), part of what we are doing is asserting that it stands up to reasons
now and betting that it would continue to do so, although we of course might be
mistaken about that.
15
Meaning is thus preserved over time. The concept of mass, for instance, has undergone significant
revision, but we can still think of Newton and today’s physicists as referring to the same thing.
16
See Misak (1998, 2007, and 2015).
17
As e.g. in Horwich (1998 [1990]: 6)—though Horwich takes ‘uncontroversial instances’ of the schema
as his theory’s axioms, rather than the schema itself.
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1.5 Experience: Mathematics, Metaphysics, Religion,
and Morals
Peirce characterizes experience broadly. It is that which is compelling, surprising,
unchosen, brute, involuntary, or forceful:
[A]nything is . . . to be classed under the species of perception wherein a positive qualitative
content is forced upon one’s acknowledgement without any reason or pretension to reason.
There will be a wider genus of things partaking of the character of perception, if there be any
matter of cognition which exerts a force upon us . . .
[CP 7. 623, 1903]
It will be clear straight off the bat that this broad conception of experience is going to
allow for a criterion of legitimacy and truth-aptness that encompasses more than
beliefs directly verifiable by the senses.
Peirce’s focus on the force of experience is linked to his rich theory of categories. In
short, while experience is that which forces itself upon us, there is no experience that
is not laden with cognition. In an unpublished paper titled ‘What Is the Use of
Consciousness?’ (intended to form the fourth chapter of his Grand Logic) Peirce puts it
thus: ‘The spectator is no longer on one side of the footlights, and the world on the
other’ (CP 7. 562, c.1893).
Peirce had a number of ways of deriving his categories of Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness,18 each of which, he argued, is present in everything that comes before the
mind or is experienced. The first two are distinguishable by the Aristotelian/Scholastic
method of abstraction or prescission, in which we can distinguish different elements of
a concept by attending to them, but we cannot actually pull them apart or imagine a
situation in which either is isolated. A condensed summary of Peirce’s clearest derivation of the categories is as follows.
A First is a simple, monadic element—a quality of feeling, an image, or a mere possibility. It is indescribable: ‘It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already
lost its characteristic innocence . . . Stop to think of it, and it has flown!’ (CP 1. 357,
1890). The difficulty of pinning down as an ontological category something that is ‘a
special suchness with some degree of determination’ is not lost on Peirce (CP 1. 303,
1894). It is perhaps helpful to focus on the idea that Firstness comes first: it is ‘predominant’ in being, in feeling, and in the ideas of life and freedom (CP 1. 302, 1894). Even
more importantly, given the continuity of Peirce’s metaphysics with his logic of relations, a First is singular: ‘a pure nature . . . in itself without parts or features, and without
embodiment’ (CP 1. 303, 1894). The First is a relatum prior to any relation, providing
the metaphysical stuff to make relations possible.
18
Some of his derivations draw heavily on Kant and Aristotle. For a more sustained exposition and
explanation of the categories, see Misak (2004 [1991]: 70ff.).
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A Second is a dyadic element: the duality of action and reaction, or brute force.
It is the category that ‘the rough and tumble of life renders most familiarly prominent. We are continually bumping up against hard fact’ and hence have revealed to
us ‘something within and another something without’ (CP 1. 324, 1903; CP 2. 84,
1902). But as with the first category, this is all we can say of our encounters with
hard fact. Any articulation or thought of what we experience takes us into the third
category—the triadic realm of experience proper, which involves interpretation,
signification, intention, endeavour, and purpose. Peirce describes what he sees in
his study:
But hold: what I have written down is only an imperfect description of the percept that is forced
upon me. I have endeavored to state it in words. In this there has been an endeavor, purpose—
something not forced upon me but rather the product of reflection . . . I recognize that there is
a percept or flow of percepts very different from anything I can describe or think. What precisely that is, I cannot even tell myself . . . I am forced to content myself not with the fleeting
percepts, but with the crude and possibly erroneous thoughts, or self-informations, of what the
percepts were.
[CP 2. 141, 1902]
As soon as we try to describe our encounters with the world, thought and language are
involved. Any perception that we can think of ourselves as having is a perceptual judgement, something that requires a ‘theory of interpretation’ (CP 5. 183, 1903). Hence
Peirce’s argument against the correspondence theory of truth: we have no unmediated
access to the objects to which our beliefs are supposed to correspond.
Everything we experience, in other words, is a mix of mind and the world. Our
beliefs about what we experience are thus fallible. If ‘going back to the first impressions
of sense . . . would be the most chimerical of undertakings’ (CP 2. 141, 1902), then ‘the
knowledge with which I have to content myself, and have to call “the evidence of my
senses,” instead of being in truth the evidence of the senses, is only a sort of stenographic report of that evidence, possibly erroneous’ (CP 2. 141, 1902). Peirce is clear
about this as early as 1868, in another of those rare published papers, ‘Questions
Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’. His key claim in this essay is that we
cannot have an infallible intuition or a ‘cognition not determined by a previous cognition . . . and therefore so determined by something outside of consciousness’ (W 2: 193,
1868). He says, of the purported special faculty of intuition:
There is no evidence that we have this faculty, except that we seem to feel that we have it. But
the weight of that testimony depends entirely on our being supposed to have the power of distinguishing in this feeling whether the feeling be the result of education, old associations, etc.,
or whether it is an intuitive cognition; or, in other words, it depends on presupposing the very
matter testified to. Is this feeling infallible? And is this judgment concerning it infallible, and so
on, ad infinitum? Supposing that a man really could shut himself up in such a faith, he would
be, of course, impervious to the truth, ‘evidence-proof.’
[W 2: 194, 1868]
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Not only can we not have infallible intuitions, but thinking that we can have them is
dangerous, as it results in a closed mind. All knowledge is inferential and hence open
to error.
As Dorothy Emmet so nicely put it: there is a difference between being brute and
stubborn and being bare and naked (1994: 186). Experience can bring our beliefs up
short, but it does not give us access to a truth unclothed by human perceptual and cognitive capacities. But we have seen that neither are our criteria for how to revise our
beliefs in the face of brute experience merely subjective. Peirce tries to make it clear
that he is not talking about mere psychological or emotional compulsion when he talks
about the force of experience. In one manuscript, he asks us to imagine that ‘the human
race like moths had an unconquerable disposition to get into the fire (and some of the
dispositions of young men are much like that)’. Peirce argues that such a compulsion
would soon bump up against the world. We would find that:
on trying the experiment we should meet with a surprise. Now I think that sound reasoning is
constituted by its leading us to believe what will reduce our surprises to a minimum. For sound
reasoning seems to me to be reasoning that tends towards the truth as much as possible.
[MS 693: 162; undated]
Peirce is trying to invest the shock of experience with something that is objective. But
he sees that we cannot say much more without getting ourselves into philosophical
trouble. He says:
it is fact, and not opinion, that we aim at. But we have no means of ascertaining any fact whatever except from appearances. In order even to know what is present to my mind at a given
instant, I must put the question to myself; and by the time I have done that the ‘given instant’ is
passed, and I must trust to fallible memory . . . So there is no way of getting at any matter of fact,
even if it be a fact of thinking, except through thinking.
[MS 334: 44, 7–11, 1879]
What we can say is the following. The fact that we have only our interpretations of what
we experience does not throw us into a sea of arbitrary interpretations, where there is
no connection to what is real. Our perceptual judgements, Peirce argues, are indices—
they mark the actual clash between an inquirer and the external world. That world,
Peirce says in ‘Prolegomena’, cannot be described as it ‘really’ is. It can only be denoted
by indices (CP 4. 531, 1906). These indices ‘furnish positive assurance of the reality and
the nearness of their Objects’, and yet they provide ‘no insight into the nature of those
Objects’ (CP 4. 531, 1906). An interpreter connects the index and its objects by a belief
in a causal law. Although the judgement is ‘unlike’ the reality, ‘it must be accepted as
true to that reality’ (CP 5. 568, 1901).
Peirce thought that Hegel had things right, except that he whitewashed out the
category of immediacy or Secondness. In a 1905 Monist article, he writes:
The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which,
however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category . . . suffices to make the
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world, or is even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages
with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the triune
Reality, pragmatists might have looked up to him as the great vindicator of their truth.
[CP 5. 436, 1905]
Hegel failed to take seriously the clash between perceivers and the world. He needed to
be ‘educated in a physical laboratory instead of in a theological seminary’.19
Peirce, unlike Hegel (at least, unlike Hegel as Peirce interpreted him), thinks that we
can know something of the world as it exists independently of us—we can know that it
is there and that it constrains us. He turns to the idea that we can be mistaken in order
to illustrate that there is an objective truth and reality, a reality that goes beyond what
you or I or any collection of actual people happen to think: ‘The experience of ignorance, or of error, which we have, and which we gain by means of correcting our errors,
or enlarging our knowledge, does enable us to experience and conceive something
which is independent of our own limited views’ (CP 7. 345, 1873). As he so often does,
Santayana puts the pragmatist thought beautifully: ‘whatever matter may be, I call it
matter boldly, as I call my acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their
secrets’ (1923: viii).
Peirce’s argument that there is a reality independent of our beliefs about it invites the
objection that he really holds some kind of correspondence theory of truth. But this
would be a mistake, for we shall see that he merely thinks that we have to hope or
assume for the sake of inquiry that there is a reality. If we do not make this assumption,
we shall be unable to believe, know, or act. Inquiry, if you like, justifies the assumption.
As inquirers, we believe in concrete, independently existing objects. It is, to use a
phrase of Arthur Fine’s, our natural ontological stance. This is Peirce’s approach to
metaphysics: it is a natural science. What exists is what would be found to exist. We
think that real objects will be found to exist, and hence we believe in them now. That
belief is reasonable, given how nicely the existence of those objects fits with experience
and prediction. It does not, however, prove their existence and it does not require that
the philosopher be able to say precisely what their nature is.
Thus Peirce argues that while all our experiential judgements are fallible and laden
with interpretation, they must, in the first instance, be accepted as they come. They are
authoritative in that they force themselves upon us without ‘reason or pretension
to reason’ (CP 7. 623, 1903). This forceful element is our link with a reality, with something that goes beyond us: ‘Now the “hardness” of fact lies in the insistency of the percept, its entirely irrational insistency,—the element of Secondness in it. That is a very
important factor of reality’ (CP 7. 659, 1903). Peirce’s argument here might be taken to
be similar to a certain reading of Kant. The hardness of fact is present within experience, so that one need not transcend experience in order to learn of its existence—it is
instead ascertainable via precission. Rae Langton’s (1995) argument for ‘Kantian
19
CP 8. Bibliography, 1893. But see Robert Stern (2007) for the argument that Peirce has his Hegel
wrong and that their views are in fact very similar.
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Humility’ is not unlike what Peirce is getting at. It would be fine with Peirce if his hero
Kant turned out to be more metaphysically humble than Peirce suspects he was.
One feature of perceptual judgements that imbues them with their authority is that
they are brute and compelling. They arrive uncritically and uninvited, and only subsequently do we subject them to reason and scrutiny. But another thing we can say is that
our perceptual judgements tend not to lead us astray, or, when they do lead us astray,
we can find explanations for why this is the case. Hence, our taking them seriously
seems wise as well as necessary.
With this view of experience in hand, we can now turn to how Peirce broadens the
range of the experiential, or identifies different kinds of experience. He is not interested in giving us a causal account of knowledge, in which the external world causes us
to have sensory perceptions, which then justify our beliefs about that world. He made a
careful change in his terminology in 1907: from the idea that we seek a method of
inquiry in which our beliefs are ‘caused’ by nothing human, to the idea that we seek a
method of inquiry in which our beliefs are ‘determined’ by nothing human.20 That
subtle shift makes room for a broad account of experience and knowledge that merely
gestures at the reality ‘upon which our thinking has no effect’ (CP 5. 384, 1877), without
making claims that such a reality contains only concrete objects.
Take, for instance, Peirce’s treatment of mathematical and logical beliefs. The history of empiricism is littered with attempts to show how mathematical and logical
statements need not be made to pass the empiricist test.21 Peirce is the rare empiricist,
along with Mill and C. I. Lewis (and Quine, who repeats his teacher Lewis’s view), who
treats mathematics and logic as one with the rest of genuine inquiry. That is, Peirce is
a holist who argues that mathematics and logic are connected to experience in the
requisite way. Our mathematical knowledge is fallible. Peirce asserts that we should
not make too many bets of our life against a penny on the truth of simple additions—
eventually we would make a mistake and lose our life for naught. Moreover, we expect
certain things to be the case if mathematical and logical beliefs are true or false.
Not only might we have practical kinds of expectations with respect to applied mathematics (they will show up in bridge-building, for instance), but hypotheses in pure
mathematics also have consequences—consequences evinced in diagrammatic contexts. When we manipulate diagrams, we can find ourselves surprised. As Ian Hacking
has recently argued, Peirce was onto something important here—experience, surprise,
and the manipulation of diagrams are fundamental to mathematics.22 Peirce’s argument was made in ‘Prolegomena’ and in ‘The Doctrine of Chances’. Ramsey himself
took notes on the latter.
Peirce puts considerable effort into trying to get this idea right. It had a central place
in his thought. Mathematical or logical inquiry:
20
21
22
See Wiggins (2004: §VIII) and Short (2000: 7).
See Misak (1995) for an account of these attempts.
Hacking (2014: 11, 14, 28, and passim).
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involves an element of observation; namely, [it] consists in constructing an icon or diagram the
relation of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the object of
reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so
as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts.
[W 5: 164, 1885]
The mathematician’s ‘hypotheses are creatures of his own imagination; but he discovers
in them relations which surprise him sometimes’ (CP 5. 567, 1901). This surprise is the
force of experience.
The insight that must not be lost sight of is that when we talk of expectations,
drawing consequences, or forecasting, we need to have the appropriate expectations—
the expectations that are appropriate to the subject matter. Sometimes Peirce gives
voice to this insight by distinguishing two kinds of experience, correlating with two
‘worlds’ we inhabit: the inner (or the ideal) and the outer (or the real). We interact with
the outer world through a clash between it and our senses. We interact with the inner
world by performing thought experiments. Inquiry, he says, has ‘two branches; one is
inquiry into Outward Fact by experimentation and observation, and is called Inductive
Investigation; the other is inquiry into Inner Truth by inward experimentation and
observation and is called Mathematical or Deductive Reasoning’ (MS 408: 150, 1893–5).
In ‘Prolegomena’, he puts it thus:
one can make exact experiments upon uniform diagrams; and when one does so, one must
keep a bright outlook for unintended and unexpected changes thereby brought about in the
relations of different significant parts of the diagram to one another. Such operations upon diagrams, whether external or imaginary, take the place of the experiments upon real things that
one performs in chemical and physical research.
[CP 4. 530, 1906]
The distinction between these two kinds of experience and two kinds of inquiry is not,
however, hard and fast. External facts are simply those that are ‘ordinarily regarded as
external, while others are regarded as internal’ (W 2: 205, 1868). The inner world may
exert a comparatively slight compulsion upon us, whereas the outer world is full of
irresistible compulsions. Nonetheless, the inner world can also be ‘unreasonably compulsory’ and have ‘its surprises for us’ (CP 7. 659, 1903; CP 7. 438, 1893). Peirce intends
to leave the difference vague: ‘We naturally make all our distinctions too absolute. We
are accustomed to speak of an external ­universe and an inner world of thought. But they
are merely vicinities, with no real boundary between them’ (CP 7. 438, 1893). Of course,
the trouble with leaving this distinction vague is that vagueness takes the precision out of
the criterion of legitimacy. But Peirce prefers to have a pragmatic maxim that accounts
for all our varieties of meaning.
Peirce thus worried over what kinds of consequences counted—he worried about
what kinds of things we must expect from our beliefs if they are to be legitimate. We
have seen that he amended the pragmatic maxim. Some of those amendments had to
do with the nature of the required practical consequences. In ‘How to Make Our Ideas
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Clear’ he had suggested that they must be consequences for the senses—directly
observable effects. But after reflection, he maintains that he is not interested in narrowing the scope of the legitimate so severely. Not only are mathematics and logic connected to experience, but also some metaphysical inquiry as well. In metaphysics, ‘one
finds those questions that at first seem to offer no handle for reason’s clutch, but which
readily yield to logical analysis’ (CP 6. 463, 1908). Metaphysics ‘in its present condition’
is a ‘puny, rickety, and scrofulous science’ (CP 6. 6, 1903), but it need not remain so. The
pragmatic maxim will sweep ‘all metaphysical rubbish out of one’s house. Each abstraction is either pronounced to be gibberish or is provided with a plain, practical definition’ (CP 8. 191, 1904). Peirce was himself something of a metaphysician, putting
forward at least two metaphysical doctrines he thought scientifically respectable: tychism and synechism. The former is the view that there is an element of chance in the
universe. The latter is the view that reality is continuous. It is no accident that both
these ideas are bound up with probability theory and infinitesimals, for Peirce was very
much engaged in the exact sciences.23
Peirce also examined the question of whether religious claims meet the test. His
answer, though deeply unsatisfactory in the end, tells us much about how his pragmatic maxim was designed to operate and how it contrasted with James’s position.
Peirce does not think that consequences for the emotional lives of believers are the
sorts of consequences that can support the belief in God’s existence. The belief that
God is real, as it is usually conceived, is a belief about the external or outer world—God
is an existing entity or he is not; Jesus walked the earth or he did not. Peirce sets himself
the task of showing how the hypothesis that God exists has consequences, and he is
determined that they must be capable of being tested by induction. His idea is that if
‘God is real’ were true, then we would expect a tendency toward ‘growth’ and ‘habittaking’ in the universe, and we would expect that the universe would be ‘harmonious’.
He says that the hypothesis of God’s reality is a good explanation of the growth of
‘motion into displacement’ and the growth of ‘force into motion’. This is his ‘neglected
argument’ for the existence of God: the hypothesis of God’s reality is a good explanation of some existing phenomena.
The reader may well think that this is a rightly neglected argument for God’s reality.
It is not at all clear what we would expect if God were real; certainly, it is not at all clear
that we would expect what Peirce suggests. Many have thought that we would expect
there to be less gratuitous pain and suffering in the world. Peirce seems to be aware of
the difficulties, for each time he begins to talk about ‘tracing out a few consequences of
the hypothesis’ he quickly breaks off and changes the subject.24 He boldly asserts that
he has shown that the belief has testable empirical consequences, when he has done no
such thing. But we can see from his argument that he thought that empirical consequences were required if we are to take seriously the belief that God exists.
23
24
For good accounts of these metaphysical positions, see Reynolds (2002) and Putnam (1995).
See e.g. MS 842, p. 127. See Misak (2004 [1991]: 31–3) for a full account of the argument and its problems.
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Peirce thought far less about the role of ethics and politics, but I have argued that
he was willing to consider that they might be, in principle, legitimate domains of
deliberation and inquiry.25 He says that when politicians disagree, the dispute usually
has ‘some other object than the ascertainment of scientific truth’ (CP 4. 34, 1893),
and sometimes politicians and ethical deliberators might be justifiably hesitant to
revise their beliefs. But sometimes truth is at stake and change of belief is justified
by experience:
Like any other field, more than any other, [morality] needs improvement, advance . . . But morality, doctrinaire conservatist that it is, destroys its own vitality by resisting change, and positively insisting, This is eternally right: That is eternally wrong.
[CP 2. 198, 1902]
Ethical judgements, Peirce thinks, are part of the field of inquiry. They are revisable in
light of experience: ‘just as reasoning springs from experience, so the development of
sentiment arises from the soul’s Inward and Outward Experiences’ (CP 1. 648, 1898).
As with every other kind of experience, ‘[t]hat it is abstractly and absolutely infallible
we do not pretend; but that it is practically infallible for the individual—which is the
only clear sense the word “infallibility” will bear . . . that we do maintain’ (CP 1. 633,
1898).
I have mentioned that Peirce was set against the nominalist who refuses to admit
law, intentions, and norms into his picture of reality. Peirce is not the kind of pragmatist26 who holds that normative notions such as meaning or intentionality can be
reduced to, or eliminated in favour of, talk about practices or behaviour. Expounding
his category of thirdness, Peirce asserts to Victoria Welby:
Brute action is secondness, any mentality involves thirdness. Analyze for instance the relation
involved in ‘A gives B to C.’ Now what is giving? It does not consist [in] A’s putting B away from
him and C’s subsequently taking B up. It is not necessary that any material transfer should take
place. It consists in A’s making C the possessor according to Law. There must be some kind of
law before there can be any kind of giving . . .
[CP 8. 331–2, 1904]
As Claudine Tiercelin (2006) has argued, for Peirce, ethics itself relies on a kind of realism about dispositions or generality. Peirce tells us that the question of realism and
nominalism, while having its roots in technical logic, has its branches reaching out in
all corners of our life. For instance:
The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question
whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common,
so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of
See Misak (2000).
Think here of Quine or Rorty, who attempt this reduction in very different ways, with very different
upshots.
25
26
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the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence.
[W 2: 487, 1871]
We shall see in the next section how important the ‘normative sciences’ were
for him.
A question arises as to how Peirce can distinguish truth-conducive experiences
(or pieces of evidence) from misleading ones. The issue arises in every kind of inquiry,
from science to ethics. His criterion for the truth-conducivity of an experience has
been signalled already—experience that leads us to beliefs that work or gives us habits
that enable us to successfully predict and act is the right kind, the kind that leads us to
the truth. The question is one for every pragmatist, and it will be a theme that runs
through the whole of this book.
1.6 Logic and Probability
Peirce thought of himself first and foremost as a logician. Indeed, that was the one
intellectual community in which he was known and respected. The London mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford reportedly thought him to be the greatest living
logician, and the only logician ‘since Aristotle who has added to the subject something
material’.27 John Venn says: ‘Mr. C. S. Peirce’s name is so well known to those who take
an interest in the development of Boolean or symbolic treatment of Logic that the
knowledge that he was engaged in lecturing upon the subject to advanced classes at
the Johns Hopkins University will have been an assurance that some interesting contributions to the subject might soon be looked for’ (1883: 594). Peirce developed a
quantified first-order logic with a sound and complete diagrammatic proof system,
independently of and at the same time as Frege; discovered the Sheffer stroke decades
before Sheffer; and made advances in the logic of statistical reasoning. The latter is
especially important to understanding the influence he might have had on Ramsey. So
is his definition of logic.
Peirce conceived of logic in an unusual way—a way that struck Ramsey as right.
Logic is a ‘normative science’, along with ethics and aesthetics. Aesthetics, the most
abstract of the normative sciences, is to provide us with our ultimate aims. Ethics
explores the connection between our aims and our conduct. Logic is the study of valid
inference, and hence explores a particular kind of conduct—rational conduct. Logic is
about finding habits of reasoning and inference that do not lead us astray. It tells us
how to conduct an inquiry aimed at truth. It is ‘the doctrine of truth, its nature and the
manner in which it is to be discovered’ (W 3: 14, 1872). From 1902 on, he had in mind
to write a logic text, titled Minute Logic. While it would have had much formal material
27
See Fisch (1964: 461). See Aikin (2014) for the relationship between Clifford’s position and that of the
pragmatists.
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in it, it would have had at its centre the study of inquiry aimed at the truth. He tells us
in one prospectus:
Begin, if you will, by calling logic the theory of the conditions which determine reasonings to
be secure . . . Logic, then, is a theory. The end of any theory is to furnish a rational account of its
object . . . A theory directly aims at nothing but knowing. Maybe, if it be sound, it is likely, some
day, to prove useful. Still, fairness forbids our making utility the criterion of the excellence of
the theory.
[CP 2. 1, 1902]
What we tend to think of as practical utility will not be the aim of every kind of
inquiry—theoretical, logical, and mathematical inquiry will have consequences that
are not captured nicely by the word ‘utility’, if by that we mean only the bridge-­
building kind.
For Peirce, logic is the study of how actual reasoning should go. Hence formal logic
has its limits. He thinks ‘it would be most unreasonable to demand that the study of
logic should supply an artificial method of doing the thinking that his regular business
requires every man daily to do’. ‘Who could play billiards by analytic mechanics?’ (CP
2. 3, 1902). We are in possession of a human, non-artificial theory of reasoning that
gets corrected by the course of experience. Thus, ‘it is not in questions closely concerning a man’s business’ that formal logic is useful, but only in ‘extraordinary and
unusual problems’, where our instinctive reasoning loses its grip (CP 2. 4: 1902).
Formal logic is useful in helping the philosopher avoid ‘loose reasoning’ in those
instances in which ‘conclusions are not readily checked by experience, and . . . our
instinctive reasoning power begins to lose its self-confidence’ (CP 2. 4, 1902).
It is thus unsurprising that Peirce was interested in the contrasts between, for
instance, what he called de inesse conditionals, on the one hand, and ‘ordinary’ conditionals or ‘hypotheticals’, on the other. The former are what logicians now call material
conditionals. The latter are the conditionals we commonly use, and so pertain not just
to what happens in the ‘here and now’ but to some wider ‘range of possibilities’. With
respect to a conditional such as ‘If I eat ice cream, then grass is red’, if I do not in fact eat
ice cream, the de inesse view tells us that, since the antecedent is false, the whole conditional is true. But Peirce thinks that we must imagine a set of scenarios in which I do eat
ice cream and ask myself whether, in those scenarios, grass is red. This allows the
ordinary conditional to be ‘sometimes’ or ‘possibly’ true across the set.28 C. I. Lewis was
later to adopt and extend this view.
All this is not to suggest that Peirce thought formal logic unimportant: ‘There will be
a mathematical logic just as there is a mathematical physics and a mathematical
­economics’ (CP 1. 247, 1902). But mathematics does not provide a certain grounding
for the logic, nor vice versa. For Peirce, the backing for explaining the validity of general logical principles is a pragmatist backing. We proceed with inquiry on the assumption
28
See Misak and Legg (forthcoming).
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that logical laws are true, and until a doubt arises, we are justified in taking them to be
true. Providing warrant for the laws of logic is not a metaphysical enterprise.29 Logical
laws are regulative principles, which operate in inquiry just like other regulative principles operate in science. They are what we assume, with excellent justification, when
we inquire. We don’t know them to be necessarily true, even though they may state
what is necessarily the case.
To see how logic is bound up with inquiry in Peirce’s thought, we need a summary
of the three kinds of reasoning he identifies: deduction, induction, and his own contribution, abduction. In his early work, in papers Ramsey had access to, Peirce calls
abduction ‘hypothesis’. It is fundamentally creative30 or ‘ampliative’. It goes beyond
what is in the premises, unlike deduction, which explicates what is in the premises.
Abduction is thus capable of importing new ideas into our body of knowledge. It takes
the form:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
[CP 5. 189, 1903]
Something very like this now gets called inference to the best explanation.31 Peirce
might well have been happy with this label, as he says that this mode of inference is
‘the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis’ (CP 5. 189, 1903). He would not
have been happy, however, with the modern idea that explanatory power is evidence
for the belief ’s corresponding to reality. A hypothesis’s being a good or the best
explanation of some phenomenon gives us a reason only to suspect that it is true.
Once we have a hypothesis on the table as the best explanation, we test it by induction and see whether it holds up. In the meantime, the conclusions of abductive inferences are mere conjectures—we must ‘hold ourselves ready to throw them overboard
at a moment’s notice from experience’ (CP 1. 634, 1898). For ‘abduction commits us
to nothing. It merely causes a hypothesis to be set down upon our docket of cases to
be tried’ (CP 5. 602, 1903).
Peirce takes the first step in the scientific method to be abductive inference. A hypothesis or a conjecture is identified that explains some surprising experience—some
exception to what was expected. Consequences are then deduced from this hypothesis
and are tested by induction. If the hypothesis passes the test of induction, then it is
accepted—it is stable and believed until upset by a new and surprising experience.
The scientific method thus proceeds as follows: from abduction, to deduction, to
induction. Peirce thinks that because abduction and induction both add to our knowledge, ‘some logicians have confounded them’. But he clearly means to describe the
29
Later he became more metaphysical about this matter, and problematically so. See Howat (2015).
There is no evidence that Ramsey read that later work.
30
Richardson (2008: 346) uses this term. It is exactly right.
31
See Misak (forthcoming a) for a more sustained treatment of the topic.
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Cambridge Pragmatism
two types of inference as separate stages of a tripartite process of scientific inquiry
(W 3: 330, 1878).
Inductive inference—which includes, for Peirce, inference from observed instances
to unobserved instances as well as statistical inference—is also ampliative. While his
philosophical sparring partner, Chauncey Wright, was interested in Hume’s famous
argument about induction, Peirce is relatively quiet about this particular shape of the
problem of induction. All he does is gesture at Hume’s way of setting out the problem
when he argues that nature ‘is not regular’. Peirce thinks that ‘It is true that the special
laws and regularities are innumerable; but nobody thinks of the irregularities, which
are infinitely more frequent’ (W 2: 264, 1869). His view is that even if nature were uniform,
adding a major premise stating that fact would not be the right way to try to justify
inductive inference. Inductive inference ‘needs no such dubious support’ (CP 6. 100,
1901). For Peirce, it is the ampliative power of both induction and abduction that justifies their use. They are irreplaceable and essential kinds of reasoning.
There is, however, much that we can extract from Peirce about the problem Hume
posed for induction. Hume had delivered a devastating argument to show that the move
from ‘all observed A’s are B’s’ to ‘all A’s are B’s’ is not justifiable. Peirce thought that pragmatism by-passed Hume’s argument: Hume’s conclusion should worry only those who
will be satisfied with nothing less than certainty. He argues that the kind of inductive
inference Hume was concerned with—what Peirce calls a ‘crude induction’—is a weak
form of inference that can be overturned by a single experience. We do, and should,
believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, yet it might not. In 1911, he tells Welby that
Hume’s mistake is that he is a deductivist trying to get too much out of induction: ‘all the
old metaphysicians such as Hume support their scepticism by virtually a­ ssuming . . . that
the only kind of valid inference is deductive’ (Hardwick 1977: 142).
Whether or not Peirce is being fair to Hume (I think he isn’t), his point is novel
and important. As I have argued elsewhere,32 Peirce’s account of abductive inference
anticipates Nelson Goodman’s Fact, Fiction, and Forecast in allowing us to see our way
through Hume’s problem by reframing it as a problem not for induction, but for
hypothesis formation. The seemingly unsolvable problem of induction starts to disintegrate once we acknowledge that regularities abound, but only some of them want
explanations. Only unexpected or surprising regularities make a demand on us to
make an inference to the best explanation. Once that demand is met by abductive
inference, then the job of induction is to test those abductive hypotheses. The problem
of induction is turned into the problem of which abductively arrived-at hypotheses
should be the ones selected for inductive testing. The problem is one of how to arrive at
hypotheses that then stand up to testing. Peirce’s own suggestions are that we should
choose hypotheses that bring ‘the most facts under a single formula’ (CP 7. 410;
c.1893); that we should choose simple hypotheses (CP 5. 60, 1903); and that we should
choose only that hypothesis ‘which is likely in itself, and renders the facts [in need
32
Misak (2004 [1991]: 96ff.) and (2013: 49–50, 212ff.).
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of explanation] likely’ (CP 7. 202, c.1901). This is just a provisional and partial list of
considerations.
The crucial point is that Peirce turns his attention away from his understanding of
Hume’s problem of induction and toward the question of whether and when induction
is a reliable part of inquiry. The reliability of statistical inference is what is important,
not the question of whether induction is a form of inference that blesses its conclusions
with guarantees. In ‘The Probability of Induction’, he asks how synthetic judgements
are possible at all: ‘How is it that a man can observe one fact and straightaway pronounce judgment concerning another different fact not involved in the first?’
(W 3: 304, 1878). His answer is that:
synthetic inference is founded upon a classification of facts, not according to their characters,
but according to the manner of obtaining them. Its rule is, that a number of facts obtained in a
given way will in general more or less resemble other facts obtained in the same way; or, experiences whose conditions are the same will have the same general characters . . . [I]n the case of
analytic inference we know the probability of our conclusion (if the premises are true), but in
the case of synthetic inferences we only know the degree of trustworthiness of our proceeding.
As all knowledge comes from synthetic inference, we must equally infer that all human
­certainty consists merely in our knowing that the processes by which our knowledge has been
derived are such as must generally have led to true conclusions.
[W 3: 306, 1878]
Reliability or trustworthiness of inferences is the key to understanding knowledge. We
shall see that this is one of the Peircean thoughts that gripped Ramsey.
Let us turn to Peirce’s account of probability and statistical inference. He thinks that
there is an objective and a subjective side to probability. We have already seen that in
‘The Fixation of Belief ’, he makes reference to degrees of belief. He continues that talk
in ‘The Doctrine of Chances’, also part of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. He
identifies the problem of probabilities thus:
The general problem of probabilities is, from a given state of facts, to determine the numerical
probability of a possible fact. This is the same as to inquire how much the given facts are worth,
considered as evidence to prove the possible fact. Thus the problem of probabilities is simply
the general problem of logic.
[W 3: 278, 1878]
Peirce’s question is to figure out how to weigh evidence33 or how to inquire into what the
given facts are worth. His answer is that degrees of belief must line up with the facts:
The numbers one and zero are appropriated . . . to marking these extremes of knowledge; while
fractions having values intermediate between them indicate . . . the degrees in which the
­evidence leans toward one or the other.
[W 3: 278, 1878]
33
See Kasser (2015) for an excellent discussion of weight of evidence in The Illustrations of the Logic
of Science.
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He then applies the pragmatic maxim: ‘To get a clear idea of what we mean by probability, we have to consider what real and sensible difference there is between one
degree of probability and another’ (W 3: 279, 1878). The difference is a matter of fact:
‘in the long run, there is a real fact which corresponds to the idea of probability, and it is
that a given mode of inference sometimes proves successful and sometimes not, and
that in a ratio ultimately fixed’ (W 3: 280, 1878). An occurrence is more or less probable
because, were an agent to perform indefinitely many inferences concluding that relatively similar events would obtain on the basis of relevantly similar evidence, he would
ultimately discover that this sort of inference tended definitively to a certain degree of
success. In the long run, the ‘fluctuations become less and less; and if we continue long
enough, the ratio will approximate toward a fixed limit’ (W 3: 281, 1878). This might
today be called an agency theory of probability, in which probability is a matter of what
inferences are good for the agent who is intervening in the world. Probability is analysed in terms of the reliability of an agent’s habit of inference.34
But in another signature move, Peirce wants to ensure that his concept is also objective.
Probability is grounded in fact. He adopts a kind of frequency theory of probability,
applied to the success of inferences. The frequency theory has it that probability is the
limit of the relative frequency with which an event occurs. What we mean when we say
that ‘the probability that this coin will land heads is .5’ is that, were we to toss the coin
very many times, independently and under as identical conditions as are possible, the
percentage of times that the coin lands heads would converge upon 50.
A big problem for the frequency theory is how to make sense of the single case.
Peirce puts it thus:
An individual inference must be either true or false, and can show no effect of probability; and,
therefore, in reference to a single case considered in itself, probability can have no meaning. Yet
if a man had to choose between drawing a card from a pack containing twenty-five red cards
and a black one, or from a pack containing twenty-five black cards and a red one, and if the
drawing of a red card were destined to transport him to eternal felicity, and that of a black one
to consign him to everlasting woe, it would be folly to deny that he ought to prefer the pack
containing the larger proportion of red cards, although, from the nature of the risk, it could not
be repeated.
[W 3: 282–3, 1878]
We need not even imagine such dire single case risks. The fact that we will all die,
Peirce says, means that each of us will take only a finite number of risks and make only
a finite number of inferences. Since the ‘very idea of probability and of reasoning rests
on the assumption that this number is indefinitely great’ (W 3: 284, 1878), we are
always facing a version of the single case problem.
34
Compare the agency theory of causation put forward by Menzies and Price (1993: e.g. 147), on which
one event causes another just in case bringing about the former would constitute an effective means by
which an agent could bring about the latter.
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Peirce’s solution coheres perfectly with the view that the truth is what we would
eventually come to, were we able to experiment into the indefinite future:
logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at
our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be
limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate
or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological
epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world,
is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social
principle.
[W 3: 284, 1878]
Peirce immediately makes his solution to the single case problem palatable by saying
that we need not actually engage in ‘the heroism of self-sacrifice’. The requirement is
merely that each of us should ‘perceive that only that man’s inferences who has it are
really logical, and should consequently regard his own as being only so far valid as they
would be accepted by the hero’ (W 3: 284, 1878).
We can extract two important points from this argument. One is about the structure
of knowledge. Science, inquiry, and rationality involve getting our beliefs in line with
experience, evidence, and reasons in an ongoing project. Logic or rational inquiry is
rooted in a ‘social principle’, for investigation into what is true is not a private interest
but an interest ‘as wide as the community can turn out to be’ (W 2: 271–2, 1868).
Rationality is social in nature because it requires more evidence than what is before
an individual or even before a community. A rational inquirer tries to get as much
evidence as she can. In our efforts to understand reality ‘each of us is an insurance company’ (W 2: 270, 1869). We make bets that will pay out (or not) later. If ‘the whole utility
of probability is to insure us in the long run’, then to be fully insured, we need to collect,
evaluate, and scrutinize as much evidence as we can. The more evidence one takes in,
the more one is likely to have successful actions. Of course, short-cuts will have to be
taken, as it would be absurd for each individual to try to gather all the ­evidence for
herself—inquiry is a community project. The linkage between degrees of belief and
their working in action is that if you fix your degrees of belief according to the (frequentist) objective chances, and if you take in a lot of e­ vidence, you will be more successful than if you had gone in for some other method of fixing your degrees of belief.
The bets you would make on this method ought to be made with a ‘great confidence’
(W 3: 295, 1878).
The other point is about the structure of value. As Scheffler (2013) argues, if we knew
that human beings would become extinct once everyone currently alive died a natural
death, then our own lives, contributions, and practices would diminish in value. While
Scheffler is not writing about pragmatism, his insight is a fundamental insight of that
tradition. The concepts of knowledge, rationality, and value make sense only within
ongoing (although we do not have to believe them infinitely ongoing) practices of
inquiring, justifying, acting, and living.
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In ‘The Probability of Induction’, on which Ramsey also took careful notes, Peirce
reiterates that, on his ‘materialistic view’, probability is ‘a matter of fact, i.e., as the
­proportion of times in which an occurrence of one kind is accompanied by an occurrence of another kind’. This kind of position is opposed to the subjective or the ‘conceptualistic view,’ in which probability is ‘regarded as being simply the degree of
belief which ought to attach to a proposition’—‘the reason we have to believe that it
has taken place’ (W 3: 291, 1878). Peirce is set against the simple or pure conceptualist, for he fails to take into account the objectivity involved in our probability
assignments:
[T]o express the proper state of our belief, not one number but two are requisite, the first
depending on the inferred probability, the second on the amount of knowledge on which
that probability is based. It is true that when our knowledge is very precise, when we have
made many drawings from the bag, or, as in most of the examples in the books, when the
total contents of the bag are absolutely known, the number which expresses the uncertainty
of the assumed probability and its liability to be changed by further experience may become
insignificant, or utterly vanish. But, when our knowledge is very slight, this number may be
even more important than the probability itself; and when we have no knowledge at all
this completely overwhelms the other, so that there is no sense in saying that the chance of
the totally unknown event is even (for what expresses absolutely no fact has absolutely
no meaning), and what ought to be said is that the chance is entirely indefinite. We thus
­perceive that the conceptualistic view, though answering well enough in some cases, is quite
inadequate.
[W 3: 295–6, 1878]35
The reasons available do not always line up with the facts, and probability seems more
closely tied to the latter than to the former. We may have reason to think that it is likely
that a bean, drawn at random from a bag of beans (and replaced), is black, given that
we have drawn twenty beans from the bag and they were all black. But of course, we
might be wrong about that—it might be that only half of the beans in the bag are black.
In that case, surely it would be right to say that the probability of drawing a black bean
was always 0.5, though our degree of belief that we would draw a black bean varied
(appropriately) with our state of information. Peirce thinks that the pure conceptualist’s
contravening of this thought is further manifested in the pure conceptualist’s commitment to the Principle of Indifference, in which ‘complete ignorance, where the judgment
ought not to swerve either toward or away from the hypothesis, is represented by the
probability ½’ (W 3: 296, 1878). In that case, too, Peirce argues, probability is determined by the facts, even though we are ignorant of them. So while Peirce countenances
degrees of belief or subjective probability assessments, he is not in favour of the position that makes those assessments fundamental.
35
Kasser (2015) provides a good discussion of how Peirce could not anticipate how contemporary
Bayesians would disarm his objection that they cannot get the prior probabilities they need without trying
magically to transform ignorance into knowledge.
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Peirce thinks there is something worth keeping from the conceptualist view.36 The
facts that determine the chance of an event have ‘an intimate connection with the
degree of our belief in it’ (W 3: 293, 1878). Thus:
belief ought to be proportional to the weight of evidence, in this sense, that two arguments
which are entirely independent, neither weakening nor strengthening each other, ought, when
they concur, to produce a belief equal to the sum of the intensities of belief which either would
produce separately.
[W 3: 294, 1878]
Take the sum of all feelings of belief which would be produced separately by all the arguments
pro, subtract from that the similar sum for arguments con, and the remainder is the feeling of
belief which we ought to have on the whole.
[W 3: 294, 1878]
The idea that the intensity or degree of belief must track the facts comes out clearly
when he expands on his view, first set out in ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ and ‘How to Make
Our Ideas Clear’, that while belief ‘is certainly something more than a mere feeling’, it is
nonetheless a distinctive conscious feeling:
yet there is a feeling of believing, and this feeling does and ought to vary with the chance of the
thing believed, as deduced from all the arguments. Any quantity which varies with the chance
might, therefore, it would seem, serve as a thermometer for the proper intensity of belief.
Among all such quantities there is one which is peculiarly appropriate. When there is a very
great chance, the feeling of belief ought to be very intense. Absolute certainty, or an infinite
chance, can never be attained by mortals, and this may be represented appropriately by an
infinite belief. As the chance diminishes the feeling of believing should diminish, until an even
chance is reached, where it should completely vanish and not incline either toward or away
from the proposition. When the chance becomes less, then a contrary belief should spring up
and should increase in intensity as the chance diminishes, and as the chance almost vanishes
(which it can never quite do) the contrary belief should tend toward an infinite intensity.
[W 3: 293–4, 1878]
Peirce does not arrive at a theory of subjective probability—he does not show that one’s
degrees of belief can be made coherent by obeying a set of rules. Rather, he articulates
something along the lines of what now gets called ‘Miller’s Principle’ and David Lewis’s
‘Principal Principle’: your subjective probability should track what you take to be the
objective probability.
The ‘kernel’ of the conceptualist position ‘is that the conjoint probability of all the
arguments in our possession, with reference to any fact, must be intimately connected
with the just degree of our belief in that fact’ (W 3: 294, 1878). Peirce seems happy to
take that as a kernel of truth, as long as we do not buy into the conceptualist’s ideas that
36
Isaac Levi has argued, however, that Peirce was completely set against the conceptualist view post1900 and so later rejected the idea, so appealing to Ramsey, that habits of inference yield degrees of belief
(2012 [2004]: 153).
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there are no objective facts about probabilities and that, whenever we lack any reason
either to affirm or to deny that an event of some description will occur, there is an even
chance of its occurring.
In 1910, in ‘Notes on the Doctrine of Chances’, Peirce shifts to the propensity theory,
another way of thinking of probability as objective:
The statement [that a die has a certain probability of landing on a number] means that the die
has a certain ‘would-be’; and to say that a die has a ‘would-be’ is to say that it has a property,
quite analogous to any habit that a man might have.
[CP 2. 664, 1910]
It will be science that tells us what propensities exist and explains them.37 Isaac Levi
puts it thus:
we improve our understanding of predicates such as ‘is compelled to attract iron filings placed
nearby’ by studying magnetic theory, not by studying possible worlds or any other armchair
semantics.
[1980: 244]
Again, it is first-order inquiry, not metaphysics, that will tell us about causes and
dispositions. They really exist, but our beliefs about them are interpretations. As
always, Peirce argues that there is both a subjective and an objective side to the
matter. We shall see these tendencies reappear in Ramsey. He too was a dualist, interpreting the calculus of probabilities both in physical terms and in terms of degrees of
belief. But while both Peirce and Ramsey have a mixed view of probability, Peirce
thinks that the objective side is more fundamental (subjective degrees of belief must
be keyed to it), whereas Ramsey, we shall see, puts more emphasis on subjective
degrees of belief.
1.7 Regulative Assumptions and the Principle
of Bivalence
I have argued in The American Pragmatists that Peirce’s version of pragmatism owes
much to Kant, as well as to the empiricist tradition. But he takes what he saw as spurious metaphysics out of transcendental idealism. There are indeed preconditions for
some of our central capacities, but these preconditions are not necessary, as Kant
thought they were. They are simply hopes or regulative assumptions of our practices—
things that we have to assume are true if we are to carry on in the way it seems that we
must carry on. While many of our regulative assumptions will be experimental, temporary hypotheses, likely to be modified or rejected, some are more stable or perhaps
even essential to the very activity of inquiry.
37
I thank Alison Fernandes for this idea and for the steer to Levi.
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Peirce’s account of truth (and probability) rests on a regulative assumption—that
inquiry will extend into the indefinite future. He says in ‘The Doctrine of Chances’:
Now, there exist no reasons . . . for thinking that the human race, or any intellectual race, will
exist forever. On the other hand, there can be no reason against it; and, fortunately . . . there is
nothing in the facts to forbid our having a hope, or calm and cheerful wish, that the community
may last beyond any assignable date.
[W 3: 285, 1878]38
The practice of abductive inference also rests on a regulative assumption. We
assume that whenever we observe C, there will be some hypothesis A that entails
C or makes C probable—we assume that there is an explanation for our surprising
observations.
In order to understand just how important the idea of a regulative assumption is in
Peirce’s thought, we need to turn to the assumption about which he is most expansive.
Peirce sees that he needs to answer a question that presses in on every pragmatist. In
‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, he puts it thus:
But I may be asked what I have to say to all the minute facts of history, forgotten never to be
recovered, to the lost books of the ancients, to the buried secrets . . . Do these things not really
exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge?
[W 3: 274, 1878]
One response is that Peirce’s account of truth rests on a subjunctive conditional
(‘If intelligent creatures were to inquire indefinitely, then . . . ’), and the falsity of the
antecedent does not disable the conditional any more than the falsity of the relevant
antecedent would disable the conditional for any disposition term. We know that the
diamond on the ocean floor isn’t actually going to scratch other things, just as we know
that the end of inquiry isn’t going to be reached.
But Peirce offers a second answer as well. It is a regulative assumption of inquiry
that, for any matter into which we are inquiring, we would (or it is probable that we
would) find an answer to the question we are investigating. Otherwise, it would be
pointless to inquire into the issue: ‘the only assumption upon which [we] can act
rationally is the hope of success’ (W 2: 272, 1869). Thus the principle of bivalence—for
any proposition p, p is either true or false—rather than being a law of logic, is a regulative assumption of inquiry. It is something that we have to assume if we are to inquire
into a matter.
To say that the principle of bivalence is a regulative assumption of inquiry is not a
claim that ascribes to it some special logical status (that it is a ‘logical truth’), nor is it a
claim about the nature of the world (that the world is such that the principle holds).
The principle of bivalence, Peirce says, is taken by logicians to be a law of logic by a
38
The fact that there are lots of empirical reasons against our existing forever does not negate Peirce’s
point that a regulative assumption of inquiry is that we keep inquiring indefinitely.
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‘saltus’—by an unjustified leap (NE 4: xiii). He distinguishes his approach from that of
the transcendentalist:
when we discuss a vexed question, we hope that there is some ascertainable truth about it, and
that the discussion is not to go on forever and to no purpose. A transcendentalist would claim
that it is an indispensable ‘presupposition’ that there is an ascertainable true answer to every
intelligible question. I used to talk like that, myself; for when I was a babe in philosophy my
bottle was filled from the udders of Kant. But by this time I have come to want something more
substantial.
[CP 2. 113, 1902]
Indispensability arguments were frequently employed in the late nineteenth century.
Josiah Royce, who did friendly battle with James at Harvard over pragmatism and
idealism, was very fond of them. James’s argument in ‘The Will to Believe’ can be seen
also as an argument from indispensability, to the effect that if one finds a proposition’s
truth indispensable for his or her life, one has reason to believe it.
Peirce carved out a new and interesting position on the subject of indispensability
arguments. He was clear that not only should the fact that an assumption is indispensable to our practice of inquiry not convince us that it is a necessary truth, it should not
even convince us that it is true. He says: ‘I do not admit that indispensability is any
ground of belief. It may be indispensable that I should have $500 in the bank—because
I have given checks to that amount. But I have never found that the indispensability
directly affected my balance, in the least’ (CP 2. 113, 1902). We must make these
assumptions ‘for the same reason that a general who has to capture a position or see his
country ruined, must go on the hypothesis that there is some way in which he can and
shall capture it’ (CP 7. 219, 1901).
Peirce’s position is that ‘we are obliged to suppose, but we need not assert’ that there
are determinate answers to our questions. For a regulative assumption is only a statement about what a practice requires in order to be comprehensible and in order to be
sensibly carried out. His position with respect to bivalence is that if we are to inquire
rationally about some particular issue, then we must assume or hope or suppose that
there is at least a chance of there being an upshot to our inquiry. Similarly, we need to
assume that there is a truth concerning matters that currently, for one reason or
another, are beyond the reach of our investigations. We need, that is, to assume that
there is a reality independent of our actual beliefs about it. In ‘The Fixation of Belief ’, he
states that a ‘fundamental hypothesis’ is taken for granted in inquiry or in the method
of science. That hypothesis is this: ‘There are real things, whose characters are entirely
independent of our beliefs about them’ and yet can be discovered through empirical
investigation (W 3: 254, 1877).
Refusing to make such essential assumptions is blocking the path of inquiry, and, in
Peirce’s view, that is the cardinal philosophical sin. We make the assumptions because
we are driven, Peirce says, by ‘desperation’. If we do not make them, we will ‘be quite
unable to know anything of positive fact’ (CP 5. 603, 1903). They support pretty much
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all our other judgements. But that is not to say that we are infallible with respect to
them, since we might discover them to fail.39 Indeed, like all rules or habits, they must
be sensitive to experience. If the principle of bivalence works, and continues to work,
that speaks in its favour. If it turns out that it is no good generally, or for some particular subject matter, that would speak against it. We shall return to these issues when we
come to the work of the later Wittgenstein.
39
Hence my answer to Tom Donaldson’s query on this matter (2014: 359). If physicists were to establish
Bohmian mechanics, which implies that inquiry would never answer certain questions, then the assumption of bivalence would be shown to be false for those questions and the pragmatist account of truth would
be imperilled, at least for those questions.
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James
2.1 Introduction
After giving up early thoughts of being a painter, William James trained as a scientist—in
chemistry, anatomy, and physiology—and then went to medical school. He had difficulty settling down and deciding on the shape of his life but, when all was said and
done, he had become the father of modern psychology and the face of American pragmatism. While Peirce was almost unknown in his lifetime, James was the most famous
American academic of his time, both at home and abroad. He had a tremendous influence on his students and colleagues—he was supportive, full of good advice, open,
generous, and engaging. He wrote beautifully, and many of his expressions are still
­ingrained in our philosophical consciousness. He was widely published and widely
translated. His brother Henry lived (and was revered) in England for the decades
William was writing, only enhancing his reputation.
James thought that Peirce was a ‘technical’ philosopher, too taken with mathematical logic. James makes it clear that he is not interested in fitting that archetype. At the
beginning of Pragmatism, he says: ‘the philosophy which is so important in each of us
is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and
deeply means’ (P: 9). James wanted to get his views across to the educated public, and
he succeeded—his ideas were discussed extensively in the magazines and literature of
the day. The downside of this way of proceeding was that it tended to blur the subtleties
of the points he was trying to make. Indeed, some of his contemporaries objected to
the very project of trying to reach a popular audience. In his rather bad-tempered (and
generally bad) Anti-Pragmatism, Albert Schinz rants: ‘Popular science, popular
art, popular theology—only one thing was lacking—popular philosophy. And now
they give that to us. What a triumph for a weak cause!’ (1909: xvi). Chauncey Wright
says of James:
He rather attracts me by the Jamesian traits; crude and extravagant as are many of his opinions,
and more especially his language. Perhaps the attraction is at bottom the opportunities afforded
by such a temperament to display the greater effectiveness of a more even one.
[Madden 1963: 45]
In fact, however, James’s extravagant moments tended to obscure the possibility of a
less extravagant or more even pragmatist stance. We shall see that his popular efficacy
spelled disaster for the ­fortunes of pragmatism.
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When James is at his most careful, his work is an excellent example of pragmatism at
its best. But he is sometimes not so careful. He sometimes puts forward the Peircean
position that truth is what is really indefeasible and that the world constrains our
beliefs. But he can also be found suggesting that widely variable human experience
determines the truth of each person’s beliefs for her, allowing that divergent or even
contradictory beliefs are simultaneously true. He shuttles, that is, between an objective
version of pragmatism to a relativist one. It is this latter version of James that influenced the trajectory of American pragmatism and came under fire in both
Cambridges—from Wright and Peirce in the American Cambridge and from Russell,
Moore, and Ramsey in the English one.
We shall see that when it comes to his psychology, which was rightly well received,
including by Russell and Wittgenstein, we shall encounter no such split-personality
problems. But when it comes to his pragmatism, I will need to get James’s less subtle
account of truth on the page. For we need to see how and why pragmatism was received
so negatively in Cambridge England. At his best, James is as good as Peirce, and,
indeed, improves upon Peirce by giving us examples of how even our ethical beliefs
might be based on experience. But that James was not always on display.
2.2 Psychology: Observation and Experience
James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology is a classic. It may be the most important book
in the whole history of psychology, not only demarcating psychology from philosophy,1
but also making points about the relationship between the mind and the brain that are
still important today. Its lasting memes include ‘the plasticity of neural matter’; ‘the
stream of thought’; the idea that every perception is in part an interpretation or creation; and the beginnings of what was later called ‘neutral monism’ (PP: 9–10). The
book had a major impact on Russell and Wittgenstein.2
James’s wide-ranging writings on psychology and related topics often contain the
best expressions of his pragmatism. Witness the following statement of James’s understanding of the pragmatic maxim, made in the 1881 ‘Reflex Action and Theism’:
[I]t may be said that if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should have
identical consequences, those two definitions would really be identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by the different verbiage in which they are expressed.
[WB: 99]
James’s psychology is also consonant with the regulative assumptions we have seen
Peirce put forward. Peirce claims that it is a presupposition of inquiry that there is a
real world, that our questions about it admit of determinate answers, and so on. James
See Klein (2010 [2008]).
Passages in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Zettel that parallel James’s Principles of
Psychology are gathered together in Appendix 2 of A Wittgenstein Workbook (Coope et al. 1970), covering
topics including belief-feelings, emotions and bodily feelings, and ownership of experiences.
1
2
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employs a similar move. Psychology is ‘the science of finite individual minds’ or ‘the
Science of Mental Life’ (PP: 6, 15). It ‘assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and
(2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know’
(PP: 6). It is also a natural, verifiable science. Psychology ‘contents itself with verifiable
laws, and seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses’ (PP: 182, emphasis
removed). James commends his British empiricist predecessors for taking phenomena
such as personal identity ‘out of the clouds’ and placing them within the scope of
­empirical science, allowing inquiry into the mind to proceed in the same way as ­inquiry
about the human body or any other natural phenomenon (PP: 319). James follows
them with an unwavering commitment to the method of observation. He calls himself
a ‘radical empiricist,’ one who, first, affirms the ‘postulate’ that ‘the only things that
shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from
experience’ (MT: 6). Further, a radical empiricist affirms a ‘statement of fact’: that relations between things are just as much matters of direct experience as is the experience
of particular things (MT: 7). From these considerations, a radical empiricist draws the
‘generalized conclusion’ that the elements of experience are held together not by some
‘extraneous trans-empirical connective support,’ but by relations ‘that are themselves
parts of experience’ (MT: 7).
James is thus committed to the view that experience is the source of all knowledge.
He holds that ‘We can only think or talk about the relations of objects with which we
have acquaintance already’ (PP: 653). Nonetheless, there is a distinction to be drawn
between two kinds of knowledge:
There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them
­respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about. Most languages express the distinction; thus γνῶναι, εἰδέναι; noscere, scire; kennen, wissen; connaître, savoir.
[PP: 216]
This distinction will be adopted and made famous later by Russell.
James used the term ‘sensation’ for knowledge by acquaintance. But we shall see that
like Peirce, he had a broad concept of sensation or observation, as that which impinges
upon us, or that with which we are acquainted. And like Peirce, James held that experience is possible only because of the mediation of the understanding. It is not clear
which of these two great pragmatists first came to these important ideas, but that is
neither here nor there.
One way in which James goes beyond Peirce is in saying how we learn about the
mind by experience, especially by looking into our own minds and reporting what we
discover: ‘Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and
always’ (PP: 185, emphasis removed). James was a master at this kind of experimental
work, always learning new things about feelings, moods, and other mental states by
careful and insightful observation. But, like Peirce, James does not think that introspective observation has any privileged epistemic status. It is not infallible. While his
empiricist predecessors might have had the commitment to observation right, James
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thinks they were mistaken about other things. One is their belief that introspection
gives us certain knowledge of our own mental states. If we are going to achieve a more
reliable understanding of mental phenomena, we need to look also at behaviour. Here
again, James offers us a rich account of kinds of behaviour.
James divides human behaviour (what he calls ‘acts’) into the voluntary, the r­ eflexive,
and a blend of the two, which he calls the semi-reflexive. When he hears the conductor
calling ‘all aboard’ as he enters the train station, his heart palpitates and his legs quicken
their movements (a reflex leading to a voluntary act); when he stumbles, his hands go
out to break the fall (a semi-reflexive act, perhaps not consciously produced but
­responsive to habit-forming efforts); and when a cinder flies into his eye, the lid closes
and tears flow (pure reflexes). James discusses the differences between these kinds of
bodily movements, in which ‘instinct and volition’ enter in different ways and in different measures (PP: 25–7). An ‘outside observer’ might be unable to discriminate
­between the voluntary and the reflexive, as both kinds of act are characterized by their
‘appropriateness’ for achieving their ends. What the outside observer will not see is ‘the
accompanying consciousness’ or lack of it, which differentiates the types of movement
from one another.
Another way in which James improves upon British empiricism has to do with the
very nature of consciousness. Ideas are not discrete and divisible entities, as Hume
would have us believe, and ‘[c]omplex mental states’ are not ‘resultants of the selfcompounding of simpler ones’, as Mill and Wundt would have us believe (PP: xlvii–
xlviii; PU: 85).3 Consciousness, rather, is a stream of thought, which cannot be broken
up into individual parts, and experience ‘is remoulding us every moment’ (PP: 228).
Nor can we always locate some introspective state—some conscious awareness of our
impending response—that might serve as an intermediary between our experience and
its effect on our behaviour. James thinks that some cases are amenable to this treatment:
in billiards, for instance, we have a feeling of preparing to expend energy before we actually take the shot and do so. But James thinks those who posit such ‘feelings of innervation’ in every case are blind to the diversity of our experience (PP: 1104). When we
finally succeed in dragging ourselves out of bed early on a cold morning, a ‘fortunate
lapse of consciousness occurs’, in which ‘we more often than not get up without any
struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up’ (PP: 1132). Russell
Goodman notes that Wittgenstein was persuaded by James’s view of the matter and,
­indeed, uses this very example to argue the point in the Brown Book (2002: 80–1).
In 1904–5, James expanded on his views of mind and set out a position known as
‘neutral monism’, although he never used this term himself. It is the idea that there is one
fundamental ‘stuff ’ that is neither material nor mental. His thoughts on the issue were
republished after his death in the 1912 collection Essays in Radical Empiricism. We shall
see that two papers in this volume attracted Russell: ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ and
3
See Roth (1993) and Klein (2009) for extended discussions of British empiricism and American
pragmatism.
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‘A World of Pure Experience’. The view articulated in those papers is that our distinction
between ‘the mental’ and ‘the physical’ picks out a difference in the operative causal laws
rather than a difference in intrinsic nature. On this view, neutral entities of a single type
figure in the causal laws of both mental and physical phenomena.
‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ was the first article in the volume, and it was first
published in 1904. James’s answer to the question is ‘no’—‘consciousness’ is ‘the name of a
nonentity’ (ERE: 3). There ‘is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which
everything is composed’ (ERE: 4). James calls it ‘pure experience’. We group neutral elements in one way or another, according to a physical or a psychological (mental) perspective.
One implication of this is that we cannot separate consciousness from its content. In
the following passage, James captures the central problem of our knowledge of the
­external world:
If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a
­perceptual experience, the ‘presentation,’ so called, of a physical object, his actual field of vision,
the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its center; and let him for the present treat
this complex object in the common-sense way as being ‘really’ what it seems to be, namely, a
collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with
which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the same time it is just
those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that
what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a
­person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the
other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but
seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.
[ERE: 7–8]
Representational theories are mistaken. Everything we experience involves both the
outer and the inner. Experience, for James, is a thick concept, involving both the object
and the mind.4
In The Principles of Psychology, we get a similar account of perception. James argues
that there is far more information in the environment than we can in fact utilize. We
are immersed in a chaotic stream of sensory data—‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’ (PP: 462)—and must select from it. That selection is determined by our physiological organs, which respond only to some of the world’s impacts on us. It is also
determined by our interests and concepts, which:
by picking out . . . the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which
we say ‘belong’ with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency;
to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in
place of what was chaos.
[WB: 95]
4
See Steven Levine (2013) for the use of this term and for an excellent account of James on
experience.
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We bring a great deal to the data. All experience is ‘seeing as’. He summarizes his view
as follows:
[T]he mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in
the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest
by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention . . . The mind, in short, works on the data
it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there
from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to
thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
[PP: 277]
Peirce, we have seen, puts forward a similar view. All perception is interpreted, and we
cannot pull apart what is cognized from the cognition. We are unable to strip away our
interpretation to perceive the object as it is in itself, apart from how it is experienced.
This was a theme running through classical pragmatism. (It also can be found in
Dewey.)
James’s radical empiricism is set against three opponents. His realist opponents
­included Russell and Moore,5 who were arguing that propositions are the objects of
thoughts and that true propositions are facts. He was also, alongside Russell and Moore,
waging battle against the metaphysics of absolute idealism, defended by Bradley in
Oxford and Royce at Harvard. On this view, there is one overarching or all-absorbing
mind or unitary consciousness that includes and determines everything else that
exists. James characterizes his idealist opponent’s view as follows:
the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive fact outside of which is nothing . . . [T]his
all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking
them, just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them . . . To be, on this scheme, is, on the
part of a finite thing, to be an object for the absolute; and on the part of the absolute it is to be
the thinker of that assemblage of objects.
[PU: 21]
This passage is from the 1909 Hibbert Lectures, delivered in Oxford and published as
A Pluralistic Universe. The lectures are in part an attack on what James took to be the
‘vicious intellectualism’ or absolute idealism rampant in Oxford. Radical empiricism is
offered as the alternative, and James expressly aligns that alternative with the
­humanism being promoted by his follower in Oxford, F. C. S. Schiller. ‘Reduced to
their most pregnant difference’, empiricism, James says, is ‘the habit of explaining
wholes by parts’, and idealism is ‘the habit of explaining parts by wholes’ (PU: 9). His
general complaint about idealists is as follows:
[P]hilosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is
filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle;
and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate ­always
5
James cites Moore’s theory of knowledge in ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ (ERE: 6).
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aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure.
[PU: 26]
This quest for tidiness leads one astray. It encourages misguided dichotomies: we have
to choose either ‘the complete disunion of all things or their complete union in the
­absolute One’; ‘the whole complete block-universe through-and-through . . . or no
­universe at all’; complete interconnectedness of experience and reality or a mere
hodge-podge of unconnected monads—‘absolute chaos’ (PU: 33, 39, 30). The ‘intellectualist’ position that our only access to the world is through our concepts is misguided
in suggesting that only one thing—the mind—is important.
Despite his being convinced that idealism is on the wrong path, James thinks that it
does present a real challenge for traditional British empiricism. That empiricism
would have us believe that the contents of perception are discrete and separable. But
James argues that if there are no connections between them, then it is hard to see how
we bring them together as coherent experiences. That is, he also found the old British
empiricist view of the mind inadequate. According to that view, the ‘Cabinet’ of the
mind is ‘yet empty’ at birth, till the senses furnish it with ideas (Locke 1979 [1689]:
I.2.15). Then everything is built up by association. This atomistic picture of experience,
James argued, simply isn’t true to experience itself. Moreover, James rejects what he
takes to be the empiricists’ quest for a representational model of sensation. For James,
the senses simply present reality; they don’t duplicate it. Sensation involves intention,
and is always enriched by the mind. Percepts and concepts ‘melt into each other’—the
particular, sensory aspects of our experience ‘are literally immersed in’ the universal,
intellective ones (and vice versa), so that ‘it is impossible (except by theoretic retrospection) to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense’ (SPP: 58–9).
James’s aim is to make sense of the world and the way we experience and represent it,
without exerting a vice-like grip that leaves no room for freedom and creativity on our
part—for the mind’s contribution to the world represented in experience. A question
arises as to just how ‘neutral’ James’s primal stuff really is.6 Is he really not committed to
either realism or idealism? All the pragmatists would respond that this demarcation of
the available positions begs the question against what they would argue is their more
sophisticated view. But the question is a real one. We shall see that Russell, for instance,
struggled with it, trying both to put forward a Jamesian monist view of experience, in
which experience is properly neutral between the physical and the mental, and also to
maintain that experience is connected to the real world. Whether the pragmatist is
successful in putting forward a view that combines the best of realism and idealism
will be an ongoing theme in this book, and is an ongoing issue within pragmatist
philosophy.
One of James’s ways of striking the neutral balance is to reject the ‘mental atoms’
brand of empiricism and appeal to the idea that experience is continuous. Sensations,
6
Indeed, Peter Godfrey-Smith put the question to me.
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he argues, contain a ‘relational element’ (PU: 125). These relations between sensations
are ‘just as immediately given’ as are the individual sensations themselves. Sensations
are not isolated atoms, but are part of the ‘sensational flux’ (PU: 126). ‘Inwardly [experiences of sensations] are one with their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously
into their next neighbors . . . Their names, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual
entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came’ (PU: 129).
In ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ he puts his point as follows:
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material
in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’
then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into
which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience;
one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other
becomes the object known.
[ERE: 4–5]
On James’s account of experience, there is no hard-and-fast distinction between the
unknown reality and the knowing consciousness, between objective matter and subjective mind. There is only ‘pure experience’, which functions both as reality and as
consciousness. He explains:
This very desk which I strike with my hand strikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a
physical object in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds.
[PU: 120]
Reality, like experience and consciousness, is continuous.
James thinks that Bergson, with his account of continuity, is on the right path in
‘remanding us to the sensation life’ (PU: 118). For James concurs with the classical
empiricists that, ‘Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence’ and that
those sensations ‘indifferently’ provide to all of us the ‘matter’ of thought (P: 117; PP: 277).
Peirce, we have seen, also remands us to the sensation life and argues that brute experience gives us indexical access to the world. For James, too, experiences indicate ‘the
real units of our immediately-felt life’ (PU: 129). He says:
What won’t stay buried must have some genuine life. Im anfang war die tat; fact is a first; to
which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second, never its full equivalent.
[PU: 118]
The reader will want to keep in mind the expression James borrows here from Goethe,
‘in the beginning was the act’, as we will see the phrase resurface in Wittgenstein. James
uses the expression to tell us that sensation, experience, or the immediately felt life
provides us with a connection to that which exists apart from us. Then what we do is
‘harness up reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it the better’ (PU: 111).
We cannot, however, harness up reality in a way that accurately or perfectly represents
it. Thought ‘cannot fathom’ the ‘thickness of reality’ (PU: 112). We shall see that James,
when he is talking about truth, sometimes forgets that what we have caught in our
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c­ onceptual apparatus is reality, which, like an untamed team of horses, is not always
willing to go in the direction we would like. James, like Peirce, wants to square two
claims that have often been thought to be incompatible: the idea that all sensation is
mediated by the intellect, and the idea that sensation is linked to the facts. But we shall
see that in his account of truth, he sometimes neglects the second claim.
2.3 Truth and Usefulness
Although James occasionally speaks to the theory of meaning that underpins his
­pragmatic maxim,7 nowhere does he work out the details in the sustained way Peirce
did. But like Peirce, James thinks that the maxim will make short work of many longstanding and seemingly intractable philosophical problems; it will settle ‘metaphysical
disputes that otherwise might be interminable’ (P: 28). And again with Peirce, James
thinks that the maxim will make short work of absolutist theories of truth. To those
absolutists who throw objections at James, he lands the following blow: ‘Well, my dear
antagonist, I hardly hoped to convert an eminent intellectualist and logician like you;
so enjoy, as long as you live, your own ineffable conception’ (MT: 159). It is the
­ineffability that is objectionable—the inability to say what it is that our beliefs might
correspond to.
Here is how James puts the maxim in Pragmatism: ‘If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle’ (P: 28). Perhaps the most famous of his succinct and memorable renderings
of the maxim is as follows:
There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference
in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.
[P: 30]
Lingering in the background is Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’: James’s idea
that there can be no difference in abstract thought that fails to make a concrete difference mirrors Peirce’s idea that something ‘tangible and practical’ must be at ‘the root
of every real distinction of thought’ (W 3: 265, 1878). But James’s next sentence is
regrettable and compounds the infelicity of Peirce’s early slogan in ‘How to Make Our
Ideas Clear’. ‘The whole function of philosophy’, James says, ‘ought to be to find out
what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this
world-formula or that world-formula be the true one’ (P: 30). Not only does James put
the maxim in the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood, but his specification
of the notion of difference-making to ‘you and me’ was to prove unfortunate. He thought
the pragmatic maxim ought to ‘be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it’
(P: 259). The ‘ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates
7
See MT: 284.
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or inspires . . . I should prefer . . . to express Peirce’s principle by saying that the effective
meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience’ (P: 259). He distinguishes himself
from Peirce by taking the consequence a belief might make to a particular individual as
pivotal for determining the belief ’s truth or falsity.
The difference a concept might make to ‘you and me, at definite instants of our life’ is
highly variable. Thus, when James applies his more broadly expressed pragmatic
maxim to the concept of truth, it is not surprising that he arrives at a more expansive,
more variable account of truth. Although at times James comes close to articulating a
view very similar to Peirce’s, he more often than not goes his own way. Truth, James
and Peirce both think, is ‘whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief ’ (P: 42,
emphasis removed). But with regard to the question of whether or not there is a single
body of truths at which all of us are aiming, everything turns on how each of these
founders of pragmatism explicated ‘good in the way of belief ’.
James sets out his view on truth and objectivity thus:
Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part
of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor; is . . . true instrumentally.
[P: 34]
‘Satisfactorily’, for James, ‘means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will
emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic’ (P: 35). The individuality or subjectivity built into James’s version
of the pragmatic maxim manifests itself in his account of truth.
We shall see that it is this kind of statement of pragmatism to which Russell, Moore,
and Ramsey objected. George Bernard Shaw also weighed in: ‘the weakness of
Pragmatism is that most theories will work if you put your back into making them
work’ (1921: lxxxvii). There is an important point underneath the humour here. The
pragmatist needs to distinguish a belief ’s working from our thinking that it works or
putting our back so hard into it that we make it work. Peirce himself was so disconcerted by how some versions of pragmatism failed to make this distinction that in
1905, he makes the following radical move. The term ‘pragmatism’:
gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary
clutches . . . So then, the writer, finding his bantling ‘pragmatism’ so promoted, feels that it is
time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise
purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word ‘pragmaticism,’ which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.
[CP 5. 414, 1905]
‘Pragmaticism’, Peirce says, should be used in a narrow sense—for his own position—
and ‘ “pragmatism” should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation
with Schiller, James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us’ (CP 8. 205, c.1905). ‘Pragmaticism’
was so ugly, though, that it never caught on.
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James sometimes tries to correct what he takes to be a misunderstanding of his
­ osition by arguing that, contrary to his critics, he holds that truth is ‘the expedient’,
p
but the expedient ‘in the long run and on the whole, of course’.8 James really is concerned to characterize truth as something that is of human value, without suggesting
that true belief might be what this or that human finds valuable at this or that time.
Even in ‘The Will to Believe’, he writes that ‘[t]hroughout the breadth of physical nature
facts are what they are quite independently of us’ (WB: 26). Pragmatist theories of
meaning and truth are concerned with how belief plays out in action. When James is at
his most careful, he, like Peirce, wants to argue that true beliefs are beliefs that survive
because they ­deserve to survive, not because they happen to survive for this or that
person.9 James quite rightly thought that his ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life’ was the best chapter in the volume that contained his infamous ‘The Will to
Believe’.10 In the former essay, we find a lucid exposition of a more objective pragmatist
theory of truth. Here James asserts, ‘Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker
to which he must conform’ (WB: 146). He offers us a view of truth in which truth is not
what works here and now for an individual thinker, but rather what works in the long
run for the community of thinkers.
So at times, James distinguishes between a stable truth and the temporary ‘truths’
that we live with here and now. But, unlike Peirce, he was inclined to blur this distinction. In Pragmatism, he says: ‘The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in
it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events’ (P: 97). We must
pay attention to the significance that each of us places upon our own particular actions
(TTP: 132). This emphasis on the individual, whose own limits and interests shape his
pursuit of knowledge, paves the way for Moore and Russell’s reading of James as a kind
of radical subjectivist. The difference between ‘truth’ conceived as a product of the
individual and truth conceived as a product of the community over time is the central
difference that fuelled the dispute between James and Peirce, hence Tom Burke’s idea
that a conflict at the heart of pragmatism lies in two readings of the tradition, which he
terms ‘operationalist’ and ‘inferentialist’. On Burke’s account, the operationalist Peirce
and his successors tie meaning to ‘how things in the world behave’, while the inferentialist James and his successors tie meaning to ‘how we behave in the world’ (2013: 45).
While the terms ‘operationalist’ and ‘inferentialist’ are not ones I use, and while Peirce
also took a belief ’s consequences for our subsequent thought and action to be partial
determinants of its semantic content, there is nevertheless something important in
Burke’s distinction.
James toggled between a radically subjective pragmatism and a pragmatism of the
more objective stripe. Unfortunately, philosophers in England focused on the former
side of James’s account of truth. We shall see that while Russell mined insights from
P: 106; reiterated in MT: 4.
See Kappy Suckiel (1982) and Donaldson (forthcoming) for excellent accounts of James at his best on
the topic of truth.
10
See Perry (1976 [1935] 2: 263, including n. 1).
8
9
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The Principles of Psychology, he could not get over James’s subjective expressions of the
pragmatist account of truth His displeasure was only compounded by James’s essay
‘The Will to Believe’.
2.4 Willing to Believe
Interest in ‘The Will to Believe’ has been remarkably sustained, beginning immediately
upon its publication in 1896 and continuing to the present. More than any other
work, it was taken to be the founding statement of pragmatism by Russell, Moore,
and Ramsey. The position expressed by its central thesis was known, on both
sides of the Atlantic, as James’s ‘voluntarism’. In the essay, James seems to argue
that not only can one will oneself to believe something, but in certain cases be
­justified in taking those willed beliefs to be true, lack of evidence for them
notwithstanding.
Russell took James’s point to be opposed to Clifford’s evidentialist claim that one
should believe only in proportion to the evidence. Clifford had argued in ‘The Ethics
of Belief ’ that if evidence underdetermines a question, one must suspend judgement: ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon
­insufficient ­evidence’ (1886 [1877]: 346). James takes on this view of the ‘logicians’
and ‘scientists’ (WB: 19), especially as it regards religious belief. He responds that in
religious matters, even agnosticism is a decision. It is a decision, moreover, that is
based on passion just as much as the theist’s and the atheist’s decisions are. It is a misrepresentation of the agnostic to see him as suspending his belief as he waits for the
objective evidence to come in. The agnostic, James argues, is going on his passion—he
is passionate about not being wrong. He is unwilling to risk error and hence he suspends his belief.
James’s point is that one must either act as if God exists or act as if he does not exist—
there is no acting as if you do not know which is true. Then he argues that once one
takes the benefits of believing into account, belief in God is rational, despite the
­absence of evidence. He says:
The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must,
decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its
­nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide,
but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is
attended with the same risk of losing the truth.
[WB: 20, emphasis removed]
If all decisions are based on passion, then it is not inappropriate to take passions or
desires seriously in deciding what to believe. If a particular desirable outcome can be
achieved by believing, then in order to get it, we are entitled to believe, especially (or
perhaps only) when the evidence has not come in yet. If the belief in God would have
a positive impact on someone’s life, then it is a reasonable belief for that person. In
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‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, James compares this person’s situation to that of an
alpine climber who needs to jump across a chasm. He should believe he can make it,
for the belief increases the likelihood of what is desired—a successful jump. James
takes it as unreasonable to be committed to self-fulfilling defeatist prophecies—to
believe that one will fail in cases in which this ensures or encourages the failure.
Optimistic believing can lead to the truth of what is desired, while pessimistic
believing can yield results that are not desirable. When the available evidence underdetermines the ­answer as to whether p, and if there are other reasons for believing
that p (such as that believing that p would make me happier), then it is rational to
believe that p is true.
But James adopts a more general thesis about truth, one that is worrying in a way
that the above point is not. Here is one of James’s staunchest defenders, Howard Knox,
writing in 1909:
All that Prof. James had actually contended was that certain risks had to be taken by faith by
both parties; but it was tempting to treat this doctrine merely as intended to revive the apologetics of Pascal’s wager, and to glorify faith by the sacrifice of Reason. His essential purpose
was, however, to challenge the very conception of ‘pure Reason’ which created the antithesis,
and to mitigate their divergence by showing that Reason, no less than Faith, must be justified
by works.
[2001 [1909]: 5]
All beliefs, for James, are made true by being good to believe. Science and faith are not
separate spheres of activity, one endorsing beliefs on the basis of evidence and the
other endorsing beliefs on the basis of success. Religious belief is in the same camp as
scientific belief: true if it ‘pays’, false if it does not. For reason and truth themselves are
inextricably linked to what pays. All this is well and good if ‘success’ is taken in a
­robust way. This is the global or holist pragmatist position shared with Peirce. Where
James makes a misstep is in emphasizing the passional. On his criteria, making one
more comfortable or one’s life more harmonious can determine whether a belief is
true or ­reasonable to believe.
Peirce loathed this move. James dedicated his volume The Will to Believe ‘To My Old
Friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, To whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to
whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express
or repay’ (WB: 3). Peirce was touched by this. Nonetheless, he didn’t have much good
to say about James’s essay. He tells James in a 1909 letter: ‘I thought your Will to Believe
was a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much’ (CWJ 12:
171, 1909). Of the pragmatism of James and Schiller, Peirce says:
It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected
with seeds of death in such notions as that of . . . the mutability of truth, and in such confusions
of thought as that of . . . willing to control thought, to doubt, and to weigh reasons . . . with . . .
willing to believe.
[CP 6. 485, 1908]
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A belief about what exists in the world might make one happy or give one peace of
mind, but that does not, Peirce thought, constitute a reason for that belief.
The radical nature of James’s proposal is clear in the preface to the collection The
Will to Believe:
If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active faiths of individuals
in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the experimental tests by which they are
­verified, and the only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out. The truest
scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, ‘works’ best; and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.
[WB: 8]
For James, religious hypotheses, like all hypotheses, need to be verified. He is a ‘complete empiricist’ (WB: 22). He is in agreement with T. H. Huxley’s stance in ‘A Modern
“Symposium” ’ (1877) and Clifford’s in ‘The Ethics of Belief ’ (1886 [1877]) that we can’t
simply will ourselves to believe something—that Lincoln’s existence is a myth, for
­instance (WB: 15, 18). We need to verify our beliefs, and we can form a belief only
when we take ourselves to have reasons for thinking it would indeed be verified. But
the verification of a religious belief can take the form of seeing how the hypothesis
plays out in people’s lives.
We shall see that it is this radical proposal that attracted the disdain of Russell,
Moore, and Ramsey. It also fared poorly on the American side of the Atlantic. Here is
J. B. Pratt in 1909, taking on James’s view that religious hypotheses can be believed to
be true if so believing would be good for one:
Pragmatism . . . seeks to prove the truth of religion by its good and satisfactory consequences.
Here, however, a distinction must be made; namely between the ‘good’, harmonious, and logically confirmatory consequences of religious concepts as such, and the good and pleasant consequences which come from believing these concepts. It is one thing to say a belief is true
because the logical consequences that flow from it fit in harmoniously with our otherwise
grounded knowledge; and quite another to call it true because it is pleasant to believe.
[2001 [1909]: 186–7]
James’s fellow founders of pragmatism were aligned against James on this point from
the beginning. In 1875, Chauncey Wright lay in wait for an opportunity to have what
he thought was a much-needed ‘duel’ with his friend James over the matter of the will
to believe. James had published some of his ideas in The Nation, and Wright was not
impressed. Here is Wright’s account of that duel:
I have carried out my purpose of giving Dr. James the two lectures I had in store for him.
I found him just returned home on Wednesday evening. His father remarked in the course of
talk, that he had not found any typographical errors in William’s article . . . I said that I had read
it with interest and had not noticed any typographical errors. The emphasis attracted the youth’s
attention, and made him demand an explanation, which was my premeditated discourse . . . He
fought vigorously, not to say manfully . . . On Friday evening I saw him again and introduced
the subject of the ‘duty of belief ’ as advocated by him in The Nation. He retracted the word
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‘duty.’ All that he meant to say was that it is foolish not to believe, or try to believe, if one is happier for believing. But even so he seemed to me to be more epicurean (though he hates the sect)
than even the utilitarians would allow to be wise . . . He quite agrees that evidence is all that
enforces the obligation of belief, and that it does this only in virtue of its own force as evidence.
Belief is only a matter of choice, and therefore of moral duty, so far as attending to evidence is
a volitional act; and he agreed that attention to all accessible evidence was the only duty
­involved in belief.
[Quoted in Madden 1963: 45]
James altered his position in light of this onslaught. When ‘The Will to Believe’ was
­finally published twenty years later, he argued that one has only a right, not a duty, to
believe without support by evidence, if the belief would make one happier. But this early
tussle supports an interpretation of ‘The Will to Believe’ in which the point is to expand
the scope of evidence so as to include the consequences that a belief has on one’s life.
The debate between James and his fellow founders of pragmatism was a debate about
whether desirable outcomes for particular individuals are linked to evidence and true
belief. James at times seemed to suggest that they are. Peirce was not in the slightest
­inclined to conflate these phenomena. Santayana weighed in and noted that the alpine
climber’s belief, if it is to be reasonable and aimed at truth, has to be connected to all
sorts of facts:
Why does belief that you can jump a ditch help you to jump it? Because it is a symptom of the
fact that you could jump it, that your legs were fit and that the ditch was two yards wide and not
twenty. A rapid and just appreciation of these facts has given you your confidence, or at least
has made it reasonable . . . otherwise you would have been a fool and got a ducking for it.
[2009 [1920]: 61]
Emotions can appropriately play a role in belief formation, Santayana suggests, only
when they are themselves responsive to the evidence at hand.
Peirce did not want to try to eradicate sentiment from belief formation and evaluation. He says:
Yet, when we consider that logic depends on a mere struggle to escape doubt, which, as it terminates in action, must begin in emotion, and that, furthermore, the only cause of our planting
ourselves on reason is that other methods of escaping doubt fail on account of the social
­impulse, why should we wonder to find social sentiment presupposed in reasoning?
[W 3: 285, 1878]
But the crux of the issue between them is as follows. Peirce thinks that while reasoning
cannot escape human sentiment, its aim is not to seek satisfaction in a conclusion that
feels good, but rather in conclusions that work in fitting with brute experience, our
other well-founded beliefs, and so on. We are not aiming at satisfaction of just any sort;
rather, our aim is to get things right. James is more willing to take any sort of satisfaction to be relevant to a belief ’s epistemic credentials. In Pratt’s terminology, the
Peircean pragmatist seeks to prove the truth of a hypothesis by its good and satisfactory consequences—its subsequent empirical confirmations, its fit with our other
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beliefs, and so on. The consequences relevant to belief cannot stem from such phenomena as the satisfaction we derive from believing.
Peirce’s objection to James’s line of thought is that passional evidence—that one
cannot, for instance, emotionally or psychologically do without the belief—is p
­ ertinent
to the question of whether or not religion is good for human beings, but not pertinent
to the question of whether God exists. Hypotheses about God’s existence are hypotheses about the world. Hence they need broadly empirical verification of the usual sort.
Passion can come into hypothesis formation, but reason, logic, and evidence must also
play their important part, which part—contra James—is simply independent of such
phenomena as the belief ’s role in helping us cope with life. It is this kind of objection
that Russell and Moore would amplify, as we shall see.
James at times encourages two more-palatable readings of ‘The Will to Believe’.
Sometimes he makes a more constrained point: there is a certain class of beliefs—­
religious beliefs—in regard to which ‘faith’, rather than scientific evidence, is appropriate. He seems to identify those beliefs whose decision is ‘forced’ as candidates for this
special treatment. Whether to believe in God is one of those forced beliefs—it is so
important that we cannot wait around for the evidence to come. We can’t ‘put a stopper
on our heart, instincts and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or
less as if religion were not true’ (WB: 32). Given how important religion is for our lives,
we are justified in believing in God’s existence before we have evidence for it. On this
reading of James, believing ahead of the evidence or independently of the evidence is
exactly what is required for religious belief, but not for all beliefs. It is this more constrained point to which Wittgenstein was attracted, although we shall see that his view
is that, given the importance of religion in our lives, it is not something we should seek
evidence for at all.
At other times, as Alex Klein (2015) argues, James makes the Peircean point that
we need to assume (not believe) certain things. Our passional nature and our
instincts, as Klein puts it, can whisper a hypothesis to us. This is, I think, the reading
that makes James the very best he can be, and it may well have been James’s intended
view. But Peirce and James still would have disagreed about just what we need to
assume, and as I tried to make clear in The American Pragmatists and have
re-emphasized here, we need to see how James was read by the philosophical community in order to understand the trajectory of pragmatism. The evidence is that the
likes of Wright, Peirce, Santayana, and Knox read him in the way Russell and Moore
were to read him: namely, as asserting the more radical and implausible view that a
belief ’s truth or warrant is ­affected by the emotional satisfaction the belief provides
to an individual.
2.5 Religious Experience
We have seen that one way of thinking of James’s ‘The Will to Believe’ has him putting
forward a kind of evidentialism. One should believe in accordance with one’s evidence,
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but we must not go merely on the ‘literal evidence’ or the ‘scientific evidence’ (WB: 76, 80).
The scientist thinks ‘there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon
which [he] shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth’. But in thinking this,
the scientist disregards all sorts of other kinds of evidence, and does so to his peril
(WB: 7). One way of putting James’s radical empiricism is that ‘experiments of living’
(to borrow Mill’s phrasing in On Liberty)11 count as evidence as well. Again, this is well
and good, as long as experiments in living aren’t taken to be evidence for hypotheses,
say, in physics or geology, but evidence for whether it is, say, good for the lives of human
beings to adopt a particular moral principle or to organize our political lives in certain
ways.
James continues to explore these ideas in his 1901–2 Gifford Lectures, delivered in
Edinburgh and published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. This book was widely
read in England, and it had a deep and positive impact on Wittgenstein. Here too we
see a familiar Jamesian toggling between keeping these experiments in living in their
(important) place, and exporting them into territory in which they do not belong.
Wittgenstein kept his eyes solely on the former, and thought Varieties an important
and helpful book. Russell, Moore, and Ramsey could not ignore the latter and hence
worried about what they saw as the Jamesian position.
James approaches the phenomenon of religious experience from the perspective of
both the psychologist and the philosopher. He sets out to rehabilitate the category of
mystical experience as a legitimate way of perceiving. Just as a dog who reacts to the
blowing of a whistle perceives a real noise, despite the fact that James cannot hear it,
mystical and conversion experiences are legitimate and ‘important’ perceptions for
those who have them, despite the fact that James himself happens to be shut out from
them. He is talking here about a wide range of experiences: déjà-vu, trances, dreams,
and the meditative and heightened states of consciousness cultivated by adherents to
various religions. He also includes experiences had under the influence of alcohol and
nitrous oxide, which ‘stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree’
(VRE: 307), and the paranormal. He was active in both the British and the American
societies for psychical research.
James is ever committed to considering all forms of experience—ever committed to
‘sportsmanlike fair play in science’ (WB: 9). He was dead set against any closed-minded
approach. When he is making this methodological point, as it is in the following passage from ‘The Will to Believe’, it is eminently sensible:
Why do so few ‘scientists’ even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think,
as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists
ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed.
[WB: 19]
11
See Mill (1989 [1859]: 56). On Mill’s influence on James, both generally and with regard to ‘experiments of living’, see Proudfoot (2000: 54–5).
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James’s insistence to instead follow the evidence wherever it leads is only empiricist
good sense.
Another of his central aims is to show that if anything provides the motivation for
and justification of religious belief, it is experience, not abstract rationalist philosophy.
The God of classical metaphysics, which the rationalist offers the theist, is ‘a metaphysical monster’, ‘an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind’ (VRE: 353). We
would do much better to look to the ‘religious propensities of man’ (VRE: 12). Religious
belief flows from a special category of experiences.
Religion, like science, seems to proceed from experience to theory. But James is at
times tempted to distinguish science from religion on the grounds that religious theory,
unlike scientific theory, almost inevitably results in monstrous doctrines. The ­scientist
builds up a theory from experience, and keeps that theory subject to overthrow by
­further experience. The theory that stands up to all the experience is true. But once
­religious experience gives us a theory or a creed, that theory or creed is a lesser thing than
those original experiences: ‘when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry’ (VRE: 270).12 Even more dry are all those ­second-hand or
secondary religious believers who, in contrast to the ‘geniuses’ who have first-hand
experience, are merely brought up in, or inculcated into, a religion (VRE: 397, 401).
At other times, he seems to think that religion is like science, giving us access to a
reality that most other sciences do not address. Mystical experience is the province of
the subconscious and is as telling for the perceiver as is the experience of ordinary,
mundane consciousness. He argues that our vision is limited by ordinary consciousness. We need to try to get beyond ‘the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole
and ultimate dictators of what we may believe’ (VRE: 338). For James, that is, mystical
experience does not merely tell us something about our own subconscious. It tells us
something about the world. At one juncture, for instance, we find him arguing that all
religions believe in the same core tenets. As evidence of this ‘uniform deliverance’, he
cites the ubiquity of a feeling of uneasiness, ‘a sense that there is something wrong about
us as we naturally stand’, as well as the ostensibly universal belief that ‘we are saved from
the wrongness by making proper connexion with the higher powers’ (VRE: 400). This
implies that the physical or ‘visible’ world belongs to a largely unseen ‘more spiritual
universe’, from which, during prayer, ‘spiritual energy flows in and produces effects’ in
the physical world (VRE: 382). On James’s view, mystical states ‘break down the
­authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness’
(VRE: 335). Other kinds of consciousness provide access to other ‘kinds of truth’, some
of which ‘relate to this world—visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden
understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events’ (VRE: 325). Indeed, James
thinks that ‘the most important revelations’ are those that have ‘metaphysical significance’ (VRE: 308)—for instance, experiences of ‘God’s touches’ (VRE: 327). They relate
12
Bacon (forthcoming) is excellent on this point.
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to a world that goes beyond the earthly one. Mystical consciousness, that is, delivers us
insights about the world. James thinks that we should develop a ‘science of religion’ so
that we can test religious beliefs with experimental methods, aiming at a ‘consensus of
opinion’ (VRE: 359). That is not to say that James thought that we should aim for a
complete and general theory of the subconscious, something like what Freud was after.
James thought that insight into the subconscious comes through these momentary
windows, and we are to take what insight we can before they close.
James tangles matters further by asserting that our metaphysical conclusions are
determined in part by our needs: ‘The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can
use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves
and on one another’ (VRE: 266). Religious experience can change us for the better:
[It] is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of
power . . . This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but
in religion.
[VRE: 46–7]
For instance, religious feeling can aid in overcoming depression and addiction. He
thinks ‘the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it’ (VRE: 361).
We are taken back to the problem that afflicted ‘The Will to Believe’. Those needs and
demands differ from person to person and change over time, and hence the truth-­
values of religious beliefs must also differ from person to person and change over time.
James notes that we find both the ‘mean’ and the ‘noble’ among the religious and the
non-religious (VRE: 383), and that the needs of the ‘healthy-minded’, who focus on
good and doing good, are very unlike the needs of the ‘sick-souls’ who focus on evil
and damnation. To use a term that James will employ later, matters seem rather plastic
when it comes to assessing what religious claims to accept.
Again, this is an acceptable point if what we are inquiring into is what would help
this or that person. But it is not acceptable if we are inquiring into whether there in fact
is a God, or a hell, or everlasting damnation. Any consensus in that science of religion,
if it is driven by need, cannot by itself tell us about what exists. The problem of appropriate domain looms large. If our aim is to determine whether it would be good to
believe in hell, we want to say that it is perfectly appropriate to bring to bear on the
question the needs of human beings. If our aim is to determine whether hell does in
fact exist, then the needs of human beings are not relevant. We shall see that Ramsey
makes this objection to James in a forceful way.
James asks the question himself. He asks whether mystical experiences ‘furnish any
warrant for the truth’ of the conclusions to which they point or whether they merely
seem to do so (VRE: 335, emphasis removed). His answer is that mystical states do
­indeed ‘open out the possibility of other orders of truth’. But he tempers this conclusion
in two ways. First, ‘those who stand outside them’ are not obligated to treat mystical
experiences as authoritative; they license faith ‘so far as anything in us vitally responds
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to them’, but they cannot require belief from those who do not have the mystical states
themselves (VRE: 335). Mystical experience, that is, is not a ‘superior authority’—it is
just one authority among equals (VRE: 338). It offers ‘possibility and permission’ to
believe, not a duty to believe (VRE: 339). This is, of course, the line he eventually took
in ‘The Will to Believe’.
There is a new thought appearing in The Varieties of Religious Experience that also
has a tempering effect. James says: ‘What immediately feels most “good” is not always
most “true,” when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience’ (VRE: 22).
Indeed, he thinks the sick soul is more in tune to the rest of experience than the
healthy soul. Given other things we know, depression might be the right response to
our situation:
[M]ankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded
by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the
inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more
sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness
with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.
[VRE: 120]
He thinks we can conclude that the person who focuses on sadness might be getting
‘the best keys to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the
deepest levels of truth’ (VRE: 136). James suffered from depression and often wondered whether life was worth living.13 He sought the religious experience that might
sooth his troubled soul, but it did not come easily to him.
But when all the evidence is weighed, when our situation is seen fully, James thinks
that his conclusion that ‘God is real since he produces real effects’ (VRE: 407) is justified. It is clear that he is right when he says the following: ‘If one should make a division
of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to
go . . . into the supernaturalist branch’ (VRE: 409).
James strikes a similar set of discordant notes in the 1908 Hibbert Lectures, also
given in Oxford, and published as A Pluralistic Universe. There he holds that ‘the only
things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms
drawn from experience’, and he reports that part of his aim in the lectures is ‘to unite
empiricism with spiritualism’ (Perry 1976 [1935] 2: 443). His position is that ‘We have
so many different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-­embracing
clasp’, and so we find ourselves in the business of reconciling all of the types of experience that have us in their clasp, including religious experience (PU: 19). He says:
[T]here are religious experiences of a specific nature . . . I think that they point with reasonable
probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from
13
Indeed, he wrote a paper titled ‘Is Life Worth Living?’
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which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific psychology, so called,
takes cognizance of) is shut off.
[PU: 135]
In these lectures, he revisits ‘The Will to Believe’, invoking a ‘faith-ladder’, the process
by which a person’s epistemic stance toward a ‘conception of the world’ moves (legitimately, in James’s view) from ‘it might be true’ to ‘it would be well if it were true’ to ‘it
shall be as if true, for you’ (PU: 148).
In 1904, the American psychologist James Leuba, writing in The International
Journal of Ethics, argued against James’s view:
If . . . we are to abide by these conclusions, the judgment of absurdity and irrationality commonly passed by the ordinary consciousness upon mystical, insane, and drunken dreams
would have to be declared altogether irrelevant, for the reason that they would belong to other
aspects of consciousness. Each aspect of consciousness would be its own judge of reality.
[1904: 331]
Leuba’s argument is that as soon as statements are made, not merely about one’s own
experience, but about the world—‘that the ecstatic feelings are due to God’s descent
into the believer; that Christ was actually, bodily, present; that the feelings of repose, of
vastness, of illumination and the increased ethical power, imply the existence of a
world of spiritual existences’—then they must be open to criticism. We can, for
­instance, use the ‘canons of logic’ such as the ‘principle of logical contradiction’, and we
can test mystical or drug-induced experiences against our ordinary experiences
(Leuba 1904: 331–4). We have seen that while James sometimes sees this, he is not consistent on the matter.
Peirce took James on in a similar way. We have seen that Peirce also wants to have a
broad account of experience, but he thinks that there has to be some basis for separating the experiences that really do verify claims from those that do not. He argues that
if statements about God are factual claims, asserting the existence of a particular entity,
then they are subject to the kinds of requirements that all statements about the existence of entities are subject to: verification by the senses and the usual standards of
­belief and theory choice. James, on the other hand, when he asks himself ‘where the
differences in fact which are due to God’s existence come in’, offers ‘prayerful communion’, which ‘exerts an influence’ by raising our personal energy and producing
­‘regenerative effects’ (VRE: 411–12). These are, of course, internal effects on a person,
not publicly observable effects on the world.
James’s overarching methodological principles seem naturalistic enough, in that he
wants to take only experience into account and to have it determine what is true and
what is rational to believe. Experience, he thinks, could result in our believing in
­supernatural phenomena—for instance, the subconscious or a vapour-like God. If this
verificationism is taken merely as claiming that some conceivable experiential states
could warrant some such conclusions, then every empiricist agrees. Consider the
near-death experience of arch-positivist A. J. Ayer. He concluded from that experience
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that the proposition that consciousness continues after bodily death is potentially
­verifiable and so admits of disinterested inquiry.14 The logical positivists thought, that
is, that the hypothesis of an afterlife was verifiable—one just had to wait and see.15 But if
James’s empiricism holds that experiences such as those had under the influence of
drugs or in religious trances count as verification of claims about the supernatural,
without any need for independent evidence of the reliability of such experiences, no
other empiricist is going to agree.
We shall see that Ramsey thought that James was misguided about evidence for
the existence of God. That hypothesis needs to be sensitive to whether or not there is
a God, not to how believing it plays out in one’s life. Wittgenstein, while he agreed
with James that the rationalist God is a worthless invention of the scholarly mind
and took great comfort in what James wrote about the importance of first-hand religious experience for one’s soul, also thought, for reasons that differed from Ramsey’s,
that evidence and inquiry are not relevant to religion. Ramsey, that is, homed in on
James’s thoughts about evidence, and concluded that James got things badly wrong.
Wittgenstein ignored what James said about evidence, and thought that James got
things profoundly right about religious experience being what really matters for
the experiencer.
2.6 James on Common Sense
We have seen that Peirce put forward a view he called ‘critical commonsensism’: we
cannot pretend to doubt what we do not in fact doubt, but even those beliefs we regard
as settled are subject to possible overthrow by further evidence and argument. James,
like all pragmatists, adopts a version of this common-sense philosophy. He argues that
once we have abandoned absolute monism in favour of empiricism, ‘This leaves us
with the common-sense world’ (P: 79). He devotes a chapter of Pragmatism,
‘Pragmatism and Common Sense’, to the task of explaining what he means by this.
James employs a kind of metaphor of which all pragmatists are fond. Peirce suggests
that knowledge is like a bog, where we find a patch of ground that holds for the
­moment, but which we may have to abandon once experience forces us to do so. James’s
own (rather mixed) metaphors are as follows:16
The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge
always remains what it was . . . [L]ike grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread
as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much as of our old knowledge, as many of our old
prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks
See Rosenthal (2004: esp. 514). 15 See e.g. Carnap (1963: 881).
There are more. We have seen James appeal in The Principles of Psychology to the sculptor and his
block of stone. In Pragmatism, he adds: ‘You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground plan of the
first architect persists—you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric
temple’ (1975 [1907]: 83) and ‘You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can’t get the taste of the medicine
or whisky that first filled it wholly out’ (1975 [1907]: 83).
14
16
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in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and
­co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning
terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is
embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.
[P: 82–3]
This is a passage full of harbinging nods to the future—to the metaphor of Neurath and
Quine, in which knowledge is not like a ship in dry dock constructed all at once from
pristine materials, but rather like a ship out at sea whose planks we must replace piecemeal, using the materials at hand; and to Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium.
Inquiry and knowledge, for the pragmatist, proceed in a piecemeal fashion, always
starting from where we find ourselves.
James goes on to argue that the great equilibrium put in place by our ancestors is a
set of categories of thought that works well for us. Other kinds of creatures (bees for
instance) would operate with a different set of categories. He, like many both in his day
and today, points to the fact that alternative geometries turn out to be equally good at
handling the facts. We could have gone either way. Thus, as we have seen, with Peirce
(and Kant) James argues that experience ‘doesn’t come ticketed and labeled’ (P: 84). We
take the ‘tangle’ of our experience and, as infants, scientists, and human beings generally, we straighten it out with our ‘conceptual instruments’ (P: 87). James agrees with
Peirce, and against (at least against Peirce’s reading of) Kant that those instruments
and categories are not vested with metaphysical necessity.
But, as so often, James takes a step that Peirce resists when he (James) suggests that
our categories ‘one and all cease to represent anything in the way of being; they are but
sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of
sensation’s irremediable flow’ (P: 91). Peirce would agree with James that the human
organism ‘may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub who has turned on the
water and who cannot turn it off ’ (P: 91), and that we need to reduce this flow by
paying attention to some and not all of it. But he would object to the idea that we stem
that flow by way of ‘tricks’. Indeed, James’s way of characterizing the fixation of beliefs
makes space for his problematic idea that the beliefs left to us by our ancestors are ‘old
truths’ and the opposing beliefs we now accept are ‘new truths’. It makes room for
truth to be plastic.
But that one difference aside, Peirce and James set the stage for all pragmatists to vest
our background corpus of belief with the importance it demands. We shall see that
while the plasticity idea incensed Russell and Moore, Moore, at least, should have been
less repelled by the idea that truths come and go. For Moore himself presented a position on common-sense beliefs that is not so far removed from James’s. His own
defence of common sense against the spurious doubts of the sceptic has us knowing in
the past that many things were ‘true’, even though we presently know them to be false.
Moore, that is, is not light years away from James on the matter of transient truths.
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Bridges across the Atlantic
3.1 F. C. S. Schiller
After an Oxford undergraduate degree, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864–1937)
went to Cornell for a doctorate1 and discovered James. He saw affinities between
James’s position and the ‘personalism’ or ‘humanism’ that he was already starting to
articulate. Back in Oxford, he became a philosophy don at Corpus Christi and achieved
a considerable profile in England. He was widely published, held the presidency of the
Aristotelian Society and a membership in the British Academy, and was the face of an
extreme form of pragmatism, engaging in contentious debates with Bradley and
Russell. He was such a visible advocate for pragmatism that Russell mistakenly took
him to be one of the three founders of the tradition, along with James and Dewey.2
Schiller and James saw themselves as a philosophical team, united against Russell
and Moore. Their frequent exchange of letters, collected in The Correspondence of
William James, makes that clear. But Schiller was more extreme than James. He
could also be rude, and was a biting satirist. He was happy to use his considerable
comic talents as a weapon in the service of what he saw as his and James’s revolution
against both the absolute idealists and the realists. Both kinds of ‘intellectualist
­philosopher’ yearn for a truth ‘that shall be absolutely true, self-testing, and self-­
dependent, icily exercising an unrestricted sway over a submissive world, whose
adoration it requites with no services, and scouting as blasphemy all allusion to
use or application’ (Schiller 1969 [1907]: 9). James and Schiller argued, against those
idealist and realist views, that meaning and truth cannot be pulled apart from use
or application. We have seen that Peirce concurred.
While Schiller was a frequent contributor to the journal Mind, his 1901 spoof Mind!
A Unique Review of Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Edited by A. Troglodyte, with the
Co-operation of the Absolute and Others was, obviously, a parody of the journal’s
devotion to what he took to be the establishment position. His debates with Bradley
in the next few years were characterized by the same tone: Bradley, he says, ‘made his
début . . . by triumphantly dragging the corpse of Mill round the beleaguered stronghold
of British philosophy’ and has since ‘exercised a reign of terror based on an unsparing
The doctorate was unsuccessful, perhaps even failed.
See Russell (CP 9: 454, 1914). Russell made the remark just after he met Dewey at Harvard. See also
Russell (2005 [1921]: 11).
1
2
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use of epigrams and sarcastic footnotes’ (1969 [1907]: 115). In the preface to
Humanism: Philosophical Essays, he is similarly undiplomatic:
It is clear to all who have kept in touch with the pulse of thought that we are on the brink of
great events . . . The ancient shibboleths encounter open yawns and unconcealed derision. The
rattling of dry bones no longer fascinates respect nor plunges a self-suggested horde of fakirs
in hypnotic stupor. The agnostic maunderings of impotent despair are flung aside with a contemptuous smile by the young, the strong, the virile.
[1912 [1903]: xii]
This tone did not endear him to his opponents, and it was repaid in kind. Bradley
attacked Schiller’s personal idealism and James’s voluntarism in ‘On Truth and
Practice’, published in Mind. He took their ‘gospel’ to be the view that all there is to a
statement’s truth is its working in practice for a particular individual. Bradley argues
that there must be a distinction between truth and usefulness. The pragmatists fail to
see that ‘If my idea is to work it must correspond to a determinate being which it cannot
be said to make’ (Bradley 1904: 311). He also argues that the concept of ‘the practical’ is
too wide and variable to do any serious work for the pragmatist, and that James’s voluntarism is mistaken because reality often clashes with one’s will. He takes this voluntarism to
be the extreme view that ‘the whole essence of truth’ consists in ‘a choice made by this or
that person’ (1904: 331). However fair or unfair his reading of their positions was, we
shall see that similar points were made in similar tones by Russell and Moore, the fierce
opponents of Bradley’s idealism. There was, that is, a block vote from prominent British
philosophers on all sides against the pragmatism of Schiller and James.
In 1904, James wrote to Schiller to try to guess the identity of a reviewer of
Humanism, who let loose ‘a long smothered volcano of irritation at your general tone
of belligerency and flippancy’. In the margins of James’s letter, Schiller scribbled ‘Mind!
&c &c’, suggesting that the reviewer’s irritation was due to Schiller’s spoofing of the
journal Mind (CWJ 10: 369, n. 2, 1904). James also reports on further reactions which
Schiller has provoked: ‘One man recently said to me “I hate him”—another: “he is
intolerable and odious.” ’ James gently advises that perhaps Schiller might ‘assume a
solemn dignity commensurate with the importance of your function’ as the champion
of pragmatism in England. He says: ‘I confess that as I grow older I find myself believing
more and more in the excellence of colorless objectivity of statement, keeping any
­personal oddity out, and letting brevity and pellucidity do the work’ (CWJ 10: 370,
1904). He ends the letter by repeating the entreaty: ‘Good bye! buckle down now to
s’thing very solemn and systematic! Write your jokes by all means, but expunge them
in proof, and save them for a posthumous no. of Mind!’ (CWJ 10: 371, 1904).
Six months later, we find James again trying to rein in Schiller, begging him to tone
down his rhetoric in a piece actually submitted to Mind: ‘What I earnestly beseech you
to do therefore is (no matter what literary cost) to suppress those pages . . . Your paper’s
total forensic effectiveness will be 4 times greater without than with it’ (CWJ 10: 446–8,
1904). He then wrote to the editor of Mind, asking him not to typeset Schiller’s paper
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until Schiller had a chance to receive and consider his letter. Schiller refused James’s
request, asking, ‘why [should] we both speak honied words?’ He is content to have
James ‘present the peaceable face of Janus’, while he will present the ‘warlike’. In the
end, he asks: ‘will you pardon me if I’m neither willing nor able to take your advice?’
(CWJ 10: 455, 1904). Schiller’s paper, with personal attacks on Bradley and all, was
published as ‘In Defence of Humanism’ in the October 1904 issue of Mind.
Schiller’s refusal to use honied words had a deleterious effect on pragmatism’s reputation, as James predicted and tried to prevent. Joseph Leighton, in an article titled
‘Pragmatism’ for The Journal of Philosophy, calls Schiller ‘at once the most pugnacious
and the most facetious protagonist of pragmatism’ (1904: 148). Santayana, who, as we
have seen, was already concerned with what he saw as James’s excesses, was even less
impressed by Schiller’s. Of all the pragmatists, he writes, only Schiller holds ‘the idealistic doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only structure of
the universe, and its whole history’ (1911: 116).
Schiller, meanwhile, was not keen on Peirce’s brand of pragmatism. He writes to
James in 1908, calling Peirce’s ‘Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’ a ‘piteous
exhibition’, and saying that he will:
treat [Peirce] as ‘non-avenu’ henceforth in matters of [pragmatism]. I never did quite believe
that he had understood the importance of what he had stumbled upon.
[CWJ 12: 130, 1908]
Schiller threw in instead with a short-lived movement called ‘personal idealism’, which
conceived of itself as a development of Oxford idealism, opposed to both naturalism
and the Absolutist brand of idealism.3 It too attempted to combine the core principles
of empiricism and idealism. As Henry Sturt puts it in his preface to Personal Idealism,
the volume that contained Schiller’s announcement of personal idealism’s arrival on
the scene: ‘ “Empirical idealism” is still something of a paradox; I should like to see
it regarded as a truism’ (1902: viii). The view took experience as its foundation. But it
eschewed appeal to the experience of a single, all-encompassing absolute subject and
instead took as basic the experience of individuals, bound up with interests, personality, and other aspects of finite subjectivity. Schiller selected as his slogan Protagoras’s
‘man is the measure of all things’.4 Peirce took him (with the Oxford idealists) to hold
that ‘enough has not been made of personality in philosophy’ (N 3: 126).
Schiller uses the labels ‘pragmatism,’ ‘anthropomorphism’, ‘voluntarism’, and, most
often, ‘humanism’ for his view. His aim is one of ‘humanising Truth’ (1969 [1907]: viii).
See Sturt (1902: v–vii).
Schiller (1912 [1903]: xxi; 1939: 21, 105). In ‘Abstractionism and “Relativismus” ’, James considers the
idea that the pragmatist construal of truth ‘reproduce[s] that protagorean doctrine that the individual man
is “the measure of all things” ’ (MT: 142). He grants the doctrine’s descriptive merit, arguing that it belies ‘the
pretence on anyone’s part to have found for certain at any given moment what the shape of [absolute] truth
is’. But he denies that this acknowledgement prevents pragmatists from emphasizing the regulative importance of intersubjective norms and the need for openness to revising our beliefs in the face of experience.
3
4
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His first careful working out of this view can be found in ‘Axioms and Postulates’, in
which he talks about practical reason’s ‘right to postulate’ (1902: 90). Hence, Schiller
often puts forward a moderate view in which knowledge is a matter of accepting
‘postulates which had suggested themselves as desirable if true, and had succeeded
and survived, for transparent reasons’. We assume that something is true because we
desire it to be true—it serves an interest of ours. Then we test it to see if it fits with our
experience. If it survives, it is indeed true. That is the moderate view, in which the
human organism ‘needs assumptions it can act on and live by, which will serve as
means to the attainment of its ends’ (1902: 91). Those that work—the survivors—are
held to be true. One conclusion of this sensible argument is that ‘it ill becomes’
humans to ‘give themselves airs and to regard their position as immutable and
unassailable’ (1902: 92). For, although it is highly unlikely that we shall ever want to
make a revolution in our thought, we may find ourselves changing some of our axioms (1902: 93–4).
So, as is the case with James, Schiller sometimes puts forward a sensible pragmatist position. But also as is the case with James, he tends to finish these moderate
statements of his position with the idea that the postulates and axioms ‘could all be
traced to the various activities of our will to believe’ (1934 [1927]: 100), and ‘are
thus the outcome of a Will-to-believe’ (1902: 91). That is, he opens the door to a
radical amplification of his moderate view, whether or not he always wanted that
door open.
Schiller also brings his humanizing thoughts to the concept of reality: he argues that
the world is ‘a construction’ (1902: 54). Metaphysics, for Schiller, is a personal matter.
He argues that ‘the fit of a man’s philosophy is (and ought to be) as individual as the fit
of his clothes’ (1902: 50), and so the ‘metaphysic which is true for one man, because it
seems to him to synthesize his experience, may be false for another, because his personality is different’ (1939: 178). On Schiller’s view, ‘it is a methodological necessity’ to
hold that both truth and reality are ‘wholly plastic’ (1902: 61).
That is, even more so than James, Schiller tends to glide from (i) the idea that there
is no sense to be made of trying to make our beliefs correspond to a reality entirely
independent of human needs and interests to (ii) the idea that reality itself is entirely
determined by human needs and interests. He starts with the perfectly good idea that
we do not have ‘any independent knowledge of the “external world” ’ (1902: 55–6), if
that expresses the thought that all our knowledge of the world is shaped by the particular forms of our sensibility and cognition, as well as our still more particular interests
and practical situations. He then moves to the view that:
there can be neither ‘things’ nor ‘persons,’ neither ‘effects’ nor ‘causes,’ until the chaotic flow
of happenings has been set in order by successful discriminations. Every sort of distinct perceptual object, therefore, alike whether it be a ‘thing’ or a ‘person,’ seems to be manifestly
man-made, i.e., relative to the human interests which singled it out, and preserve for it its status
as a ‘reality’ which it is expedient to take into account.
[1909–10: 226]
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Hence James’s complaint that Schiller is forever delivering a ‘butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist position’ (P: 117). He says (privately) that some of Schiller’s
essays in Studies in Humanism ‘seem to be written with my own heart’s blood—it’s
startling that two people should be found to think so exactly alike’ (CWJ 11: 345, 1907).
But he seems well aware that when Schiller is in pragmatism’s corner, fighting its
­battles, both James and Schiller are in danger of getting knocked out. For instance, in a
review of Personal Idealism, he speaks well of Schiller’s ‘re-anthropomorphised
Universe’, but notes that Schiller’s ability to render a definitive presentation of personal
idealism is conditional on his ‘ton[ing] down a little the exuberance of his polemical
wit’ (James 1987 [1903]: 541).
Peirce reviewed Personal Idealism for The Nation. He singled out Schiller’s piece as
the best in the volume, then held it up for serious criticism. This is generally Peirce’s
way with Schiller. For instance, in one unpublished paper, he says that Schiller’s logic is
‘brilliant and seductive’ and happily acknowledges that Schiller is part of the pragmatist family. But in the next sentence he says that Schiller’s view is a ‘very evil and harmful
procedure’ (CP 5. 489, 1907). The harm, as Peirce describes it in the review of Personal
Idealism, comes about because:
Mr. Schiller does not believe there are any hard facts which remain true independently of what
we may think about them. He admits it requires a hard struggle to make all facts suit our fancy,
but he holds that facts change with every phase of experience, and that there are none which
have been ‘all along’ what history decides they shall have been. This doctrine he imagines is
what Professor James means by the ‘Will to Believe.’
[N 3: 127]
Peirce also objects to Schiller’s view that metaphysics ought to be regarded as ‘a matter of
personal fancy’ (N 3: 126). In a direct poke at Mind!, Peirce says: ‘instead of merely jeering
at metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, whether by long drawn-out parodies or
otherwise, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence’ (CP 5. 423, 1905).
Commenting on this quip to Welby, Peirce notes that it ‘amounted to saying, what I think,
that he introduces his personal passions into philosophy in a reprehensible way’
(Hardwick 1977: 56). Upon the publication of Schiller’s Humanism, Peirce writes to
James: ‘The humanistic element of pragmatism is very true and important and impressive; but . . . [y]ou and Schiller carry pragmatism too far for me. I don’t want to exaggerate
it but keep it within the bounds to which the evidences of it are limited’ (CP 8. 258, 1904).
In a series of polite letters in 1905, Schiller and Peirce went back and forth about the
nature of the pragmatic maxim, with plenty of misunderstanding due to the fact that
Peirce had hardly anything in print. But while their disagreements about the pragmatic
maxim more or less faded by the end of the correspondence, their disagreement about
reality remained entrenched. Peirce insists on the independence of reality, and it is this
insistence that marks off his position from Schiller’s:
As to whether the real is changed by our thinking about it, I do not think there can be any
question . . . [M]y ethics of terminology will not permit me to give it any other meaning than
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that it is that whose characters do not at all depend upon what any man or men think that they
are. I have said (in 1892) that to say that anything is quite real is a postulate, much as if a man
went to borrow money of a bank and was asked for his security, he might say ‘Oh, I have no
other security than that I postulate the loan.’ But I added that many things certainly approach
so near to being real that we cannot say they are not so. You seem to think this very ill considered; but that is what we think in the laboratory.
[Unpublished letter quoted in Scott 1973: 372]
He spells out their key differences in this way:
I have no hope of finding you nearer to me because you want your philosophy to be the quintessence of the whole man. I want mine to be no such thing. I want it to be scientific, logical and
frigid, with all the falsifications (if you will regard them as such) that are unavoidable in
dissections.
[Unpublished letter quoted in Scott 1973: 372]
Peirce most decidedly ‘cannot turn aside into Mr. Schiller’s charming lane’ (CP 5. 489,
1905). It is bad enough that James has followed him. Of Studies in Humanism, Peirce
says: ‘Schiller informs us that he and James have made up their minds that the true is
simply the satisfactory. No doubt; but to say ‘satisfactory’ is not to complete any predicate whatever. Satisfactory to what end?’ (CP 5. 552, 1905).
Kenneth Winetrout sums up Schiller’s place in classical pragmatism nicely: ‘we
may think of pragmatism as having three initial thrusts: Charles S. Peirce represents
the analytical thrust; John Dewey, the reformist thrust; and William James and F. C. S.
Schiller, the existentialist thrust’ (1967: 10). Schiller and James were the ones who took
individual freedom, immediate concrete experience, and the personal to be at the centre of their theory of truth and reality. Schiller himself was not unaware of such gulfs in
the pragmatist family; indeed, he only widened them by undermining Peirce’s role in
the birth of pragmatism. He made Peirce cross when, in Humanism, he said that James
gave pragmatism its name, and then added the note:
Strictly speaking, I am reminded, it was Mr. C. S. Peirce, but it would seem to follow from
pragmatist principles that a doctrine belongs to him who makes an effective use of it.
[1912 [1903]: 27, n. 1]
Peirce wrote to Welby that ‘nobody but an angry man’ could think that this remark of
Schiller’s was right. In the same letter, he says of Schiller ‘I do not doubt he is a very
lovable man as James is; and of the two perhaps Schiller is stronger in philosophy.’ That
last thought is a bit shocking. Peirce’s bottom line, however, lumps James and Schiller
together: ‘But I have not a very high admiration for the philosophical calibre of pluralists’ (Hardwick 1977: 56–7).
If we set aside the issue of pluralism about truth, we can see one important point
made by Schiller. He starts by accepting the pragmatic maxim that all concepts must be
understood by appeal to their consequences. When applied to the concept of truth, he
takes the maxim to suggest that the difference between the truth and the falsehood of
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an assertion must show itself in some visible, observable way. Two theories that lead to
precisely the same practical consequences are different only in words (1969 [1907]: 5).
Schiller follows James and Peirce in being expansive about the kinds of consequences
that we might consider, and it is here that he makes a real contribution. He says: ‘Of
course the special nature of the testing depends on the subject-matter, and the nature
of the “experiments” which are in this way made in mathematics, in ethics, in physics,
in religion, may seem very diverse superficially’ (1969 [1907]: 6–7). In a further comment on this diversity, he gives an important claim perhaps its clearest statement in any
early pragmatist work:
In some cases, doubtless, as in many problems of history and religion, there will be found
deep-seated and enduring differences of opinion as to what consequences and what tests may
be adduced as relevant: but these differences already exist, and are in no wise created by being
recognised and explained. Pragmatism, however, by enlarging our notions of what constitutes
relevant evidence, is far more likely to conduce to their amicable settlement than the intellectualisms which condemn all faith as inherently irrational and irrelevant to knowledge.
[1969 [1907]: 155–6]
Schiller’s point is one that needs to be considered by every naturalist. It is undeniable
that our standards of evidence and good judgement vary as our subject matter varies.
What passes for confirmation in chemistry is unlike what passes for confirmation
in ethics, and unlike what passes for confirmation in mathematics. We do not ‘contemplate absurdities such as . . . the intrusion of ethical or aesthetical motives into
the estimation of mathematical truths’ (1969 [1907]: 155). At least when taken in
isolation, Schiller’s point is excellent: the naturalist must be committed to recognizing, explaining, and justifying the different standards we employ in our different
kinds of inquiry. The naturalist must attend to this diversity and give an account of
legitimate and illegitimate methods of inquiry that is consistent with it. Peirce makes
some progress toward a principle that might backstop such an account when he
argues that our belief must be determined by something extraneous to the facts, and
then gives us an account of different kinds of experience that might be indices of the
facts. James seems unwilling to take as basic any such principle. Schiller, at his best,
falls between the two, seeing that some such principle is required, but not providing
it himself.
Despite Russell’s scorn for Schiller, he did learn something from him. Schiller’s 1912
Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem makes the following claim:
It is NOT possible to abstract from the actual use of the logical material and to consider ‘forms of
thought’ in themselves, without incurring thereby a total loss, not only of truth but also of
meaning . . . It is necessary to pull down the pseudo-science of Formal Logic, and to show what
an incoherent, worthless, and literally unmeaning structure it is, before it is possible to build up
the true Logic of real reasoning which starts from the act of thought and so does not lose touch
with Science and practical life.
[Schiller 1912: ix–x]
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Russell found it hard to get past the nastiness in this kind of passage. But we shall see
in §5.2 that when he looks back at his philosophical development, he sees one of his
major shifts as occurring around 1917, when he starts to take seriously philosophical
problems concerning language and meaning, and he attributes this insight to Schiller
and Welby.
Indeed, in Formal Logic, Schiller puts forward a view of meaning as use: the meaning
of a word ‘must have arisen out of the use of the sound by persons who managed to
convey their meaning thereby’ (1912: 16). We shall see that Wittgenstein comes to this
pragmatist thought via a different route: the influence of Ramsey. It is not that Russell
followed Schiller precisely on these matters. But both Russell and Wittgenstein learned
from the pragmatists that logical analysis cannot in the end provide an adequate philosophical framework. We need a philosophy that is connected to human thought and
inquiry. Russell sees that he would not have awakened to the topic of meaning and
subjectivity were it not for Schiller and Victoria Welby, to whom we now turn.
3.2 Victoria Welby
James did not really need Schiller as a bridge across the Atlantic. He travelled to
England often enough himself and his work was well known there. It was Peirce, rather,
who needed all the help he could get in promulgating his view outside his small circle
in Cambridge Massachusetts. The person who served as Peirce’s bridge across the
Atlantic was Lady Victoria Welby, one of Peirce’s few intellectual interlocutors.
Welby was self-educated and well travelled, born into an important family. Queen
Victoria was her Godmother. In one of her first letters to Peirce she says:
Before I say more, may I confess that in signing my book ‘V. Welby’ I hoped to get rid as far as
possible of the irrelevant associations of my unlucky title? . . . You will understand my desire to
be known as simply as possible . . . [T]he only honour I value is that of being treated by workers
as a serious worker.
[Hardwick 1977: 13]
I will follow her wishes and drop the ‘Lady’.
Welby was interested in how meaning changes with experience. This was one
reason Peirce thought highly of her. She argued that we could reduce confusion and
ambiguity by developing a sophisticated science of meaning that would be sensitive
to the evolution of language. Another of her aims, in Peirce’s words, is that she
wanted to know ‘what a sign is and what its signification as opposed to its denotation really is’.5 She published papers on these topics in Mind and The Monist. In
1903, her What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance came out,
followed in 1911 by Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive
and Interpretive Resources. Between 1907 and 1926, with Dutch writer-reformist
5
WA: 1970-010/012(6), Peirce to J. W. S. Slaughter, 2 September 1909.
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Frederik van Eeden, she ran the Signifische Kring (the Signific Circle). This group
evolved into the International Group for the Study of Significs and then the
International Society for Significs, which petered out only in the 1960s. The aim of
these bodies was to analyse and clarify language in both science and society. They
had alliances with the Vienna Circle, which was coming together in the 1920s, and
Friedrich Waismann and Otto Neurath were members of the Welby–van Eeden
group from the 1930s. Earlier, in the first decade of the 1900s, Neurath had been
influenced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, who won the first Welby
Prize, awarded to early-career scholars concerned with meaning and clarification.
The idea of a unified and clear language of science was a common theme among
Welby and the Vienna Circle.6
Russell could be dismissive of Welby,7 but we shall see that even he eventually took
meaning seriously partly because of her. A list of her correspondents is a stunning parade of the leading philosophers, logicians, scientists, and novelists of her time. The
more relevant ones to Peirce include Bergson, Bradley, Calderoni, Carus, Cook
Wilson, Huxley, both William and Henry James, Jowett, McTaggart, Poincaré, Pollock,
Ogden, Russell, Schiller, Sidgwick, Spencer, Stout, and Venn.8 But the correspondence
between Welby and Peirce is the one whose importance has survived through the
generations.9 In a 1904 letter to Russell, Welby mentions that Peirce is probably an
opponent of Russell’s, but that the two men will agree that we must reconsider and
revise ‘if need be our presuppositions and our inherited formulas from new and living
points of view’.10
In the early 1900s, Welby knew a lot about pragmatism. She had ‘studied and noted
almost every line’ James had written. But she said to her regular correspondent Schiller
that she felt James was ‘a somewhat dangerously fascinating writer’ and did not find
him ‘ultimately convincing’.11 She worried even more about Schiller’s position, identifying it with solipsism.12 Probably through her correspondence with James and
Schiller, she also knew a little about Peirce’s work on signs. She wrote to him in 1903,
after sending him a copy of What Is Meaning? Shortly after, Peirce reviewed What Is
Meaning?, together with Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics, for The Nation. He
6
See Pietarinen (2009) and Schmitz (1985: §4.2) for full accounts of the relationships between Welby
and the Vienna Circle.
7
8
See e.g. A: 195.
See Petrilli (2009, Appendix 3).
9
Peirce’s letters to Welby first saw print when Ogden and Richards included extracts from them in the
Appendix of their much-read The Meaning of Meaning (Ogden and Richards 1923). They were later published in 1953 for the Graduate Philosophy Club at Yale (Lieb 1953); some of these also appear in Peirce’s
Collected Papers, vol. 8, book II, ch. 8. Finally, a volume of letters by both correspondents appeared in 1977
(Hardwick 1977), with some omitted materials later added in a volume of Welby’s writings (edited by
H. Walter Schmitz) in 1985 (Welby 1985).
10
In reply, Russell expresses hope of convincing Peirce on questions regarding the foundations of mathematics, suggesting that unlike opponents like Cook Wilson, Peirce knows his modern mathematics. Both
letters can be found in WA: 010/013 (22).
11
WA: 1970-104/05, 22 June 1900.
12
Schiller’s response, again showing that he was not always as radical as he could be, replies that he too
believes in the external world on pragmatic grounds (WA: 014/08).
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spent most of his time on Welby’s book, since, as he privately told Welby, he found
Russell’s book ‘pretentious & pedantic’ (Hardwick 1977: 9). He also told her that he
didn’t agree with all the ‘extensions’ to pragmatism made by Schiller and others. Welby
wrote to Schiller that she was ‘rather “swelling” at the fact of C. S. Peirce coupling the
importance of ‘W.[hat] is M[eaning] with B. Russell's book!!’13 Indeed, Peirce thought
that Welby’s view of language, focused on the triadic relationship between what she
called sense, meaning, and significance, was important, and not dissimilar to his own
analysis of meaning. Thus began a close and substantial correspondence spanning
1903 to 1911, ending with Welby’s death in 1912.
During the later years of their correspondence, Peirce was in ill health and dire financial straits. He was also keen to set his thoughts out in a clear and comprehensible way.
Welby circulated copies of Peirce’s letters, sending them to Ogden, Russell, and others
in 1904 and getting replies from these two that made it clear that they read and appreciated Peirce’s missives. She tried her best to patch up the relationship between Peirce
and Schiller, and tried to get Cook Wilson and Russell to see the merit of Peirce’s ideas.
She wrote to Stout, then the editor of Mind, describing some of these diplomatic
manoeuvres:
I feel quite like the Hague Commission! You spoke once of the wild biologists among whom
you feared to be devoured: but these mathematicians are if possible still fiercer; and it is something to have conveyed even one message of peace between them . . .
[Petrilli 2009: 73]
She met with only one success, but it was to be a momentous success. In 1911, Welby
wrote to Peirce:
I have found you, I think, a disciple at Cambridge. He has been studying with care all I could
show him of your writing on Existential Graphs, and is anxious to see your contribution to the
volume of Essays which Prof. Stout is still holding back, in hopes of receiving it. The name of
the recruit is C. K. Ogden, and he is at Magdalene College. He enters also with enthusiasm into
the possibilities of Significs.
[Hardwick 1977: 138–9]
Ogden had made contact with Welby in November 1910, writing to her about her work on
significs. Soon Odgen was visiting Welby for weekends of philosophical discussion and
examination of her collection of materials on signs. Welby gave Ogden four of her most
important letters from Peirce. By January 1911, Ogden was writing to her about how
‘wonderful’ they were.14 In these letters, Peirce laid out his derivation of the categories
(with its thin notion of the given and thick conception of experience), his formal logic or
existential graphs, and his theory of signs. With respect to the communication of a sign,
Peirce writes: ‘the essential function of a sign is to . . . establish a habit or general rule
WA: 1970-014/07, 4 February 1904.
Those were the letters of 12 October 1904; 23 December 1908; 31 January 1909; and 14 March 1909.
Ogden’s letter to Welby can be found in WA: 1970-011/21.
13
14
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whereby they will act on occasion’ (Hardwick 1977: 31). He also sets out his view of
belief as a basis of deliberate conduct and his view of assertion as not ‘a pure act of signification’ but ‘an exhibition of fact that one subjects oneself to the penalties visited on
a liar if the proposition asserted is not true’ (Hardwick 1977: 34). So Ogden had the
essentials of Peirce’s position in hand. We shall see in the next section why this was of
such great importance.
3.3 C. K. Ogden
Charles Kay Ogden was well known around Cambridge as an energetic organizer and a
slightly eccentric polymath. He was founder and editor of The Cambridge Magazine;
editor of the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method;
co-founder of the Heretics Society (which opposed compulsory chapel and was
devoted to open discussion); and inventor and promoter of Basic English.
Welby was right that Peirce had found a disciple in Ogden. He did more for Peirce’s
reputation than almost anyone else, and played a vital role in the dissemination of
Peirce’s thought. This included small things like taking the Encyclopedia Britannica to
task for not mentioning ‘that outstanding American genius, Charles Santiago Sanders
Peirce’ (1977 [1926]: 200). It included large things like getting Peirce’s work into print
in England and giving the Welby–Peirce correspondence to Ramsey.
Peirce’s widow gave his manuscripts to Harvard in 1915, and the university
sought someone to head up the organization and publication of his work. (The fact
that in 2016 this task remains unfinished will give the reader a hint of the challenges
involved.) When C. I. Lewis arrived at Harvard as a faculty member in 1920, he was
roomed with the piles of papers in the hope that he would prepare some of them for
publication. Though Lewis put the papers in order, absorbed their contents, and
was won over to Peirce, he declined to do much editorial work. Nine years after
Peirce’s death, in 1923, a volume of his papers finally appeared, edited by Morris
Raphael Cohen. He titled it Chance, Love and Logic. An almost forgotten fact is that
simultaneously with the American Harcourt Brace edition, it was also published in
England—as part of the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific
Method, founded and edited by none other than C. K. Ogden.15 Ramsey got a copy
hot off the press.
He also introduced Peirce’s work to a wide audience in a substantial appendix of
the 1923 The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought
and of the Science of Symbolism, co-written with I. A. Richards. Their book developed a triadic theory of signs, with an emphasis on instrumentality, context, and
pragmatic tests. It was heavily influenced by Peirce’s thought. As well as some
15
Ogden also published in this series Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Russell’s The Analysis of Matter, Moore’s
Philosophical Studies, and Justus Buchler’s Charles Peirce’s Empiricism (published in 1939) and The
Philosophy of Peirce (in 1940).
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c­ ursory discussion of Peirce in the book itself, an appendix lays out Peirce’s theory
of signs, logic, and categories in considerable detail and complexity. While The
Meaning of Meaning is far from a flawless guide to Peirce, it did set out some long
passages from Peirce himself.
The Meaning of Meaning is not easily pigeonholed into any one discipline, although
it is more like philosophy than anything else. Richards, who had an undergraduate
philosophy degree, tells us that its purpose was to impose some discipline on how
the word ‘meaning’ was used, to elucidate the various functions of language, and to
clarify the various ways in which meaning is caused (1977: 101). In its preliminary
stages, he says, ‘Our efforts . . . were much aided by Frank Ramsey, then still a schoolboy’
(1977: 101).
On its release, the book received a chequered reception from philosophers. Russell
seemed at times to think the ideas contained in it were interesting. Ogden wrote to
Russell, as soon as he read the German print of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:
Looking rapidly over the off print in the train last night, I was amazed that Nicod and Miss
Wrinch had both seemed to make so very little of it . . . I know you are frightfully busy at present, but I should very much like to know why all this account of signs and symbols cannot best
be understood in relation to a thoroughgoing causal theory. I mean the sort of thing in the
enclosed . . .
[von Wright 1973: 3]
What Ogden enclosed was a chapter of The Meaning of Meaning, then in press. Russell
replied that he hadn’t had a chance to read the chapter, but that he agreed with Ogden’s
suggestion. Ramsey, however, wrote to Wittgenstein that Russell ‘does not really think
The Meaning of Meaning important, but he wants to help Ogden by encouraging the
sale of it’ (von Wright 1973: 84). Ogden sent a copy of the book to Wittgenstein and got
the following reply: ‘I think I ought to confess to you frankly that I believe you have
not quite caught the problems which—for instance—I was at in my book (whether
or not I have given the correct solution)’ (von Wright 1973: 69). Wittgenstein then
wrote to Russell:
A short time ago I received ‘The Meaning of Meaning’. Doubtless it has been sent to you too. Is
it not a miserable book?! No, no, philosophy, after all, is not as easy as that! But it does show
how easy it is to write a thick book.
[McGuinness 2012b: 137]
Russell and Wittgenstein found the book’s treatment of meaning quite dissimilar to—
and quite inferior to—the accounts they had given.
To make matters of public reception worse, in the book Ogden and Richards put
forward an emotive view of ethics, in which ethical sentences or beliefs are not
symbolic or referential and do not express genuine propositions. Rather, they
­express ­emotional attitudes. Although this emotivism would be enthusiastically
taken up by Schlick and other members of the Vienna Circle during the early to
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mid 1900s,16 Moore’s view of ethics reigned supreme in Cambridge at the time The
Meaning of Meaning was published. It put forward a position very much incompatible
with that of Ogden and Richards.
In 1903, Moore had published Principia Ethica. It advanced the thesis that ‘good’
denotes a simple, unanalysable, undefinable, objective, non-natural property, just as
‘redness’ does. He shared what we shall see is the logical analyst framework with
Russell. Thus begins Chapter 1 of Principia Ethica (‘The Subject-Matter of Ethics’):
if it is not the case that ‘good’ denotes something simple and indefinable, only two alternatives
are possible: either it is a complex . . . or else it means nothing at all, and there is no such subject
as Ethics.
[2004 [1903]: 15]
Moore opts for the alternative that ‘good’ denotes something simple and indefinable.
When you have reduced a complex term to its simplest components:
then you can no longer define those terms. They are simply something which you think of or
perceive, and to any one who cannot think of or perceive them, you can never, by any definition, make their nature known.
[2004 [1903]: 7]
He argues that if you try to define ‘the good’ in terms of some other property, it
can always be intelligibly further asked: but is that property good? The attempt to
translate ethical terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into non-ethical ones like ‘pleasing’ and
‘displeasing’ commits what Moore called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. The good is intrinsically valuable and cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. It is ‘one of those
innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because
they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition
must be defined’ (Moore 2004 [1903]: 9–10). We should trust our intuitions about
the good, rather than search for another property in which our judgements of the
good are grounded.
Ogden and Richards thought that Moore had it all wrong. They distinguished
between the symbolic (or referential) use of words and the emotive (non-referential)
use, arguing that our use of ‘good’ falls into the latter category:
‘good’ is alleged to stand for a unique unanalysable concept. This concept, it is said, is the subject matter of Ethics. This peculiar ethical use of ‘good’ is, we suggest, a purely emotive use.
When so used the word stands for nothing whatever, and has no symbolic function. Thus,
when we so use it in the sentence, ‘This is good’, we merely refer to this, and the addition of
‘is good’ makes no difference whatever to our reference . . . [I]t serves only as an emotive sign
16
Stevenson writes that a passage from The Meaning of Meaning was ‘the source of the ideas embodied’
in his ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’ (1937: 23, n. 1), and Ayer calls his reliance on Ogden and
Richards in Language, Truth and Logic unconscious ‘plagiarism’ (1984: 29).
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expressing our attitude to this, and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to actions of one kind or another.
[1923: 228]
Contra Moore, ‘good’ does not refer to any property at all. Rather, ‘good’ is used to
express an emotional attitude.
Ramsey reviewed The Meaning of Meaning for Mind. While he was not generally
enamoured of the book, we shall see that his view of the debate between the Moorean
and the emotivist is of real interest. And he was interested in the Peircean appendix,
saying in the review: ‘the excellent appendix on C. S. Peirce deserves especial m
­ ention’
(MM: 109).
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PA RT I I
Cambridge England
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4
The Anti-Pragmatism of
Pre-War Cambridge
4.1 Introduction
Moore had been a fellow of Trinity since 1898. Russell was appointed to a five-year
fellowship there in 1910. Wittgenstein arrived in 1911. These three giants of philosophy were together to mount a sustained attack against idealism and pragmatism. At
this time, Peirce and James were still alive, and James at least was inclined to respond.1
What they did not live to witness was the splintering of this Cambridge c­ oalition.
We shall see that by the conclusion of the First World War, Wittgenstein was wary
of the ­general philosophical outlook of Russell and Moore and eventually moved
toward a kind of pragmatism, and by 1920 Russell was himself edging toward another
kind of pragmatism.
Russell had read mathematics at Cambridge, and fundamental questions about
mathematics and logic were at the centre of his thought—just one of many respects in
which Russell resembles Peirce more closely than he does other pragmatists. Another
of Russell’s central preoccupations was the problem of truth. During the first years of
his fellowship, he was interested in ushering out the dominant idealism of McTaggart.
But his career was long, and he shaped philosophy for decades. As Ramsey quipped,
the problem of setting out the meaning of truth is a hard one—‘How difficult the problem is may be judged from the fact that in the years 1904–25, Mr Bertrand Russell has
adopted in succession five different solutions of it’ (OT: 15).
Russell came at the matter of truth from a variety of perspectives. At times, he
approached it from an empiricist angle: ‘Can we know, either with certainty or with
probability, of the existence of anything with which we have not direct acquaintance?
And if so, how is such knowledge obtained?’ (CP 6: 81, 1912). If all genuine knowledge
must be anchored in acquaintance with its object, it is not clear how the touchstones
of sensory observation and logic suffice to provide the starting point for all of
­knowledge—for all those domains in which we ordinarily take ourselves to have
knowledge. What Russell and his colleagues called sense-data are only known with
1
It’s not clear whether Peirce was fully aware of the charge, nor what he would have said about it. He too
was not keen on the Jamesian/Schillerian variety of pragmatism, but he nevertheless took James and
Schiller to be fighting on his side of intellectual wars of this sort.
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certainty to exist while our sensations last.2 Hence, any knowledge of other minds, of
conclusions of inductive inferences, and of the persistence of objects when we aren’t
actually observing them seems impossible. If we are to have knowledge not merely of
our own experiences here and now but also of something like the enduring external
world, then we need to show how we can construct that knowledge from those immediately given and fleeting sensory experiences.
Russell conceived of truth as eternal, as he felt the truths of mathematics and science
must be. He was of the view that in a logically perfect, scientific, and transparent language, philosophers could solve the problem of knowledge. He summed up his
approach in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell: ‘I expect my paper on matter will be a
model of cold passionless analysis, setting forth the most painful conclusions with
utter disregard of human feelings . . . I want to write a paper which my enemies will call
“the bankruptcy of realism” ’ (CP 6: 77, 1912).
We shall see that Russell despaired of the situation of human beings in the cold
world that was revealed by his passionless analysis, and that Ramsey challenged
that despondent attitude, while sharing Russell’s disenchanted view of the world.
Wittgenstein, by contrast, managed to re-enchant the world, yet remain in despair.
Whether or not Russell’s existential response to his theoretical philosophy was warranted, he was certainly right about the reception of his view. One enduring criticism
of his approach (although perhaps more aptly made against his successors—certain
members of the Vienna Circle and Quine) was that his preference for the desert landscapes3 of an ontologically austere world did indeed indicate the bankruptcy of his
realism. James certainly felt this way about Russell. As Rorty, James’s successor in
twentieth-century philosophy, said, Russell had a theory of truth, a natural corollary of
his foundationalism and his demand for certainty, against which pragmatism recoiled.
But, as is his wont, Rorty goes further than he should: ‘Neither William nor Henry
James would have had anything to say in a world without Russells’ (1982: 136). This is
rather strained, to say the least, since William and Henry were putting their ideas forward before Russell came on the scene. But Rorty is using Russell as an archetype for
‘straight men’ who defend ‘common-sense realism’. We shall see that there was indeed
some recoiling done on each side of this debate as it played out in the mid 1900s.
The ferocity of the dispute might strike one as curious, since Russell and the pragmatists have much in common. They are all empiricists, who aim to anchor thought in
experience, as well as to do away with any metaphysics that floats free of such
anchoring. Russell starts off his 1908 ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’ by noting
how much he and James share. And for a while, their engagements about truth and
knowledge were civil. Schiller wrote to James in 1907, speaking of a paper Russell had
given about pragmatism to a large undergraduate society:
2
Although, as Proops (2014) argues, Russell at times denies we are certain of any truth. Russell’s view
was always evolving and changing. I mostly present the versions of it that I think Ramsey had in mind.
3
This is Quine’s phrase (1953: 4). As Proops (2011a) notes, Russell’s ontology did include unsensed
sensibilia. But his tendency was to eliminate entities, especially in response to paradoxes.
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A great meeting . . . & a very fine paper which I hope he’ll print, full of fine points & subtle misconceptions, but with some unexpected concessions & in a friendly tone. He called himself an
empiricist, & admitted that [pragmatism] explained inductive science, also that he [could] not
say how he came by his ‘objects’ . . . B.R. has certainly been moving, tho’ not so much as Stout
who alone of our critics has seen the enormous importance of the fact that a theory of knowledge cannot start with the conception of a real object & define knowledge as a relation to that.
[CWJ 11: 468, 1907]
After the meeting, Russell invited Horace Meyer Kallen—a visiting American who had
just finished his Ph.D under Santayana and James—to his house and wrangled with
him for six hours. Kallen reports that, in the end, ‘Russell admitted our [pragmatic]
notion of “correspondence” to be very plausible’ (CWJ 11: 473, 1907). Meanwhile,
Schiller had communicated his positive impressions from the talk to Russell, saying
that he was anxious to see the paper in print ‘because I thought it so full of really good,
enlightening and useful criticism’ (Russell CP 5: 465, 1907). Russell wrote back, and
Schiller replied, noting their shared enmity to the idealism of McTaggart and Bradley
and their mutual commitment to the method of induction.
But the friendly tone was ultimately drowned out by a polemical one. Even a month
before Russell’s conciliatory remarks to Kallen, James was writing to Schiller about the
‘unspeakably insolent Moore’s’ argument against pragmatism, and saying that the epistemology of Moore and Russell ‘seems to me only a disease of language’ (CWJ 11: 528,
1908). Moore and Russell became the arch-enemies of pragmatism, although we shall
see that there are similarities between Moore’s common-sensism and pragmatism, and
that Russell was to adopt some central pragmatist tenets about belief and consciousness a decade after this iteration of the debate died along with James.
As the new anti-idealist philosophy was gathering steam under Russell’s steering,
Russell and Moore launched their attack on pragmatism. They saw it as too close to
idealism for their liking. This is interesting, as James, too, was a militant anti-idealist.
He waged a decades-long battle with Royce over the respective merits of pragmatism
and idealism, eventually winning Royce over to the pragmatist side. But James was
nowhere near realist enough for Russell and Moore. Their attack on James was conducted in a series of papers between 1908 and 1912, in which pragmatism’s reputation
was nearly fatally wounded.
Russell, from very early on, had considerable exposure to and engagement with
pragmatist ideas. As a young man, he met Santayana and James at the family home of
his future wife, the American Alys Smith. He read James’s Principles of Psychology
shortly after he completed his undergraduate degree and, in 1896, before he secured
his Cambridge fellowship, Russell spent three months in America. He wrote to James,
asking if he might come and see him, and Russell says that he stayed with him during
this trip (A: 220). That very year, James published ‘The Will to Believe’, the early percolations of his pragmatist account of truth. We know that by 1902 Schiller was writing
to James, noting that Russell and others were discussing (and criticizing) pragmatism and that Russell was then reading James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
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and, again, The Principles of Psychology.4 This was five years before Russell put pen to
paper on the topic of pragmatism and truth.
The warm personal feelings, at least on Russell’s part, survived the public vitriol that
was to follow. Upon James’s death, Russell considered revising one of the essays
(‘William James’s Conception of Truth’) that was about to be reprinted in his
Philosophical Essays, in order to tone down some of the polemical remarks. Instead, he
added a Postscript (in the Preface to the volume) in which he said:
The death of William James, which occurred when the printing of this book was already far
advanced, makes me wish to express, what in the course of controversial writings does not
adequately appear, the profound respect and personal esteem which I felt for him . . . For readers
trained in philosophy, no such assurance was required; but for those unaccustomed to the tone
of a subject in which agreement is necessarily rarer than esteem, it seemed desirable to record
what to others would be a matter of course.
[CP 6: 257–8, 1910]
Russell’s verdict on pragmatism, we shall see, is pretty harsh. But we shall also see in
Chapter 5 that, during the decade in which Ramsey was writing (1920–30), Russell
became mightily attracted to some of pragmatism’s most central thoughts. In this
chapter I will show how, prior to 1920, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein were putting
in place a realist position in Cambridge England. That position was very much set
against the grain of pragmatism.
4.2 The Revolt against Idealism: The Early Moore
and Russell on Propositions and Reality
Russell and Moore (like James) were educated by Hegelians. But after a youthful
hitching of their wagons to Bradley and their teacher McTaggart, they struck out on
their own path. At the very end of the 1800s Russell and Moore led a ‘revolt’ against
idealism (MPD: 12). This revolt is critical for understanding the hostility of Russell and
Moore to pragmatism, for we shall see that they worried that Jamesian pragmatism
was too close to idealism.
Russell and Moore, however, retained faint traces of idealism that tempered their
subsequent empiricist views. For instance, Moore, as Hacker observes, is more a
Platonic realist than an empiricist—for him, concepts exist independently of minds
(1996: 6). And as Hylton (1990) has shown, Russell’s deep engagement with idealism
means that we must not think of him as a mere inheritor of Hume’s and Locke’s views.
His general willingness to invoke abstract entities stems from his idealist beginnings—
we shall see that, even if he eventually leaves this Moorean path, he too starts off with a
view of propositions and relations as objective and irreducible.
4
See CWJ 10: 165, 1902, Griffin (1992b: 250), and Proops (2011a) and (2014).
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Some of the objections levelled at the idealists were common to Russell, Moore, and
James. All three argued that idealists make no effort at being clear, preferring the
pseudo-profundity of obscurity. All three argued that the idealists rely upon an unwarranted optimism about morality, with disastrous moral consequences. All three argued
that the idealists’ monism, which holds that all things are internally related in such an
intimate way that they constitute an ‘organic unity’, makes no sense. And they all
agreed that idealism holds an unattractive view of relations. The idealists argued that
relations were ‘internal’—if A is known by B, its being known by B is part of the very
nature of A and B. The relation penetrates the being of both terms. In the 1911 ‘The
Basis of Realism’ and elsewhere Russell argued that the idealist doctrine of internal
relations is hopeless. On it, ‘simple terms could have no relations, and therefore could
not enter into complexes; hence every term would have to be strictly infinitely complex’ (CP 6: 129, 1911).
But other objections were not shared by James. Russell and Moore thought that a
great failing of idealism was its refusal to admit that human beings can have beliefs that
get right a world not of their making, and they argued that truth must be absolute or
unchanging if it is to be worthy of the name. Hylton depicts Russell’s stance from the
time of his rejection of idealism onward: ‘either a thing is true or it is not, there can be
no qualifications, and no degrees; and . . . there are entities, independently identifiable,
each of which has the property that it is either absolutely and unqualifiedly true or
equally absolutely false’ (1990: 10). Russell and Moore were right to think that James
did not agree with them on these matters.
Another thing that distinguished at least Russell’s revolt against idealism from
James’s is that Russell found compelling the new higher order, quantificational logic
that Frege had offered the world in 1879. In Principia Mathematica, co-authored with
Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913,
Russell promoted Frege’s logic and argued that it is the foundation for mathematics.
This logicism held that all mathematical truths can be defined as logical truths and all
mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs. Russell’s way of doing philosophy
was driven by the structure of the new logic, including its requirement that a wellformed sentence is either true or false, with no shades of grey. Again as Hylton puts it,
the new logic ‘was not a philosophically neutral tool, but a source of philosophical
claims and of reasons for those claims’ (1990: 10).
In his Trinity Prize Fellow dissertation of 1898 and his early published papers,
Moore argued against idealism and for what we would now call a kind of direct realism. He held that consciousness, far from spinning in the void of the mental, has direct
access to its object, as it is in itself. We do not need to drive ourselves into philosophical
despair with the old British empiricist question of how we could possibly achieve
awareness of something beyond our circle of mental impressions. For to have a
­sensation just is to take us out of the circle. The idealist, on this view, fails to see that
whenever I have a sensation, I know something that is not wholly dependent upon
my experience.
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In 1899 Moore published a paper in Mind that he had read at the Aristotelian
Society. ‘The Nature of Judgment’ set the stage for the early work of both Russell and
Wittgenstein on the nature of propositions. Bradley, Moore argued, is stuck with the
claim that an idea is entirely a mental state: he is stuck with the claim that our ideas
have objects, but those objects are other ideas of ours (1899: 177–8). Moore thought
that this conception of an idea was false. Rather, an idea is a sign representing something whose existence transcends all our ideas—it gets at the world which science
is investigating. As Russell was to put it later: ‘fact is in general independent of
­experience’ (MPD: 54). Facts (unless they happen to be facts directly about what I’m
experiencing) are not dependent on experience, and it is in the nature of the mind to be
in touch with that non-mental factual reality.
Moore also argued that propositions are existents. A proposition is a complex of
concepts that might be involved in a belief or judgement. But the proposition is not a
mental entity. The proposition simply is a fact, and the concepts that constitute the
proposition are the entities the proposition is about. Of the judgement ‘This rose is red’
Moore says:
What I am asserting is a specific connexion of certain concepts forming the total concept ‘rose’
with the concepts ‘this’ and ‘now’ and ‘red’; and the judgment is true if such a connexion is
existent . . . If the judgment is false, that is not because my ideas do not correspond to reality, but
because such a conjunction of concepts is not to be found among existents.
With this, then, we have approached the nature of a proposition or judgment. A proposition
is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of concepts. Concepts are possible objects
of thought; but that is no definition of them. It merely states that they may come into relation
with a thinker; and in order that they may do anything, they must already be something. It is
indifferent to their nature whether anybody thinks them or not. They are incapable of change;
and the relation into which they enter with the knowing subject implies no action or reaction.
[1899: 179]
One can see from the above passage that Moore does not think the truth of a judgement is a correspondence between it and reality. Rather, he thinks that there is no difference between a proposition—understood as a mind-independent complex—and
what would make it true. A proposition is a synthesis of concepts, and when a proposition is true, it is because of a relation between those concepts. Russell expresses the
idea in a letter to Frege in 1904:
I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high’. We do not assert
the thought, for this is a private psychological matter: we assert the object of the thought, and
this is, to my mind, a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont
Blanc is itself a component part.
[Gabriel et al. 1980: 169]
Moore sees that his theory is not, on its surface, plausible: ‘I am fully aware how paradoxical this theory must appear, and even how contemptible’ (1899: 181). For one
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thing, it implies that the world is composed of concepts, and that is a bizarre thought.
Nonetheless, Moore is of the view that:
Truth . . . would certainly seem to involve at least two terms, and some relation between them;
falsehood involves the same; and hence it would seem to remain, that we regard truth and falsehood as properties of certain concepts, together with their relations—a whole to which we give
the name of proposition.
[1899: 181]
The question arises immediately: what kind of relation makes a proposition true and
what makes it false? Moore thinks you can’t say, but that you know it when you see it.
Truth is an indefinable relation: ‘What kind of relation makes a proposition true, what
false, cannot be further defined, but must be immediately recognised’ (1899: 180).
A true proposition has concepts related in one way, and a false proposition has them
related in another way. But these relations and their differences from each other,
though known to each of us experientially, elude elucidation.
Moore eventually abandoned this position, with its mysterious account of relations
and how they might make a proposition true and false. But it shaped the discussion for
Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey—indeed, Russell later heralded it as the first
account of the ‘new philosophy’ (MPD: 54)—by putting on the table the idea that a
fundamental concept could be indefinable. Russell, for instance, in what James Levine
(2009) aptly calls his Moorean period, argued that in order to understand a definable
term, we first have to intuit or understand the indefinable terms. Moore’s theory of
propositions provided the space for Moore to say that the good is indefinable, and for
Keynes to say that probability relations were indefinable. We shall see that Ramsey, in
turn, revolted against his teachers on precisely this matter.
This Moorean view eventually came to seem unsatisfactory to Russell. For one thing,
Russell did suggest at times that truth was definable. In 1910–13, he turned to the multiple relation theory of judgement, in which the truth of a judgement is not simply a
relationship between two things—the judging mind and the proposition judged.
Rather, it is a relation of several things—the mind, and a number of properties and
relations—those he previously thought of as constituents of the proposition in question. But while Russell dispensed with those strange objective entities called propositions, he was still set against having his position become too psychologistic. Judgements
still stand in relations to mind-independent entities.
In his 1910 ‘On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood’, he identifies the central question: ‘The question we have to discuss is, therefore: What is the difference between a
true belief and a false belief?’ (CP 6: 117, 1910). He is not looking for a mere criterion
of truth, or for some property that is coextensive with it, but for an account of what
‘truth and falsehood actually are’. Now his view links truth to human beings, as well as
to the facts:
If we were right in saying that the things that are true or false are always judgments, then it is
plain that there can be no truth or falsehood unless there are minds to judge. Nevertheless it is
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plain, also, that the truth or falsehood of a given judgment depends in no way upon the person
judging, but solely upon the facts about which he judges.
[CP 6: 117, 1910]
By 1911, that is, the Cambridge realists started to see a glimmer of truth in what idealism shared with pragmatism—the idea that judgements or beliefs are the bearers of
truth-values, and that judgements or beliefs cannot be pulled apart from believers and
from our background of presuppositions.
We shall see that Ramsey takes up the challenge of saying how these two things
about truth can hold simultaneously: how the things that are true and false are judgements that are nonetheless connected to the way things are. Along the way, he will
reject Russell and Moore’s early treatment of propositions. Of the question of the status
of the proposition, he notes in a draft of his unfinished book manuscript that ‘there
have been endless disputes about what kind of entity this object or proposition is’. His
own view is that ‘only the hardiest verbalists . . . can persuade themselves that “that the
earth is flat” is the name of something real’ (OT: 85). James, too, in 1908, had objected
to the propositions of Moore and Russell. Such propositions, he thought,
are expressly devised for quibbling between realities & beliefs. They seem to have the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other, and he who uses them can straddle as he likes,
owing to the ambiguity of the word that which is essential to them. ‘That Caesar existed’ is
‘true,’ sometimes means the fact that he existed is real sometimes the belief THAT he existed
is true. You can get no honest discussion out of such terms.
[CWJ 11: 526, 1908]
By the time that Ramsey set out his own qualms in the 1920s, the debate had shifted.
But the nature of propositions remained relevant to the discussion, and it was natural
for Ramsey to speak to the early views of Russell and Moore.
4.3 Russell’s Logical Atomism
We have seen that Russell took the new formal logic, of which he was a pioneer, to be
vitally important to philosophy. He was the first to engage in the project, still thriving,
of exploring the relationship between logic, language, experience, and thought. It was
a project enthusiastically taken up by Wittgenstein when he began to study with
Russell in 1911, and also by the Vienna Circle. It was an evolution of British empiricism, with the requisite reductionist (or, as Russell thought of it, constructionist) aim.
With the new tools of logic, we are to show how all meaningful thought and language
can be constructed out of experience.
In the 1911 ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, Russell
distinguished between two kinds of knowledge, a distinction he acquired from James’s
Principles of Psychology and then built upon in a very non-Jamesian way.5 Knowledge
5
Moore in some undated lecture notes on metaphysics, notes that both Russell and James make use of
this distinction, Cambridge University Library Add 8875 13/39/33/1. See Proops (2014) for an excellent
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by acquaintance is knowledge in which I have ‘a direct cognitive relation’ with the
object of the proposition known. I ‘am directly aware’ of it (CP 6: 148, 1911). We have
here something akin to Moore’s intuition—we can know a simple object by being directly acquainted with it. What I am directly acquainted with is not, as the idealist would
have it, ‘part of the subject’—part of me. Russell says that only ‘the most desperate
contortions’ could prevent that idealist position from leading to solipsism—to the
conclusion that only I and my mental states exist. Russell wants to keep the external
world and ‘to preserve the dualism of subject and object’ (CP 6: 148, 1911). Knowledge
by acquaintance is a two-term relation between a subject and an object. We are directly
acquainted with ‘sense-data’—noises, colours, etc.—that are capable of existing unobserved (RSP: 5, 7).6
Russell extends this view of acquaintance to cover cases in which the object ‘is not
actually before my mind, provided it has been before my mind, and will be again whenever occasion arises’. And it is not only these ‘particulars’ with which Russell thinks we
can be directly acquainted; he thinks we are also aware (‘though not quite in the same
sense’) of universals, such as concepts, relations, and predicates (CP 6: 149–50, 1911).
Knowledge by description is knowledge of ‘the so-and-so’, when we know there is
an object answering to a description, but we are not, or not always, directly
acquainted with it. I can make a judgement or have a belief about Julius Caesar, even
though I have never been directly acquainted with him. I only know him by description, by invoking a mass of historical knowledge. But if we are to judge, for instance,
that Caesar was assassinated, ‘we can only be assured of the truth of our judgment in
virtue of something with which we are acquainted—usually a testimony read or
heard’ (CP 6: 153, 1911). All descriptions, including proper names and place names,
‘start from some one or more particulars with which we are acquainted’ (CP 6: 153,
1911). Thus Russell’s principle of acquaintance is this: ‘Every proposition which we
can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are
acquainted’ (CP 6: 154, 1911, emphasis removed). At this stage in his thought,
Russell exhibits an unvarnished optimism that our ordinary beliefs, as well as their
normative statuses—especially truth and error—can be accounted for in terms of
knowledge by acquaintance.
Also in 1911, Russell started to attach the labels ‘analytic realism’ and ‘logical atomism’7 to his position, and it is this extension that is anti-Jamesian. For we have seen that
James, like Peirce, was insistent that what we are acquainted with, or what impinges
account of the historical connection between Russell’s distinction and James’s, as well as the similarities and
the differences.
6
Strictly, Russell reserves the term ‘sense-data’ for only those sensory qualities that are actually perceived by a mind; he describes ‘those objects which have the same metaphysical and physical status as
sense-data, without necessarily being data to any mind’ as ‘sensibilia’ (RSP: 7).
7
Because there are subtle differences between Russell’s logical atomism and Wittgenstein’s Tractarian
position, I will use ‘logical atomism’ for Russell’s (evolving) picture, and ‘logical analyst’ for the problematik
shared by Russell, the Tractarian Wittgenstein, Moore, and the Vienna Circle. I will continue to use ‘atomic’
and ‘simple’ interchangeably.
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upon us, is an interpretation. Russell, on the other hand, thought that the connection
between the mind and the world was direct and less mediated. He says:
The philosophy which seems to me closest to the truth can be called ‘analytic realism.’ It is realist, because it claims that there are non-mental entities and that cognitive relations are external
relations, which establish a direct link between the subject and a possibly non-mental object. It
is analytic, because it claims that the existence of the complex depends on the existence of the
simple, and not vice versa, and that the constituent of a complex, taken as a constituent, is absolutely identical with itself as it is when we do not consider its relations. This philosophy is therefore an atomistic philosophy.
[CP 6: 133, 1911]8
These labels capture both an epistemological thesis about our knowledge of the world
and a methodological prescription for philosophy. The methodological claim, shared
by Russell, Moore, and the Tractarian Wittgenstein (at least, as, we shall see, before the
move that declared his own preceding logical analysis nonsense) is that philosophy
must proceed by logical analysis—an analysis that bottoms out in something. The
­philosopher must show how concepts in want of explanation can be analysed or
reduced into their constituent simples, which, in turn, can be shown to refer to simple
existents in the world.
This methodological claim presupposes a substantive metaphysical assumption
contrary to that of the idealist—namely, that it is the atomic objects that are metaphysically fundamental, rather than any whole made up of them. A concept is to be analysed or defined by reconstructing it in a ‘minimum vocabulary’. By this process—and
this is the epistemological thesis—we can (ideally) attain knowledge of truths about
atomic, simple entities, the fundamental constituents of reality, from which all truths
about complexes derive. As he was to put it later, in the 1918 course of lectures in
London that became The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: ‘you can get down in theory, if
not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and . . . those simples
have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else’ (PLA: 234).
The epistemological thesis is supposed to solve the most general and pressing
problem for empiricists—to say just how we can know truths that go beyond what is
directly given to us by our senses. On Russell’s view, the world consists of logical
atoms, such as little patches of colour and their properties. Together these atoms
and their properties combine to make more complex objects. Russell’s solution to
the empiricist problem of knowledge is to argue that we do not arrive by inference
at knowledge of entities such as enduring physical objects—at least, not by any
inference that requires substantial (i.e. non-analytic) premises not themselves
known by acquaintance. Complex entities like physical objects or other minds are
logical constructions from the immediately given entities of sensation, so that the
8
This is perhaps the origin of the term ‘analytic philosophy’. But while the label is still widely used, the
method or position to which Russell took it to refer has pretty much disappeared. Indeed, it is no longer
clear what we mean by it, or even whether we mean anything precise by it at all.
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data yielded by acquaintance in a given case are simply ‘defined as constituting’ the
complex object in question (PLA: 237). The way out of the empiricist quandary
about knowledge is to see:
[that] our world is not wholly a matter of inference. There are things that we know without
asking the opinion of men of science. If you are too hot or too cold, you can be perfectly aware
of this fact without asking the physicist what heat and cold consist of . . . We may give the name
‘data’ to all the things of which we are aware without inference.
[MPD: 23]
Russell has shifted so that ‘data’ seem to mean immediately known truths—for
instance, that I am too hot—rather than colour patches and such like. Nonetheless, he
continues to maintain that we are directly acquainted with these data. We construct
enduring physical objects and other complex objects out of sense-data, and thus there
is no intractable problem of our knowledge of them. For Russell, ‘the supreme maxim
in scientific philosophizing is this: Whenever possible, logical constructions are to be
substituted for inferred entities.’9 We must not simply infer, taking a leap beyond the
data we know by acquaintance, that complexes such as the external world or other
minds exist, but rather we must derive these claims from truths about the sensible particulars into which these complexes can be analysed.
This analytical method also aims to bring to light the logical interrelations between
various concepts, displaying—and so allowing us to eliminate—vague, unclear, or
redundant aspects of the original concept, belief, or theory. Once a proposition is analysed we have clarity—we have an isomorphism between the structure of the proposition and the structure of the fact that would make it true (PLA: 166–8). Analysis has
the benefit of making the metaphysical commitments of our theories transparent as
their concepts are reduced to more fundamental ones. In this vein Russell says: ‘the
point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating,
and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it’ (PLA: 172).
Analysis makes clear the consequences, perhaps surprising, of the beliefs we find so
obvious. Russell might have turned his claim around with equal merit: the point of
philosophy is to take our paradoxical-seeming concepts and show which of them can
be analysed into something simple and believable, and which cannot. That is, analysis
also has the potential to reveal many of the paradoxes and thorny problems that exercise us to be wholly unnecessary, or at least capable of being supplanted by something
less problematic, by showing that they do not correspond to facts at all.
Another way of describing the project of analysis is to say that it aims to identify the
smallest number of basic concepts and vocabulary needed to accurately describe the
world. The world, according to Russell, consists of a plurality of simple, independently
existing particulars—particulars that exhibit qualities and stand in relations. These
entities come together to form a layer of atomic facts, which consist either of a
9
RSP: 11, emphasis removed.
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­ articular exhibiting a quality, or of multiple particulars standing in a relation. These
p
atomic facts are combined into complex molecular facts describing complex objects,
dependent on those atomic facts and simple, basic entities. A logically ideal language
would describe all such combinations using, besides logical connectives, only words
representing the constituents of atomic facts. This simple language would mirror the
world as it really is.
Hence, a theory of truth comes along with the logical analyst project. An ‘atomic
proposition’ consists of a predicate representing a quality or relation, along with proper
names, each representing an individual. The truth or falsity of an atomic proposition is
a matter of its getting right the corresponding atomic fact. At least in its strongest
articulation, and at least in principle, logical atomism aimed to provide certainty of all
truths given acquaintance with all the atomic ones: ‘Given all true atomic propositions,
together with the fact that they are all [the true atomic propositions there are], every
other true proposition can theoretically be deduced by logical methods’ (IPM 2: xv).
All of this goes against the grain of pragmatism. Russell’s epistemological project is a
foundationalist one.10 A set of problems dogs any such project, and Russell set out to
solve them. For instance, the logical analyst must tell us how we should understand
apparently meaningful sentences such as ‘The present King of France is bald’, whose
subject has a grammatical structure in virtue of which it appears to refer to something,
but for which the only obvious candidate referent does not actually exist. Do we have
to admit non-existent entities into our ontology? Russell’s answer is famous and
ingenious. He analyses the sentence into ‘There exists one and only one x such that x is a
present King of France, and x is bald.’ That is a meaningful statement that happens to be
false. And by showing us how to treat ‘present King of France’ as a disguised predicate,
Russell does away with the description’s apparent referential function. No reference to
non-existent entities is required to explain its semantic contribution to the sentence.
But Russell’s model requires that every sentence be made true or false by a fact, and it
is not clear which truth-maker we can identify for this sentence, or any false sentence,
for that matter. On Russell’s view, the truth or falsity of a belief is a matter of its relationship to a mind-independent reality. But what is it that a false belief (or a true negative
belief) relates to—a negative fact? This issue was discussed extensively in print and
also at the Moral Sciences Club. The minutes for 24 November 1916, for instance, show
the group worrying that a false judgement ‘has nothing as its object’.11 Russell vacillated
on whether his theory required objective falsehoods and/or negative facts. Early on he
thought that a false proposition is simply lacking a corresponding fact, since a ‘view
which denies objective falsehoods is, on the face of it, more plausible’. But he recognized that ‘the difficulties in its way are formidable, and may turn out to be insuperable’
(CP 5: 453, 1907). He seems to have concluded that this was indeed the case, for in The
10
It is foundationalist, even if Russell is usually careful to state that it is only in theory, not in practice,
that our acquaintance with atomic facts will suffice for certainty concerning molecular or complex
propositions, and even if it may not have been a stable feature of all his work.
11
Cambridge University Library: UA Min. IX.42.
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Philosophy of Logical Atomism he suggested that some facts might be negative—that is,
if ‘R(a, b)’ is false, there is such a fact as a’s not bearing relation R to b. That is an odd
thing for a realist ontology to include—as Russell notes, it fills us with ‘a certain repugnance’ (PLA: 187). Hence, his rather qualified support for negative facts: ‘I really only
ask that you should not dogmatize. I do not say positively that there are, but there may
be’ (PLA: 187).
Another problem Russell grappled with had to do with terms such as ‘and’—what do
they stand for?12 And what about propositions of the form ‘All F’s are such-and-such’?
If there are a finite number of terms—all voters in Cambridge, for instance—then in
principle we could be directly acquainted with all of them. But if there are an infinite
number of terms—all numbers, for instance—the logical atomist has a problem. We
are not directly acquainted with all numbers or all instances of a law of nature, and so it
is not clear how we could ever know universal generalizations or the laws of nature to
be true or false. Russell suggests that ‘there must be primitive knowledge of general
propositions’ (PLA: 206). Of course, it’s equally unclear how such primitive knowledge
could be logical-analyst-friendly, but Russell just moves on.13
Nonetheless, the waves of Cambridge analysis gathered force and rolled into twentieth-century analytic philosophy through the work of the Vienna Circle. Their logical
empiricism is often seen as a tsunami that washed away the homegrown pragmatism
when it hit the shores of America. I have argued that this is a poor interpretation of this
intellectual encounter. The best of logical empiricism and the best of pragmatism had
much in common, and eventually some of the logical empiricists, having failed to solve
the problem of truth, turned to the pragmatist view of it. But in Cambridge England,
in the first decades of the 1900s, the contrast between logical analysis and pragmatism
loomed large, and proponents of the former were confident that their view would carry
the day.
Those proponents included, to various extents at various times, Moore and
Wittgenstein. We shall see that Wittgenstein was to abandon the ship around 1929, in
part because the intricate theory of knowledge Russell had built on the foundations of
relations of acquaintance was becoming what Robert Tully calls ‘an embarrassing sort
of ruin’ (1993: 187). We shall see that some of the crumbling bricks in the foundation
were identified by Ramsey. We shall also see that Ramsey was in tune with James’s more
general objection to the logical analyst picture. James thought that the demand for
certainty embedded in their foundationalism is untrue to life. He expresses his opinion
rather too strongly in a 1909 letter to Schiller:
I give Russell up! That a man of his years should be so childish as to ignore the existence of
probable reasoning, and the frequent need and right to decide somehow, puts him out of the
pale of serious discussion. Moreover he is rabid on the subject of the Will to Believe . . . and
smells it where it doesn’t exist . . . Good bye, Russell!
[CWJ 12: 379, 1909]
12
See PoM: §71. 13 I’m indebted to Griffin Klemick here.
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He writes to Peirce, also in 1909:
I am a-logical, if not illogical, and glad to be so when I find Bertie Russell trying to excogitate
what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower
and the known. Ass!
[CWJ 12: 397, 1909]
Russell wanted knowledge of a truth independent of our epistemic situations. In the
1910 paper ‘On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood’, he makes it clear that he is not
interested in linking the meaning of the truth predicate to how we use it in practice:
‘There is the question: “How is the word ‘truth’ properly used?” This is a question for
the dictionary, not for philosophy’ (CP 6: 116, 1910). In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he
puts his need for truth of a more transcendent sort thus: ‘the worship of my life . . . is
Truth. That is the something greater than Man that seems to me most capable of giving
greatness to Man. That is why I hate pragmatism’ (CP 6: liii, 1911). And that is why
James hated logical atomism.
This difference between the philosophical temperaments of James and Russell is
nicely captured in some letters between the two in 1908. James wrote to Russell as he
was returning from England to America, apologizing for not being able to see him. He
objects to what he sees as the unjust treatment Russell had given Pragmatism: ‘My
dying words to you are “Say good-by to mathematical logic if you wish to preserve your
relations with concrete realities!” ’ (CWJ 12: 103, 1908). Russell made his reply in a
letter to the logician Philip Jourdain: ‘I would much rather, of the two, preserve my
relations with symbolic logic.’14
4.4 Russell’s Attack on Pragmatism
The clashing frameworks of the Cambridge England analysts and the Cambridge
Massachusetts pragmatists sparked Russell to write something critical on pragmatism
every year from 1908 to 1912. He took pragmatism’s ‘cardinal’ and ‘genuinely new’
point to be its theory of truth (P: 260–1), and thus, when he refers to pragmatism by
name, he almost always talks about truth. He seems to have read all that James and
Schiller wrote, and he knew Dewey’s work. He reviewed Dewey’s 1903 Studies in
Logical Theory and his 1919 Essays in Experimental Logic. He wrote to Morrell after
meeting Dewey at Harvard in 1914 that ‘he is a good man but not a very clever one’
(CP 6: 258, 1914). In the 1920s his view of Dewey deteriorated. Again to Morrell, he
wrote: ‘In 1914, I liked Dewey better than any other academic American: now I can’t
stand him’ (CP 6: 258, 1921). As for Schiller, Russell also uses strong language: he is ‘a
pathetic fool’ (A: 195).
I have noted that Peirce had reviewed Russell’s Principles of Mathematics along with
Welby’s book in the Nation. He says of Russell: ‘That he should continue these most
14
Russell to Jourdain, 20 October 1908; see Grattan-Guinness (1977: 111).
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severe and scholastic labors for so long, bespeaks a grit and industry, as well as a high
intelligence’ (N: 1: 143). While he praises the book for being ‘a convenient introduction
to the remarkable researches into the logic of mathematics that have been made during
the last sixty years’, he spends the bulk of the review and the bulk of his good words, on
Welby. Schiller wrote to Welby that he thought ‘B. Russell was hugely annoyed’15 about
the review. But that irritation did not stop Russell, at least in retrospect, from being
much kinder about Peirce than he was about the other pragmatists. In 1959 he tells us:
‘beyond doubt . . . he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever’ (1959b: 276). And in 1946,
Russell remarks that he did indeed read Chance, Love and Logic, perhaps even shortly
after it came out in 1923:
Peirce . . . gave to the world only fragments of his system, with the result that he has been very
thoroughly misunderstood, not least by those who professed to be his admirers. I am—I
­confess to my shame—an illustration of the undue neglect from which Peirce has suffered
in Europe. I heard of him first from William James when I stayed with that eminent man in
Harvard in 1896. But I read nothing of him until 1900, when I had become interested
in extending symbolic logic to relations, and learnt from Schroder's Algebra der Logik that
Peirce had treated of the subject. Apart from his work on this topic, I had until recently read
nothing of him except the volume entitled by its editors Chance, Love and Logic.
[F: xv]
But Peirce’s work always remained in the shadows for Russell. He was focused, as far
as pragmatism was concerned, on the theory of truth held by James and Schiller. James
and Schiller wrote to each other that Russell’s objection to pragmatism and especially
to the will-to-believe idea ‘is at bottom emotional & the result of a revolt against his
religious education’ (CWJ 12: 393, 1909). But we shall see that this is unfair. While
Russell was certainly capable of being emotional and careless in his writing on pragmatism, his objections often have the cold steel of excellent reasoning behind them.
Many of his arguments are based on the claim, as Jane Duran puts it, that James ‘does
violence to the English language’ (1994: 32). This has to be a troubling thought for the
pragmatist who is committed to keeping philosophical notions closely tied to practice
and use. Russell thinks that what we mean by ‘truth’ is simply not what James and
Schiller say we mean.
In 1907 James published Pragmatism. Russell reviewed it almost immediately, with
Russell’s initially ‘plain’ title replaced by the editor of The Albany Review with the
punchy ‘Transatlantic “Truth” ’. When Russell reprinted the paper, he called it ‘William
James’s Conception of Truth’. He begins the review by noting that he and James are
both empiricists and hence are in broad agreement. But the book ‘is like a bath with hot
water running in so slowly that you don’t know when to scream’ (JCT: 472). On
Russell’s understanding, James argues that ‘a belief is to be judged true in so far as the
practical consequences of its adoption are good’ (JCT: 475). James seems to define
15
York University Clara Thomas Archives, 1970-010/14(7), Schiller to Welby, 26 November 1903.
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truth as what is useful, and this is what so upset Russell and the other Cambridge
England philosophers.16
Russell’s first argument hinges on the difficulty of determining whether a belief
‘pays’ or has useful consequences:
We must suppose that this means that the consequences of entertaining the belief are better
than those of rejecting it. In order to know this, we must know what are the consequences of
entertaining it, and what are the consequences of rejecting it; we must know also what consequences are good, what bad, what consequences are better, and what worse.
[JCT: 476–7]
This is a very tall order, which Russell immediately illustrates with two examples. First,
the consequences of believing the doctrine of the Catholic faith might be that the belief
makes a person happy ‘at the expense of a certain amount of stupidity and priestly
domination’ (JCT: 477). It is unclear how we are to weigh these benefits and burdens
against each other. Secondly, the effects of Rousseau’s doctrines were far-reaching—
Europe is a different place from what it would have been without them (not least
because of the role of those doctrines in leading to the French Revolution). But how
can we isolate from the whole history of Europe after Rousseau all and only those
events that are effects of his views? And even if we could do that, whether we take these
effects to be good or bad will itself depend on our political views. The question of
whether the consequences of believing something are good or bad is an extraordinarily difficult one: often much more difficult to settle, Russell suggests, than the simple
question of whether it is true.
In a related objection, Russell challenges James’s use of the words ‘works’ or ‘pays’.
Pragmatism is an extension of the method of the inductive sciences, and Russell commends it for being such. But pragmatism, he says, misapplies this method in its understanding of what ‘works’:
When science says that a hypothesis works, it means that from this hypothesis we can deduce a
number of propositions which are verifiable . . . But when pragmatism says that a hypothesis
works, it means that the effects of believing it are good, including among the effects . . . the emotions entailed by it or its perceived consequences, and the actions to which we are prompted by
it or its perceived consequences. This is a totally different conception of ‘working’, and one for
which the authority of scientific procedure cannot be invoked.
[JCT: 484]
Russell reads this conception of ‘working’ in ‘The Will to Believe’. Had he focused on
James’s other work, he would have seen that James often looks at the consequences of p
obtaining, rather than the consequences of believing that p obtains.17 But fair or not,
his accusation stuck to James like glue.
16
Braithwaite, for another instance, when he was an undergraduate, said that James had ‘a contempt for
truth’ (1921: 605).
17
See Jackman (forthcoming).
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Finally, Russell accuses the pragmatist of conflating the criterion of truth with the
meaning of truth. He illustrates: if you wish to consult a certain book in the library, you
check the catalogue—but a book’s being in the catalogue is not the same thing as its
being in the library. In a similar way, utility is a mark or a criterion of truth, but it is not
identical to truth. Just as what we want is for the book to be in the library and not
merely in the catalogue, what we want is for beliefs to be actually true, not merely to
work for us. Russell considers, for example, the belief in the existence of other minds:
if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is ‘true’ in the
pragmatist’s sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should
profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not
that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should
in fact exist.
[JCT: 479]
James, Russell argues, ‘ignores’ the meaning commonly given to the word ‘true’ (JCT:
478). We have seen that Peirce also made this point against James. When we search for
the truth about some phenomenon, we do not desire to hold onto a belief simply
because it works for us. We desire to hold onto a belief that works for us partly because
its working for us is a sign that the belief is connected to the facts.
James had thought that because he and Russell were both hostile to absolute idealism, he would find in Russell a sympathetic ear for his pragmatist account of truth. He
could not have been more mistaken. Russell criticizes, on similar grounds, both neoHegelian idealism and pragmatism—both allow the human standpoint to play too
great a role in truth. While James was preparing a reply to Russell’s first piece (James’s
‘Two English Critics’ in the 1909 The Meaning of Truth), Russell published ‘Pragmatism’.
James and Schiller were at the time writing frequent letters to each other about Russell.
This is James to Schiller in 1909:
I, as you know, despise logic . . . and I think that if one wants to see what sorry tricks it will play
with a man of genius one need only read over again, as I have recently done, the epistemological contributions of Bertrand Russell. Really pathological stuff, in my opinion.
[CWJ 12: 175, 1909]
The two empiricists James and Russell seemed to be repelling each other farther and
farther away.
Russell’s ‘Pragmatism’ is a long review of six books on ‘the genuinely new philosophy’ of pragmatism, including James’s Pragmatism and The Will to Believe, Schiller’s
Humanism and Studies in Humanism, and Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory (P: 260).
Early in the review he says that Peirce was the originator of the name ‘pragmatism’:
It was applied by him to the doctrine that the significance of a thought lies in the actions to
which it leads. In order to estimate the difference between two different beliefs about the same
matter, he maintained, we ought to consider what difference in conduct would result according
as we adopted the one belief or the other. If no difference would result, the two beliefs are not
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effectively different. Mr. Peirce’s doctrine, however, remained sterile until it was taken up twenty
years later by William James, who, while retaining the word ‘pragmatism’, gave it a more sweeping
significance. The full-fledged philosophy is to be attributed to him and Dr. Schiller jointly.
[P: 261]
Russell knew enough about Peirce in 1909 to see that he tied meaning to action. We
shall see this point picked up by Ramsey, who made it fertile.
Russell’s review then starts in on James’s argument concerning the will to believe.
Russell takes James to hold that in certain cases, it is right to believe wholeheartedly in
one of two alternatives, even when there is no evidence as to which of them is true.
When in moral and religious perplexity, for instance, we are compelled to come to
some decision, since inaction is as much a decision as action. Our passions and emotions must decide on the option.
Russell takes the idea of the will to believe to be ‘an almost indispensable preliminary to the acceptance of pragmatism; and conversely pragmatism, when once accepted,
is found to give the full justification of the will to believe’ (P: 263). He thinks the idea
goes against common sense, and that such a verdict constitutes an indictment of pragmatism. For one thing, in the example of religious belief, the presumed premise that
there is no evidence for or against religion is questionable, in Russell’s view. But even if
it were to be granted, it does not warrant James’s conclusions.
He points to what he takes to be ‘a confusion which runs through the whole pragmatist account of knowledge, namely the confusion between acting on an hypothesis and
believing it’ (P: 263–4). At this stage of his thought, Russell is quite clearly set against
bringing the idea of dispositions into his account of belief. The idea that belief is forced
whenever a practical decision is forced stands ‘contrary to many of the plainest facts of
daily life’:
If, in walking along a country road, I come to a fork where there is no signpost and no passer-by,
I have, from the point of view of action, a ‘forced’ option. I must take one road or other if I am
to have any chance of reaching my destination; and I may have no evidence whatever as to which
is the right road. I then act on one or other of the two possible hypotheses, until I find some one
of whom I can ask the way. But I do not believe either hypothesis. My action is either right or
wrong, but my belief is neither, since I do not entertain either of the two possible beliefs. The
pragmatist assumption that I believe the road I have chosen to be the right one is erroneous.
[P: 264]
Russell thinks that to ‘infer belief from action, in the crude way involved in the assumption that we must “either accept this truth or go without it”, is to ignore the plain fact
that our actions are constantly based on probabilities’ (P: 264). This holds especially for
our actions in scientific practice, when we test working hypotheses without believing
them. Rather, entertain them:
Pragmatists tell us that, in such cases, the initial unverified belief is a necessary condition for
the subsequent established theory, and by so doing they make out a case for the usefulness of
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believing before we have evidence. This is, however, a mistaken analysis of the state of mind of
a man who is testing an hypothesis. All that is required, and all that occurs among careful
investigators, is the belief that the hypothesis has a greater or smaller chance of being true, and
for this belief there is probably sufficient evidence.
[P: 264]
James’s distinction between full belief and no belief at all is ‘far too crude’ (P: 265). We
can have partial belief, based on probabilities. It is here and only here that we might
hope that a belief is true and be comforted by it, to the extent that it is probable. Russell
adds that we will be less prone to persecuting others if we take our religious beliefs to
be probable, as opposed to certainly true.
Russell was writing this in 1909, before his substantial introduction to Peirce’s thought.
While we have seen that Peirce also leans toward James’s reliance on full belief, he was
more cognizant about the need to see that belief comes in degrees. But more importantly, Peirce is not open to Russell’s objection because he argued that the hypotheses
we arrive at by abduction and then test by induction are not to be believed simply on
the basis of their abductive support. They should merely be placed on the docket to
be tried.
We have seen the fork in the road metaphor already (in Peirce) and it will re-occur
again (in Ramsey). In Russell’s use of it here, he fails to accurately capture the dispositional account of belief in its best instantiation. For that account does not hold
that to act as if A is true suffices for believing A. If we follow Peirce in treating the
account as a partial constitutive claim, then we will not mistake a necessary condition for a sufficient one. For the dispositional account of belief, at least as Peirce and
Ramsey interpret it, says only that part of what it is for you to believe A is that you
would act on it in various ways, given other aspects of your mental state and background circumstances. The pragmatist should agree with Russell that the walker
does not form a belief simply by picking a road to follow. Peirce would put it thus:
he will, and should, go on instinct until he has some evidence, at which time he will
naturally and rightly form a belief.
James may not, however, avoid the confusion highlighted by Russell. He may indeed
infer from the premise that the action is forced the conclusion that the belief is forced;
he may indeed take the need to act as if p to amount to the need to believe p. Again,
Peirce (and Santayana) levelled Russellian objections to James. Peirce thought his view
amounted to: ‘Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did’
(CP 5. 377, 1877). Indeed, even when James has the conditional going in the right direction (from belief to action), he sometimes fails to honour the distinction between
believing and entertaining a hypothesis. Russell thus puts his finger on one of the central debates in pragmatism in his objection to James’s bringing ‘the emotional satisfaction of the belief itself ’ into his accounts of warrant and truth. As I’ve suggested,
however, there is a pragmatist view positing a more plausible connection between
belief and action that Russell’s objections do not endanger.
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Russell then leaves The Will to Believe and launches into James’s account of truth
more generally, with ample quotation to support his case. The account is not all bad, in
his view. For one thing, Russell approves of the fact that James accepts that the dictionary definition of ‘truth’ is ‘the agreement of ideas with reality’, as well as of his observation that this definition does not take us very far until we know what we mean by
‘agreement’ and ‘reality’ (P: 268). Also on the positive side of the ledger, pragmatism
sees that induction, though it cannot give us certainty, underlies all of science and
mathematics (P: 271).
But Russell objects, as he did in ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’, to the
Jamesian position that to say that a belief is true means that it is profitable or leads to
the satisfaction of desire, as well as to the Schillerian position that a true belief is one
that furthers the purpose which led to the question. Pragmatism, in Russell’s view,
makes psychology paramount (P: 270). Unwarranted emphasis is placed on what people
take to be true, not what is in fact true. Russell thinks that the existence of the external
world, and all sorts of facts about it, ‘must be “true” in some other sense than that the
consequences of supposing them true are satisfactory’ (P: 271). He reiterates the point
that the scientist takes a belief to work when it agrees with the observed facts or when
all its verifiable consequences are shown to be true, not when it gives ‘emotional satisfaction’ or ‘satisfies our aspirations’ (P: 272). While it may be the case that desire influences belief, to suggest that desire is part of what makes a belief true is to introduce an
irrelevance into the meaning of truth. Desires may have a causal connection with a
belief that something is true, but that does not entail that the definition of ‘true’ makes
reference to desires. ‘When we say that a belief is true the thought we wish to convey is
not the same thought as when we say that the belief furthers our purposes’ (P: 274).
We have seen that in ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’ Russell notes that there
is an ambiguity in the word ‘meaning’, and he suggests that James conflates the criterion of truth with the meaning of truth. He amplifies this argument in ‘Pragmatism’.
A thing can mean another when it is a sign of it, in the way a cloud means rain. Another
sense of ‘meaning’ is a dictionary definition, or a translation of a word from one
­language to another—for example, ‘pluie means rain’ (P: 274). Russell thinks that the
pragmatist confuses these two senses of meaning. But is this a confusion or an intentional move on the pragmatist’s part? We have seen that Peirce argued that the pragmatist must not take his theory of truth to be an analysis or a definition of truth. Rather,
the pragmatist, after accepting a definition of truth, will want to elucidate another
aspect of the meaning of truth—the aspect that links truth to belief, inquiry, and expe­
rience. One does not find this distinction so finely drawn in James or Schiller. James
states that the definition of ‘truth’ is the correspondence definition, but he does not do
the work that Peirce does in telling us how the pragmatist can hold onto that definition
while linking the meaning of truth to something more human. We shall see that
Ramsey struggles with the same question, since—against Russell, but with Peirce—
Ramsey does not think that a definition of ‘truth’ can do all the philosophical work that
needs doing. We still need to speak to truth’s connection to action and human purpose,
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while recognizing the legitimate pull of the correspondence definition. So for Peirce
and Ramsey, at least, there is in fact no identification of these two senses of ‘meaning’—
a definition of truth and a statement of how we evaluate the truth-worthiness of a
belief. The move is intentional and designed to be not an equivocation.
After making the above worthwhile contributions to the debate about James,
Russell cannot resist drawing a caricature of pragmatism. He says:
We may now restate the pragmatist theory of truth in bald outline, giving due prominence to
presuppositions of which pragmatists themselves are perhaps not fully conscious. Their major
premiss is: Beliefs which persist after a doubt has been raised are true. Their minor premiss is:
Beliefs which are found to be serviceable persist after a doubt has been raised. Hence it follows
that such beliefs are true.
[P: 276]
Again: ‘The scepticism embodied in pragmatism is that which says “Since all beliefs are
absurd, we may as well believe what is most convenient” ’ (P: 280). But this is really
unfair. No pragmatist should, or does, go near that thought.
Russell’s bad humour at this point is sparked by Schiller’s metaphysics—the idea of
‘making reality’, which can also be found in James. Russell aligns this view with
Hegelian idealism and takes umbrage at the suggestion that our will and our beliefs can
make facts. Indeed, he chalks up pragmatism’s popularity to recent trends regarding
democracy, which he sees ‘in almost every page of William James’s writing’—‘an impatience of authority, an unwillingness to condemn wide-spread prejudices, a tendency
to decide philosophical questions by putting them to the vote’ (P: 281). James is now
under full attack:
A thing which simply is true, whether you like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by ‘hard facts’, when
he has humanized truth, and made it, like the police force in a democracy, the servant of the
people instead of their master.
[P: 281]
Russell links this tendency to think of human beings as all-powerful to an American
focus on optimism, virility, energy, and hope that all obstacles can be overcome, with
the correlative conviction that failure to overcome them is a mark of ‘laziness or pusillanimity’ (P: 282). Unfortunately for the English reception of pragmatism, he is able to
march out plenty of quotes from James and Schiller to prop up some of this interpretation. And in this connection Russell makes a point which we would do well to bear in
mind.18 On those views, on which there really is no standard of truth apart from a
Jamesian kind of success, ‘Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of . . . truth’
(P: 282). If truth is not grounded in objective reality, but only in what works for particular individuals or cultures in the short-term, then might will turn out to be right.
18
I made this point in Truth, Politics, Morality (Misak 2000), not realizing that Russell got there almost
a hundred years before me.
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We have seen that James, when at his most careful, was concerned to characterize
truth as something that is of human value, without reducing true belief to what this or
that human finds valuable at this or that time. He often expressed regret that he did not
always make this clear, and he tried to correct the resulting misunderstanding by
arguing that, contrary to his critics’ understanding of him, his claim in Pragmatism
was that the true is ‘the expedient’, but the expedient ‘in the long run and on the whole,
of course’ (P: 106). That is, true beliefs are beliefs that survive because they deserve to
survive.19 Some of the essays in The Will to Believe, especially ‘The Moral Philosopher
and the Moral Life’, show James at his best. But Russell was not inclined to be charitable
when it came to the pragmatists on the topic of truth.
To make matters worse, when James tries to rebut Russell’s charges, he does not
always allay the worries. His response in ‘Two English Critics’ could not have helped,
and we shall see how Ramsey worried over it:
Mr. Russell . . . joins the army of those who inform their readers that according to the pragmatist definition of the word ‘truth’ the belief that A exists may be ‘true,’ even when A does not
exist. This is the usual slander, repeated to satiety by our critics. They forget that in any concrete
account of what is denoted by ‘truth’ in human life, the word can only be used relatively to some
particular trower. Thus, I may hold it true that Shakespere [sic] wrote the plays that bear his
name, and may express my opinion to a critic. If the critic be both a pragmatist and a baconian,
he will in his capacity of pragmatist see plainly that the workings of my opinion, I being what
I am, make it perfectly true for me, while in his capacity of baconian he still believes that
Shakespere [sic] never wrote the plays in question. But most anti-pragmatist critics take the
word ‘truth’ as something absolute, and easily play on their reader's readiness to treat his own
truths as the absolute ones.
[MT: 147]
At other times, James provides a much better response. In a letter to Russell, railing
against ‘Transatlantic “Truth” ’, he says: ‘no pragmatist forgets that concretely our wish
to square ourselves with hard fact may be irreconcilable with our other wishes’ (CWJ
12: 220, 1909). Read sympathetically, and ignoring passages such as the one about
Shakespeare, James can be seen to be arguing that a belief is true when it satisfies both
personal needs and the requirements of objective things.20 And he and his ally Knox
discuss Russell’s ‘demand’ for a ‘verbal definition’, as opposed to a ‘real’ definition,
which can be ‘applied to concrete cases within our experience’ (CWJ 12: 352, 1909).
Knox thinks that much of Russell’s misreading of pragmatism is a failure to see that the
pragmatist is after the latter, not the former. But these better replies were often buried
in letters and those that were in print were ignored by Russell and Moore.
The Jamesian conception of truth did not stand up to Russell’s onslaught. James
would have been better off consistently staying with Peirce’s arguments. When we look
at our practices, we find that no sense can be made of the idea of a sentence or belief
19
20
See Kappy Suckiel (1982: 105–15) for this way of putting the point.
This is Dewey’s phrasing, which he came to after noting the tensions in James’s work (1908: 96).
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c­ orresponding isomorphically to items in a totally transcendent reality. But while such
a correspondence theory is not defensible, the idea behind it has power and must be
retained. Our practice of inquiry rests on the regulative assumptions that reality is that
which is independent of our wills, and that our beliefs must be settled by a method that
is not extraneous to the facts. Peirce was as adamant as Russell about pressing James on
these matters. There are standards for truth; there is a reality that impinges upon us.
James and Schiller’s brand of pragmatism, which flirts with denying this, gave scope
for Russell, with his formidable intellect and his rhetorical talents, to make pragmatism look utterly unattractive and dangerous.
After the death of James in 1910, Russell’s polemic lost some of its edge. He makes
clear his sorrow at losing a personal friend, a loss felt more keenly because of the distance imposed by the ‘acute controversy’ of the final years (CP 6: 286, 1910). But while
the subsequent papers have a bit more of a tribute feel, their objections to James’s theory of truth hold steadily to the course Russell had set in ‘William James’s Conception
of Truth’ and ‘Pragmatism’.
4.5 Moore’s Contribution
As Timothy Sprigge notes, Moore seems to have lacked the respect Russell had for
James (1997: 127). And James returned, in spades, the lack of respect for Moore. His
letters are full of descriptions of him in the harshest terms. To take but one instance:
‘I wonder what makes every word that man writes fill me so with a feeling of offense on
behalf of human nature, insulted so to the full by his insufferable arrogance of manner’
(CWJ 11: 526, 1908).
Moore reviewed James’s Pragmatism in the 1907 Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society. The review is long, harsh, and laboured, with Moore repeatedly identifying
James’s main assertions as things that he is ‘anxious’ to say, picking them apart in a
repetitive way, finding ‘obvious objections’ to them (1907: 33). He takes James to be
‘particularly anxious to assert’ three things about truth: that true ideas are those that
are verifiable or work; that truth is not static and immutable; and that truth is in
some measure man-made (1907: 33). He cannot see how James could be offering
anything but a definition of truth, on which all our true beliefs are verifiable and
useful in the short-term, and all our ideas that are verifiable and useful in the shortterm are true.
Despite Moore’s unattractive tone, he makes some points that have to be addressed
by any pragmatist. First, he deals with verifiability. He agrees that all completely verified statements are true, but he objects to the claim that all true statements are verifiable. There are plenty of statements the evidence for which has been destroyed, was
never recorded, or lies buried deep in the past. That a particular whist player had the
seven of diamonds in his third hand last night is either true or false, despite there
now being no way of telling (1907: 36–8). We have seen Peirce try to deal with this
problem by arguing that the principle of bivalence is simply a regulative assumption of
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any inquiry in which we are engaged. James, however, either leaves the problem of
buried secrets hanging or, as Donaldson (forthcoming) suggests, falls back on the idea
that nature, and hence truth, is predetermined for some matters, such as science and
what the whist player had in his hand. This would seem, though, to be in tension with
his general account of truth, which is supposed to hold over all matters.
Moore adds to Russell’s interrogation of the linkage between the true and the useful.
And here he makes a number of strong objections. He argues that sometimes a true
belief will not be useful—it will positively be ‘in the way’ (1907: 44). And sometimes a
useful belief will not be true. Moreover, usefulness is a property that may come and go,
and hence James’s view entails that a belief that occurs at several different times may be
true at some of the times at which it occurs, and yet untrue at others (1907: 61). But the
idea that truth is not a stable property of beliefs but is mutable is an anathema:
Does he hold that the idea that Julius Caesar was murdered in the Senate-House, though true
now, may, at some future time cease to be true, if it should be more profitable to the lives of
future generations to believe that he died in his bed?
[1907: 70]
In a related objection, Moore takes on James’s claim that we make the truth: ‘I think he
certainly means to suggest that we not only make our true beliefs, but also that we make
them true’ (1907: 71–2). Moore thinks that it is crazy to suggest that my belief that p
makes it true that p. My (correct) belief that it rained today did not make it rain today.
Moore provides a number of illustrations that pull apart truth from usefulness,
including the following, which picks up on James’s will to believe argument:
It seems to me very difficult to be sure that the belief in an external hell has not been often
useful to many men, and yet it may be doubted whether this idea is true. And so, too, with the
belief in a happy life after death, or the belief in the existence of a God; it is, I think, very difficult to be sure that these beliefs have not been, and are not still, often useful, and yet it may be
doubted whether they are true.
[1907: 48]
He goes on to say that he is not at all sure that James wants to assert the misguided idea
that all our true beliefs are useful and all our useful beliefs are true (1907: 49). But this
is not a sudden charitable impulse toward James. For it is now that he gets nasty:
I think it is quite possible he would admit that they are [false], and would say that he never
meant either to assert or to imply the contrary. He complains that some of the critics of
Pragmatism are unwilling to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into the statements of
Pragmatists; and, perhaps, he would say that this is the case here. I certainly hope that he would.
I certainly hope he would say that these statements, to which I have objected, are silly. For it does
seem to me intensely silly to say that we can verify all our true ideas; intensely silly to say that
every one of our true ideas is at some time useful; intensely silly to say that every idea which is
ever useful is true. I hope Professor James would admit all these things to be silly, for if he and
other Pragmatists would admit even as much as this, I think a good deal would be gained.
[1907: 49]
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Moore goes on and on in this vein, concluding that James:
may protest, quite angrily, when a view is put before him in other words than his own, that he
never either meant or implied any such thing, and yet it may be possible to judge, from what he
says, that this very view, wrapped up in other words, was not only held by him but was precisely
what made his thoughts seem to him to be interesting and important.
[1907: 50]
He then assesses what James has insisted is his considered view—that truth is expedient, but expedient in the long run. Moore hopes that James is right, but thinks that such
prophecies are too difficult to make. In any event, Moore is simply unwilling to conclude that James meant to assert this more plausible position and sticks the implausible
position back onto him, providing textual evidence from James.
James, in a letter to Kallen, returns the snarky tone:
Poor childish Moore! . . . He is too weak & silly for any comment at all, so I wont waste a
minute on him. A monument to the folly of pretending to have no vision of things, but to
admit anything as possible and then select by ‘logic’ which is most probable! He crawls over
the outside of my lecture like a myopic ant over a building, seeing only the spot he touches,
tumbling into every microscopic crack, and not suspecting even that there is a centre or a
whole at all. Bah!
[CWJ 11: 538–9, 1908]
Thus was the state of the philosophical relationship between Cambridge Massachusetts
and Cambridge England as James and Peirce entered the last years of their lives. It
was as hostile as it could be.
Pragmatism came under some similar stresses in America, but it was the British
who did the most damage to pragmatism’s reputation. They seemed to cut off at the
knees the upstart theory of truth from across the Atlantic. We shall see that the story is
much more complicated, with Russell adopting some central pragmatist themes. There
is also an underappreciated similarity between Moore and pragmatism. Moore’s antipathy to pragmatism is strange, given that he was a defender of common sense, first as a
route to what is indubitable or known, and then as an argument against the sceptic. He
appeals to common sense at the same time James is making similar arguments. Moore
sets out his argument in both ‘Hume’s Philosophy’ (1909) and Some Main Problems
of Philosophy, delivered as lectures in 1910–11.21 For instance, in the former Moore
argues that:
The only proof that we do know external facts lies in the simple fact that we do know them.
And the sceptic can, with perfect internal consistency, deny that he does know any. But it can,
I think, be shown that he has no reason for denying it.
[1922 [1909]: 160]
In these lectures, he also quickly runs through his arguments against the pragmatist account of truth
(1953: 281–3).
21
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Not only can we conclude that we know external facts, but further, regarding the
question of which facts we really do know and which we are mistaken about, Moore
holds that we cannot prove any particular answer to be correct. Our common-sense
view of what we do and don’t know must serve as the benchmark for all our epistemological theorizing.
In a more sustained way, he argued in the 1925 ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ and
the 1939 ‘Proof of an External World’ that he (and other people) know a great many
things, ‘with certainty, to be true’—that he is a human being with a body and a fund of
experiences, that the earth and many three-dimensional things have existed for many
years, and so on (1959 [1925]: 33). In the later paper, his position was that his knowledge of such claims suffices to refute scepticism about the existence of the external
world. When he holds his hands up and asserts that ‘Here is one hand, and here is
another’, then ‘How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only
believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case!’ (1959 [1939]: 146). There is no need
for stronger proof than that which is given in cases like these to show that hands exist,
and countless other truisms. The falsity of scepticism is simply entailed by the truth of
the truisms. In order to dispute what Moore says he knows for certain, the disputer
would have to advance some evidence that he was mistaken, and that evidence would
have to outweigh Moore’s own evidence.
We have seen Peirce and James argue for a very similar position. Peirce’s critical
common-sensism has it that until there is a first-order reason to doubt the existence
of an external world, such doubts are paper or tin doubts. They are not the real
thing. Moore completely ignores James’s chapter on common-sense beliefs in
Pragmatism. And in Some Main Problems of Philosophy, in which Moore defends
common sense, he also attacks pragmatism. But James, even in the passages on
truth Moore so vehemently opposed, might be taken to be amplifying the pragmatist thoughts on common sense. His position on truth, that is, is close to Moore’s
view: our not having any real doubts about a claim like Here are hands! suggests that
we know that hands are here. True, there is no mention of a belief ’s ‘working’ by
Moore. But what else are his grounds for his common-sense beliefs? The belief in
the external world works, part of which consists in its fitting with all the evidence
and all our other beliefs, and so we are justified in taking it to be true. Of course,
Moore has to somehow square this stance with his view of truth, on which a belief ’s
working practically shouldn’t suffice as a justification for thinking it true. Given that
facts are totally mind-transcendent, why think that the way my belief that ‘here are
hands’ works so well for me should say anything at all about whether it’s a fact that
hands are here? Any tensions between the metaphysical realist and common-sense
strains in the pragmatist position are much weaker than they are in Moore’s. We
shall see these debates about common sense unfold further when the later
Wittgenstein takes on Moore, offering yet a different version of what we might as
well call the pragmatist justification of our belief in the external world.
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4.6 The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus
Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911 in order to study with Russell. They had
intense philosophical conversations from the moment they met, and despite periods
of strain and a rupture in 1922, they formed one of the great intellectual relationships
in the history of modern philosophy. It is clear from Russell’s letters that the introduction of ‘his German’ to the Cambridge scene was, for him and for Moore, a gust of fresh
and bracing air. While Wittgenstein would soon strike out on his own, it is important
to see that his views were, as Hacking puts it, ‘most intimately moulded by Russell’, and
he ‘fought his duels with his internalized Russell’ (2014: 111).22 His problems were
Russell’s: the foundation of mathematics, the nature of propositions, and the relationship between language and the world.
In this section, I will speak to the early period of Wittgenstein’s thought, culminating in the Tractatus, in which he was (almost) fully enrolled in the programme
Russell had begun. That programme was to develop a logically ideal language into
which all languages are in principle translatable, so that confusions—in thought in
general, and in philosophy in particular—could be made transparent and resolved.
While Wittgenstein was clear in the Tractatus that not every discourse that we consider
important is expressible in terms of the language of elementary propositions, we shall
see that only in 1929 did he start to abandon the underlying Russellian framework, and
only in 1932 did he abandon the project definitively.
Wittgenstein was ‘a troubled soul’ who was ‘always given to despair’.23 His sister,
after relaying the family’s incomprehension of his decision to rid himself his considerable wealth and to work as a gardener and elementary schoolteacher, describes
Wittgenstein’s reaction to that incomprehension:
Thereupon Ludwig answered with a comparison which silenced me for he said, ‘You remind
me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the
strange movements of a passer-by. He doesn’t know what kind of a storm is raging outside and
that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet’. It was then that I
understood his state of mind.
[Hermine Wittgenstein 1981: 5]
The intensity of this state of mind was no doubt partially responsible for the strain on
Wittgenstein’s relationships with Russell and others, as well as for the overpowering
style that was to appear so attractive to many. But one suspects that Nicholas Griffin is
also right to say that Wittgenstein had a problem ‘with those who were his intellectual
equals or at least were prepared to behave as such’ (1992a: 83). Russell, Keynes, Moore,
and Ramsey were each at some point at the sharp end of Wittgenstein’s termination
Gregory Landini makes the point as well, in Wittgenstein’s Apprenticeship with Russell (2007).
These terms are from the recollections of Leavis (1981: 67) and Pascal (1981: 44). See McGuinness
(1988: 223f. and passim) for a fine and sensitive account of his state of mind.
22
23
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notices. All this contributed to the impression that his mind was like no other. But one
upshot of my argument in this book is that he was not as isolated and unique a thinker
as he may have seemed.
When the First World War broke out, Wittgenstein signed up with the Austrian
army, despite having a medical exemption. On leaves from the front, and later in a
prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, he continued to work through the logical and philosophical issues that exercised him in pre-war Cambridge. He transcribed his reflections in a set of coded notebooks, and those notebooks show a major change in his
thinking during this period. As the war progressed, he became more absorbed with
questions about value and life, and he became more religious. He told Russell in 1915
that he had completed a manuscript, but between 1916 and 1918 he added at the very
end some thoughts that put the rest of the views in a completely different light. When
Russell eventually saw what Wittgenstein had produced, he was shocked at the mysticism of the final pages. In 1922, after much wrangling with prospective publishers, the
manuscript appeared as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Ogden’s International
Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.24
It is difficult to overstate just how important a work the Tractatus was taken to be.
We shall see in the next section the impact it had on the Vienna Circle. Keynes wrote to
Wittgenstein in 1924 about its impact in Cambridge:
I still do not know what to say about your book, except that I feel certain that is a work of extraordinary importance and peculiar genius. Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge since it was written.
[King’s College Archive JMK PP/45/349/25]
This extraordinary book is a set of seven numbered primary assertions, with secondary assertions marked by sub-numbers, with their own subordinate remarks. It is an
attempt to specify the structure of the relationship between language and reality. In
articulating this relationship, Wittgenstein also gives an account of what constitutes a
significant or meaningful proposition, and of how to clear up mistakes caused by misleading surface grammar. In the Preface, he says:
The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why
these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood. The whole sense
of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said
clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
[T: 3]
The Tractatus, that is, sets out a vision of language and thought that has at its centre the
idea ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly’. This part of the programme seems to
be very much in step with Russell’s logical analysis. Russell certainly thought it was. He
24
It had appeared in German a year earlier, under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, in the
journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie.
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prefaced The Philosophy of Logical Atomism with this paragraph, on the basis of
Wittgenstein’s pre-war thought:
The following [is the text] of a course of eight lectures delivered in [Gordon Square,] London
in the first months of 1918, [which] are very largely concerned with explaining certain ideas
which I learnt from my friend and former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have had no opportunity of knowing his views since August, 1914, and I do not even know whether he is alive or
dead. He has therefore no responsibility for what is said in these lectures beyond that of having
originally supplied many of the theories contained in them.
[PLA: 160]25
In the post-war chaos Wittgenstein managed, through his friend Keynes and Keynes’s
connections, to get his manuscript to Russell. The two met in The Hague in December
1919 to talk about it, and Russell’s verdict to Ottoline Morrell was thus:
I leave here today, after a fortnight’s stay, during a week of which Wittgenstein was here, and we
discussed his book every day. I came to think even better of it than I had done; I feel sure it is a
really great book, though I do not feel sure it is right . . . I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic.
[McGuinness 2012b: 112]
Feigl recalls Russell’s attitude: ‘Bertrand Russell, dismayed at the new turn Wittgenstein’s
philosophy had taken, first was icily silent and later outspokenly opposed to it’ (1968:
639). Russell thought that the mystical rot he detected in the Tractatus ‘all started
from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience’ (2012b: 112). But as one of
Wittgenstein’s biographers, Brian McGuinness, suggests, Wittgenstein’s religious tendencies were amplified by the strains and dangers of being caught up in heavy fighting
on the front. He writes in his notebook in July 1916 in the midst of severe fighting:
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I have a place in it like that of my eye in its visual field.
That there is something problematic about it, which we call its sense.
That this sense is not situated in the world but outside it . . .
The sense of life, i.e. the sense of the world, can be called God.
And connected with the image of God as a father.
[Notebooks 1(4) 7.16: quoted in McGuinness 1988: 245]
This idea, that the sense or meaning of life cannot be found in the world, is the mystical
move reproduced in the Tractatus, and it persisted throughout Wittgenstein’s life.
But Wittgenstein’s clarificatory undertakings before that mystical move are made
with the logical precision that seemed to Russell to be an excellent manifestation of
their joint project. Those clarificatory undertakings are ambitious—Wittgenstein
25
Russell eventually learned that Wittgenstein most certainly did not want responsibility for what
Russell said in those lectures. See McGuinness (2012b: 93, 118–20).
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wants to show us how propositions represent the world. The Tractatus presents us with
an account of meaning on which language, like a picture, represents that objects are a
certain way. It is always risky to put forward a summary of Wittgenstein’s position,
since he was quick to claim that interpretations of it were wrong, and, as he was to say
later, the argument of the Tractatus is ‘highly syncopated’ (Drury 1981: 173).
Nonetheless, in what follows I will present a brief account of the logical analyst position he seemed in large part to share with Russell,26 and then the mystical twist that
swept the rug out from Russell’s feet.
Wittgenstein asserts that ‘The world divides into facts’ (T: 1.2), and most fundamentally into ‘atomic facts’ (the German is ‘Sachverhalte’), which he defines as existing
states of affairs (T: 2). States of affairs consist of absolutely simple objects that are in a
definite structure or set of relations with each other, and the elementary propositions
that assert the existence of particular states of affairs are true or false independently of
each other (T: 4.211, 5.134). The general form of a proposition, according to
Wittgenstein, is that elementary propositions assert putative atomic facts. But if a
proposition is to assert a fact, there must be something identical in the picture and the
depicted (T: 2.161)—a logical form. ‘We picture facts to ourselves’ (T: 2.1), and those
pictures present ‘situation[s] in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states
of affairs’ (T: 2.11). Those pictures may look completely unlike what we find in ordinary language, but the conjunction of all true elementary propositions nevertheless
constitutes a complete picture of the world.
Like Russell, Wittgenstein gives us a correspondence theory of truth: ‘In a picture
objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them’ (T: 2.13), which allows
for assessment of the picture according to whether ‘things are related to one another in
the same way as the elements of the picture’ (T: 2.151). For what a picture represents—
‘its sense’, for Wittgenstein (T: 2.221)—is the existence or non-existence of a possible
state of affairs (T: 2.201), and the ‘agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality
constitutes its truth or falsity’ (T: 2.222).
Along with saying that the correspondence between elements of the picture and
objects amounts to the former’s representing the latter, Wittgenstein gives us a number
of metaphors to make sense of the idea of correspondence: a picture is ‘attached to reality’; it ‘reaches right out to it’; it is ‘laid against reality like a ruler’; it ‘touches’ objects
with ‘feelers’ (T: 2.1511–15); it is a ‘model’ of reality (T: 4.01); ‘[A] picture agrees with
reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false’ (T: 2.21). An elementary
proposition is a logical picture of facts (T: 3, 3.1), and its truth or falsehood depends
entirely on the existence or non-existence of those facts (T: 4.21). More complex propositions are built up from elementary propositions in truth-preserving ways (T: 5.3).
26
There is plenty of interpretive controversy over precisely what is shared. For instance, did Wittgenstein
think that properties and relations could be, to use Russell’s phrase, objects of acquaintance? Some—e.g.
Anscombe (1971 [1959]: 26–7)—answer ‘no’; others—e.g. Hintikka and Hintikka (1986: ch. 3)—answer
‘yes’. But these are details made visible only against a shared background.
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We have seen that Russell had to try to make sense of false propositions and negative
facts, and Wittgenstein also felt he needed to give an account of such phenomena. On
his view, all elementary propositions depict positive facts, the world fully described
only once. We capture the particularities of the actual world simply by noting which of
the elementary propositions are true and which false (T: 4.26). Negative facts do not
exist. It is simply that there is no such combination between objects or things. A negation represents the non-existence of a state of affairs (T: 4.1). But he was still mulling
over the matter in the 1930s, remarking in the Blue Book:
How can one think what is not the case? If I think that King’s College is on fire when it is not
on fire, the fact of its being on fire does not exist. Then how can I think it?
[BB: 31]
We shall see that the problem of how negations (and other ill-fitting propositions
such as disjunctions and universal generalizations) can represent reality was a critical
­impetus for Ramsey’s turning his back on the correspondence theory. But as far as
Russell was concerned, all of these questions were part of working out the details of
their joint project.
It was the final remarks in the Tractatus that astonished Russell. Wittgenstein starts
them off plainly enough: when we feel that all possible scientific questions have been
answered, ‘the problems of life remain completely untouched’ (T: 6.52). Russell may
well have been able to stay with Wittgenstein up to this point—as we shall see in §6.8,
he too worried about how to think about the problems of life in a cold scientific framework. But the next sentence is less plain and less acceptable to him: ‘Of course there
are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer’ (T: 6.52). Why does Wittgenstein
think that we cannot ask questions about the problems of life? He says:
The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is this not the
reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became
clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?) There are, indeed,
things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is
mystical.
[T: 6.521–2]
Wittgenstein wrote to Russell from his prison camp, correcting him about the ‘main
point’ of the manuscript that was now in Russell’s hands. Russell had taken the main
point to be the idea that logical propositions are tautologies, not true in the way that
empirical propositions are true. Wittgenstein corrects him: ‘The main point is the
­theory of what can be expressed . . . by prop[osition]s—i.e. by language—(and which
comes to the same, what can be thought) and what can not be expressed by prop[osition]s,
but only shown’ (McGuinness 2012b: 98). He ends the Tractatus by telling us that the
correct method in philosophy is to say nothing except what can be said:
i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and
then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that
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he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions . . . My propositions serve as
elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to
speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions,
and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
[T: 6.53–7]
We shall see that Ramsey objected to the idea that we must use Wittgenstein’s so-called
nonsense philosophical statements like a ladder, to be kicked away once we have
climbed up it. Russell objected as well. In his Introduction to the Tractatus, he says:
‘Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said’ (1922: xxi).
Let us look carefully at what Wittgenstein thought his picture ­theory27 entailed for
what cannot be expressed in the logical language. In order to tell whether a picture is
true or false, we have to ‘compare it with reality’ (T: 2.223). This is the province of the
natural sciences: ‘The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science’ (T:
4.11). Philosophy, on the other hand, is not a mode of inquiry that aims at comparing
propositions with reality. It must aim at the ‘clarification of thoughts’ and is not a ‘body
of doctrine, but an activity’ (T: 4.112). Rather than being a natural science, it ‘sets limits
to the much disputed sphere of natural science’—and thus ‘to what can be thought’ (T:
4.113–14). Ramsey summarized this point beautifully in 1929. The circumstances
around the summary are themselves fascinating, and it is worth jumping ahead in the
chronology to set them out. When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, after a
long self-imposed exile after the war, he needed a degree in order to get a position. So
he was enrolled in the Ph.D, with considerable help from his friends Keynes, Russell,
Moore, and Ramsey, and considerable irritation on his part about the preliminary
bureaucratic hoops he had to jump through. Ramsey was named as his supervisor.
This was very much a nominal supervision, as the Tractatus was submitted as the
thesis. Russell and Moore examined it, with Russell declaring the work ‘an important
event in philosophy’ and Moore asserting ‘it would be a sheer absurdity not to grant
the Ph.D. degree to Mr. Wittgenstein’.28 Wittgenstein, that is, did not have to do
much, as the thesis had been published and the examiners were impressed. But he
did have to submit a summary of the thesis, no more than 300 words, to the Board of
Research Studies in order to get the degree conferred. He demurred and assigned
the chore instead to Ramsey, who wrote as follows to the Secretary of the Board of
Research Studies:
Dear Mr. Priestley,
Wittgenstein has asked me to send you a summary of his thesis, as he professes to be unable
to give the time to it himself; so it seemed to me it would save trouble if I wrote one, of which
27
We shall see that Wittgenstein became set against the very idea of a theory. I shall argue that he presented plenty of them, as long as we take theory in a low-profile sense. But if the term offends, then one can
think of the picture theory as an account, rather.
28
Cambridge University Library: UA BOGS 1, 1920–37, Wittgenstein File 1925.
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I enclose two copies. I hope it will do, his book being really impossible to summarize intelligibly. The first paragraph must seem very odd, but is what I know he would like to have said.
I’m sorry this is so very late, but I have only just got his letter asking me to do it.
Yours sincerely,
F. P. Ramsey
[Cambridge University Library: UA BOGS 1, 1920–37, Wittgenstein File 1925]
Ramsey perfectly summarizes the point we have been discussing in that first (oddseeming) paragraph:
This thesis deals with the problems of philosophy, and argues that their formulation depends
on a misunderstanding of the logic of language. It proposes, therefore, to set a limit to what can
be thought; or rather, not to what can be thought but to what can be expressed in language; for
in order to set a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit, to
think, that is, what cannot be thought. The limit can therefore only be drawn in language and
what lies beyond it is simply nonsense.
This view of philosophy is based on new theories of propositions and their relations to facts,
of the nature and meaning of logical constants and of the distinction between internal and
external relations. According to these theories the propositions of formal logic are tautologies
and tautology is the only meaning of logical necessity and the only justification for logical
inference. Besides an exposition of this logical system the thesis contains observations on many
other philosophical problems such as possibility, causality and induction, and the meaning of
mathematical propositions and of scientific theories. And in conclusion the author gives a brief
statement of his views on ethics and mysticism.
[Cambridge University Library: UA BOGS 1, 1920-37, Wittgenstein File 1925]
The job of the philosopher is to discern the ‘form of the thought’ underneath the
clothing of the ordinary language in which we express it, since ‘Language disguises
thought’ (T: 4.002). Philosophers, though, usually make the mistake of putting disguises on, rather than taking them off:
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but
nonsensical . . . Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to
understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether
the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest
problems are in fact not problems at all.
[T: 4.003]
We have seen that James too thought that many philosophical problems were confusions. He thought the pragmatic maxim would clear them up. Wittgenstein comes to a
similar conclusion with a different argument: philosophy cannot be part of our logical
picture of the world, but it can be employed to show that explosive fact. Philosophy can
be employed only to show that philosophy is nonsense.
There are implications also for logic. There are no logical objects in the world to
which our logical propositions might correspond. As Ramsey notes, Wittgenstein
advances the pivotal idea that logical truths are tautologous—they do not tell us
­anything about the world. Logical propositions are not pictures of reality—they ‘say
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nothing’ (T: 6.11) and admit all possible situations. They are true, no matter what.
Without relying on any knowledge about the world, ‘one can recognize that they are
true from the symbol alone’ (T: 6.113). Hence they ‘cannot be confirmed by experience
any more than they can be refuted by it’ (T: 6.1222). Logic need not meet the criterion
for sense precisely because the propositions of logic, as tautologies, lack sense (T: 6.1,
4.461). As a result, contra Peirce, Wittgenstein thinks ‘there can never be surprises in
logic’ (T: 6.1251).
But unlike the statements in philosophy books, which, failing to meet the criterion
of sense, get called nonsense, the statements of logic are granted a positive status by
Wittgenstein. Logic is the ‘scaffolding’ on which propositions must rely if they are to
depict the world at all (T: 4.023): ‘What makes logic a priori is the impossibility of illogical thought’ (T: 5.4731). Logic is not a domain in which ‘we express what we wish with
the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the natural and inevitable signs
speaks for itself ’ (T: 6.124). Wittgenstein uses an interesting word for this special
status: ‘Logic is transcendental’ (T: 6.13). This is a straightforward translation of his
use of the German word ‘transzendental’, and we might well conclude that he meant to
gesture at Kant’s elevation of particular principles of judgement as indispensable for
human experience. So while logical statements are senseless (sinnloss), they are not
nonsensical (unsinnig): tautologies and contradictions, while ‘lack[ing] sense’, are ‘not,
however, nonsensical’ (T: 4.4611). Thus, they stand much closer to meaningful propositions than the nonsensical propositions. They are simply the limiting cases of a
proposition,29 and so are ‘part of the symbolism, much as “0” is part of the symbolism
of arithmetic’ (T: 4.4611). A tautology is senseless because it does not attempt to say
anything, as everything is consistent with it. The nonsensical claims of philosophy, on
the other hand, attempt to say what can only be shown in our ordinary language and
activities.
Value statements, such as ethical and religious claims, are also nonsensical—they
also lie outside what can be said. But Wittgenstein puts them not in quite the same boat
as the philosophical. They too are transcendental. It is ‘impossible for there to be propositions of ethics’, as propositions, on the logical analyst account, ‘can express nothing
that is higher’ (T: 6.42). The statements of ethics and religion, despite being unsayable,
are higher. Clearly, they are not tautologies like the statements of logic. But like the
statements of logic, Wittgenstein does not think that they should be tossed into the
rubbish bin of meaninglessness: he does not think they are worthless to us. They are
important, in some way that he never fully articulates. His point in the 1929 ‘A Lecture
on Ethics’, for instance, is that the language of ethical or religious experience is not
defective in the way that the language of metaphysics is, but rather is inadequate to
express what one wants to express. In drawing the boundary between what can be
thought or said and what cannot, Wittgenstein saw himself as making space for the
ethical and religious spheres of experience. One can have an impression of one’s life, or
29
I owe this way of putting the point to Steven Methven.
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perhaps of the good and the beautiful, but that impression is ineffable.30 We must say
no more than what we can—we must not pretend to know what we cannot know. All
we can do is speak about the things in the world. Recognizing the limit of the thinkable
or the sayable evokes a sense of mystery and awe of what lies on the other side of it.
The Tractatus also offers an account of the theories and causal hypotheses of science
as going beyond the primary language, yet as somehow not being nonsense. The
hypotheses or theories of science are not truth-functions of elementary propositions,
but rather, generalizations arrived at by induction. Science also adopts principles upon
which its theories and hypotheses rest, such as that nature is continuous or simple,
and these ‘a priori intuitions of possible forms of the propositions of science’ (T: 6.364)
also cannot be expressed in the atomistic language. Scientific theories, according to
Wittgenstein, are grids or meshes that we place on the phenomena in order to understand them (T: 6.341). As James Griffin puts it, they are methods of representing
phenomena (1964: 105). This issue—the fact that inductive inferences, hypotheses,
generalizations, and theories go beyond what we observe—will be discussed further in
§§6.6 and 7.3. It presents a problem for anyone, including the logical analyst, who takes
observation to be the foundation of knowledge. It is a problem that has exercised the
likes of Hume, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, for it seems to throw a spanner in
the works of constructing science from observation and truth-functional logic.
Thus, first-order philosophy comes in for the roughest treatment of all those propositions that go beyond what can be said. It has nothing to add to ordinary language:
‘In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect
logical order’ (T: 5.5563). The only kind of philosophy that is any good is that which
comprises Wittgenstein’s ladder, and after kicking it away, philosophers should cease
and desist.31 Once philosophy is shown to transgress the limit itself, we come to see the
philosophical claims that got us to that conclusion as attempts at grasping the ungraspable, and all those other philosophical claims as real nonsense.
For instance, the problem raised by the sceptic is not a problem, for it makes
no sense:
Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no
questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where
an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
[T: 6.51]
30
I do not fit neatly into the debate between the ‘new’ readers of Wittgenstein, who ‘resolutely’ accept
his claim that what cannot be said is nonsense, and those who have him saying that what cannot be said is
important but ineffable. On my reading, Wittgenstein holds that there are various kinds of things that
cannot be said, and he gives each of these kinds of belief a different treatment. For a small sample of good
entry points into this contentious issue, see Kremer (2001, 2002), Conant and Diamond (2004), and
Tejedor (2015).
31
Perhaps another philosophical proposition that survives is that the world exists in the first place. We
need to take this on faith, as it were: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’
(T: 6.44).
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If we could take this thought in isolation, we might say that, like Peirce, Wittgenstein
thinks that the sceptic does not ask a genuine question. The sceptic’s doubts, in Peirce’s
words, are paper or tin doubts—not the real article. But the logical analyst rationale on
which Wittgenstein relies in making this point is one that Peirce would reject. He
argued that such doubts are not genuine because they have no root in our experience
and in our practical life. We may entertain them, but they lack the force to genuinely
affect our behaviour—and so they also lack any genuine normative weight. But this is
not Wittgenstein’s reason for dismissing scepticism. He relies on his atomist semantics,
in which statements must assert properties or relations of objects in order to have
sense. The sceptical assertion that our statements are incapable of representing objects
and their properties is not itself a direct assertion about objects and their pro­perties or
relations, and so it lacks sense. Thus Wittgenstein contends: ‘Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common
with reality in order to be able to represent it—logical form’ (T: 4.12). If we cannot
sensibly say how our propositions can accurately depict reality, we cannot sensibly
doubt that they do so. This is Wittgenstein’s response to a kind of scepticism about the
capacity of language to represent at all.
The Tractatus thus tells philosophers to leave representation, value, and a host of
other formerly philosophical topics mysterious. Perhaps it will be useful here to
remind ourselves that it was not uncommon in Cambridge England at the turn of the
twentieth century to posit phenomena that cannot not be articulated. We have seen
Moore, for instance, do it with respect to indefinable entities, and we shall see Keynes
do it with respect to indefinable probability relations. Ramsey was unimpressed by
such ineffable posits, arguing against appeals to the indefinable and making snappy
retorts to Wittgenstein such as: ‘what we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it
either’ (GC: 146).32
Peirce and James would have been in full agreement. One reason they would have
rejected the picture theory of meaning is that it is removed from the way inquiry really
operates, and makes truth and other things we want to explain mysterious. But another
reason for their antipathy would have been that Wittgenstein’s picture theory sets up a
dichotomy between fact and value. It is not clear whether Wittgenstein thought that
there could be no talk about ethics or only, as he suggests in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, that
there can only be first-order talk about ethics. Either way, his view results in a quietism
regarding ethics, in which we cannot evaluate our ethical discursive practices. And
this quietism would have been rejected by the Cambridge Massachusetts pragmatists.
32
Cora Diamond (2011) argues that this remark was made in a very particular context (about infinite
conjunctions) and cannot be taken as a general objection to the saying/showing distinction in the Tractatus.
It is difficult to pin down the role of the quip in Ramsey’s argument: it sits on its own, and is placed in not
one, but two sets of brackets. I give my reading in §6.6. See Methven (2014) for another. But whatever the
context of this particular quip, Ramsey makes the general point against Wittgenstein’s saying/showing distinction in many contexts, starting with his 1923 Critical Notice of the Tracatus, and ending in August
1930, when Braithwaite read a paper of the recently deceased Ramsey to the Apostles titled ‘Muß man
schweigen?’ (‘Must one say nothing?’).
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They would ask Wittgenstein why it is that we must try not to articulate insights about
what is valuable. We do so all the time. Indeed, forswearing such thoughts might result
in moral disaster. Are we to each develop our own unspeakable sense of what is right
and wrong, with no deliberation, with no input from others? The pragmatist would say
that the quietist moral road that Wittgenstein himself managed (on the whole) to
travel might not only be impossible for others, but might also lead to a world not worth
living in.
We have seen that Peirce and James also grappled with the question of the scaffolding, of the epistemic status of those beliefs that seem practically indispensable for
us. Peirce insists that they are fallible and that we must content ourselves with the hope
or ‘faith’ that they are true, while James claims that in certain situations at least, we may
straightforwardly believe what we need to believe. Russell reacted badly to James’s
position on the matter, and was generally inhospitable to Kantian arguments about
necessary presuppositions, even in their more naturalistic, Peircean formulations.
Wittgenstein’s location in this dispute is unclear. His position might look to be not far
from Peirce’s. For Wittgenstein seems to allow that we have to assume all sorts of logical laws, we have to assume that the world is, we have to assume that there is some point
to our lives, and so on. And for Wittgenstein, as for Peirce, we are not justified in
believing what we need to assume. But it is hard to see how, for Wittgenstein, these
hopes (if he would even go near that term) have any content. That is one difference
between them. Another is that Peirce wanted to take the transcendental air out of those
beliefs, yet he would have been loath to replace it with the mystical air that comes on
the heels of the saying/showing distinction. Peirce argued that we must hope or assume
that indispensable elements of our scaffolding are true, but he left open the possibility
that some of these hopes might have to be abandoned in order to best make sense of
what we experience. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, rejected the idea that there are
any propositions at issue here at all—and so, seemingly, that our rejection of these
hopes could ever be epistemically founded.
However we might parse the debate between Peirce and Wittgenstein, one thing
seems to be clear. The Tractatus ends on an apparent ambiguity. Are Wittgenstein’s
own philosophical propositions (and all others about logic, ethics, and philosophy)
nonsense and hence illegitimate? Or are some or all of them inexpressible, and yet
higher or more important than what can be expressed in words?33 Is Wittgenstein protecting the scaffolding from scrutiny by placing it beyond the boundary of the expressible? Or does he really think it is meaningless? We shall see that Ramsey was as
unimpressed as Russell by the ‘main point’ of the Tractatus. But first we shall see how
33
Commentators differ. Hacker (1972, 2000) reads Wittgenstein as holding that they are ineffable but
higher, and Diamond (1995) and Conant (2002) read him as claiming that they are nonsensical. Proops
(2001) sees a coherent third option: we must not try to state the content of the insights, but rather, try to
make sense of the impulse to utter nonsense when we appreciate something inexpressible and wish to put
it into words.
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the Vienna Circle was also confounded by it, and how Wittgenstein himself was not
altogether clear about it in his own mind.
4.7 Wittgenstein’s Intersections with the Vienna Circle
In the early 1920s, movements began in Vienna and Berlin espousing a view that
became known as logical positivism or logical empiricism. The Vienna Circle34 had
formed around Moritz Schlick, who in 1922 had taken up the chair of Naturphilosophie
once held by Boltzmann and Mach. In 1924 Schlick wrote to Wittgenstein, expressing
his admiration of the Tractatus and his desire to meet with its author. After a fruitless
attempt on Schlick’s part to visit Wittgenstein at his schoolteacher’s post in the country,
the two finally met in Vienna in 1927. Each impressed the other, and they continued to
meet until Schlick was killed by a disturbed student in 1936. The meetings initially
included others in the Circle, although Wittgenstein eventually restricted them to
Schlick and Waismann, due to his unhappiness with the views and objections of the
others. Schlick was the person within the Circle whom Wittgenstein most admired,
and with whom he was closest. In 1933, for instance, they took a philosophically
intense summer holiday together on the Adriatic coast. It is fair to say that the intellectual association between Wittgenstein and the Circle was an important and sustained
engagement, despite the tensions and the eventual break even with Waismann. We
simply do not know whether his intellectual relationship with Schlick would have survived, had Schlick himself survived.
The aim of the Vienna Circle was to build up a precise, certain, and scientific conception of the world, using the materials of observation and the new formal logic.
Their ‘verifiability principle’ went through a number of iterations. But at its heart was
the requirement that all meaningful sentences, with the exemption of logical and other
analytic sentences, be reducible via deductive logic to an elementary language of
simple and basic observation statements. No meaningful question was thought to be in
principle unanswerable by science, and all branches of investigation were to be carried
out via the same straightforward method of direct observation and logical deduction.
They consigned to the dustbin of meaninglessness all unverifiable, non-empirical
speculation. Metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics were all either to be revised so as to be
statable in scientific language or else to be abandoned as so much nonsense. Here is
Philipp Frank, looking back on the movement of which he was a part, at the Prague
Congress in September 1929:
Schlick and Reichenbach had identified ‘true cognition’ with a system of symbols that indicated
the world of facts uniquely . . . Carnap introduced as the elementary concepts of his system
immediate sense impressions and the relations of similarity and diversity between them. The
world is to be described by statements that may contain any symbols, provided that from them
34
I will not be concerned with the circle in Berlin, as it did not have substantive intersection with
Wittgenstein and Ramsey.
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statements can be logically derived that contain nothing but assertions about similarity between
sense impressions.
[1949 [1930]: 33]
The affinities between this project and that of the Tractatus seemed obvious to the
Vienna Circle, and they should seem obvious to us. The Tractarian Wittgenstein and
the Vienna Circle shared the aim of identifying a simple language that directly hooks
onto the world, a focus on truth-preserving formal logic, the idea that the goal of philosophy is to clarify our concepts, and a verificationist thesis about what is nonsense
and what is not. The last shared aim—the commitment to some kind of empiricist way
of demarcating what is meaningful—also has affinities with pragmatism. Frank goes
on to say that:
[Carnap’s Aufbau] reminded me strongly of William James’s pragmatic requirement, that the
meaning of any statement is given by its ‘cash value,’ that is, by what it means as a direction for
human behavior. I wrote immediately to Carnap, ‘What you advocate is pragmatism.’ This was
as astonishing to him as it had been to me.
[1949 [1930]: 33]35
In July 1927, Ramsey wrote to Schlick, inviting him to present a paper at the Moral
Sciences Club that October.36 Schlick presented ‘The Meaning of Cognition’, which
argued that the essential property of cognition was that it is capable of symbolic expression, whereas reality is not expressible by symbols. Yellow, for instance, is an actual
quality that the word ‘yellow’ stands for. The quality itself cannot be communicated.37
We do not have any record (at least, none that I could find) of how this paper was
received. Wittgenstein had not yet returned to Cambridge. But his views, as well as
Russell’s, were already dominant there, and one suspects that Schlick’s paper was very
much on topic for the Cambridge philosophers.
Thus, it is no surprise that Wittgenstein, Russell, and Ramsey were all taken by the
Circle as being ‘Leading Representatives of the scientific world-conception’, ‘sympathetic to’ and ‘closely associated with’ it.38 Schlick lectured frequently on Russell, corresponded with him, and invited him to Vienna (an invitation he seems not to have
taken up). Ramsey too was engaged in a friendly way with Schlick. The year after the
invitation to the Moral Sciences Club, Ramsey planned a trip to Vienna and wrote to
Schlick asking whether ‘you or any of your circle would be able to spare a little time to
talk philosophy with me’.39 Schlick invited him to stay at his house. But Ramsey, we
shall see, was more sceptical of the Vienna Circle than was Wittgenstein. I shall argue
in Chapter 7 that during 1929–30, when Ramsey and Wittgenstein were in frequent conversation and when Wittgenstein was in transition from the account given
35
See Thomas Uebel (2015) for important work showing the continuity between the verifiability principle
of the Vienna Circle and James.
36
Vienna Circle Archives, Noord-Hollands Archief, #114-Ram-1.
37
Cambridge University Library, UA Min.IX.43. 38 Hahn et al. (1929).
39
The Vienna Circle Archive, Noord-Hollands Archief, #114-Ram-2.
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in the Tractatus to his later view, Ramsey pressed his worries on Wittgenstein to
great effect.
Schlick was clear about who in Cambridge was most important. He wrote to Einstein
that the Tractatus was the ‘deepest’ work of the new philosophy (Schlick 1927). Herbert
Feigl recalls:
In the Circle we began to penetrate Wittgenstein’s ideas on the nature of language and its relation to the world, his repudiation of metaphysics (notwithstanding a few aphorisms toward the
end of the Tractatus that had a mystical flavor), and his conception of logical and mathematical
truth. We had been well-prepared for this venture, especially by Hans Hahn, who in an extracurricular evening course had introduced us to the major ideas of the great work of Alfred
North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica.
[1968: 634]
The circle read and discussed the Tractatus with great care and attention between 1924
and 1927. Carnap says that two insights of Wittgenstein’s were especially important.
One played an influential role in the evolution of the Circle’s thinking, namely, the idea
that the truths of logic are tautologies:
the conception that the truth of logical statements is based only on their logical structure and
on the meaning of the terms. Logical statements are true under all conceivable circumstances;
thus their truth is independent of the contingent facts of the world.
[1963: 25]
The other was an idea to which the members of the Circle had come independently of
Wittgenstein: ‘that many philosophical sentences, especially in traditional metaphysics, are pseudo-sentences, devoid of cognitive content’ (Carnap 1963: 25).
When Wittgenstein was in Vienna in 1927, designing and building a house for his
sister, he met on Monday evenings with what he called the Round Table—usually
Schlick, Waismann, Feigl, Carnap, and Maria Kasper. He continued those meetings,
with Schick and Waismann only, while on visits from Cambridge to Vienna in ­1929–31.
He found Carnap exasperating and thought that he had ‘no nose’ for deep philosophical problems.40 He also felt the very idea of a school was self-posturing and boastful.
Nor did take well to the group’s general dismissal of his mystical side, since he took
those mystical thoughts at the end of Tractatus to be the work’s main point, not merely
a few closing, poetic aphorisms. But even at these later meetings, by which time the
initial shine of the Round Table had somewhat dimmed for him, Wittgenstein was
keen to transmit his views to members of the Circle, knowing that the Circle was keen
in turn to transmit them to a wider audience. In 1930, with Wittgenstein’s blessing,
Waismann presented Wittgenstein’s views on mathematical topics at a conference on
the theory of knowledge and the exact sciences. Earlier, in 1928, it had been agreed that
Waismann would write an accessible exposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, to be
40
Feigl (1968: 64).
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called Logik, Sprache, Philosophie. When Wittgenstein abandoned that project because
his views were changing and he didn’t like the way Waismann’s book was panning out,
they agreed that he and Waismann would co-author a different book giving an exposition of his new ideas. That is, Wittgenstein was heavily engaged for almost a decade
with what was at times a cooperative venture with Schlick and Waismann, even if the
relationship was often one-sided, with Wittgenstein using the Circle to help him clarify
and promote his own ideas. That engagement eventually waned. By 1937, when
Waismann arrived in Cambridge, in the wake of the anti-Semitism that was rolling
into Austria, Wittgenstein reportedly avoided contact with him.41
The Schlick/Waismann/Wittgenstein sessions consisted largely of Wittgenstein
explaining themes in the Tractatus, as well as his new and emerging thoughts about
matters he had discussed there. On occasion, Ramsey’s views on the foundations of
mathematics and identity were also discussed. Waismann transcribed much of what
was said. Those notes show Wittgenstein more or less buying into a shared picture,
sometimes making modifications to it or correcting old conceptions in favour of
new ones. Many Tractarian assertions are reaffirmed.42 For instance, in a meeting in
1929 at Schlick’s house, Wittgenstein reasserted the verificationism expressed in the
Tractatus:
if I can never verify the sense of a proposition completely, then I cannot have meant anything
by the proposition either. Then the proposition signifies nothing whatsoever.
[WVC: 47]
Such a meaningless proposition, he says, is like ‘a wheel turning idly in a machine’. In a
1938 meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, Wittgenstein was to state that he had never
heard of the verification principle till the previous fortnight, and that all he had meant
to do was employ a method of drawing distinctions between the appropriate uses of
this or that statement (McGuinness 2012b: 289). He did not like calling this idea a
principle; as we shall see in Chapter 7, this is of a piece with his rejection of anything
with the look of a theory. But notwithstanding his later demurrals, in his discussions
with the Vienna Circle he seemed to put forward a straightforward version of the
verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness.
His idea that logical and analytic statements have a special status was also stable
during this period. On the verifiability criterion, every meaningful statement is either
verifiable or analytically true. Synthetic statements such as ‘Barack Obama has two
brothers’ are made true or not by the world and hence must pass the verifiability test.
Analytic statements such as ‘All brothers are male’ are true solely by virtue of their
meaning and hence do not have to meet the test. The truths of mathematics and logic
lack content—they are tautologies, true come what may. Thus they need not be, and are
not, subject to the verificationist test.
41
See Uebel (forthcoming). 42
See Hacker (2000: 377) for a more complete list.
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There was discussion of just what kind of statements meet the verifiability principle
or count as genuine statements or propositions. Wittgenstein asserted, for instance,
that a ‘natural law’ cannot be verified or falsified, and hence:
it is neither true nor false but ‘probable,’ and here ‘probable’ means: simple, convenient. A statement is true or false, never probable. Anything that is probable is not a statement . . .
[WVC: 100]
Natural laws refer to the future ad infinitum. They never count as proved; we always
reserve the right to drop or alter them, in contrast with a real statement, whose truth is
not subject to alteration.
This point—that the laws of science fail the verifiability test—was to prove a real problem
for the Vienna Circle. Because law-statements range over an infinite number of cases, they
always outrun the evidence for them and can never be proven. Note a local kind of pragmatism in Wittgenstein’s view in the above passage—laws are not bona fide statements,
expressible in the primary, verifiable language and capable of truth or falsity, but rather are
merely ‘probable’ statements that are to be assessed in terms of whether or not they are
simple and convenient. We shall see, when we turn to Ramsey’s ‘General Propositions and
Causality’, that he was almost certainly the source of Wittgenstein’s position on this matter.
Wittgenstein in these meetings also made amendments to the positions he put
forward in the Tractatus. For instance, in 1930, we find him rejecting his old view that
elementary propositions must be independent of each other.43 When said about the
same point at the same time, ‘this point is now red’ and ‘this point is now blue’ both
are elementary propositions, yet the truth of the one entails the falsity of the other. The
rules of logic, he now thinks, must have something to do ‘with the inner structure of
propositions’, and so must ‘form only a part of a more comprehensive syntax’ (WVC:
74). We shall see in §6.2 that Ramsey was responsible for this amendment too. We also
find Wittgenstein on occasion rejecting the fundamentals of the logical analyst picture, here with respect to ostensive definition:
In the Tractatus logical analysis and ostensive definition were unclear to me. At that time I
thought that there was a ‘connexion’ between language and reality.
[WVC: 210]
Again, I shall argue that it was Ramsey who caused this (rather major) shift in
Wittgenstein’s thought.
Just as Russell found the cracks of disagreement between himself and Wittgenstein
gradually to open into chasms, so eventually did the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein
tended to think that these meetings were too ‘scientific’.44 The Circle failed to see the
importance of ethics, poetry, and religion. There is a well-known story of Neurath
saying to Wittgenstein in one meeting: ‘In order to minimize my interruptions, let me
rather call out “non-M!” whenever you are not talking metaphysics’, the implication
being that Wittgenstein was mostly talking spurious metaphysics (Hempel 1969: 168).
43
See also the 1929 ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’. 44
See McGuinness (1979: 16).
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There is a similarly well-known story of Wittgenstein at one point sitting in a corner
during their discussions, doggedly reading poetry.45
That is, while the Circle and Wittgenstein agreed that most of the purported answers
to age-old metaphysical questions will be shown to be fruitless and meaningless ‘pseudopropositions’, they disagreed about what that meant. From the shared idea that ethics and
metaphysics cannot be expressed in the elementary language, they drew very different
conclusions. For the Vienna Circle, if something was unsayable, then it really is nonsense
and ought to be discarded as such. Philosophy, ethics, and religion must be redesigned so
as to be part of the train of scientific progress. Hence, the Circle’s test of meaningfulness
led them to the view that statements about what is right or wrong are either: (i) statements about what people actually approve of, not what they ought to approve of—that is,
ethics is an empirical psychological or sociological science that investigates the attitudes
of human beings; or (ii) expressions of emotions or feelings rather than descriptions of
facts; or (iii) meaningless.
But we have seen that Wittgenstein’s point in the Tractatus was not that ethical statements are either descriptions of psychological facts, or expressions of emotions, or
mere nonsense to be jettisoned. His point is that they are somehow higher than the
everyday propositions that hook onto the world. Carnap says on this matter:
Earlier, when we were reading Wittgenstein’s book in the Circle, I had erroneously believed that
his attitude toward metaphysics was similar to ours. I had not paid sufficient attention to the
statements in the book about the mystical, because his feelings and thoughts in this area were
too divergent from mine. Only personal contact with him helped me to see more clearly his
attitude at this point.
[Carnap 1963: 27]
Wittgenstein, in his conversations with the Circle, repeats those statements about the
mystical and expands upon them:
This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put
an end to all the claptrap about ethics—whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values
exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the
matter . . . But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something.
[WVC: 68–9]
Our ‘astonishment that anything at all exists’ is the ethical. It is just that ‘Every attempt
to express it leads to nonsense’ (WVC: 93). In a subsequent meeting he expands on
this point:
Everything I describe is within the world. An ethical proposition never occurs in the complete
description of the world, not even when I am describing a murderer. What is ethical is not a
state of affairs.
[WVC: 93]
45
See e.g. Janik and Toulmin (1973: 257).
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If it had previously been unclear how running up to the limits of our language is the
very same thing as ethics, we now have a little bit of clarity. The primary language—the
complete description of the objects in the world—can never contain the ethical. But we
have seen that Wittgenstein thinks that the complete description of the world also
can also never contain natural laws, nor the truths of logic. So, it cannot be that every
statement that runs up against the limits of our language is, or is even closely related to,
the ethical.
Waismann presses Wittgenstein on this point, asking him if the existence of the
world is connected to the ethical (and by ‘ethical’ he is clearly talking about the spiritual). Wittgenstein replies that people have historically felt that there is a connection.
As an expression of that feeling, he cites the idea that God the Father created the world
and that the Son of God is at the heart of the ethical (WVC: 118). But in another session, we can draw out from Wittgenstein’s remarks a different answer, perhaps just as
bewildering, but nonetheless giving us a pointer to his general anti-theoretical stance.
Wittgenstein asks what is valuable in a Beethoven sonata. It is not the sequence of
notes, nor is it the set of feelings Beethoven had while composing it, nor is it our own
state of mind:
I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was
false but because it was an explanation. If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say,
No, no! That does not interest me . . . What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the
essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever . . . For me a theory is without value. A theory gives me nothing.
[WVC: 116–17]
While here we might be sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s idea that you cannot explain
value in non-evaluative terms, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that by ‘theory’, he sometimes means logical analysis. Against Moore, with whom he says he discusses this
question ‘constantly’, he says:
Are people . . . ignorant of what they mean when they say ‘Today the sky is clearer than
y­ esterday’? Do we have to wait for logical analysis here? What a hellish idea!
[WVC: 129–30]
We shall see that this rejection of theory was to become more and more important in
Wittgenstein’s thought and that it was a critical factor in his eventual assertion that he
was not a pragmatist, notwithstanding the pragmatist themes that were starting to
appear in his work in 1929–30.
For Wittgenstein was not merely objecting to theorizing along logical analytical
lines. He was objecting to theorizing or explaining tout court. Waismann presses
Wittgenstein on whether it really doesn’t make sense to ask oneself questions regarding
an axiom system, and then asks some. Wittgenstein replies by saying that we can only
make comparisons and only ask questions within a system. There is no answering a
question about axioms from outside the system (WVC: 128–9). A contradiction, for
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instance, ‘can only occur among the rules of a game’ (WVC: 124). Wittgenstein employs
a metaphor that he was frequently to use. Just as the rules of chess delimit certain
moves in that game, the idea of a logical contradiction only makes sense in ‘the true–
false game, that is, only where we make statements’ (WVC: 124). In a three-valued
logic, an inconsistent calculus could be applied—‘for mathematics the demonstration
of consistency cannot be a question of life or death’ (WVC: 141). In a particular
grammar, ‘the words “sense” and “senseless” correspond to what a rule permits and
prohibits’ (WVC: 126). Under the heading ‘Summary’ in his conversations with Schlick
and Waismann, we find:
The question whether an axiom system is independent only makes sense if there is a procedure
for deciding the question. Otherwise the question cannot be raised at all, and if you discover
that e.g. an axiom is redundant, you have not proved a proposition, you have read a new system
into the old one. And the same holds for consistency.
[WVC: 148]
What is emerging in Wittgenstein’s thought is the idea that it is only within a particular
way of thinking—what he later, on occasion, was to call a ‘form of life’—that our questions arise and get answered. There is no explanation or theory that rises above this
contingency. Any such theory falls into the realm of the inexpressible. Later in the
book, I will explore this idea further and argue that we can recognize that our theorizing always begins within a system of background commitments without trying to
reject theorizing altogether.
By the mid-1930s Wittgenstein had finished with the Circle. Not only was he dissatisfied with the book that Waismann was planning to write, but he was equally exasperated by the use Carnap was making of his work. He wrote to Schlick in 1932 that
Carnap’s ‘Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science’ made it look
like he was plagiarizing Carnap, rather than vice versa. He says in 1932:
And now I will soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a
reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s . . . But I don’t want to join forces with Carnap and to
belong to a circle to which he belongs . . . If I have an apple tree in my garden, then it delights
me and serves the purpose of the tree if my friends (e.g. you & Waismann) make use of the
apples; I will not chase away thiefs . . . but I am entitled to resent that they are posing as my
friends or alleging that the tree should belong to them jointly.
[Quoted in Hintikka 1996: 131]
Carnap’s plagiarizing project was to try to logically reconstruct our theories or knowledge of the external world from immediate experience.46
46
He was later to utilize ‘Ramsey sentences’ to reconstruct the theoretical terms of science (1975
[1958]). But while Ramsey provided an innovative tool for reconstructing our theories in the primary language and eliminating theoretical entities, he was not on board with the general project. That is, he did not
share Carnap’s reconstructionist aims.
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The very nature of these disputes—about the book that Wittgenstein and Waismann
were collaborating on; that Wittgenstein accused Carnap of plagiarizing his work; that
Wittgenstein criticized their manner of exhibiting a view he seemingly held, too, but
thought needed to be expressed differently—shows, albeit in an odd way, just how
much Wittgenstein had in common with the Circle. But the disputes were what Feigl
called the beginning of a ‘profound schism in modern analytic philosophy’:
Although I believe that Carnap’s and Wittgenstein’s basic substantive positions were fairly similar in the twenties, their manners of approach were radically different. Later, this led to the
sharp divergence between the method of Carnap’s rational reconstruction and the procedure of
informal analysis of the ‘ordinary language philosophy,’ in England as well as in America, and
that was inspired by Wittgenstein.
[1968: 639]
Indeed, the breach with Carnap was more than a matter of Wittgenstein accusing
Carnap of not acknowledging the source of his ideas. Wittgenstein tells Schlick and
Waismann that the Tractatus is an example of dogmatism in its conviction that,
although we are currently unable to specify the form of elementary propositions,
logical analysis was sure to discover them. Now, he says, it is clear to him that ‘we
cannot proceed by assuming from the very beginning, as Carnap does, that the
elementary propositions consist of two-place relations, etc.’ (WVC: 182). All he
wants to do now is:
simply draw the other person’s attention to what he is really doing and refrain from any assertions. Everything is then to go on within grammar.
[WVC: 186]
This idea shall be explored further when we turn to Wittgenstein’s later work.
We shall see that Ramsey weighed in with a position somewhere between the position of the Vienna Circle and the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein. He thought that
Wittgenstein was wrong to think there is something unsayable yet important—that
one could peer through the fence, glimpse the unsayable, and stand in awe of it. Ramsey
shared his incredulity toward that thought with the Vienna Circle. We shall see that
Wittgenstein thus lumped Ramsey and the Circle together, accusing both of being too
focused on science. But we shall see that Ramsey was not as sympathetic to the aims of
the Vienna Circle as Wittgenstein took him to be.
One final note, of considerable importance. I argued in The American Pragmatists
that when the logical empiricists arrived in America in the 1930s, they took the pragmatist positions of Peirce and Dewey to be close cousins to their own views. They all
shared a commitment to first-order inquiry as opposed to meta-level or philosophical
inquiry, to empiricism, and to clarity. As the strong programme was battered by criticism, some members of the Vienna Circle eventually saw that they were committed to
a kind of pragmatist account of truth (Misak 2013, §§9.3–4). And at least one of the
Circle’s members, Philipp Frank, makes a commitment to pragmatism (against the
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correspondence theory of traditional metaphysics, or what he calls the ‘school
­philosophy’) as early as 1930:
The physicist in his own scientific activity has never employed any other concept of truth than
that of pragmatism. The ‘agreement of thoughts with their object,’ which the school philosophy
requires, cannot be established by any concrete experiment . . . Actually, the physicist compares
only experiences with other experiences. He tests the truth of a theory through what one is
accustomed to call ‘agreements.’
[1949 [1930]: 102]
No American pragmatist, however, had been attracted to anything like the reductionist or reconstructionist programmes of logical empiricism. Those programmes, of
course, post-dated the founders of pragmatism, but they would have rejected them
had they encountered them, as the anti-reductionist spirit was deeply embedded in
their views.47
We shall see that Ramsey argued in precisely Frank’s terms: the school philosophy
(he called it the ‘scholasticism’) of Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein is wrong,
and once one sees that, one sees that pragmatism about truth needs to be explored.
I shall argue in Chapter 7 that Ramsey’s pragmatism had an impact on Wittgenstein,
especially on his views about the importance of hypotheses, and the fact that they are
verified by their fitting with our expectations, not by hooking onto the atomic facts.
I have argued elsewhere that this early engagement with pragmatist ideas (via
Wittgenstein, via Ramsey) paved the way for the Circle’s later move toward pragmatism.48 We shall see that it also paved the way for Wittgenstein’s later views.
47
Neurath did not share the reductionist programme of his fellows, and so it is no accident that he was
the logical empiricist who was able to persuade Dewey to be a participant in the Unity of Science project,
as least for a while. See Misak (2013, §9.4).
48
See Misak (forthcoming c). And see David Stern (2007) for an account of the complex relationship
between Wittgenstein’s conception of hypotheses and Carnap’s.
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The Pull of Pragmatism on Russell
5.1 Russell at Harvard
In the spring of 1914 Russell delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston. They were on
scientific method in philosophy, and were published under the title Our Knowledge of
the External World: As a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. We have seen that the
pragmatists also wanted to bring the scientific method to philosophy. James had died
in 1910 and Peirce died in the middle of Russell’s visit, so they had no direct contact
with Russell during his semester at Harvard, during which he also gave two courses.
We have seen that Russell knew James’s work well by 1914. Not only had he given much
(critical) attention to James’s theory of truth, but he knew James’s psychology and
­theory of perception well. Alex Klein (forthcoming) argues that his construction of the
external world (spatial points, instants of time, bits of matter) in his Harvard lectures
owes much to James’s view of spatial relations. We have also seen that, through Welby,
Russell knew some of Peirce’s work. Indeed, in 1904, Peirce was hoping to make a visit
to England, and Russell told Welby that it would be ‘the greatest interest and pleasure’
to meet Peirce, as ‘he is a man for whose work I have a great respect’.1 He goes on in the
letter to talk about Peirce’s categories.
During his visit Russell gained more exposure to Peirce’s thought. Here is the physicist Victor Lenzen, then a Ph.D student in Philosophy at Harvard, reminiscing:
The spring semester of 1914 was made notable at Harvard by the residence of Bertrand Russell,
who was scheduled to give courses on Logic and on Theory of Knowledge. Russell was then at
the height of his fame as a logician, and Professor Royce declared that he had received more
attention than any logician since Aristotle. Russell’s arrival was delayed, and for several weeks
Costello and Royce lectured for him in the courses on Logic and Theory of Knowledge, respectively. The latter . . . contrasted the theories of Russell and Peirce. Professor Royce explained that
Russell’s theory, in which mind and object were related by a dyadic relation, was a dyadic theory of knowledge, whereas Peirce’s theory, which involved the concept of interpretation, was a
triadic theory. Royce agreed with Peirce that the process of cognition is a social one.
[1965: 4]
Harry Costello was a young Instructor in the Harvard Department, who served as an
Assistant Lecturer to Russell during his Advanced Logic course, and took on the
1
York University Clara Thomas Archives 1970-010/13(22).
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instruction of that course prior to Russell’s arrival in mid March. Royce did the
duty for Russell’s Theory of Knowledge course, with Costello and Lenzen each taking
notes on Royce’s lectures. T. S. Eliot took notes on the Advanced Logic class. In addition, Royce’s long-standing Comparative Methodology seminar ran for the whole
of the academic year, with Costello and Lenzen again taking careful notes.2 Russell
arrived midway through it, and it is unsurprising that his logic and theory of knowledge were frequently discussed in the seminar, along with Moore’s definition of
the good.
During Royce’s seminar and his lectures in Russell’s course, the views of Peirce,
James, Dewey, and Schiller enjoyed frequent and careful discussion, with pragmatism
distinguished from, as Royce put it, the ‘wider’ humanism of Schiller and James. The
pragmatist account of truth, as well as ‘its misunderstanders’ (as James had termed
them), figured heavily in some lectures. Peirce was at times held up for special praise.
Royce was perhaps the only person during Peirce’s lifetime who understood how seriously Peirce took the idea that our justification for mathematical and logical beliefs
comes from experience. This position came up in the seminar: the discussion took
place on 28 April 1914, two weeks after Peirce’s death.3 Royce also spent time on Peirce’s
abductive inference,4 his categories, and his triadic account of interpretation. Royce
also discussed his own student C. I. Lewis’s anti-Russellian, pragmatist views about
implication. At one point Royce noted that Russell had prior exposure to Peirce’s logic
through Schröder (Costello 1963: 60).
When Russell finally arrived, his own lectures were well attended by students and
faculty. Royce had critical interactions with him. Costello says that both ‘Royce and
Russell were big enough to take it and like it’ (1963: 194). Royce announced in his
seminar that Russell’s first Lowell Lecture had a ‘harte Schönheit’ (hard beauty), and at
the end of the lectures, his view of Russell had not dimmed (Costello 1963: 151, 186).
Lenzen tells us that ‘On one occasion when Mr. Russell was expounding his dualism
between mind and matter’, Ralph Barton Perry was ‘drawn into defense of his behavioristic theory of mind’ (Lenzen 1971: 5). Thus we have Russell being exposed
to ­behaviourism at the hands of the pragmatists in 1914. We will see that it would
prove effective: by 1921, he will have accepted so much of the behaviourist position that he was thought of as a pragmatist.
It is clear that during his Harvard semester, Russell learned much about pragmatism. It
is telling that on 23 September 1916, the chair of the Harvard Philosophy and Psychology
Department, James Woods, invited Russell to return to Harvard for a year, to teach a seminar on Peirce, and with the help of some graduate students and the Harvard logician Sheffer,
2
Bernard Linsky has been compiling and editing the notes for these courses, piecing together this fascinating bit of intellectual history.
3
Costello (1963: 165). See Misak (2013: 84–7) for Royce on Peirce’s view of experience.
4
He uses another of Peirce’s terms for it: ‘retroduction’. See Lenzen (1914: 67f.).
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edit two or three volumes of Peirce’s writings.5 Russell was keen. On 14 March 1916, in
a letter to Woods Russell writes:
I am looking forward to your answers as to my lectures next year. I am very anxious to give the
sort of course that will be acceptable.
[Eliot and Haughton 2011: 145]6
Russell was at that time caught up in political activities, which were to result in his
dismissal from Trinity College and land him in jail. The Foreign Office refused to
give him a passport, and as a result Russell never did give his seminar on Peirce.
What a missed opportunity, and how the modern course of empiricism might have
been altered!
Royce was right to see one pivotal difference between the 1914 Russell and the pragmatists. Russell was looking to set out the relationship between the mind and the world
as a correspondence between things in the mind and things in the world. He was eventually to change his view on this matter, under the influence of James. He says in My
Philosophical Development that by 1918 he had become convinced ‘that William James
had been right in denying the relational character of sensations’ (MPD: 134). We have
seen that for the pragmatists, the mind’s relation to the world is not straightforward or
unmediated. Three things are involved: the mind, the world, and an interpretation. In
his later admission that ‘it is a mistake to regard . . . mere seeing itself as knowledge’ (AM:
83), Russell recognizes this insight in pragmatism. Cognitive states always involve the
activity of the mind—we do not passively receive the world as it is in itself. He also
became attracted to what he called James’s ‘neutral monism’,7 or his idea that the
mental and the physical are really two ways of describing the same phenomenon,
which is itself neither wholly mental nor wholly physical. But while it is well known
that Russell became friendly to these aspects of pragmatism, other aspects of his
emerging pragmatism are an under-discussed part of the history of analytic philosophy.8 That more general shift was toward a behaviourist position, culminating in the
1921 The Analysis of Mind, which drew on pragmatist resources. Russell tried in that
book to analyse the relationship between thought and the world by appealing to James’s
neutral monism and rich account of experience, as well as to Dewey’s behaviourism.
But we shall see that he remained hostile to James’s theory of truth and took it to be
essential to pragmatism. Hence, he declined to take the step to a viable, thoroughgoing
pragmatism. That was left to Ramsey.
5
The letter can be found in the Russell Archives, William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections, Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University. Woods, like many others in the years after
Peirce’s death, misspells his name.
6
The letter is mostly about T. S. Eliot’s doctoral degree. Russell met Eliot while at Harvard and had
become friendly with him in England.
7
Russell does not, however, consistently use this term to describe the Jamesian view he adopts and
sustains. The position has come into recent favour under the label ‘Russellian monism’. See e.g. Chalmers
(2010) and Pereboom (2011), chs. 5–6.
8
But see Acero (2005) and Levine (forthcoming).
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5.2 New Thoughts about Experience, Belief,
and Meaning
When James died in 1910, Russell wrote an intellectual eulogy in a short piece titled
‘The Philosophy of William James’. He speaks highly of James’s psychology; of his
empiricist aptitude for seeing ‘facts first, instead of first seeing theories and then
searching out facts to confirm or refute them’; and of:
[his refusal] to begin, as psychologists are apt to do, with sensations, because a mere sensation
is an abstraction which never really occurs. He begins instead with ‘the stream of thought’,
taking thought as we find it, with all kinds of thinking mixed in a vague continuum. This leads
him to a long and very able discussion of ‘the consciousness of self ’, in which he reduces the Self
to the passing thought, with its memory of other thoughts and its consciousness of the body.
[CP 6: 286, 1910]
In 1912 Russell wrote his final review of a book of James’s—the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism—for Mind, and we find in it a change in tone from
his previous reviews. The volume’s editor was Ralph Barton Perry, who tells us in the
preface that James initially intended this volume to contain much else, about meaning
and truth, for instance, but he had already reprinted that material while he was still
alive. Perhaps this is why Russell was so positive about Essays in Radical Empiricism. It
was relatively shorn of the things that he did not like in pragmatism, leaving only the
rich conception of experience and its relationship to the world. That was the material
he was attracted to, and he was heartened by James’s claim that one could be a radical
empiricist without being a pragmatist about truth. For despite not quite believing ‘that
empiricism, however radical, requires that we should deny the difference between
mind and matter’ (CP 6: 304, 1912), Russell was now attracted to James’s anti-atomistic
view that we directly experience relations, as well as particular things.
The empiricist position that preceded Russell held that the data of the senses are
mental. That position seems to lead either to scepticism, or else to idealism. Russell felt
the very pressures that Berkeley, Locke, and Hume felt. If all knowledge is rooted in
perception, but the objects of perception are entirely mental, then it seems we have no
epistemic access to the external world. Russell was thus intrigued by James’s idea that,
as Russell put it: ‘There is no stuff out of which thoughts, as opposed to matter, are
made; pure experience is the only stuff of the world; what distinguishes consciousness
is a certain function, namely the function of knowing’ (CP 6: 300–1, 1912). While
Russell posed a number of questions for James’s position and wished James had offered
more elaboration, he finds interesting the idea that ‘the knower and the known . . . may
be the same piece of experience in different contexts’ (CP 6: 301, 1912).
As he wrote his review, Russell was in the painful process of dealing with some
stinging criticisms from Wittgenstein. But he felt plenty of problems (not just
Wittgenstein’s) pressing in on his logical atomism. While much of the architecture
of logical atomism survives into the Analysis of Mind—for example, Russell continues
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to offer a correspondence theory of truth and a distinctive account of the logical
atoms—he gave up the multiple relation theory of judgement, which requires a self to
serve as a relatum. He was rather despondent about his future in philosophy, writing
to Ottoline Morrell in 1916:
I wrote a lot of stuff about Theory of Knowledge, which Wittgenstein criticised with the greatest severity[.] His criticism . . . was an event of first-rate importance in my life . . . I saw he was
right, and I saw I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.
[A: 282]
But, of course, Russell went on to do much more work in philosophy, and it should be a
matter of contention whether it was more or less fundamental than his work in the first
two decades of the 1900s. Russell was tacking toward James9 on experience and a kind
of pragmatist naturalism in general. In what follows, I will outline that new and, in my
view, more promising programme.
We have seen that in his 1909 ‘Pragmatism’, Russell argued that pragmatism confused acting on a hypothesis with believing it. When Russell sent Schiller the proofs of
that article, Schiller replied on this very point:
It may be a wrong theory, but it is certainly not a confusion, to hold that action is a clue to
belief. Belief is surely one of the most ambiguous and multiform of psychical facts, and there
has hitherto been no adequate theory of it. Our clue certainly covers most of [the] facts. On
p. 4 . . . you don’t allow for shades of belief, or the growth of its intensity as verification accrues.
[Russell CP 6: 380, 1909]
Russell declined to make any revisions to his proofs.
A decade later, Russell no longer thought it was a confusion to link belief and action.
In 1919 he wrote a long review of Dewey’s 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic, in which
Dewey was mighty rude about Russell. Russell sets out some detailed criticisms of
Dewey’s ‘misunderstanding’ of the ‘analytic realists’ and of Russell’s conception of data.
He also criticizes the ‘will-to-believers’. But he responds generously to Dewey’s general
project:
In reading this collection of Essays, I have been conscious of a much greater measure of agreement than the author would consider justifiable on my part. In particular, in passages dealing
with my own views, I have often found that the only thing I disagreed with was the opinion that
what was said constituted a criticism of me.
[CP 8: 134, 1919]
Dewey takes logic to be the study of the nature, origin, and justification of belief—a set
of topics that Russell thinks is important, but is more properly thought of as a mix of
9
Perhaps Russell was primed by James Ward, the most prominent psychologist in England, who was
also Moore’s teacher and predecessor in the Professorship of Mental Philosophy and Logic. In the late
1880s Ward promoted ‘the primacy of the practical’. He linked the true and the useful, although, as he tells
James in a letter, the success of a belief ‘points towards truth’, but does not provide a criterion for ‘absolute’
truth (WWJ VI 76). See Dunham (2014), Ward (1915 [1899]).
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psychology and logic (he does not like Dewey’s calling them problems of logic). But,
once properly labelled, Russell is not altogether hostile to the core of Dewey’s position,
which he characterizes as follows:
The essence of a belief is the behaviour which exemplifies it (which is it, one is tempted to say);
this behaviour is such as is intended to achieve a certain end, and the belief is shown in the
behaviour adopted for that purpose. The belief is called true when the behaviour which exemplifies it achieves its end, and false when it does not—omitting refinements due to cooperation
of different beliefs. Knowledge is like a railway journey: it is a humanly constructed means of
moving from place to place, and its matter, like the rails, is as much a human product as the rest
of it, though dependent upon a crude ore which, in its unmanufactured state, would be as useless to intellectual locomotion as iron ore to locomotion by train.
[CP 8: 143, 1919]
Russell argues that there is something good in this view. But he cannot buy it all. He
argues that not all knowledge will serve as a means to our ends; that Dewey’s
­position seems to leave no room for contemplation; that it nonchalantly helps itself to
our common-sense view of causality, since ‘we must know what effects are caused by
our beliefs’ if we are to ‘test their value as instruments’ (CP 8: 145, 1919); that it ignores
the sceptical challenge; and that it allows us to know only the ‘world’ of our own
construction—‘we know how the trains will move, since we laid down the rails for
them’ (CP 8: 148, 1919). The part of Dewey’s view that Russell likes is the behaviourist
account of belief, ‘since it would enable me to define a belief as a certain series of acts’
(CP 8: 147, 1919). Russell, that is, was coming round to the idea that belief and action
are linked.
He was also coming round to the idea that signs and meaning are important. In My
Philosophical Development, he cites Welby and Schiller as those who sparked his interest in the topic, although at the time they had pressed him on the point, he resisted. He
wrote to Welby in 1909, who had asked for his opinion regarding some issues related to
signs and mathematics: ‘I feel that my views on the question you speak of would be
utterly worthless, as it is a psychological question & I know only the merest smattering
of psychology.’10 But he was to become interested in these topics a decade later:
There was another problem which began to interest me at about the same time—that is to say,
about 1917. This was the problem of the relation of language to facts . . . The problem had been
dealt with by various people before I became interested in it. Lady Welby wrote a book about it
and F. C. S. Schiller was always urging its importance. But I had thought of language as transparent—that is to say, as a medium which could be employed without paying attention to it.
[MPD: 14]
In his review of Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning, Russell tells a similar
story:
10
Russell to Welby, 24 June 1909. Russell makes a similar remark in his immediately previous letter to
Welby, that of 3 April 1908. All these letters are reprinted in Petrilli (2009: 323–4).
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When, in youth, I learned what was called ‘philosophy’ . . . no one ever mentioned to me the
question of ‘meaning’. Later, I became acquainted with Lady Welby’s work on the subject, but
failed to take it seriously. I imagined that logic could be pursued by taking it for granted that
symbols were always, so to speak, transparent, and in no way distorted the objects they were
supposed to ‘mean’.
[CP 9: 138, 1926]
Russell’s account of language and its relationship to reality was starting to come
under strain by 1917. Both he and Wittgenstein would eventually trade in their purportedly transcendental accounts of the relationship for something approaching
pragmatism.
This transformation was affected chiefly by Russell’s beginning to see that what he
called ‘psychology’ underpins logic. In a 1918 letter, he grants that logic requires theories of judgement and symbolism, ‘both of which are psychological problems’.11 This
recognition prompted him to turn to the study of behaviourist psychology. In the 1919
‘On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean’, Russell explictly rejects the
theory of beliefs and propositions he had proposed around 1910—that belief consists
‘in a multiple relation of the subject to the objects constituting the “objective”, i.e. the
fact that makes the belief true or false’ (CP 8: 295, 1919). There is something, he now
thinks, to the behaviourist theory of belief. We cannot have a full account of grasping
the meaning of language without seeing that the ‘relation of a word to its meaning
is . . . of the nature of a causal law’, as well as that at least one key component of learning
a language is the acquisition of ‘habits which . . . . may be reduced to mere physiological
causal laws’ (CP 8: 290, 1919). Specifically, this is true of what Russell calls the ‘demonstrative’ use of language; he contrasts this with the ‘narrative’ use, in which ‘it is . . . the
possibility of a memory-image in the child and an imagination-image in the hearer
that makes the essence of the “meaning” of the words’ (CP 8: 291–2, 1919). This second, ‘most essential function of words’, depends on private mental phenomena, and so
meaning ‘cannot be fully dealt with on behaviourist lines’ (CP 8: 292, 1919). Images, for
Russell, remain critical.
The 1920 ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’ continues to explore the role of behaviour in
meaning:
Now meaning is an observable property of observable entities, and must be amenable to scientific treatment. My object has been to endeavour to construct a theory of meaning after the
model of scientific theories, not on the lines of traditional philosophy.
[CP 9: 91, 1920]
When Russell proceeds to briefly state the theory on which he has settled—after taking
Schiller to task for grounding his theory of meaning on unverifiable ‘experiences from
11
8 July 1918. Quoted in Monk (1996: 532). The letter was written from prison. Like many of Russell’s
prison letters, it was a circular that contained messages for a number of different people, since Russell was
(at least officially) allowed to write only one letter per week. He also read the behaviourist J. B. Watson
in prison.
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within’—we find that what is essential to the meaningfulness of a sign is not its connection to conscious thought or to experience, but rather its production of suitable activity.
Indeed, ‘the intervention of consciousness marks an imperfectly established habit’.
A sign whose meaning we grasp more fully and readily ‘tends to operate directly’ in
causing our behaviour (CP 9: 93, 1920).
5.3 The Analysis of Mind
Russell’s next substantial work was the 1921 The Analysis of Mind, and in it, we find the
fullest expression of his pragmatist thoughts.12 First, he adopts the Jamesian account of
experience. He rejects both the idealist view that ‘matter is a mere fiction imagined by
mind’ and the materialist view that ‘mind [is] a mere property of protoplasm’ (AM: 1).
He offers in their stead a pragmatist account of experience, mind, and matter. Looking
back in My Philosophical Development on his early dyadic theory of perception (in
which perception is a two-term relation between subject and object), he remarks that,
though it ‘had made it comparatively easy to understand how perception could give
knowledge of something other than the subject’, nevertheless, ‘under the influence of
William James, I came to think this view mistaken, or at any rate an undue simplification’ (MPD: 13). He now rejects both his dyadic theory and his later multiple relation
theory, granting James’s claim that sensations are ‘not in their own nature relational
occurrences’ (MPD: 13). In recognizing this, Russell in effect vindicates Royce’s opting,
in his 1914 Harvard lectures on knowledge, for a Peircean ‘triadic’ theory over Russell’s
account at the time. For Russell has now abandoned any theory of knowledge founded
on the self ’s direct perceptual acquaintance with objects, since he grants that sensation
does not of itself put us in cognitive relation to objects, absent the interpretive work of
the understanding. Instead, Russell now adopts a pragmatist account of the mind–
world relation. With James (he quotes extensively from The Principles of Psychology, ‘A
World of Pure Experience’, and ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’), Russell now rejects the
dualisms between subject and object, on the one hand, and mind and body, on the
other. He later noted that this wasn’t an easy move: ‘This change in my opinions greatly
increased the difficulty of problems involved in connecting experience with the outer
world’ (MPD: 13).
In the preface to The Analysis of Mind, Russell says that his motivation in writing the
book stems from the idea of combining two tendencies in recent thought. Psychologists
had become more interested in the material realm—in physiology and external observation of behaviour. And physicists, working under the paradigm set by Einstein’s
theory of relativity, had been ‘making “matter” less and less material’. Russell states his,
new, Jamesian, intention:
12
See James Levine (2009: 1–2) for an excellent account of Russell’s post-1918 behaviourism. See also
Baldwin (2003).
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The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of psychology with the
anti-materialistic tendency of physics is the view of William James and the American new
realists, according to which the ‘stuff ’ of the world is neither mental nor material, but a ‘neutral
stuff,’ out of which both are constructed. I have endeavoured in this work to develop this view
in some detail as regards the phenomena with which psychology is concerned.
[AM: iii]
There is no thing called ‘consciousness’ that is the substance within which (token)
mental phenomena—for instance, beliefs and desires—occur. James asserts that:
[there is] no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects
are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience
which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked.
That function is knowing.
[ERE: 4; quoted in AM: 9–10]
Russell would like not to go quite this far: he retains his resistance to the idea that there
is no distinction at all to be drawn between the respective entities to be found in the
mental and the physical worlds. Some entities, he thinks, will be subject only to mental
laws, and some will be subject only to physical laws. The images produced in dreams or
by imagination, for instance, are not objects within the physical world (AM: 82). And
there may be physical objects that no subject ever experiences, in which case they
would not be part of the mental world (AM: 11). Nonetheless, ‘the distinction between
mind and matter is not so fundamental as is commonly supposed’ (AM: 63). And perhaps the laws peculiar to the mental are also ‘really physiological’ at bottom (AM: 82).
Russell is particularly concerned to argue for monism in the case of sensation
or perceptual experience. Sensations are a paradigmatic example of the neutral:
‘Sensations are what is common to the mental and physical worlds; they may be defined
as the intersection of mind and matter’ (AM: 85). A consequent aim of The Analysis of
Mind is to work through this idea to explain how we might have knowledge of the
external world. Isolating the ‘sensational core’ of an experience is ‘by no means an easy
matter’, but it is a duty to which the philosopher must commit. For sensations or perceptual experiences ‘are obviously the source of our knowledge of the world’, and
‘although it may be difficult to determine what exactly is sensation in any given experience, it is clear that there is sensation, unless, like Leibniz, we deny all action of the
outer world upon us’ (AM: 83). We have seen Peirce and James attempt to meet this
challenge by putting forward a rich conception of experience that has us connected to
the outer world, but that does not posit a one-to-one correspondence between mental
items and items in that outer world. Russell is now far less optimistic about that
­correspondence project than he once was. Indeed, he now moves toward an account of
belief very like Peirce’s, in which a belief is in part a disposition to behave. He now
focuses on habits of action.
It is important to see that Russell is not attracted to an extreme behaviourism.
Neither is Peirce, and neither is Ramsey. But unlike Peirce and Ramsey, Russell had a
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hard time seeing his way to a moderate behaviourism. Just as with the pragmatist theory of truth, Russell’s approach tended to be an all or nothing one. He thinks that in the
pure behaviourist view, ‘nothing can be known except by external observation’ (AM:
11), and so psychology, as a science, can only be concerned with externally observable
behaviour, or ‘what we do’ as opposed to what we merely think (AM: 12). With some
qualms about whether even J. B. Watson holds such a ‘crude’ view, he nonetheless takes
the pure behaviourist to be saying that all there is to knowing is the habits shown in
behaviour. What we observe when a child answers ‘What is six times nine?’ with ‘fifty-four’ is just a ‘habit’ in the use of words, not a ‘thought’ in the child’s mind (AM: 13),
and so the habit is all there is.
While Russell believes that the behaviourists ‘somewhat overstate their case’, still he
thinks that ‘there is an important element of truth in their contention’, even when it
comes to introspection of our own thoughts and desires (AM: 13). We can observe
what people desire from what they do, and one thing we can observe is that people—
including oneself, viewed retrospectively—can be mistaken about what they desire.
At bottom, human beings are animals, and in analysing the nature of the mind ‘it is of
the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a
very wide gap either in structure or behaviour’ (AM: 21). It is clear that Russell has
been won over to the behaviourist camp’s fundamental principle: our mental language
must be explicated in terms of aspects of our animal existence, and its conditions for
appropriate use must make reference to observation (and not primarily to introspection). Braithwaite put Russell’s position thus: ‘He accepts the analysis of will and
desire as merely characteristics of certain cycles of actions, but he will not agree with
Professor J. B. Watson that thinking consists entirely of muttering words under the
breath’ (1921: 605).
Russell’s conception of belief is especially interesting. In a chapter dedicated to the
topic, Russell calls belief the most central problem in the analysis of the mind, for our
whole intellectual life consists of belief ‘and of the passage from one belief to another’
by, for instance, our processes of reasoning. Beliefs now, rather than propositions, ‘are
the vehicles of truth and falsehood’ (AM: 139). But Russell’s view of truth and falsity
has not changed its broad shape. He remains set against the idealist ‘mystic unity of
knower and known’ (AM: 141). Whether a belief is true or false consists in ‘something
that lies outside the belief ’—what makes a belief true or false is a ‘fact’ (AM: 139).
Russell did not waver from the view that judgements of perception, when true, correspond to facts. The only exception are judgements concerning logic and mathematics,
as they are tautologous. That exception aside, he thought we need to do metaphysics in
order to understand truth and reference. He says, in a passage that will be important
when we turn to Ramsey:
The particular fact that makes a given belief true or false I call its ‘objective,’ and the relation
of the belief to its objective I call the ‘reference’ or the ‘objective reference’ of the belief. Thus,
if I believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the ‘objective’ of my belief is
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Columbus’s actual voyage, and the ‘reference’ of my belief is the relation between my belief
and the voyage—that relation, namely, in virtue of which the voyage makes my belief true
(or, in another case, false).
[AM: 139–40]
There can be ‘true reference’ or ‘false reference’ (AM: 140). Beliefs have objectives, or
connections to the way things are, which make them true or false.
The great question for Russell is how he is going to connect belief to its objective
reference. He is by now less committed to the logical analyst search for one-to-one
correspondence between our thoughts and reality, the attempt to analyse our propositions into simple elements that represent simples in the world and the relations
between them. Whatever the nature of the tie between thoughts and reality is, it is
looser than Russell initially envisioned. He now has a view of signs and meaning,
something Welby and Schiller helped him to see is required. Indeed, one can at times
detect the influence of Peirce. He says:
We may say that a person understands a word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use
it, (b) the hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these two active and passive understanding respectively . . . It is not necessary, in order that a man should ‘understand’ a
word, that he should ‘know what it means,’ in the sense of being able to say ‘this word means
so-and-so.’ Understanding words does not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or
in being able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate . . . Understanding language is
more like understanding cricket: it is a matter of habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use the word
correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the use of the word comes first, and the
meaning is to be distilled out of it by observation and analysis . . . The relation of a word to its
meaning is of the nature of a causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when
we hear it used.
[AM: 117–18]
Like Peirce, Russell thinks there is more to understanding than knowing a definition
or being able to point to the objects to which the concept refers. One also needs to
acquire the appropriate habits of action. Russell says that whenever possible, we
should treat a proposition (the content of actual or possible beliefs) rather than actual
token beliefs as being non-derivatively truth-apt (AM: 145). Most of our beliefs are
not present to our mind—they ‘display themselves when the expectations that they
arouse fail in any way’ (AM: 146). The ‘shock of surprise’ we feel, say, on drinking a
glass of what seemed like beer but turns out to be tea ‘makes us aware of the expectations that habitually enter into our perceptions; and such expectations must be classed
as beliefs, in spite of the fact that we do not normally take note of them or put them
into words’ (AM: 146). Russell has become a pragmatist about many kinds of belief:
they are expectations that guide our behaviour and can be upset by the shock of recalcitrant experience.
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Earlier in the book Russell cautions that we must not begin our analysis by assuming
that we have beliefs—we can only assume that which ‘external observation can reveal’
(AM: 23). Russell turns again to James, quoting copiously, to help think through what
we can observe—‘human movements’. We have seen that James, in The Principles of
Psychology, had divided human movements into the categories of the voluntary and
reflex, and said that the outside observer would have trouble slotting actions into
one category or another. Russell agrees, and more or less agrees also with James’s
main point that nowhere do we observe the will or consciousness—‘these things can
only be seen from within, if at all’ (AM: 24). Russell thinks that we can make sense of
a broad distinction between instinct and habit, in which the former is innate and the
latter is acquired only through the process of learning by experience (AM: 27). The
‘habitual knowledge’, or the body of ingrained expectation acquired through this
learning process, is ‘not always in our minds, but is called up by the appropriate
stimuli’ (AM: 45).
But while Russell may have become a pragmatist about belief, he has not become a
pragmatist about truth. And, unlike the pragmatist, he still hankers after the reductionist project:
It is quite likely that, if we knew more about animal bodies, we could deduce all their movements from the laws of chemistry and physics. It is already fairly easy to see how chemistry
reduces to physics . . . We only know in part how to reduce physiology to chemistry, but we
know enough to make it likely that the reduction is possible.
[AM: 24–5]
The reduction of human behavior to physical laws ‘can only be effected by entering into
great minuteness’—like a spark to dynamite, a postcard saying ‘All is discovered; fly!’
will set off a long chain of actions (AM: 25). While it is highly unlikely that we will be
able to predict such minute and precise matters, Russell thinks that reductionist projects—for instance, the ‘analysis’ of the ‘material unit’ into ‘constituents analogous to
sensations’—remains of ‘the utmost importance’ for philosophy (AM: 185). James
would not have accepted that.
He also would not have accepted a similar hankering after reductionism in the interpretation of neutral monism. Russell takes neutral monism to hold that mental states,
like beliefs and desires, as well as physical objects, are ‘constructed or inferred, not part
of the original stock of data in the perfected science’ (AM: 182). This stock of data consists of the particulars and relations disclosed to us in sensation, which are studied by
both physics and psychology. His 1927 The Analysis of Matter is an attempt to show
how the world can be inferred or constructed out of such sense-data. By contrast, the
classical pragmatists start with experience, understood in a qualitatively rich way, but
maintain that the meaning of experience must hold good intersubjectively. For this
reason, they can give a richer picture of our mental life, but one that is not reducible to
the entities and properties discussed by physics.
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Russell occasionally feels the nearness of the various difficulties for his position. The
only data we have to work with are beliefs or judgements: ‘It follows that no datum is
theoretically indubitable, since no belief is infallible’ (AM: 180). So, certainly the foundationalism of Russell’s earlier iterations of the atomist project, in which we can know
with certainty that our perceptions of basic entities are veridical, is imperilled. The
Vienna Circle was just coming into being as The Analysis of Mind was published. They
too became alert to these problems. Perhaps the most significant controversy within
the Vienna Circle was about the nature of the experience in which science was supposed to be grounded. The phenomenalist branch held that observation reports are
about private sensations, while the physicalist branch held that they are about public
physical events. The problem for the phenomenalists was that it seems impossible
to communicate private qualitative content to others—the experiencer seems to be
trapped in his or her own world. We have seen that Russell was attuned to this difficulty
and thus was motivated to eliminate ‘consciousness’, as well as the divide between the
mental and the physical. The problem for the physicalists was that they seemed to be
grounding knowledge in something about which we could be mistaken. That is, they
seemed to be unable to achieve their aim of epistemological security. Russell, in The
Analysis of Mind, seems to accept this conclusion for his own neutral monist model,
but he seems to revert to form in The Analysis of Matter.
There are other ways in which Russell was not entirely won over to the pragmatist or
behaviourist project. He noted cases in which a belief does not manifest itself in terms
of a disposition to cause voluntary movements. We can recall a bit of history, believe a
proposition of mathematics, and so on, without being disposed to any movement at all.
Russell retains the view he put forward in ‘On Propositions’ two years earlier: a necessary condition of a word’s possessing at least the ‘narrative’ dimension of meaning is its
capacity to produce mental images in its audience, and those images cannot be reduced
to behavioural dispositions (AM: 120). We have seen that Peirce argued that thinking
about and manipulating proofs are actions, and he gave accounts of experience (as that
which impinges upon us) and action (as consequences for future thought and inference, as well as for future bodily movements) that were broad enough to warrant the
claim that our judgements about history, mathematics, ethics, and other such domains
also have causal implications. But while Peirce would have wanted to maintain that
every belief has a causal or behavioural dimension, he would have been steadier than
Russell in not wanting to define or analyse away beliefs in terms of propensities to
cause behaviour.
Another way in which Russell is not fully signed up to the pragmatist project is that
he worries about a version of a pragmatist view of belief and behaviour, which he
­attributes to James, in which belief is the opposite of doubt. Here belief would consist
simply in entertaining an idea without doubting it: ‘belief is not a positive phenomenon, though doubt and disbelief are so’ (AM: 149). In the absence of any reasons for
calling it into question, considering an idea or mental image simply constitutes belief,
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and so imbues the one who considers it with dispositions to act. Doubt can then be
seen as an attempt to restrain ‘the natural tendency to act upon’ the propositions we
consider (AM: 149–50). Whether or not this really is James’s view, Russell thinks ‘There
is a great deal to be said’ in its favour, and he has ‘some hesitation in regarding it as
inadequate’ (AM: 150). He argues, for instance, that one’s dispositions to behave are
altered when one is in a state of doubt or suspense. This feeling might be compared to
that of a man who is waiting for the signal to run a race—‘Such a man, though not
moving, is in a very different condition from that of a man quietly at rest’ (AM: 149).
Indeed, it is in his use of such examples that Russell makes a real contribution to the
pragmatist/behaviourist project. For instance, he shows how accuracy of response and
sensitivity to stimuli do not suffice for knowledge. A thermometer might be accurate
and sensitive, but the thermometer does not know anything. Sensitivity to a certain
feature of the environment is simply a matter of behaving differently according to the
presence or absence of the feature. In terms of sensitivity alone, there is nothing to
choose between a thermometer that rises with the temperature and one that falls in
exact proportion to the temperature’s rising. We see the practical difference between
them when we notice that one will tend to make us to dress comfortably for the weather
while the other may mislead us. Russell’s argument is that appropriateness or suitability to realizing a purpose must be part of the behaviourist analysis of knowledge
(AM: 157–8). The pragmatist will of course find this congenial.
But despite these flirtations with and contributions to pragmatist accounts of mind
and knowledge, Russell is unconvinced in the end. He still worries about memory and
mathematics, and so he thinks that there has to be belief-feelings that are irreducible to
actions or dispositions. But of course, Peirce, too, did not want to do away with the
phenomenal aspect of belief—he thought that the feeling of doubt could and should be
intrinsically distinguished from the feeling of belief. But either Peirce’s position was
not known to Russell, or Russell was so stuck on the idea that definitive analysis or
reductionism has to be the aim of any theory that he was blind to the possibility of
the Peircean non-reductive alternative. So Russell took a step away from a unified
account of belief. He demarcates memory, expectation, and bare assent, as ‘each constituted by a certain feeling attached to the content believed’ (AM: 150), and as not
captured by pragmatism or behaviourism.13
Russell’s pragmatism is also tempered in the lack of importance he accords the
idea that belief is fundamentally a habit of action for his theory of truth and his epistemology. Russell still accounts for truth in terms of mind-transcendent facts. The
13
Russell continued to hold this bifurcated position. Jim Levine pointed out to me that in the 1948
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, he distinguished between beliefs that can be understood purely
from the viewpoint of behaviourism from those that cannot; and he thought that while the pragmatist
theory of truth holds for the former, it does not hold for the latter. The behaviourist/pragmatist domain
includes beliefs in general propositions. We shall see that this issue was much discussed by Ramsey and
Wittgenstein in the 1920s.
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behaviourist view ‘is important, but not exhaustive of the nature of knowledge’
(AM: 153). Part of the importance of the behaviourist idea is that it offers us a way of
understanding how we can verify some of our beliefs, despite the fact that there can
be no absolute criterion of truth. If you go to the station believing that a train will
arrive at a certain time, and it does indeed arrive at that time, your ‘expectation-belief ’
has been verified (AM: 163). Russell goes so far as to say that a sensory experience
like that of the train pulling in ‘may be defined as verification, and as constituting the
truth of the expectation’ (AM: 163). Science and history rely on indirect verification,
where we deduce consequences from a hypothesis and verify those, or where we
­display manuscript evidence to support our claim that, for instance, Caesar crossed
the Rubicon. This process is not infallible, but if we reject complete scepticism,
then we rightly treat such verification as a ‘practical method by which the system of
beliefs grows gradually toward the unattainable ideal of impeccable knowledge’
(AM: 164). For the class of belief that Russell calls expectations, he offers something
approximating pragmatism.
Nonetheless, the ‘purely formal definition of truth’ remains a matter of the objective
reference of a proposition. It is important to try to see what Russell means by this
expression, for Ramsey picks it up. Russell notes that you may believe the proposition
‘today is Tuesday’ on Tuesdays as well as on other days of the week. Both of these token
beliefs have the same objective—‘namely the fact that it is Tuesday.’ But:
If to-day is not Tuesday . . . obviously the relation of your belief to the fact is different in this
case from what it is in the case when to-day is Tuesday. We may say, metaphorically, that
when to-day is Tuesday, your belief that it is Tuesday points towards the fact, whereas when
to-day is not Tuesday your belief points away from the fact. Thus the objective reference of a
belief is not determined by the fact alone, but by the direction of the belief towards or away
from the fact.
[AM: 164]
In a note, he says that he owes this way of looking at the matter to ‘my friend Ludwig
Wittgenstein’.14 It is ‘necessitated by the circumstance that there are true and false
propositions, but not true and false facts’ (AM: 164). Since there are none, false facts
are not the objectives of false beliefs. Accordingly, propositions are not names for facts,
since they correspond not one-to-one but (at least) two-to-one to the facts. And the
nature of this correspondence will depend on whether the proposition in question
points toward or away from the fact to which it corresponds.
But the pointing metaphor that is supposed to capture the relationship between
propositions and facts is just as hard to unpack as the metaphors of propositions picturing or ‘hooking onto’ the world. Russell means to throw light on the relationship when
he says, as he and Tractarian Wittgenstein were wont to do, that at least in the simple
cases ‘true propositions actually resemble their objectives’ (AM: 165). If we think of an
14
See also ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ (PLA: 167).
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image-proposition, for instance, that the window is to the left of the door in a particular
room, ‘there is a correspondence between the image and the objective’ when the
proposition is true. For in this case:
the very same relation relates the terms of the objective (namely the window and the door) as
relates the images which mean them. In this case the correspondence which constitutes truth
is very simple . . . [T]he objective consists of two parts with a certain relation (that of left-toright), and the proposition consists of images of these parts with the very same relation.
[AM: 165]
Russell notes that if he is to make this notion of formal correspondence go beyond
the simple cases, there are some obstacles he has to clear away. Once we turn to
word-propositions, the idea of picturing facts is harder to make transparent. For
instance, words for relations introduce a third term to a simple proposition such as
‘Socrates precedes Plato’—in this case, the third term is ‘precedes’, which, while it
‘means a relation, [still it] is not a relation’—and so word-propositions have ‘more
terms than the facts to which they refer’ (AM: 166). And, again, negative facts and
propositions introduce thorny complications. We cannot form an image of the fact
that the window is not to the left of the door, and so the picturing metaphor seems
unavailable. Here Russell does not make use of the pointing-away-from metaphor.
Rather, he attempts to solve the problem by suggesting that word-propositions symbolizing negative facts are themselves positive facts: ‘Plato does not precede Socrates’
is ‘just as positive’ as ‘Socrates precedes Plato.’ There is indeed a relation between
the symbols ‘Plato’, ‘does not precede’, and ‘Socrates’ and this relation between the linguistic items is no less positive than that between ‘Socrates’, ‘precedes’, and ‘Plato’.
Positive facts, rather than being ‘verified by a positive objective’, are verified by a ‘negative objective’ (AM: 167). It is hard, I suggest, to see how this solves the problem of how
there is an isomorphism between words and objects in the world, rather than conceding that there is not such an isomorphic relation.
That is, none of Russell’s moves ought to strike the reader as sweeping away the
obstacles in the way of Russell’s position. We shall see in the next chapter that Ramsey
did not think that Russell could make good sense of the idea that true propositions
resemble facts. Indeed, a few years after the publication of The Analysis of Mind, we
find Russell explicitly conceding the point and attributing it to the pragmatist:
Although pragmatism may not contain ultimate philosophical truth, it has certain important
merits. First, it realizes that the truth that we can attain to is merely human truth, fallible and
changeable like everything human. What lies outside the cycle of human occurrences is not
truth, but fact (of certain kinds). Truth is a property of beliefs, and beliefs are psychical events.
Moreover their relation to facts does not have the schematic simplicity which logic assumes; to
have pointed this out is a second merit in pragmatism. Beliefs are vague and complex, pointing
not to one precise fact, but to several vague regions of fact. Beliefs, therefore, unlike the schematic propositions of logic, are not sharply opposed as true or false, but are a blur of truth and
falsehood; they are of varying shades of grey . . .
[CP 9: 456, 1924]
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Even within The Analysis of Mind, Russell recognizes a critical shortcoming in his
correspondence theory. He closes his chapter on truth with this pragmatist thought
about purpose:
I do not believe that the above formal theory [of truth as correspondence] is untrue, but I do
believe that it is inadequate. It does not, for example, throw any light upon our preference for
true beliefs rather than false ones. This preference is only explicable by taking account of the
causal efficacy of beliefs, and of the greater appropriateness of the responses resulting from true
beliefs. But appropriateness depends upon purpose, and purpose thus becomes a vital part of
theory of knowledge.
[AM: 168]
Ramsey confounded generations of scholars of American pragmatism by saying
that he got his pragmatism from Russell, whom they viewed as the arch-enemy of
pragmatism. We can now see how Russell might have provided a spark to Ramsey, by
prompting him to begin to think about how belief is tied to action. As a visiting philosopher to Cambridge in 1929 noted in his diary, Russell had become ‘Americanised’
(MacIver, unpublished: 40). By this, he meant that Russell had adopted a kind of pragmatist behaviourism.15
But we shall see that even before he discovered pragmatism, Ramsey was set against
the early Russellian view that philosophy is a descriptive activity undertaken objectively, without regard for how we use words, and that Ramsey was inclined towards a
broader array of pragmatist theses than was Russell, including the pragmatist account
of truth.
15
According to Feigl, Russell introduced pragmatism to the Vienna Circle as well. He says the Circle
members were ‘largely ignorant of American philosophy’, and he thinks ‘it was through Bertrand Russell’s
books that our attention was called to American Behaviorism’ (1968: 644–5).
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6
Ramsey
6.1 Introduction
Ramsey came from an established Cambridge academic family. His father was a
mathematician and President (vice master) of Magdalene College. His mother was
a well-known and well-educated socialist and suffragist. His brother was to become
Regius Professor of Divinity, then Archbishop of Canterbury. But it was clear early on
that Frank Ramsey, even in this distinguished company, was something special. Ogden
had seen his brilliance when he was still at school, and became a mentor to him.
Richards reminisces:
I well remember the strange large-boned boy, with a head like the young Beethoven coming
into Top Hole and Ogden producing C. I. Lewis’s A Survey of Symbolic Logic. It contained in an
Appendix a collection of problems in logic supposedly not solvable by extant logical procedure.
Ogden asked young Ramsey what he made of them. Frank glanced through the first of them
and said, ‘I don’t see that there is a problem. It tells you, as it goes on, all you need to know.’ And
then, one after another, he gave us the answers amidst bursts of laughter at our astonishment.
[Richards 1977: 103]
In 1921 Ramsey entered Trinity, and in 1923, he graduated as a ‘wrangler’ in the
Mathematical Tripos, scoring the University’s highest marks in the final Honours
examinations. This was at a time, in Hacking’s words, when ‘The Tripos was not just an
examination, but a training ground in a local way of doing mathematics, which lasted
most of its wranglers the rest of their lives’ (2014: 185).
In April 1921 Ramsey and his fellow undergraduate and friend Richard Braithwaite
were elected new members of the Apostles and the Moral Sciences Club, the former
highly selective and secretive, the latter much more open. They too were training
grounds. The Moral Sciences Club was where serious philosophy got done. One of the
first papers in Ramsey’s introductory year asked whether truth and beauty are human
inventions; another discussed instinct and intelligence; another was about whether
materialism resulted in the abolition of ethics; another discussed causation.1 These
were topics that would interest Ramsey for the rest of his life. The Apostles, or
the Cambridge Conversazione Society, while sometimes taking on serious topics,
1
3 November 1922; 1 December 1922; 9 February 1923; 16 February 1923. Cambridge University
Archives, Min. IX.42.
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c­ onsistently emphasized cleverness and irreverence, binding its members with bonds
of friendship and loyalty.
At the age of 22, Ramsey was made a Fellow of King’s College and a University
Lecturer in Mathematics. He had already impressed Keynes, Moore, Russell, and
Wittgenstein, and these intellectual relationships continued to flourish. Keynes had
thought Ramsey ‘as good a philosopher as anyone living’ (Harrod 1951: 320–1). Moore
recalled:
In the early twenties, F. P. Ramsey attended at least one course of my lectures. I had soon come
to feel of him, as of Wittgenstein, that he was very much cleverer than I was, and consequently
I felt distinctly nervous in lecturing before him: I was afraid that he would see some gross
absurdity in things which I said . . .
[1968 [1942]: 35]
With Russell too, he was on good terms. In 1924 there was a flurry of letters in which
Ramsey helped out with Principia, verifying references, adding to the bibliography,
correcting the mathematics, looking over the proofs, and so on.2 He continued to
engage Russell on topics of mutual interest. For instance, in 1926, Russell noted:
‘Ramsey all morning talking mathematical logic.’3 Russell, however, was not resident
in Cambridge during Ramsey’s career there. He had been dismissed from Trinity in
1916 because of his anti-war activities, to return as a fellow only in 1943. In the 1920s
Russell was in London, standing for Parliament, and then running an experimental
school for children. But as is clear from a diary he kept in his first year as a Trinity
undergraduate, Ramsey was absorbed in Russell’s thought, reading almost everything
he had written. He, like Wittgenstein, fought his duels with his internalized Russell. As
Braithwaite says:
In 1919 and for the next few years philosophic thought in Cambridge was dominated by the
work of Bertrand Russell . . . [T]he books and articles in which he developed his ever-changing
philosophy were eagerly devoured and formed the subject of detailed commentary and criticism in the lectures of G. E. Moore and W. E. Johnson. Russell’s statements on the various
topics of philosophy were . . . the orthodoxy . . .
[1933: 1]
But when Ramsey came onto the philosophical scene, Wittgenstein was also looming
large, and he had him to contend with as well. It can sometimes seem that, given that all
three use much of the same language and many of the same concepts to address the
same problems, they are more or less in agreement. But they did not view matters this
way, and we should not make the mistake of thinking they were all on the same page.
By the time Ramsey took ill with a liver ailment and died at the age of 26, he had
made his indelible mark not just on Cambridge thought—he had advanced a number
2
3
See e.g. the letters from Ramsey to Russell, Russell Archive BR 9/22/24, BR 8 12/3/24, BR 9 12/23/24.
Russell Archive RA3/1027/250357.
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of entire disciplines: probability theory and statistics, mathematics, economics, logic,
and philosophy. Lytton Strachey wrote to Dadie Rylands after Ramsey’s death:
The loss to your generation is agonizing to think of—and the world will never know what has
happened—what a light has gone out. I always thought there was something of Newton about
him—the ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament . . .
[Holroyd 2011: 655]
In the year after his death, Braithwaite edited many of his papers and published them
(in Ogden’s Library) under the title The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical
Essays. Moore wrote the preface, speaking to Ramsey’s ‘very exceptional brilliance’
combined with ‘great soundness of judgment’ and ‘common sense’ (Moore 1931: vii).
Braithwaite wrote the editor’s introduction, in which he notes what I shall argue for in
a more sustained way. Ramsey’s posthumously published papers:
show him moving towards a kind of pragmatism, and the general treatise on logic upon which
at various times he had been engaged was to have treated truth and knowledge as purely natural phenomena to be explained psychologically without recourse to distinctively logical
relations.
[Braithwaite 1931: ix]
We shall see that Ramsey had been moving in the direction of pragmatism even
earlier than in that unfinished treatise. It seems near ridiculous to speak of
Ramsey’s later view, given how young he was when he died. So perhaps it is best to
say that as he matured, he became more and more a Peircean pragmatist. We shall
see that this evolution was complicated by the fact that Ramsey had a hard time
fully shaking off the logical analyst framework. He tended to retain the basic structure, while founding it on a different theory of meaning and a different approach
to ontological commitment.
Ramsey, like all the philosophers in Cambridge, knew James’s work. But Ramsey
saw that James was not the whole of pragmatism. We have seen that he knew C. I.
Lewis’s 1918 logic text. In that book, Lewis outlines Peirce’s mathematical logic and
presents his own pragmatist, non-extensionalist construal of conditionals. And in the
early 1920s, Ramsey’s diary tells us ‘Read a little Santayana: has points.’4 So he had a
fairly broad picture of pragmatism from very early on.
But it was Peirce, and his work on meaning, truth, and probability that really caught
Ramsey’s attention. Ramsey makes use of Peirce and his type–token distinction in his
critical notice of the Tractatus, a distinction that appears in the notes Ogden took on
‘Prolegomena’ in 1911.5 But the intensity of Ramsey’s engagement with Peirce was
amplified in 1923 when Ogden published Chance, Love and Logic in his International
Library, simultaneously with the US edition. We find Ramsey on 23 January 1924
But he soon ‘chucked’ him ‘as a bore’. King’s College Archives. FPR 1/1.
Thus, contra Methven, who seems to suggest that Ramsey only read Peirce when Chance, Love and
Logic was published in 1923 (2015: 53), I think it is pretty clear that Ramsey read some Peirce before then.
4
5
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­ riting in his diary: ‘Read some Hobbes Logic, and Peirce, who is surprising good in
w
parts.’ Two days later: ‘Read some more Pierce’ (sic) and three days later:
Read more Peirce in morning wrote after tea some notes on formal logic (abstraction, identity,
axiom of infinity). Peirce towards end of this book sad stuff.6
That ‘sad stuff ’ is ‘Man’s Glassy Essence’, with its talk of a ‘primordial habit-taking
tendency’ in the physical world, and ‘Evolutionary Love’ with its speculative evolutionary
metaphysics muddled in with the idea that love is operative in the cosmos. Ramsey did
the sensible thing and ignored those last papers, taking extensive notes on the rest of
the book.7 Ramsey was then in the final stages of his undergraduate degree, and he
remarks that he may devote his dissertation to probability ‘partly because interested in
it again by Peirce’. On 29 January, Ramsey writes ‘Finished Peirce’, but two days later he
was still making notes ‘of C. S. Peirce’. One of the great minds of the twentieth century
was now fully immersed in the work of one of the most neglected minds of the nineteenth century. Ramsey read a staggering number of volumes in economics, politics,
philosophy, and mathematics. But he referred to thoughts contained in Chance, Love
and Logic more than any other work outside that of his Cambridge colleagues. We shall
see that he was the attentive reader Peirce yearned for.
Chance, Love and Logic included ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, with its three-part
account of what a speaker must do in order to fully understand a concept: provide a definition, pick out objects to which it refers, and identify its possible effects on experience
and action. It included ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ with its dispositional account of belief and
low-profile, non-absolutist account of truth and objectivity. It included the papers on
statistical reasoning in which Peirce linked degrees of belief to objective probabilities.
Ramsey made it clear in his subsequent work that he was inspired by Peirce with
respect to belief, probability, reasoning, and truth. Indeed, that ‘treatise’ mentioned by
Braithwaite grappled with how to interpret Peirce’s view of truth, and leant toward it.
Ramsey, with Russell and the early Wittgenstein, was seen by the Vienna Circle as
one of their own.8 It will become clear in the pages that follow that Ramsey did share
some things with them: he too employed logical techniques, and he inherited Russell
and Wittgenstein’s interest in the foundations of mathematics and in the relationship
between propositions and reality. But whether or not Russell and the early Wittgenstein
can be taken to be part of the Vienna Circle’s tradition, Ramsey most certainly cannot.
As Keynes says in his review of the The Foundations of Mathematics, Ramsey was
‘departing . . . from the formal and objective treatment of his immediate predecessors’.
He and Wittgenstein were helping Russell to perfect the formal matters first set out in
Principia Mathematica. But, Keynes says, the effect was:
gradually to empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until finally
it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the principles, usually reckoned
King’s College Archives. FPR 1/1, 23, 25 and 28 January 1924. 7 See RP 005-30-01.
Ayer, for instance, says: ‘The brilliant Cambridge philosopher F. P. Ramsey was marked as an adherent,
but he died in 1930 at the early age of 26’ (1959: 6).
6
8
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l­ ogical, of reasonable thought. Wittgenstein’s solution was to regard everything else as a sort of
inspired nonsense, having great value indeed for the individual, but incapable of being exactly
discussed. Ramsey’s reaction was towards what he himself described as a sort of pragmatism,
not unsympathetic to Russell, but repugnant to Wittgenstein . . . Thus he was led to consider
‘human logic’ as distinguished from ‘formal logic’.
[Keynes 1972 [1931]: 338]
Keynes gets so much right. Ramsey, like Peirce, was a first-rate mathematician and
formal logician, and both were keen on working out all sorts of mathematical and logical problems. But also like Peirce, Ramsey wanted to explore what it was for human
beings to believe and reason successfully. That exploration is the subject matter of the
rest of this chapter.
6.2 The Undergraduate Ramsey and the Tractatus
In the spring of 1920, as he was about to finish at Winchester, the 17-year-old Ramsey
met Ogden.9 When Ramsey arrived in Cambridge the next year to start his undergraduate degree, Ogden was a mentor, advising on what lectures to attend, suggesting
that he get himself into the Heretics Society, and serving as his general soundingboard. They spent considerable time talking in Ogden’s office, the ‘Top Hole’, and
Ogden took Ramsey to London for a weekend in 1920 to meet Russell.10
When Ogden agreed to publish the Tractatus, he asked Ramsey, still an undergraduate, if he might help translate it. In a preface, he says: ‘The Editor further desires to
express his indebtedness to Mr F. P. Ramsey, of Trinity College, Cambridge, for
assistance both with the translation and in the preparation of the book for the press’
(Wittgenstein 1922). Ramsey had won a prize in German at Winchester, but that
was not all Ogden prized for this translational project. The Tractatus was a mighty
difficult and technical work, and Ogden, for all his abilities, was not an advanced
philosopher, never mind a logician. Ramsey’s role, I suggest, was much more than
that of a helpmate—it was to provide the philosophical solidity for the translation.
The correspondence between Ogden, Ramsey, Wittgenstein, and, to a lesser extent,
Russell shows that Ramsey was involved in sorting out countless translational matters, large and small.11 Braithwaite in his obituary of Ramsey simply asserts that
Ramsey translated the Tractatus (1930: 216). Wittgenstein insisted that the translation had equal authority with the German text,12 which was printed side by side
with the translation.
9
A 1920 diary Ramsey kept in his last year at school makes that clear, and his diary in his first term at
Cambridge shows the continuing mentorship. Both documents were provided to me by Ramsey’s grandson,
Stephen Burch.
10
See Paul (2012: 76–80) and Dora Russell (1977).
11
See the letters compiled in von Wright (1973).
12
See McGuinness (1988: 298). One must take this assertion as speaking to the corrected version. See
Lewy (1967: 417) for a list of the alterations made in Ramsey’s copy of the Tractatus.
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Shortly after the publication of the Tractatus, Ramsey wrote a critical notice of it,
published in the October 1923 volume of Mind. He praises the book for its originality,
extraordinary interest, and treatments of tautology, identity, and so on. But Ramsey
raised a number of pressing issues for the Tractatus. He notes that there are two things
going on in the book. One is ‘the non-mystical deductions’ that occupy most of the
text—the arguing in detail for ‘the necessity of something in common between the
picture and the world’ (CN: 468). The other consists of indicating all the things that are
‘intrinsically impossible to discuss’ (CN: 468). He saw difficulties arising for both parts
of the Tractatus.
The issues he raised for the non-mystical deductions or the picture theory are themselves of two kinds. Some are particular problems, for instance, about Wittgenstein’s
account of probability13 and what is now known as the colour exclusion problem. The
latter challenges the understanding of necessity in the Tractatus: it is not a tautology
that red and blue cannot be in one place at the same time, hence not all necessity is logical necessity.14 These particular problems were worries about how we might picture the
simple world of actual objects, and Wittgenstein grappled with them before and after
Ramsey’s Critical Notice.
But Ramsey also raised a general problem for the picture theory. What about those
propositions that do not even try to picture the simple world of actual objects? He
argued that the picture theory does not give anything like a complete account of what it
is for a proposition to have the sense that it does. Ramsey takes Wittgenstein’s view to
be as follows: ‘the sense of a proposition is that the things meant by its elements (the
words) are combined with one another in the same way, as are the elements themselves, that is logically’. The proposition and the facts have the same logical form.
Ramsey sees a major problem for Wittgenstein:
But it is evident that, to say the least, this definition is very incomplete; it can be applied literally
only in one case, that of the completely analysed elementary proposition. (It may be explained
that an elementary proposition is one which asserts the existence of an atomic fact, and that a
proposition token is completely analysed if there is an element in it corresponding to each
object occurring in its sense).
[CN: 469]
If we have to deal with complex propositions, for instance, those with logical operators
such as ‘not’ and ‘if ’, we are in trouble. For those operators ‘do not represent objects as
names do’ (CN: 469). Moreover, the theory works ‘if we had only to deal with one logical symbolism’ (CN: 471), and the assumption that there is only one notation is surely
false. I shall argue that Ramsey’s conclusion that ‘we cannot be satisfied with a theory
that deals only with elementary propositions’ played a major role in Wittgenstein’s
rejection of the Tractatus.
13
Like Keynes, the Tractarian Wittgenstein thought of probability as a logical relation between propositions.
Sahlin (1997: 74–5, 82–3, n. 48) shows us that Ramsey was concerned to correct what he saw as that mistake.
14
See Methven (2015: 218) and Proops (2011b: 234f.) for good accounts of this problem.
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But Ramsey also had a (related) worry about the conception of philosophy found
in the Tractatus and its ‘mystical’ elements. And while Wittgenstein would give up
on what grounded the mystical thesis and the Tractarian conception of philosophy
(that is, he would give up on the picture theory), we shall see that in his later work he
would hold on to reconstituted versions of these ideas. On the conception of philosophy articulated in the Tractatus, philosophy is an activity that aims at the logical
clarification of thoughts, and that requires showing how in a perfect language the
internal properties of a proposition picture their objects. Ramsey finds Wittgenstein’s
form of representation an ‘elusive entity’, and registers his not-yet-fully-formed
unease at the idea that philosophy and ethics might be nonsense, yet important nonsense (CN: 468). He would sharpen and amplify this worry in the years to come.
The critical notice also registers a thought about truth that Ramsey will make
much of later. If we can answer the question of what it is for a proposition to have a
certain sense:
we incidentally solve the problem of truth: or rather it is already evident that there is no
such problem. For if a thought or proposition token ‘p’ says p, then it is called true if p and
false if –p.
[CN: 469]
We shall see that Ramsey will build on this idea for the rest of his life, and I shall argue
that the ensuing structure becomes a pragmatist one.
Ramsey’s critical notice was the first commentary on the Tractatus, apart from
Russell’s introduction to the book. It remains standing as something to be taken seriously by any subsequent commentator. It is remarkable that at the time of writing it,
Ramsey had yet to discuss philosophy directly with Wittgenstein. That was to change
in September of 1923. Ramsey travelled to Puchberg am Schneeberg, near Vienna,
where Wittgenstein was in self-imposed isolation as a schoolteacher. They spent five
hours a day for two weeks going through the Tractatus line by line, at the rate of a page
an hour, with Wittgenstein making amendments in Ramsey’s copy.15 In a letter to
Ogden, Ramsey is full of enthusiasm and admiration:
He looks younger than he can possibly be; but he says he has bad eyes and a cold. But his general appearance is athletic. In explaining his philosophy he is excited and makes rigorous gestures but relieves the tension by a charming laugh . . . He is great. I used to think Moore a great
man but beside W!
[von Wright 1973: 77–8]
No one had a window into Wittgenstein’s early work as did Ramsey. That window
opened even wider when Ramsey finished his undergraduate degree and spent six
months in 1924 in Vienna being psychoanalysed. He met with Wittgenstein a number
of times and ‘work’ was the ‘mainstay’ of their conversation (McGuinness 2012b: 150).
15
See the letters collected in McGuinness (2012b: 140) and von Wright (1973: 77ff.).
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During this second visit, Ramsey was less enthusiastic. He is still keen to see
Wittgenstein, but his work is not so shaped and dominated by Wittgenstein:
I stayed a night at Puchberg last weekend. Wittgenstein seemed to me tired, though not ill; but
it isn’t really any good talking to him about work, he won’t listen. If you suggest a question, he
won’t listen to your answer but starts thinking of one himself.
[Letter of 30 March 1924, reprinted in von Wright 1973: 85]
Ramsey is starting to have his own answers to his own questions, and is less enamoured
of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy. He visited again in May: ‘Wittgenstein
seemed more cheerful . . . But he is no good for my work’ (Paul 2012: 162). Ramsey
wrote to his mother that the piece he turned in for a prize explains ‘such parts of
Wittgenstein that I want to use for my own stuff ’.16 Shortly after his undergraduate
degree, Ramsey’s work had become independent of Wittgenstein’s.
Nonetheless, Ramsey and Wittgenstein were starting to see themselves as the vanguard. The following is from a 1924 letter from Ramsey to Wittgenstein, in advance of
his trip:
I went to see Russell a few weeks ago, and am reading the manuscript of the new stuff he is putting into the Principia. You are quite right that it is of no importance . . . I felt he was too old: he
seemed to understand and say ‘yes’ to each separate thing, but it made no impression so that 3
minutes afterwards he talked on his old lines.
[McGuinness 2012b: 147]
Nonetheless, Ramsey ‘liked him very much’.
6.3 The Undergraduate Ramsey’s Response to Russell
On 18 November 1921, the 18-year-old undergraduate Ramsey read a confident paper
to the Moral Sciences Club titled ‘The Nature of Propositions’. Russell’s domination of
the issue seemed secure, even if, as we have seen, his view of it was ever-changing.
Ramsey says: ‘All accounts of propositions and judgment which I have read are variations of either the propositional theory of judgment or the incomplete symbol theory
of propositions’ (NP: 109). But Ramsey rejected them all, attacking Russell’s early view
of propositions, facts, and truth, and expressing a problem for Russell’s newer multiple
relation theory. In briefly setting out his concerns, we can see how the spirit of his work
was already in line with the pragmatist view he was to later find in Peirce.
Russell, Ramsey argues, had been wrong to think that a belief is a dual relation
between something mental and a proposition, and he was still wrong to think that sentences containing propositional phrases (such as ‘Aristotle believed that Plato was
mortal’ or ‘p implies q’) refer to multiple relations. Of the early Russell’s conception of
propositions, which Ramsey takes to be the familiar and common understanding
16
King’s College Archive, FPR 2/4. That ‘stuff ’ was to become ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’.
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(at least for philosophers), he says that there simply are no such ‘mysterious entities’ as
propositions, ‘so unlike anything else in the world’ (NP: 112). The suggestion that there
are objects such as propositions introduces more problems than it solves. And the new,
multiple relation analysis even in ‘the simplest case is so complicated’ and for some
cases, such as general propositions, it is ‘infinitely complex’ (NP: 109). Ramsey thinks
that it is ‘generally agreed’ and indeed ‘self-evident’ that ‘no proposition entertainable
by us can be infinitely complex’ (NP: 109).
Ramsey read a follow-up paper to the Apostles on 29 April 1922. In it, he continues
to examine Russell’s logical analyst framework and tries to fit complex properties and
propositions asserting probabilities into it, utilizing the theory of types. He thinks he
might be successful in doing that, but the theory (that everything that exists is simple)
stumbles even on propositions about our beliefs, for instance, that the cat is on the mat
or that God exists. He says: ‘How are we to analyse them so as to avoid all complex
entities? It is very difficult to see’ (King’s College Archives FPR 4/1). Attempts such as
Russell’s to analyse the belief that something comes before B in terms of the belief being
related (i) to before, (ii) to B, and (iii) a mysterious thing called a logical form are
‘misguided’:
If you consider the enormous number of logical forms that can be constructed, you will see that
to get a coherent account of belief in this way is awfully difficult especially as there is also the
problem of the constituents of mathematical propositions.
[King’s College Archives FPR 4/1]
General propositions pose a problem for logical analysis, as do mathematical propositions and the connectives within them. We saw that Ramsey put the same objection to
Wittgenstein in his critical notice of the Tractatus. The young Ramsey is rebelling
against the idea of logical form, as well as against the logical analyst theory of truth (at
least, as accounting for the truth of all propositions). Such a theory:
rests on the assumption either that there are one or many indefinable belief relations, or that
if they are definable it is possible to settle their logical form first and define them afterwards.
It seems to me unlikely that there are any such indefinables . . . , somewhere in the course of
evolution and animal ‘thought’ in an unanalysable sense for the first time. I therefore suppose thinking of believing to be analysed into other simpler relations probably causal
relations.
[King’s College Archives FPR 4/1]
He is looking, at this stage in his thought, to solve the problems for the logical analyst
by an analysis of belief into causes, although he admits that Russell, for instance, has
had little success in doing this. He will soon shift his attention more steadily to the
project of getting a coherent, all-encompassing, account of belief. He will consider all
manner of statements: singular statements, negations, statements containing logical
connectives, open generalizations, and so on. He will conclude that the idea of a special
universe of facts, which precisely determine which of our propositions have
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s­ emantic content and truth-conditions, is not fitting for the enormous variety of legitimate and truth-apt belief.
Ramsey offers his alternative picture in the Moral Sciences paper. He distinguishes
‘two kinds of characters’ of mental states such as ‘a belief, a doubt, or an assumption’.
Each is ‘of great importance’ (NP: 110). The first consists in ‘the presence or absence of
feelings’, which Ramsey calls the ‘pistic’ character. ‘Pistic’ comes from the Greek word,
transliterated as pistis, associated with persuasion and faith; a mental state’s pistic
character pertains to the degree of commitment to the content in question. It is this
character that distinguishes my belief that Socrates was mortal from my doubting
that Socrates was mortal. The second Ramsey calls a belief ’s ‘referential characters or
references’ (NP: 110). When we assert of a belief that it is a belief that Socrates is mortal,
we assert that it has the character of referring to Socrates and to mortality. We shall see
that, although Ramsey drops the term ‘pistic’, he retains this two-character view of
belief for the rest of his life. His debt to Russell in thinking of belief in this way is clear,
but he is already starting to develop his own views.
Ramsey does not spend much time in the Moral Sciences paper on the pistic character of belief, but he worries at length about the nature of its referential character.
He argues that the ‘propositional view’ is wrong—‘to have a reference is not to be
related to a proposition’, at least as propositions are standardly conceived (NP: 113).
Russell’s modified view in The Analysis of Mind, which analyses a belief ’s being a
belief that p in terms of its content’s ‘pointing toward’ the fact p, is also wrong. For
one thing, Ramsey notes, Russell’s theory, far from rendering perspicuous the relations of ‘pointing toward’ and ‘pointing away from’ on which it depends, ‘only pretends to have analysed’ them (NP: 113). For another thing, Russell’s theory is
committed to the existence of facts corresponding to each true sentence. But Ramsey
thinks that statements do not ‘literally’ characterize facts or presume the existence of
facts, except in those cases ‘in which the facts could naturally be called events’
(NP: 115). It would be much better to dispense with facts in favour of real objects,
properties, and events in the world. A principle of parsimony or Occam’s Razor
makes short work of Russell’s position.
How, then, does Ramsey analyse a belief ’s being a belief, for instance, that something is green? Those who analyse beliefs in terms of irreducible propositions will
account for the reference of this belief in terms of a relation between the belief and the
proposition that this is green. They will grant, however, that this relation is ‘equivalent
to a multiple relation between the belief, this, and green’ (NP: 113). Ramsey thinks
they should drop the idea of propositions:
But much the simplest view which supposes no unobservable entities and/or propositions is
that the holding of this multiple relation is what is asserted in ‘the belief is a belief that this is
green.’ To this view I can see no objections and I conclude that to have a reference p is to be
multiply related in a certain manner to the individuals and universals which would usually be
called the constituents of the propositions p.
[NP: 113]
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At the end of his paper, he deals ‘as briefly as possible’ with the idea of truth. Here we
find another early articulation of Ramsey’s equivalence thesis, which is taken by many
commentators to be a redundancy theory of truth,17 in which ‘It is true that p’ means
no more than ‘p’. Ramsey says:
The most certain thing about truth is that ‘p is true’ and ‘p’, if not identical, are equivalent. This
enables us to rule out at once some theories of truth such as that ‘to be true’ means ‘to work’ or
‘to cohere’ since clearly ‘p works’ and ‘p coheres’ are not equivalent to ‘p’.
[NP: 118]
This passage seems to confirm the redundancy reading of Ramsey and seems to contain
a straightforward assertion that pragmatism is wrong.
But as Ian Rumfitt says: ‘Everyone knows that F. P. Ramsey had a theory of truth.
Rather fewer people know that the theory came in two significantly different versions, and that the later and less famous version is more fertile than its predecessor’
(2011: 213). The later and less famous version is a rather special extension of
Peircean pragmatism. When Ramsey fully discovers Peirce, he will argue that it is
only Jamesian pragmatism that is wrong. He will continue to hold that the equivalence thesis is a key to understanding truth, alongside Peircean pragmatist thoughts
about truth.
In this early paper Ramsey says that there are only three ‘sensible theories of truth’.
He quickly dismisses the third—that ‘truth is indefinable; but as a matter of fact true
beliefs do have a certain relation to facts which false beliefs do not have’. He dismisses this theory because he has already argued that ‘there is no reason to suppose
there are facts’ and he cannot see why the idea that truth is indefinable would suddenly provide some. The paper ends there, without further assessing the other two
prima facie sensible theories of truth: ‘(1) that a true belief is defined to be one which
has a certain relation with a fact, [and] (2) truth is indefinable and has no connection
with a relation between belief and fact’ (NP: 118). Perhaps he did not choose between
them because (1) is not compatible with his banishment of facts, and (2) suffers the
defects of all indefinabilist theories of truth—if truth is indefinable, then nothing
can be concluded about the nature of truth. We shall see that these issues continued
to occupy him until the very end of his life, and that his opposition to the early
Russellian pictures only deepens. We shall also see that he came to the view that
there are more sensible theories of truth than the three he mentions here. In these
early 1921–2 papers, he wants to provide an alternative to the logical analyst picture,
but he seems at a loss as to just how to do it. He soon finds his answers in pragmatism. While he remained of the view that truth cannot be identified with ‘what works’,
a better kind of pragmatism is not only sensible, but becomes Ramsey’s own theory
of truth.
17
See e.g. Hacker (1996: 71) and Baldwin (2013: 444).
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6.4 The 1927 Ramsey: Belief, Action, Probability, Truth
At the end of 1926 and into 1927, Ramsey wrote two important papers: ‘Facts and
Propositions’ and ‘Truth and Probability’. Each is threaded with Peirce’s thoughts,
and together they form the first articulation of Ramsey’s pragmatism—his deliberate
and thorough linkage of belief, action, and truth.
‘Facts and Propositions’ was presented to the 1927 Joint Session of the Aristotelian
and Mind Societies. In it he continues to destruct the correspondence theory that so
attracted Russell and Wittgenstein, and he announces his alternative to their logical
analyst position. That alternative is pragmatism, and Ramsey signals the significant
payouts it will have for seemingly intractable philosophical problems. It solves the
problem of negation; it makes possible an understanding of partial belief and its
measurement; and it cleans up the mess with respect to facts and propositions, leaving
the route clear for an analysis of belief.
The paper begins with the statement: ‘The problem with which I propose to deal is
the logical analysis of what may be called by any of the terms judgment, belief, or assertion’ (FP: 34). Ramsey now more confidently takes the fundamental epistemic act to be
the endorsing of a proposition or the making of a judgement. He then reiterates the
position he set out in his 1921 paper. When I believe that Caesar was murdered, it
seems that this event involves, on the one hand, something subjective—‘my mind, or
my present mental state, or words and images in my mind’—and, on the other hand,
something objective—‘Caesar, or Caesar’s murder, or Caesar and murder, or the
proposition Caesar was murdered, or the fact that Caesar was murdered’ (FP: 34).
Belief seems to involve both subjective and objective factors, as well as some relationship between the two. Ramsey is not interested in abandoning the distinction between
thought and object, but he has not budged from his view that none of the received
accounts of the relationship are good.18 He rejects Russell’s early position that it is a
proposition that is true or false, as well as Russell’s subsequent idea ‘that every proposition
asserts a relation between terms’ (FP: 43). We should refrain from twisting ourselves
into knots about what part of a proposition corresponds to what part of objective
reality. For there cannot be objective falsehoods such as ‘that Caesar died in his bed’,
and the nature of the difference between truth and falsehood cannot be mysterious.
These are some of the reasons Ramsey thinks an account of belief, not the proposition,
is the best starting point for the investigation into truth.
For instance, with respect to the old and thorny problem of negation, an approach
that starts from belief will give us a new and productive angle on it. In the view presented in Russell’s The Analysis of Mind, beliefs point toward or away from facts. But
Ramsey argues that since a false statement is nevertheless meaningful, and indeed has
the same meaning it would have if it were true, ‘an analysis of cognition in terms of
18
Russell is in the background, but Ramsey also has in mind his Cambridge colleague J. A. Chadwick,
whose 1927 paper in Mind is Ramsey’s precise target here.
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relations to facts cannot be accepted as ultimate’ (FP: 38). On Ramsey’s view, ‘the significance of “not” consists not in a relation to an object, but in the equivalence between
disbelieving “p” and believing “not-p” ’ (FP: 43–4). Believing not -p is not a matter of
believing a content that purports to represent a negative fact. It simply amounts to
aligning your behaviour in a certain way:
It seems to me that the equivalence between believing ‘not-p’ and disbelieving ‘p’ is to be
defined in terms of causation, the two occurrences having in common many of their causes and
many of their effects. There would be many occasions on which we should expect one or other
to occur, but not know which, and whichever occurred we should expect the same kind of
behaviour in consequence.
[FP: 44]
Again following the structure of the Moral Sciences Club paper, it is at this point that
Ramsey makes his well-known deflationary remark about truth:
there is really no separate problem of truth but merely a linguistic muddle . . . ‘It is true that
Caesar was murdered’ means no more than that Caesar was murdered, and ‘It is false that
Caesar was murdered’ means that Caesar was not murdered.
[FP: 38]
He says that we use truth-talk for ‘emphasis or for stylistic reasons, or to indicate the
position occupied by the statement in our argument’. The same holds for expressions
such as ‘the fact that’ and ‘he is always right’. The latter amounts to: ‘For all p, if he
asserts p, p is true’, which we can express just as well for any given propositional form
without using ‘true’: for instance, ‘For all a, R, b, if he asserts aRb, then aRb’ (FP: 39).
All this does indeed sound like a redundancy or deflationary theory in which talk of
truth is a superfluous add-on, supplying no contribution of its own to the meanings of
the statements in which it occurs. But Ramsey thinks that once you have laid out the
matter in this way, it becomes clear that it is the nature of belief, judgement, or assertion that is the interesting problem: ‘for what is difficult to analyse in the above formulation is “He asserts aRb” ’ (FP: 39). Indeed, he prefaces his deflationary remark by
saying that he should briefly discuss truth ‘before we proceed further with the analysis
of judgment’, and he finishes the whole discussion by concluding that ‘if we have analysed judgment we have solved the problem of truth’ (FP: 39). The equivalence schema
tells us that the truth of p is equivalent to the assertion that p. But that leaves all the hard
work ahead of us. The deflationary move must be followed by an examination of belief,
judgement, and assertion, which will provide us with a theory of truth. What we have
to explain ‘is the meaning of saying that the judgment is a judgment that a has R to b’
(FP: 39). Again, he holds that in explaining that meaning, we cannot rely on the idea of
correspondence. But now he invokes the equivalence idea against correspondence.
Talk of correspondence to facts adds nothing, since ‘. . . is a fact’ is equally eliminable
from a sentence as ‘. . . is true’.
So, while Ramsey says that there is no problem of truth, he is clear that what he
means is that there is no problem of truth over and above the problem of assertion or
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belief. Brian Loar was, I believe, the first commentator outside Ramsey’s own group
of contemporaries to see that his commitment to the equivalence thesis is ‘ancillary to
the far more important foundational concern of the theory of belief or judgement’
(1980: 49).19 But the typical reading of Ramsey skips over this essential move.
Ramsey proceeds with that examination of belief or judgement, and pragmatism for
the first time enters his picture in a positive way. Chance, Love and Logic was published
by Ogden in 1923 and in the interim between his 1921 Moral Sciences Club paper and
the two acclaimed 1926–7 papers, Ramsey’s engagement with Peirce intensified via the
careful reading of this volume. Extensive notes on Chance, Love and Logic in Ramsey’s
hand, his diary notes for 1924, and a footnote in ‘Truth and Probability’ definitively tell
us that Peirce was becoming a major presence in Ramsey’s intellectual life.
Belief, for Ramsey, now involves a habit or disposition to behave. But it is not reducible to behaviour. In some notes, Ramsey deploys a well-known Jamesian metaphor
against extreme behaviourism. Any viable ‘construction of the fundamental epistemological concepts, “meaning”, “acquaintance”, “truth”, “knowledge”, etc.’ needs to be centrally concerned with, and to work toward an analysis of, a ‘stream of experience’. And
‘any system such as behaviourism which does not include experience is evidently
wrong or at least incomplete’ (NPPM: 52). Ramsey had in mind a strong behaviourism,
against which he wanted to contrast his own position. On this strong view, meaning
and mental states consist solely in behaviour (and behavioural dispositions). Ramsey
thinks that position leaves out something important. It leaves out experience:
I do not believe other people are automata; for I use my experience to forecast their action, and
to eliminate experience from this process of inference and recast it in terms of unknown bodily
states would be too far fetched.
[NPPM: 68]
Behaviourism, Ramsey says, ‘is not false as far as I know; but it is “insane” ’ (NPPM: 70).20
Perhaps we can put his point as follows. When we analyse meaning, truth, and knowledge, we always do so in reliance on and in terms of human experience. Behavioural
concepts, that is, must be aided by experiential or phenomenal ones in any adequate
attempt to depict the human mind and its relation to the world.
We have seen Peirce suggest that the decapitated frog almost reasons, for when it is
stimulated, it acts. What it is missing is ‘preparatory meditation’ (CP 6. 286, 1893). And
we saw that James distinguishes reflex from voluntary action. Ramsey, too, is happy to
19
Sahlin (1990: 66) and Majer (1991: 162–3) also pressed home this point early on, and Methven (forthcoming, ch. 4) does so more recently. Methven argues that the idea is already present in Ramsey’s critical
notice of the Tractatus.
20
Glock is one of many who misread Ramsey, asserting that he signs up to a ‘purely causal and behaviourist’
account of meaning and belief which identifies belief and the conditions under which it is true with the
conditions under which it is useful, thus committing himself ‘to a strong form of behaviourism that . . .
contemporary Ramseyians would reject’ (2005: 59–61). Glock makes this assertion of On Truth, but we will
see that this is not Ramsey’s view there, or anywhere else.
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consider the instinctive habits of the likes of chickens, in addition to habits ‘expressed
in words . . . consciously asserted or denied’ (FP: 40). He says in ‘Truth and Probability’:
I use habit in the most general possible sense to mean simply rule or law of behaviour, including instinct: I do not wish to distinguish acquired rules or habits in the narrow sense from
innate rules or instincts, but propose to call them all habits alike.
[TP: 90–1]
But beliefs expressed in words are, he says, more appropriate for ‘logical criticism’ or
evaluation. That is, James, Peirce, and Ramsey all saw that there are instinctual habits,
as well as those which are reflected upon and verbally expressible, and so on. Perhaps it
makes sense to see some organisms (single-cell organisms, the decapitated frog) as
being closer to automata than humans—such organisms do not have beliefs, desires, or
intentions, but only actions and behaviour. Perhaps there is a continuum, but not a
bright line, between kinds of entities that might have such enriched states, on the one
end, and automata, on the other. But however vague the distinction might be, it is clear
that human beings, at least, can have both kinds of habits: those of thought and language-use as well as those of mere action.
In ‘Facts and Propositions’ Ramsey expresses the pragmatist thought about belief
and behaviour as follows. If a chicken ‘believes’ that a certain caterpillar is poisonous, it
abstains from eating that kind of caterpillar on account of the unpleasant experiences
associated with eating them:
The mental factors in such a belief would be parts of the chicken’s behaviour, which are somehow
related to the objective factors, viz. the kind of caterpillar and poisonousness. An exact analysis of
this relation would be very difficult, but it might well be held that in regard to this kind of belief
the pragmatist view was correct, i.e. that the relation between the chicken’s behaviour and the
objective factors was that the actions were such as to be useful if, and only if, the caterpillars were
actually poisonous. Thus any set of actions for whose utility p is a necessary and sufficient condition might be called a belief that p, and so would be true if p, i.e. if they are useful.
[FP: 40]
That last sentence is less than straightforward. One thing it seems to convey is that if a
belief leads to successful action, the belief is true—and yet that action will be successful
only if the belief is related in the right way to objective factors. This is reminiscent of
Peirce’s view in ‘The Fixation of Belief ’, in which a belief that always would prove successful is true, but the belief must be determined by circumstances not extraneous to
the facts.
More straightforwardly, Ramsey tells us that a belief is individuated—its content is
determined—by the actions it causes (as well as the input-states that cause it). What it
is that makes one belief equivalent to another is that the beliefs have ‘in common many
of their causes and many of their effects’:
To be equivalent . . . is to have in common certain causal properties, which I wish I could define
more precisely. Clearly, they are not at all simple; there is no uniform action which believing ‘p’
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will always produce. It may lead to no action at all, except in particular circumstances, so that
its causal properties will only express what effects result from it when certain other conditions
are fulfilled. And, again, only certain sorts of causes and effects must be admitted; for instance,
we are not concerned with the factors determining, and the results determined by, the rhythm
of the words.
[FP: 44]
Beliefs are individuated by their causes and effects, ‘more especially their effects’
(FP: 44).
We can understand why some philosophers21 have taken Ramsey’s view to be a
precursor to, and at the same time an advance on, what is now known as ‘success
semantics’—‘the view that a theory of success in action is a possible basis for a theory of
representation, or a theory of content or intentionality’ (Blackburn 2005: 22). Success
semantics claims that the meaning and truth-conditions of a belief are fully determined by its causal role: its meaning consists in its causal relations to input and output
states, and it is true just in case the actions produced as its outputs succeed, regardless
of the agent’s desires.
But Ramsey is not a straightforward success semanticist. For one thing, he does not
explain a truth-condition on the basis of an independent notion of a success condition.
Instead, as we have seen, he analyses the success of a belief partly in terms of what he
calls ‘objective factors’. For another, a belief is individuated not only by the actions it
produces, but also by the beliefs or experiential states that entail or rationalize it. He
would think that a success semantics, which fully analysed belief and meaning in terms
of dispositions, would be too strong a behaviourism. So we find him, for instance, in his
notes on his discussions with Moore, distancing himself from the view that semantics
is all about causal role:
Moore thinks I mean to analyse negative facts in terms of disappointed expectations
no I do not
[NPPM: 128–9]
Also, as Boncompagni (forthcoming c) argues, Ramsey and Wittgenstein argued over
whether, by uttering or thinking any well-formed declarative sentence, one thereby
means something. According to Wittgenstein, Ramsey held that when we express a
contradiction, we have the sensation that the sentence has a sense, albeit a degenerate
sense. We have seen that all Ramsey meant by this thought (expressed rather oddly by
Wittgenstein) is that among the components of a given belief of ours will be ‘a feeling
or feelings of belief or disbelief ’ (FP: 40). But he, like Peirce, thought that a focus on
this feeling cannot take us very far at all in semantics or in the philosophy of mind. The
normative causal role is just one aspect of belief, but it is the aspect that will deliver
results.
21
See Blackburn (2005), Dokic and Engel (2002), Mellor (2005), and Whyte (1990).
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We shall see that in the 1929 ‘General Propositions and Causality’ he uses different
terms to make a similar point: two people’s beliefs are identical if any possible future
must agree with both if it agrees with either (GC: 149). Notice that this later formulation of the individuation of belief is formulated normatively, as well as causally. Ramsey
is not open to the standard objection to success semantics, which is that you can get
success with false beliefs. He may well be open to the objection that he does not tell us
enough about how both ‘objective factors’ and cognitive phenomenal states fit into his
view. We have seen that Peirce saw that much work needed to be done here, and he
made a sustained effort to do it as he crafted his theory of meaning. But even the very
acknowledgement of these states draws both Peirce and Ramsey out of the success
semanticist camp.
While we can see the direction in which Ramsey wanted to go in ‘Facts and
Propositions’, Rumfitt is right when he says that Ramsey merely ‘gestures in the direction of a pragmatist theory of content’ and gives us an indication of how difficult the
construction of such a theory must be (2011: 227). Indeed, Ramsey does not pretend to
do more than gesture in this paper:
To say that feeling belief towards a sentence expresses such an attitude [of agreement or disagreement with possible states of the world] is to say that it has certain causal properties which
vary with the attitude, i.e. with which possibilities are out and which, so to speak, are still left
in. Very roughly the thinker will act in disregard of the possibilities rejected, but how to explain
this accurately I do not know.
[FP: 46]
Someone who believes that p will be bound up in a nexus of causal properties which
will help her determine which possibilities the truth of p leaves open and which it
closes. She will be caused to act in various ways, taking account of certain possibilities
and disregarding others.
As Acero (2005) has argued, Ramsey builds here on Wittgenstein’s account of logical truths, saying that a logical truth ‘excludes no possibility and so expresses no attitude of belief at all’ (FP: 47). Beliefs exclude possibilities and that’s how we can
determine just what beliefs they are. What Ramsey builds is a pragmatist account of
what it is for a belief to have meaning. If a belief has no causal impact on our actions, it
expresses no attitude of belief at all. We have seen that Peirce thought that logical
truths do indeed have such an impact. That difference aside, he would agree with
Ramsey’s account of what it takes for an attitude to be a belief. What it is to believe p is,
in large part, to behave in certain ways, and to take the various possibilities as either
alive or dead.
This is a novel way of characterizing what is now called the holism of the mental.
Mellor (2001) puts it thus. Beliefs are characterized by how they make people act, and
truth is that property of beliefs that enables us to get what we want or to succeed in our
actions. If we take a belief and a range of desires that might be in place, the belief will
issue in successful action only if it is linked to the objective factors. This is Ramsey’s
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point with respect to the chicken ‘belief ’. A belief combines with some set of desires,
and the action following from it is successful only if the belief is true. As Rumfitt says:
Ramsey puts his finger on an aspect of a statement, or a belief, which bears quite directly on the
actions (or plans for action) of one who accepts that statement, or who has that belief, but
which is nevertheless constant across subjects with different aims or desires.
[2011: 230]
Thus, while Ramsey’s account of the relationship between belief and action includes
desires, it includes desires in a way that allows us to make sense of belief abstracted
from desire.
As both Rumfitt (2011) and Blackburn (2005) note, Ramsey would be mistaken if he
thought that the truth of a belief guarantees successful action. For there may be ‘an indefinite number of things . . . wrong with the environment: unknown and unthought-of
obstacles waiting to trip [one] up’, and ‘there may be an indefinite amount of other
rubbish in [one’s] head’, leading one to act wrongly in light of the nevertheless true belief
(Blackburn 2005: 23). Again, the causal role (and so, for Ramsey, the content) of beliefs is
a holistic matter: what a given belief causes someone to do in a given situation will depend
on all the other things the person believes and desires. Accordingly, a belief can be true
and still cause unsuccessful actions, because other (false) beliefs also play a role in causing
those actions. It is clear that Ramsey does not overlook this complexity. While any philosophical account of semantic notions and concepts must display the underpinning of our
linguistic activities by the successes or failures of our practices, Ramsey recognized as
clearly as contemporary thinkers that this underpinning relation is complex.
With that caution in place, we can see another glimmer of the pragmatist view of
truth in ‘Facts and Propositions’:
It is evident that the importance of beliefs and disbeliefs lies not in their intrinsic nature, but in
their causal properties. For why should I want to have a feeling of belief towards names ‘a’, ‘R’,
and ‘b’, when aRb, and of disbelief when not-aRb, except because the effects of these feelings are
more often satisfactory than those of the alternative ones.
[FP: 44]
If beliefs can be accounted for in terms of their causal properties, it seems that the normative statuses to which beliefs are subject, including truth, should also be accounted
for in terms of their causal properties.
Ramsey ends ‘Facts and Propositions’ with two remarkable short paragraphs, cleverly setting himself apart from Wittgenstein and Russell and announcing to the world
the new theory he intends to carve out. He first pays homage to Wittgenstein’s conception of formal logic:
Everything that I have said is due to him, except the parts which have a pragmatist tendency
[and the suggestion that the notion of an atomic proposition may be relative to a language],
which seem to me to be needed in order to fill up a gap in his system.
[FP: 51, bracketed part in a footnote in the original]
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The pragmatist tendencies expressed in this paper are rather significant, and will soon
turn into a full rendition of pragmatism. In ‘Facts and Propositions’, those tendencies
have manifested themselves in the ideas that (i) the content of a belief is determined
by the actions, including further beliefs, it commits the believer to; that (ii) the value
of believing that p just in case p is that the effects of believing that p will be more
satisfactory than believing otherwise; and (iii) atomic propositions are relative to a
language or a notation. The last point can also be found in his critical notice of the
Tractatus, and Ramsey is right to think that none of these pragmatist ideas are present
in the Tractatus. We shall see that Ramsey’s pragmatism would have a significant
impact on Wittgenstein’s post-Tractarian thinking.
Ramsey continues with the final paragraph of the paper:
My pragmatism is derived from Mr. Russell; and is, of course, very vague and undeveloped. 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, but of nothing more definite.
[FP: 51]
It is astounding that Russell, in 1927, would so casually be described as a pragmatist.
The passages I have reproduced from Braithwaite’s obituary of Ramsey and Keynes’s
review of The Foundations of Mathematics provide further evidence that this was an
easy-going, unguarded assertion in late 1920s Cambridge.22 I have explained this initially curious remark by showing in Chapter 5 that Ramsey encountered in Russell a
pragmatist idea that was critically important for his own thinking: the idea that the
central characteristic of belief is its significance for action.
But Ramsey sees that his own pragmatism cannot be straightforwardly attributed to
Russell. In ‘Truth and Probability’ he says that the degree of our belief is the extent we
are prepared to act on it, and that this ‘generalization’ is discussed and dismissed by
Russell in The Analysis of Mind (TP: 65). We have seen that in the early 1920s, Russell
was linking meaning with behaviour. Russell himself, in his own review of The
Foundations of Mathematics, simply notes that Ramsey attributes his pragmatism ‘to the
present reviewer’ without owning or rejecting the attribution, and later in the review
says that Ramsey was ‘perhaps too pragmatist in his attitude’ (1931: 479, 482). One thing
that Ramsey might have been doing in this final paragraph is looking for contemporary
support for what was a radical move in 1920s Cambridge England philosophy. But
another thing he was doing was setting the stage for the more confident, more precise
articulation he would go on to supply of this new way of thinking about the relationship
between the mind and the world, and our concepts of meaning and truth.
What crystallized Ramsey’s inchoate pragmatism, I suggest, was reading Peirce’s
Chance, Love and Logic in 1924. Ramsey learned from Peirce not only that belief is
22
Ramsey makes it again: ‘In the Theory of Knowledge Mr. Russell’s earlier Rationalism has been considerably modified in a pragmatist or behaviourist direction’ (NPPM: 137).
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in part a disposition to behave (which he had previously seen in Russell), but also that
the pragmatist view of belief and action neither identifies meaning with consequences
for action nor eliminates mental and other intentional states. That is, pragmatism is
not an ‘insane’ behaviourism. I have suggested that the position Ramsey articulates in
‘Facts and Propositions’ is but a small step away from Peirce’s pragmatist account of
belief and truth. In order to see the move fully, we need to consider the other paper
Ramsey wrote in 1926–7: ‘Truth and Probability’, to which I now turn.
Ramsey read ‘Truth and Probability’ to the Moral Sciences Club and it was published
after his death by Braithwaite in The Foundations of Mathematics. It is the site of his
most renowned result—a logic of partial belief that became the basis for decision theory and subjective probability theory. That view has as its basis the pragmatist or dispositionalist account of belief. Ramsey tweaks that account in a way that was to prove
highly significant: degrees of belief can be measured by how we act, especially in betting contexts. He shows us, that is, how we can see our way to a disciplined connection
between inner states and behaviour, and these insights laid the groundwork for understanding how the notions of utility and probability could be used in economics and
decision theory. Ramsey in effect asks: if we had before us a flawlessly rational agent,
how could we describe that agent’s rationality, or how might we get at what is going on
in the mind of such an agent?23 He answers that we should offer the agent bets and see
what he chooses (provided that he isn’t influenced by the amount of money offered—
i.e. disregarding risk-averseness, diminishing marginal utility, etc.). When we find out
what he chooses, then—assuming that his actions are determined by his desires and
opinions, as well as governed by mathematical expectations—we can set a utility that
mirrors his preferences. Then we use the utilities to construct new gambles. If we offer
him enough bets, we will be able to use the bets to separate his expectations into his
degrees of belief and his desires.
In the Foreword to the paper, Ramsey tells us that probability has more than one
‘useful interpretation’—the word has more than one legitimate ‘sense’ (TP: 53).
Statistical and the physical sciences for the most part adopt a frequency theory of probability, which accounts for probability in terms of the objective chances. But one can
also look at probability as an extension of formal logic—in particular, as the logic of
consistency of partial beliefs (TP: 78). Ramsey thinks we are rational if we conform our
degrees of belief in propositions to the logic of probability, and to the objective chances.
We have seen that in January 1924 he renewed his interest in probability after reading
Peirce’s papers on the topic in Chance, Love and Logic. While it would be wrong to say
that Ramsey derived his subsequent thoughts about probability from Peirce’s, we can
see that he was inspired by him and we can see some direct connections.24
I’m indebted to Nils-Eric Sahlin in putting the argument this way.
Methven (2015), for instance, suggests that Peirce’s objections to the conceptualist position may have
influenced Ramsey to develop a version of conceptualism that is not open to them. Ramsey is careful to make
no prescriptive claims about the degree to which any particular proposition, simply as such, should be
23
24
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Ramsey begins with an examination of the frequency theory, with its undeniable basis
in practice and ordinary language. He thinks this theory is useful not only in statistics
and physics, but also in providing a simple and uncontroversial interpretation of the
probability calculus, taken ‘as a branch of pure mathematics’ (FP: 54). Hence there is no
reason to abandon the frequency theory; indeed there is some practical reason to retain
it. But it does not give Ramsey precisely what he is after. He is interested in partial belief as
a basis for action, and ‘The pretensions of some exponents of the frequency theory that
partial belief means full belief in a frequency proportion cannot be sustained’ (TP: 84).25
He thinks ‘It is not enough to measure probability; in order to apportion correctly our
belief to the probability we must also be able to measure our belief ’ (TP: 62). This way of
proceeding also has ‘the authority . . . of ordinary language’ (TP: 55).
It is not only the frequency theory that is inadequate, but Keynes’s theory is as well.
On Keynes’s view, probability relations—objective and unanalysable—hold between
any two propositions, and determine the rational degree of belief in the one, given the
other. Ramsey, we have seen, is not enamoured with the unanalysable. Here he simply
but disarmingly points out that, with respect to probability relations, ‘I do not perceive
them, and . . . I . . . suspect that others do not perceive them either’ (TP: 57). We have no
reason to think they really exist: if someone were to ask him what probability one proposition gave to another, he ‘should not try to answer by contemplating the propositions
and trying to discern a logical relation between them’ (TP: 59). His criticism of Keynes,
that is, is a criticism that appeals to our actual practices: ‘no one estimating a degree of
probability simply contemplates the two propositions supposed to be related by it; he
always considers inter alia his own actual or hypothetical degree of belief ’ (TP: 59).
Keynes was indeed disarmed by Ramsey’s criticism, and thought that he had to
‘yield to Ramsey’ on the matter of the status of probability relations—‘I think he is
right’ (1972 [1931]: 339). Whether or not Keynes in fact and forever abandoned the
idea of objective probability relations in favour of a Ramseyan pragmatism is a matter
for Keynes scholars. What is important for us is Keynes’s understanding of Ramsey’s
position, for it aids us in our own efforts to get Ramsey right. Here is Keynes:
Ramsey argues, as against the view which I had put forward, that probability is concerned not
with objective relations between propositions but (in some sense) with degrees of belief, and he
succeeds in showing that the calculus of probabilities simply amounts to a set of rules for
ensuring that the system of degrees of belief which we hold shall be a consistent system. Thus
the calculus of probabilities belongs to formal logic. But the basis of our degrees of belief—or
the a priori probabilities, as they used to be called—is part of our human outfit, analogous to
our perceptions or memories rather than to formal logic.
[Keynes 1972 [1931]: 338–9]
believed: the laws of probability ‘merely distinguish those sets of beliefs which obey them as consistent
ones’ (TP: 78).
25
Ramsey suggests that there might be ‘a roundabout way’ of connecting degrees of belief to frequencies
(FP: 83). But he rejects it. See Levi (2012 [2004]: 142) for the argument that this roundabout way is no
way at all.
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In order to understand probabilities, we must turn to our human outfit. Ramsey, like
Peirce, had both objective (frequentist) and subjective (human) elements in his probability theory.
If Keynes was wrong about how to conceive and measure partial belief, what is the
solution? For Ramsey, it is a dispositional or causal approach. While we have seen that
many philosophers and logicians were interested in behaviourism at the time, it was
Ramsey who linked behaviour to the measurement of partial belief. He saw that if we
are to measure belief, we need a ‘purely psychological method’ (TP: 62). But this view
of the situation requires him to go against what was then received wisdom, which held
that ‘belief and other psychological variables are not measurable’ (TP: 62). He concedes that some beliefs will be more accurately measured than others and that the
measurement will vary according to the method by which it is conducted (TP: 63). But
such vagaries are everywhere in scientific measurement, and we should not assume at
the outset that they invalidate the project. He is not seeking the holy grail of precise,
determinate measures of degrees of belief, but rather a ‘sufficiently accurate’ way of
measuring belief that is easy to apply and is fit for our purposes (TP: 63). He also does
not seek the holy grail of infallibility—a logic of consistency that will enable us to
believe with certainty all and only the truths. As Suppes notes, Ramsey follows Peirce
in distinguishing the kind of consistency involved in deductive logic from that involved
in maintaining the consistency of your set of partial beliefs (Suppes 2006: 45). Logical
consistency is not everything, according to Ramsey:
It may be said that we ought to think what is true, but in that sense we are told what to think by
the whole of science and not merely by logic. Nor, in this sense, can any justification be found
for partial belief; the ideally best thing is that we should have beliefs of degree 1 in all true propositions and belief of degree 0 in all false propositions. But this is too high a standard to expect
of mortal men, and we must agree that some degree of doubt or even of error may be humanly
speaking justified.
[TP: 80]
Ramsey’s epistemic standards are human: they are the standards that humans can
reasonably aspire to follow.26 Given that logic is part of those human standards for
reasoning, it is, as Peirce put it, one of the normative sciences that are aimed at truth.
Ramsey also rejects the idea that we can measure degrees of belief introspectively,
with each of us measuring the intensity of the feeling that accompanies our belief in
any given proposition. For one thing, it would be very difficult to ascribe numbers to
intensity of feelings. For another, we would be sure to get inaccurate measurements.
The beliefs we hold most strongly—the ones we take for granted—are often ‘accompanied by practically no feeling at all’ (TP: 65). But we have already seen that Ramsey
does not conclude that feelings must be eliminated from the account of belief altogether. In ‘Truth and Probability’, he puts that thought in a new and important way. We
26
They are human standards also in that they allow that no human being can consciously acknowledge
and commit to every one of the infinite cascade of consequences of any one of her beliefs.
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must begin with the concept of an expectation, understood as the combination of a
habit and a feeling, and proceed to separate the two parts of the expectation.27
His way of measuring strength of belief builds on his dispositional account of belief:
‘the degree of a belief is a causal property of it, which we can express vaguely as the
extent to which we are prepared to act on it’ (TP: 65). Ramsey notes that this idea can
be found in Russell’s Analysis of Mind, but Russell’s behaviourism there, far from the
strong kind that Ramsey mocked, suffers from the opposite defect. It is too half-hearted.
Perhaps Russell followed a half-hearted line because he took Watson as a paradigmatic
behaviourist, and then found all sorts of problems for Watson’s strong view. But whatever the causes of Russell’s not following through on his initial thoughts, Ramsey
rightly sees that Russell considers the position ‘that the differentia of belief lies in its
causal efficacy’ and then dismisses it (TP: 65). He also sees that one of Russell’s primary
worries about behaviourism simply misses the point—the worry that ‘in the course of
trains of thought we believe many things which do not lead to action’ (TP: 65). For the
behaviourist need not assert that a belief actually leads to action. What he needs to
assert is that a belief would lead to action in suitable circumstances. Ramsey, like
Peirce, insists on the subjunctive—‘we are concerned with dispositional rather than
with actualized beliefs’ (TP: 68).
Ramsey’s key insight is his recognition that ‘the probability of 1/3 is clearly related to
the kind of belief which would lead to a bet of 2 to 1’ (TP: 67). While we cannot measure
directly the intensity of the feeling that accompanies a subject’s belief, we can straightforwardly observe whether she will accept or refuse a bet at particular odds. So, if we
want to see how strongly someone believes something, we need only propose a bet and
‘see what are the lowest odds which he will accept’ (TP: 68). Ramsey’s aim is to generalize this rough method and make it exact, or at least exact enough for our purposes.
All sorts of complexities enter into the picture of measuring our degrees of belief. We
have to consider the diminishing marginal utility of money; the fact that eagerness to
bet varies from person to person; and the fact that one’s state of opinion might change
due to the very fact of one’s making a bet. But nonetheless, bets are everywhere and
they are telling:
Whenever we go to the station we are betting that a train will really run, and if we had not a
sufficient degree of belief in this we should decline the bet and stay at home.
[TP: 79]
The ‘general psychological theory’ that undergirds our actions, and so our betting, is
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’ (TP: 69).
Ramsey, as in ‘Facts and Propositions’, admits that ‘this theory cannot be made
­adequate to all the facts’, but it is a useful approximation presupposed by many of our
27
See Maurin and Sahlin (2005) for this point, and for noting that Ramsey employs a similar strategy
with respect to universals and particulars.
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ordinary ways of thinking. He sums up thus: ‘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’ (TP: 69).
The ‘anything else whatever’ is important. Ramsey does not think that people form
beliefs or adopt plans for action only on the basis of considerations about maximizing
their pleasure. Those engaging in scientific inquiry, for instance, may want simplicity,
explanatory power, and the like; in mathematics, consistency is one key criterion by
which beliefs are assessed; and so on for other domains of inquiry. We have seen this
idea play a prominent role in Peirce’s thought, and we have seen that he spent considerable time considering how science and mathematical inquiry might best be conducted.
With respect to other domains of inquiry such as ethics, one has to turn to Peirce’s
successor C. I. Lewis, who put forward some desiderata that such action must meet to
be warranted. These include consistency and concern about one’s future self (1971
[1946]: 483–4). Ramsey, it turned out, did not have time to conduct a philosophical
investigation into what we want in different first-order inquiries, but he engaged in
plenty of first-order inquiries himself—in mathematics, economics, ethics—and were
one to take a close look at those investigations, one might be able to extract some
thoughts about what the ‘whatever’ is for Ramsey.
One of Ramsey’s main achievements, which the other pragmatists did not attempt,
is to set out, with mathematical precision, the laws of partial belief. The fundamental
law Ramsey identifies is that of consistency—‘a willingness to bet on a given proposition at the same odds for any stake’, as well as to hold consistent ‘the odds acceptable
on different propositions [so as to] prevent a book being made against you’ (TP: 78–9).
That is, one’s degrees of belief in different propositions must be consistent with one
another, or else one will leave oneself vulnerable to a Dutch Book—a bet with a set of
odds that guarantees a loss, regardless of the outcome of the thing bet upon—and so
demonstrate one’s own irrationality. Savage (1972 [1954]) and others have improved
on this theory, but Ramsey is its originator.
Ramsey has his own account of the walker at a crossroads, one that differs from
Peirce’s and Russell’s by invoking partial belief:
I am at a cross-roads and do not know the way; but I rather think one of the two ways is right.
I propose therefore to go that way but keep my eyes open for someone to ask; if now I see
someone half a mile away over the fields, whether I turn aside to ask him will depend on the
relative inconvenience of going out of my way to cross the fields or of continuing on the wrong
road if it is the wrong road. But it will also depend on how confident I am that I am right; and
clearly the more confident I am of this the less distance I should be willing to go from the road
to check my opinion.
[TP: 70–1]
Ramsey very nicely alights on the position between the extremes. Peirce seems to be
committed to the position that, when we pause at the crossroads, not having a full
belief upon which to act, it is only when we form a full belief that we can act. Russell
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rightly criticizes such an idea,28 saying that we act without a full belief. But since Russell
did not have a way of measuring degrees of belief, he seems close to being stuck with
the position that the walker has no belief at all in such circumstances, which leaves it
mysterious how the walker’s mind exerts any guidance on his actions. Surely it is
Ramsey who is right. If we are literally without a clue—without any degree of belief
whatsoever—we are in Peirce’s position and action is paralysed. Perhaps we should go
on the flip of a coin. But in most situations we can and do act on partial belief, attuned
to incoming evidence that requires us to raise or lower our degree of belief.
Since Peirce says that we wait at the fork in the road and look for an indication, I think
he is in fact much closer to Ramsey on this matter than he first appears. Indeed, in the
notes he scribbled when reading Chance, Love and Logic, Ramsey writes: the ‘log[ic] of
chance measures appropriate degree of belief ’ (RP 005-30-01).29 Peirce, however, did
not follow his insight all the way down Ramsey’s path. In ‘The Fixation of Belief ’, he
leaves us with the idea that the goal of inquiry is to reach stable beliefs that leave no
room for doubt. This is a highly unrealistic hope. Thus Ramsey improves on Peirce’s
position by turning our attention away from full belief that is or is not toppled by experience, and toward degrees of belief, emphasizing that when we are uncertain of the truth,
we need to take in more evidence and keep our degrees of belief consistent.
We have already seen that Ramsey’s points of connection with Peirce on probability
and belief go well beyond the core insight that belief and action are inseparable. But
perhaps the most striking connection is that Ramsey adopts Peirce’s conception of
logic. It is easy to agree, Ramsey says, that the aim of logic is to tell us how to think. But
then things get harder. Like Peirce, he thinks that the aim of logic cannot be to tell us
how to think what is true, for that is the job of the whole of inquiry, not just logic.
Ultimately, the thought that proves to be most important for Ramsey’s understanding
of logic is Peirce’s view of logic as a normative science. In ‘Truth and Probability’ we
find the first of Ramsey’s reproductions of Peirce’s idea that logic must be ‘human logic
which shall not attempt to be reducible to formal logic’ (TP: 89). He takes his cue from
Peirce’s ‘The Probability of Induction’:
It seems to me . . . that 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) ‘ampliative,
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
28
His primary (and uncharitable) criticism, though, is of James’s complementary idea that to strike out
on one road just is to form the belief that it is the right road.
29
See also: ‘There are 4 connections between degree of belief and frequency: . . . (3) if freq[uency] is λ,
deg[ree] λ of belief is justified. This is Peirce’s definition’ (NPPM: 275). See Peirce’s W 3: 293–4, 1878: ‘we
may . . . speak of the chance of an event absolutely, meaning by that the chance of the combination of all
arguments in reference to it which exist for us in the given state of our knowledge. Taken in this sense it is
incontestable that the chance of an event has an intimate connection with the degree of our belief in
it . . . [Our] feeling of belief should be as the logarithm of the chance, this latter being the expression of the
state of facts which produces this belief.’
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knowledge; deduction on the other hand is merely a method of arranging our knowledge and
eliminating inconsistencies or contradictions.
[TP: 82]
The ‘lesser logic’ is ‘the logic of consistency, or formal logic’, and the ‘larger logic’ is
‘the logic of discovery, or inductive logic’. This distinction, Ramsey says, does not
coincide with that between full and partial belief, for consistency in partial belief is
just as important as in full belief. Indeed, ‘we want our beliefs to be consistent not
merely with one another but also with the facts’, and that aim falls well beyond the
purview of formal logic (TP: 87). Logic, if it is to tell us what to think, must be broad,
and it must reach for what is ‘humanly speaking’ right (TP: 87). Such a ‘human logic
or the logic of truth’, which tells us how we should think, ‘is not merely independent of
but sometimes actually incompatible with formal logic’ (TP: 87). Here we have
another clear signpost to the pragmatist account of truth: human logic and the logic
of truth are one and the same.
What is the proper starting point for this human logic? Ramsey disagrees with those
who think it can be reduced to the operations of formal logic on data given by observation and memory. For we need some explanation of ‘how exactly . . . observation should
modify my degrees of belief ’ (TP: 88). One might hold with Keynes that some initial
degrees of belief (including some that are conditional on potential future observations) are simply justified a priori, but Ramsey remains of the view that this is ‘meaningless’ (TP: 88). We do not know what is true and false at the outset of inquiry. We
must start where we find ourselves and move from there. This is the fundamental pragmatist thought that has been picked up by Isaac Levi and other pragmatist decision
theorists who insist that the context of current inquiry be the starting point of statistical inference. Like Ramsey, they look for a human logic.
In another, even more overt, signpost to the pragmatist theory of truth, Ramsey
says that, on this human logic, the reasonable degrees of belief for an individual
might be identified with ‘the opinion of an ideal person in similar circumstances’
(TP: 89). Of course, he says, ‘the highest ideal would be always to have a true opinion
and be certain of it; but this ideal is more suited to God than to man’ (TP: 89–90).30 He
then states: ‘What follows to the end of the section is almost entirely based on the
writings of C. S. Peirce. (Especially his “Illustrations on the Logic of Science”, . . .
reprinted in Chance Love and Logic (1923)’ (TP: 90). Here is the Peircean position
he puts forward:
We have therefore to consider the human mind and what is the most we can ask of it. The
human mind works essentially according to general rules or habits; a process of thought not
30
As Sahlin and Brännmark (2013) argue, Ramsey’s human logic is an ideal human logic: a formal
description of the decision-making process of an ideally rational agent. This is all entirely in step with
Peircean pragmatism. Peirce, too, thought that logic needs to find out what we ought to think, not what we
happen to think. And he was willing to engage in a significant amount of idealization: to investigate what
we ought to think ‘in the long run’.
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proceeding according to some rule would simply be a random sequence of ideas . . . We can
therefore state the problem of the ideal as ‘What habits . . . would it be best for the human mind
to have?’
[TP: 90]
Ramsey says in a note that in some ways his expression of this conclusion is better in an
earlier draft:
we . . . criticize not primarily an individual opinion but a mental habit as being conducive or
otherwise to the discovery of truth or to entertaining such degrees of belief as will be most
useful.
[TP: 90]
Thus we see Ramsey in ‘Truth and Probability’ explicitly linking truth with usefulness
and with the most we can ask of the human mind. He was to continue to explore this
linkage over the rest of his short life. But one thing that is already manifest is that
Ramsey was trying to achieve the same balance as Peirce: to hold onto both the thought
that truth is the best we can ask of the human mind and the thought that truth is linked
to the facts or reality.
Ramsey illustrates his position as follows. Say someone has a habit of reasoning
such that, whenever he sees a toadstool that is yellow, he proceeds to form a belief of
some degree that it is unwholesome. What would the optimal degree of this belief
be? Well, it will be best if his degree of belief that a toadstool is unwholesome given
that it is yellow is equal to the proportion of yellow toadstools that are in fact
unwholesome (TP: 91). Ramsey thinks that we need to understand how objective
chance and subjective degree of belief are related. A good inference is one in which
the degree of belief aligns with the relevant frequency. We have seen that Peirce put
forward a very similar view.
‘Truth and Probability’ is thus brimming with Peircean ideas. It is as if Ramsey has
suddenly discovered, by reading Chance, Love and Logic, the key to some important
puzzles. There is even a Peircean solution to the frequency theorist’s single case problem. We praise or blame a habit:
accordingly as the degree of belief it produces is near or far from the actual proportion in which
the habit leads to truth. We can then praise or blame opinions derivatively from our praise or
blame of the habits that produce them.
[TP: 92]
As Peirce put it, if you want to understand the probability of a single case, you have to
understand it as the adopting of habits of inference that would, more often than not,
carry to the right conclusion not just you, in this particular circumstance, but anyone
who would adopt the habit.31
31
In the 1928 note ‘Reasonable Degree of Belief ’, Ramsey again invokes Peirce as the source of this idea.
Reasonableness is fundamentally to be predicated not of an individual judgement, but of a habit: ‘Roughly,
reasonable degree of belief = proportion of cases in which habit leads to truth’ (RB: 97).
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We also find a pragmatist justification of induction. Induction is a good habit:
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. We are
not, therefore, able to help trusting induction, nor if we could help it do we see any reason why
we should, because we believe it to be a reliable process.
[TP: 93]
Without induction, ‘we should be helpless’; it is ‘indispensable’ (TP: 94). Again, we see
the mix of objectivism and subjectivism so typical of Ramsey and Peirce. Induction is
part of our standard of good belief—we are not able to distrust it in general. We shall see
this thought resurface in Wittgenstein’s later work. But Ramsey and Peirce, unlike
Wittgenstein, locate their positive assessment of this inability of ours in objective reality:
there seems to be something about the world that makes inductive arguments lead to
success. We may be wrong about that—in Peirce’s terms, it is a mere hope. In Ramsey’s
terms, while to ask that the conclusions of inductive arguments be proved ‘is to cry for
the moon’, induction and memory are nonetheless ‘ultimate sources of knowledge’
(TP: 93). The fact that ‘there is no proof that the world did not begin two minutes ago
and that all our memories are not illusory’ is not an argument against our use of induction.32 Ramsey is unbothered by the sceptical hypothesis, for pragmatist reasons.
Induction works well, and unless and until it fails to do so, we are justified in relying
upon it. He says:
This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work, i.e whether the
opinions they lead to are for the most part true, or more often true than those which alternative
habits would lead to.
[TP: 93–4]
Some habits are a better basis for action than others. We suppose that is because the
world is a certain way, and the success of our rules in the past provides us with fallible
evidence in support of that supposition.
Ramsey is often taken to have a pragmatist theory of content, but not a pragmatist
theory of truth. For instance, Thomas Baldwin says:
His redundancy theory of truth prefigured subsequent deflationary conceptions of truth; and
he rightly saw that once the issue of truth is in this way set to one side, the misguided pragmatist theory of truth can be reworked as a pragmatist theory of content which has much to be
said in its favour.
[2013: 444]
But this case could only be made if one stopped with ‘Facts and Propositions’
and declined to read ‘Truth and Probability’. It is prefaced with a quote from Peirce
on the normative nature of r­ easoning. While the nature of logic was the focus
of much of the early work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey, we have seen
32
Russell put this hypothesis forward in The Analysis of Mind as a potential argument for scepticism.
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that by this point in his development Ramsey was drawn to Peirce’s radically d
­ ifferent
view of the nature of logic. Logic is the study of the habits we should adopt and is thus a
normative science. The problem of the ideal—the problem of truth—is in part a matter
of what would be the best habits for the human mind to have. This pragmatist account
of truth was to remain central to Ramsey’s work for the rest of his life.
6.5 Philosophy and Meaninglessness
Ramsey, like so many philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the
twentieth century, can be thought of as a kind of verificationist, as long as that term is
construed broadly. The basic insight of verificationism is that meaning must be tied to
experience, consequences, and action. Ramsey’s views on this matter appear at an
especially intriguing period—just as the (two different) verificationisms of Peirce and
the early Wittgenstein were about to be overrun by the verificationism of the Vienna
Circle. Once the Vienna Circle had captured the term, it was unusable for generations,
and it still cannot be employed without first taking pains to distinguish one’s preferred
iteration of it from theirs. Nonetheless, it is important to see that while each of the
many parties (Peirce, James, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and the Vienna Circle)
may have developed the verificationist insight into substantially different theses, they
shared the idea that the boundary between sense and nonsense is deliminated by
considering the role of confirmation by experience. They may have been moving in
different directions, but at the intersection of their pathways that was the one common
thing each party needed in order to arrive where it was headed. I shall argue that we
can discern a distinct and important kind of verificationism in Ramsey’s work that we can
still learn from today. Beliefs must not be causally inert. That goes for philosophy as
well, but philosophy, Ramsey thought, contra Wittgenstein, can meet the bar.
We have seen that Ramsey articulates an account of belief in which beliefs are individuated in large part by their causes and their effects, the latter being dispositions to
behave. We have also seen that he does not adopt a reductionism about beliefs. He thinks
that we cannot understand beliefs without understanding their causes and their behavioural effects, but that is not all there is to them. For this reason, while Ramsey’s brand
of dispositionalism about the individuation of content or belief is fully functionalist, his
dispositionalism about what it is to believe that content is not. His position is thus
more accurately labelled pragmatist than functionalist or behaviourist. Dispositions to
behave are our primary criterion for individuating a belief, but those dispositions are
not identical with the belief. Ramsey’s view is distinct from his friend Braithwaite’s in
this respect, as Braithwaite identifies the belief that p with the disposition to act as if p
when it matters whether p.33
33
See Braithwaite (1933: 17): ‘That I believe in, and do not merely meditate upon, the [proposition that p]
consists in the fact that, under certain circumstances, I shall act as if it were true.’ Mellor (1991 [1980]:
30–1) attributes the same view to Ramsey. I mean to contest this interpretation.
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It is the dispositional account of belief that leads Ramsey, as it did Peirce, to a
broad kind of verificationism. Ramsey thinks that we can construct sentences ‘which
express no attitude of belief ’ at all and which should not be regarded as ‘significant’.
In ‘Facts and Propositions’, he said these include logical tautologies and contradictions, for they have no function in the causal nexus of action. Statements such as ‘p or
not-p’ can be conjoined to any sentence without altering its meaning. The same
holds for ‘p and not-p’: it ‘excludes every possibility’ and thus ‘expresses no possible
attitude’ (FP: 47).
This view of logical tautologies and contradictions seems at first glance to be
perfectly in line with Wittgenstein’s, as expressed in the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein
did not offer the same explanation for sequestering logical truth. He did not suggest
that belief in a logical truth is causally inert. This is, I think, one aspect of what Ramsey
meant by that remark at the end of ‘Facts and Propositions’: ‘Everything that I have said
is due to [Wittgenstein], except the parts which have a pragmatist tendency, which
seem to me to be needed in order to fill up a gap in his system’ (FP: 51). In Ramsey’s
opinion, though Wittgenstein had succeeded in showing how the meanings of molecular propositions could be accounted for as truth-functions of atomic ones, he had not
enabled us to gain any traction on the question of what it is to believe an atomic proposition in the first place. In the 1925 ‘Universals’, Ramsey seemed content to agree with
Wittgenstein that ‘we know and can know nothing whatever about the forms of atomic
propositions . . . and there is obviously no way of deciding any such question’ (U: 29).
But he came to recoil against this semantic scepticism, and so he supplied a new way of
thinking about the meaning of beliefs, one within our epistemic grasp. We are to look
to the effects of beliefs on behaviour.
We have also seen that Wittgenstein, in an elusive way, wanted to extend to religion
something like the status he gave to logical truth. Ramsey was dead set against this
move. It of course wouldn’t make sense to think of religious belief as tautology and
while religious belief might have effects on our behaviour, we shall see when we turn to
On Truth that Ramsey thought that a Jamesian vindication of religious belief is misguided. Ramsey thought that we must indeed ask how religious belief fits into the
causal nexus of behaviour, and his answer was not Wittgenstein’s, nor James’s. Ramsey,
like Peirce, required religious belief to fit into the causal nexus of facts and, unlike
Peirce, thought that the facts did not support it.
Wittgenstein, we have seen, protected religious beliefs from his logical analyst verificationist criterion, but required that philosophy meet the standard, and thought that
it failed to do so. The only philosophy that can be employed is what Wittgenstein uses
and then kicks away like a ladder. This move did not impress Ramsey. In 1929, he made
some notes for a paper titled ‘Philosophy’. We have seen that from his earliest undergraduate years, Ramsey was wary of the logical analyst conception of philosophy. In
this paper, he started to put some argumentative structure to his worries. We shall see
in the remainder of this chapter that for the whole of 1929, the last year of Ramsey’s life,
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he was engaged in working out that alternative structure. On his view, philosophy is
not reducible to or constructible from sense-data and logic, but that does not mean
that it is a spurious venture.
He opened a draft of ‘Philosophy’ with a passage now famous because of its reprimand to Wittgenstein:
Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and
so our actions, Otherwise it is mere chatter. or else it is a disposition we have to check, and an
inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. 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!
[RP: 006-02-03]
We must avoid the ‘absurd position’ of the child in the following dialogue:
‘Say breakfast.’ ‘Can’t.’ ‘What can’t you say?’ ‘Can’t say breakfast.’
[P: 6]
Ramsey thinks Wittgenstein’s strategy is a snare and delusion. Wittgenstein cannot
argue for a particular view of the nature of meaning in which statements of and arguments for that view are meaningless. When we analyse the meaning of philosophical
concepts, Ramsey says that those analyses cannot be ‘nonsensical’—they ‘must be such
as we can understand’ (P: 6–7). Moreover, philosophical analysis must offer something
of practical importance and use. We shall see when we turn to On Truth that Ramsey,
like all pragmatists, struggles with the question of just what kinds of consequences
beliefs such as those found in philosophy must issue in.
But one thing is clear. He thinks the logical analyst picture impoverished. In
‘Philosophy’, Ramsey amplifies his objection to the idea, omnipresent in 1920s
Cambridge, that philosophy must take the propositions of science and ordinary life
and ‘exhibit them in a logical system with primitive terms and definitions’ (P: 1). It is
not that he sees no point at all in the method of analysis. At times we reach insights in
that way: Russell’s theory of descriptions, for instance, is his ‘most important’ and ‘least
controvertible’ discovery (NPPM: 135). But if philosophy is construed solely as the
search for precise definitions or analyses of concepts, too often it will not be true to the
complexity of our concepts:
I used to worry myself about the nature of philosophy through excessive scholasticism. I could
not see how we could understand a word and not be able to recognize whether a proposed definition of it was or was not correct. I did not realize the vagueness of the whole idea of understanding, the reference it involves to a multitude of performances any of which may fail and
require to be restored.
[P: 1–2]
Trying to construct an ideal definition in a perfect language is an instance of scholasticism, ‘the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to
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fit it into an exact logical category’ (P: 7).34 I shall argue in the next chapter that this
objection of Ramsey’s was responsible for Wittgenstein’s rejection of the Tractatus
and his move to the idea that meaning is use.
Ramsey holds that in many cases, we need some sort of philosophical explication
other than a definition. Sometimes we have to be content with a mere ‘description of
how a definition might be given’ (P: 2). For instance, when we try to explain the locution ‘Jane’s voice’, we cannot define it, since the constituents into which we would
analyse it are highly specific sensations for which we have no names. So, we can only
say that its meaning is illuminated through recourse to sensations of that general
sort. Moreover, we have to see that sometimes ‘nominal definition is inappropriate,
and . . . what is wanted is an explanation of the use of the symbol’ (P: 3). This is true in
some cases because a strict definition is too specific for our practical needs, and a
looser description of the concept’s use-conditions will be more fit for our purposes.
But it is also true because, in Ramsey’s view, explanations of use-conditions play a
normative role that strict definitions do not—or, at any rate, have not typically been
taken to—play. So, while Moore, for instance, held that definitions tell us what we
have always meant by the analysed propositions, Ramsey argues that we should
instead seek explications that ‘show how we intend to use them in future’ (P: 1). To
use an expression of Ramsey’s that we shall explore at length in §6.6 (with specific
reference to open generalizations), definitions should be seen as rules with which we
meet the future.
Those steeped in the later Wittgenstein will hear a strong forecast here. In the next
chapter I will argue that, indeed, these thoughts of Ramsey’s about use had a significant impact on the later Wittgenstein. But those steeped in Peirce will hear strong
echoes. The allusion to Peirce’s use of ‘nominal’ definitions is one signal. Ramsey’s
idea that philosophy must not obsessively focus on definition, but rather on how our
concepts are used, is straight out of Peirce. But whatever its genealogy, it is clear that
the standard understanding of Ramsey is wrong. On that understanding, Ramsey
was immersed in working through the details of the logical analyst programme of
Russell and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Ayer, for instance, takes him to be a member
of the school of Cambridge analysis and then goes on to say, with the benefit of
hindsight, that the aim of that school—analytic definition—had now been shown
to be too thin a job for philosophy (1959: 16–17). But while Ramsey never completely extricated himself from the programme of the logical analysts, the idea that
analytic definition is too thin was precisely Ramsey’s view during the heyday of
Cambridge analysis. While Ramsey retains a place for analysis in his philosophical
framework, he thinks it of limited value. He had doubts, for instance, about Carnap’s
34
A similar point is made in ‘Theories’, where he denies that our scientific theories should always be
structured in terms of explicit definitions, since definitions cannot ‘be adequate to the theory as something
in process of growth’ (Th: 130). If definitions are too strict they make the entire system rigid.
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attempt in the 1928 Aufbau to reconstruct the world out of a primary language,
writing to Schlick:
I feel very guilty that I’ve not yet written a review of Carnap’s book, which is really inexcusable.
I found it very interesting, though some things I thought certainly wrong and others I felt very
doubtful about.35
And while he had respect for Schlick, he thought his The General Theory of Knowledge
contained ‘some sad rubbish’.36
Ramsey is after a kind of explanation that is both more complete and more complex
than that of the logical analyst. We are to ask ourselves questions such as:
‘What do I mean by that?’ ‘What are the separate notions involved in this term?’ ‘Does this
really follow from that?’ etc., and to test identity of meaning of a proposed definiens and the
definiendum by real and hypothetical examples.
[P: 5]
Russell was right to take analysis as central to philosophy. His mistake was to think that
this can be done ‘entirely unselfconsciously, thinking all the time of the facts and not
about our thinking about them, deciding what we mean without any reference to the
nature of meanings’ (P: 5). Ramsey, in contrast, accepts that we will often run into terms
‘we cannot define, but . . . can [only] explain the way in which they are used’ (P: 5). He
takes open generalizations and theoretical terms to be examples of locutions that must
be explicated in terms of use-conditions. In giving such explications, ‘we are forced to
look not only at the objects we are talking about, but at our own mental states’ (P: 5).
So Ramsey does not want to give up analysis altogether, but his kind of analysis will
always proceed in light of an understanding of the natures of human language-use,
behaviour, and mental states. Philosophy must not neglect the ‘subjective side’ (P: 6). It
is not only in Cambridge that Ramsey finds an overly objectivist conception of philosophy. He is wary also of ‘the Oxford folly’:
They want the truth of their remarks to be guaranteed . . . They would say a correct theory of
knowledge must show that it is impossible to know what is false, just as Ludwig says that a correct theory of judgment must show that it is impossible to judge nonsense.
[NPPM: 81]
He comments that while, of course, ‘it is part of the meaning of “knowledge” that it
should be true’, philosophy, rightly practiced, is grounded in the subjective standpoint, from which whatever we take as knowledge may nevertheless fail to be true
35
Vienna Circle Archives, Noord-Hollands Archief, #114-Ram-4. The letter is dated simply ‘Dec. 10’,
with no year given. But since he says ‘At the moment I am in bed with a very severe attack of jaundice’, we
can date it 1929, as that jaundice ended Ramsey’s life the following month.
36
McGuinness (2012b: 160). Ramsey met Schlick when he was in Vienna during his six-month stay in
1924. After a dinner, he records his impression: ‘he didn’t seem to me much of a philosopher but a very nice
man’ (King’s College Archive: FPR 2/1/4).
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(NPPM: 81). As Methven puts it, Ramsey is after ‘realistic’ analyses: ‘A realistic
account is one which dispenses with myth and metaphor, and which instead places
human beings—finite, fallible and yet extraordinarily functional—at its heart’ (2015: 51).
That is as good a description of pragmatism as any.
But if Ramsey criticizes Russellian analysis for its neglect of subjectivity, he is equally
loath to ground philosophy in an all-encompassing and inescapable subjective sphere,
whose relation to the concrete world is in principle incapable of discovery. It is partly
for this reason that we philosophers ‘have to take our problems as a whole and jump
to a simultaneous solution’ (P: 6). As Ramsey remarks, anticipating Quine, in doing
philosophy we are ‘in the ordinary position of scientists of having to be content with
piecemeal improvements’ (P: 6).
While Ramsey wasn’t satisfied with all the ideas he was working through in
‘Philosophy’,37 he was always clear about his objection to Wittgenstein. Ramsey thoroughly rejected two overarching themes in Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy. First,
Ramsey denies that philosophy is nonsense. Rather, it ‘must be such as we can understand’ (P: 7). It meets the bar of meaningfulness if it stays connected to practice and
proves useful. Second, he denies that the task of philosophy is to clarify thoughts by
setting out the rules of our language. In another note on the nature of philosophy
Ramsey comes up with a different quip to get his point across: ‘The standardisation of
the colours of beer is not philosophy, but in a sense it is an improvement in notation,
and a clarification of thought’ (NPPM: 55). Ramsey is interested in providing not only
a description, but a normative theory, and he takes Wittgenstein’s defect to be his lack
of interest in the normative. Philosophy is not a mere ladder to be kicked away. It is a
tool we can use in service of concrete human purposes.
When in the next chapter we get to Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus philosophy, we
shall see that Wittgenstein was moved by some of Ramsey’s criticisms. Those criticisms
were delivered from an explicitly pragmatist point of view. That pragmatist objection,
expressed here in Ramsey’s notes and, one imagines, also face-to-face, is as follows:
If meaning is causal, we cannot mean anything about the nature of things . . . We cannot really
picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do
we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our
language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make
to ourselves are not pictures of facts.
[NPPM: 51]
In the Tractatus, a proposition is a picture of the world, disconnected from any reference to the self whose picture it is. Ramsey recognizes that this position leaves us
totally vulnerable to scepticism or solipsism. It leaves it mysterious how we can
make claims about the world. So he commits himself to a view of meaning that
links meaning to the effects a belief has on our behaviour. Meaning is not to be
37
At the top of the draft, before he added the famous passage about Wittgenstein (which is written on a
separate piece of paper), he wrote ‘I don’t like this.’
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grounded simply in reference to the facts, for—at least, if we conceive of the subject
and of the facts as Wittgenstein does—that is something we simply can’t do, and it’s
no good trying.
This is a slightly different objection than that which is captured in the quip ‘But what
we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.’38 In the whistling quip Ramsey
seems to warn against trying to find a different mode of expression in order to say what
we can’t say. After all, if we succeeded, that would not be to express the inexpressible,
but only to prove that the thought in question was not inexpressible after all. In the
quip about what we can’t do, he seems to be warning that if you assert that you can’t say
x, then if you are to be taken seriously, you mustn’t then try to say x. These are related,
perhaps equally good, but slightly different objections.
6.6 ‘General Propositions and Causality’
We have seen that Russell, prior to the 1921 The Analysis of Mind, was not impressed by
the idea of a ‘human logic’. In 1912, for instance, he wrote to Schiller, asserting that
logic cannot be about human reasoning or inference:
I have just finished your Formal Logic and am quite surprised to find how much of it I agree
with. Everything that you say in favour of empiricism, doubt, adventure, has my entire sympathy. It is only the ‘humanism’ that I don’t go with. I can’t bow down to Man and worship
him . . . You suggest as a reductio ad absurdum that if logic is not to be psychological it must not
deal with inference. I have long held this view, and regard inference as outside the scope of
logic, strictly understood.
[Russell to Schiller, 11 April 1912, reprinted in CP 6: 293]
A few years later, between 1914 and 1917, leading up to the 1918 A Survey of Symbolic
Logic, C. I. Lewis was making a pragmatist argument against part of Russell’s logic—
his conception of implication—and he made that argument from a more secure basis
in formal logic than Schiller possessed. Russell had asserted in The Principles of
Mathematics that ‘false propositions imply all propositions, and true propositions are
implied by all propositions’ (PoM: §16). Lewis notes the differences between Russellian
material implication and ‘ordinary’ implication, and argues that:
Pragmatically . . . material implication is an obviously false logic. If ‘p implies q’ means only ‘it
is false that p is true and q false,’ then the implication relation is far too ubiquitous to be of
any use.
[Lewis 1914: 246]39
Lewis argues that our philosophical account of implication must be founded on our
actual practices of inference. He is set against extensional definitions of the logical
Wittgenstein used to walk around Cambridge whistling complex operas (Paul 2012: 212).
See Shieh (2012 and forthcoming) for a subtle account of the debate between Lewis and Russell. See
IMP: 153–4 for Russell’s replies to Lewis.
38
39
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connectives. Such definitions look only to the truth-tables to define the connectives,
rather than thinking about the meaning of the connectives in human inference.
Regarding the extensional definition of disjunction, Lewis says in a paper in Mind:
The extensional disjunction, ‘either Cæsar died or the moon is made of green cheese,’ is true
because Cæsar died. If p is true, the extensional ‘either p or q’ is true, however irrelevant the
content of p and q.
[1914: 242]
But on the pragmatist view, our conception of the operators (such as disjunction) has
to be relevant or ‘good for reasoning’ (1914: 247).
We have seen that Ramsey, too, is after a human logic. He fleshes this idea out in an
important paper he drafted in 1929 that Braithwaite, preparing the notes for posthumous publication, titled ‘General Propositions and Causality’. In this paper, he argues,
like Lewis, that the question we must ask regarding a conditional is: should we accept it
and hence allow it to guide our actions? He asked this question also of counterfactual
conditionals, open universal generalizations, and statements of causal laws. In doing
so, he amplified and made precise some of his most significant pragmatist ideas. For he
offers a pragmatist account of these statements.
Open generalizations or what Ramsey sometimes called ‘variable hypotheticals’—
such as ‘all men are mortal’ or ‘arsenic is poisonous’—range over an infinite number of
individuals. Because such statements seem simply to be predicating the same property
of one individual after another, Ramsey notes that ‘everyone except us’ thinks of such
generalizations as conjunctions.40 He adopted the view of generalizations as conjunctions in ‘Facts and Propositions’, and ‘General Propositions and Causality’ marks his
change of mind. Ramsey’s new view is that open generalizations are not infinite conjunctions, and conditionals are not to be defined truth-functionally. We shall see in the
next chapter that Wittgenstein eventually followed him in making this shift.
Ramsey’s discussion of the universal quantifier picks up on a discussion of Russell’s.
Russell had noted in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism that even finite universal statements like ‘Everyone in Cambridge voted’ carry more information than a summary of
our current knowledge (that Russell voted, Moore voted, Hardy voted, and so on).
Russell thought that we need also to know an extra fact—that these were all the people
who were in Cambridge. Ramsey thinks that it is relatively unproblematic to take generalizations to be conjunctions when they range over a finite domain, as in ‘Everyone
in Cambridge voted.’ But an open generalization ‘always goes beyond what we know or
want’ (GC: 146). It cannot be thought of as an infinite conjunction, for we lack the symbolic power or the capacity to express an infinite statement. It is here that Ramsey
40
See FP: 54–5, as well as FM: 159–60. Braithwaite, as editor, says in a note that he is the other member
of the ‘us’. For Braithwaite’s position, see ‘The Idea of Necessary Connexion’, published by Mind in two parts
(Braithwaite 1927 and 1928a). Later in the paper Ramsey draws out some differences between his view and
Braithwaite’s (see GC: 150ff.).
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makes the famous quip: ‘But what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it
either.’41 He warns against drawing on comforting but misleading analogies:
Variable hypotheticals have formal analogies to other propositions which make us take them
sometimes as facts about universals, sometimes as infinite conjunctions. The analogies are
­misleading, difficult though they are to escape, and emotionally satisfactory as they prove to
different types of mind. Both these forms of ‘realism’ must be rejected by the realistic spirit.
[GC: 160]
In urging us to adopt a ‘realistic spirit’, Ramsey means to remind us that philosophy
must matter to us. A philosophical theory must not neglect the facts of our own experience in favour of an elegant theoretical construction; it must not be such that we can
only believe it to be true if we divorce ourselves from the very features of our experience that we wished to examine in the first place. This realistic spirit, I have suggested,
is the spirit of pragmatism. Ramsey thinks that Russell, Moore, and the Tractarian
Wittgenstein were not guided by it—they turned their backs on actual human practices and inquiry. That is, although Ramsey’s friends were realists in one sense of the
word, that traditional kind of realism, founded on the goal of an exact isomorphism
between thought and reality, lacks the realistic spirit in Ramsey’s sense.
In providing an alternative, realistic, position about open generalizations, Ramsey
makes one of his most interesting pragmatist moves.42 He argues that an open generalization ‘expresses an inference we are at any time prepared to make, not a belief of the primary sort’ (GC: 146). Nor can it be ‘eliminated and replaced by the primary propositions
which serve as evidence for them’ (GC: 153). And the problem is extensive—many
ordinary predicates can be thought of as ranging over an infinite number of objects. It
would be ‘wrong’ to think that generalizations and all these other judgements not well
suited to the primary language are ‘superfluous’:
[A]part from their value in simplifying our thought, they form an essential part of our mind.
That we think explicitly in general terms is at the root of all praise and blame and much discussion. We cannot blame a man except by considering what would have happened if he had acted
otherwise, and this kind of unfilled conditional cannot be interpreted as a material implication,
but depends essentially on variable hypotheticals.
[GC: 154]
41
Ramsey employs the quip to indicate that, on the view expressed in the Tractatus, infinite conjunctions are problematic. The primary language, Ramsey says, is a map with which we steer and we can’t have
an infinitely extended map. That’s a problem for Wittgenstein, who holds that an infinite conjunction is
something included in ‘the sayable’. But Ramsey thinks it is not sayable within the framework of the
Tractatus, and if we can’t express an infinite conjunction, we can’t whistle it either. I thank Cora Diamond
for discussion on this matter, which is not to say she would agree with my final position.
42
As Majer (1989, 1991) and Sahlin (1990: 240 n. 6) first argued—and Holton and Price (2003: 331–3),
and Marion (2012: 74) have since maintained—Ramsey’s position also finds inspiration in Weyl, who
argued that an existential statement of the sort ‘there are laws of kind E’ ‘is no judgment at all, but a
judgment abstract . . . The general statement “every number has property E” . . . is equally not an actual
statement, but rather a general instruction for judgments’ (1998 [1921]: 98).
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On Ramsey’s alternative view, we will not try to eliminate general terms, counterfactual
conditionals, and so on.
In invoking the idea of ‘a belief of the primary sort’, it might seem that Ramsey
retains a significant part of the Russellian/Tractarian picture. It might seem that he
retains the contrast between generalizations made true by something human, on the
one hand, and primary beliefs straightforwardly made true by the facts, on the other.
But I shall suggest that this is not the best reading of Ramsey. I have already canvassed in detail his worries about the logical atomist picture. Here we shall examine
his argument that the fact that generalizations are not propositions in the primary
language does not entail that they do not express ‘cognitive attitudes’ (GC: 147). That
position is as follows.
If I believe that all Φ’s are ψ’s, I will adopt rules or habits of the following sort: I shall
tend to ‘say so’ when asked if all Φ’s are ψ’s, and if I meet a Φ, I shall regard it as a ψ
(GC: 148–9). Of course, that rule or generalization can be upset by the experience of
a Φ that is not a ψ. Ramsey treats causal statements and the laws of nature similarly.
They are not statements of necessity or descriptions of objective modal facts. They are
rules with which we meet the future. Peirce called them habits or rules for action. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, the eminent Supreme Court Justice who had been a member of The
Metaphysical Club with Peirce, James, and Chauncey Wright, called them bets. He
reminisces in 1929:
Chauncey Wright a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that
I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don’t know whether anything is necessary
or not. So I describe myself as a bettabilitarian. I believe that we can bet on the behavior of the
universe in its contact with us.
[Holmes to Pollock, 30 August 1929; reprinted in Howe 1941, vol. 2: 252]
This is an expression of an epistemic, as opposed to metaphysical, conception of laws
or necessity. Ramsey, too, is clear that we must examine necessity and causality from
the agent’s perspective, not from a metaphysical perspective.43
The question arises as to how rules or habits or dispositions can be ‘cognitive attitudes’: ‘in what way can [such a habit] be right or wrong?’ (GC: 146). Ramsey’s
answer is that an onlooker can evaluate or criticize such beliefs, ‘and he may be in
the right without having proof on his side’ (GC: 147). Think about the countless and
diverse ways my belief that all humans are mortal will play out. I will be disposed
to assert that humans are mortal in appropriate circumstances; I will be prepared to
offer reasons for my belief; I will disagree with those who assert the contrary; I will
drive my car carefully around those pedestrians I wish to remain alive; whenever I meet
a person and consider the possibility that she will at some point die, I will conclude
43
In the 1950s, Braithwaite was to say that the special status of law-statements as against ‘mere generalizations’ consists ‘in the different roles which they play in our thinking rather than in any difference in their
objective contents’ (1953: 295). For an account of this idea, see Mellor (1980c) and Hacking (1980),
although only Hacking traces this Ramseyan thought back to Peirce.
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that this possibility will indeed obtain; I will not treat myself as an immortal exception;
I may despair about the meaning of life; and so on. Moreover, we can assess whether
I indeed form such a belief or rule or habit on the basis of whether it manifests itself in
appropriate ways (whether I adopt dispositions such as the ones above), and we can
evaluate the belief in terms of whether its manifestations fit with experience. That is,
these rules can be adopted or rejected for reasons, and the rules and the reasons can be
evaluated and shown to be good or bad by future experience. An open generalization
or a causal law is a rule that is trustworthy. Ramsey says:
Variable hypotheticals or causal laws form the system with which the speaker meets the future;
they are not, therefore, subjective in the sense that if you and I enunciate different ones we are
each saying something about ourselves which pass by one another like ‘I went to Grantchester’,
‘I didn’t’.
[GC: 149]
If you and I meet the future with different systems, then we disagree. And the future
might be compatible with one of our systems but not the other, even if for some variable hypotheticals the future in fact will agree with both systems (GC: 149). Our attitudes are not subjective, as they are in the indexically driven non-dispute about who
went to Grantchester. They are ‘cognitive’, and while Ramsey did not have the time to
fully explicate just what this means, we can think of a range of cognitive terms that
describe these attitudes: from ‘appropriate’, to ‘rational’, to ‘being aimed at the truth’,
and to ‘being true or false’. Cognitive attitudes are attitudes that we can agree or disagree with, for reasons.44 This idea appears as early as his 1926 ‘Mathematical Logic’, in
which he is clear that ‘knowledge’ applies to general propositions, saying, ‘all our natural associations to the words judgement and knowledge fit general and existential
propositions as well as they do individual ones; for in either case we can feel greater or
lesser degrees of conviction about the matter; and in either case we can be in some
sense right or wrong’ (ML: 235–6).
Richard Holton and Huw Price have argued (2003: 335) that ‘General Propositions
and Causality’ marks a change of mind on Ramsey’s part regarding open generalizations. They argue that the change arose because his ideas about infinity had changed,
and they place their emphasis on the fact that he seems in this paper to maintain a distinction between generalizations and genuine propositions in the primary language.
In ‘General Propositions and Causality’, that is, it can seem that Ramsey accepts the
bifurcation thesis—that some propositions are genuinely descriptive, representational, or truth-apt and so can be accounted for by a semantics centred on reference,
while others are not and require a different semantic treatment. These days such a
­position might be called expressivist. Expressivism holds that generalizations (or ethical statements, or modal statements, or statements of whatever other domain is in
44
For a contemporary statement of this pragmatist view that truth is the grit in virtue of which a difference between two people’s statements can amount to a genuine disagreement, see Price (2003).
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question) are not descriptive. Despite their ‘surface grammar,’ they have a different,
less objective status, which the expressivist then tells us about. My own view is that it is
clear that significant elements in Ramsey’s thought cut against the position Holton and
Price ascribe to him, and that he was from the mid 1920s moving toward a position
that blurred the boundaries between the genuinely representational and the merely
practical or expressive. That is, he is not offering us a local pragmatism that says that
only theoretical statements and other empirical-looking statements that we cannot in
fact verify are to be assessed in terms of whether they work. All beliefs are habits with
which we meet the future, and if they would meet the future well and be in our best
theory, then they are true.
In the late 1920s, Ramsey, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle were all thinking
about the statuses of different kinds of statements. The most pressing issue was that of
the statements of mathematics and logic, which are not easily placed in the primary
language. Wittgenstein dealt with them by explaining that they were tautologies. That
idea was happily snapped up by the Vienna Circle as the explanation for why such
statements are important, yet unverifiable. We have seen that Ramsey was on board as
well, noting that in being tautologies, these statements have no impact in the causal
nexus of action. No one considered the Peircean move to dismantle the barrier between
the semantic status of logical/mathematical statements and that of empirical statements.
Peirce did the dismantling by taking logical and mathematical statements to be a special kind of empirical judgement grounded in our experimentation upon diagrams.
They are linked to action and behaviour. Perhaps Mill’s disastrous attempt at making a
similar move was enough to put anyone off another attempt at an empiricist construal
of logic and mathematics. Mill had argued that 2 + 1 = 3 is an empirical truth about
collections—we observe that the collections oo and o can be rearranged as the collection ooo (1973 [1872]: 257). This thought did not go over very well: Frege pointed out
that it is a good thing that all objects are not bolted to the ground, for if we couldn’t
move collections around, then on Mill’s view 2 + 1 would not equal 3 (Frege 1950
[1884]: §7).
But other kinds of statements were seen to require attention as well—such as those
universal generalizations or laws ranging over infinite domains. They are also not
fully empirically verifiable. One approach is to adopt an instrumentalist position in
which they are not genuine propositions, but rather mere instruments to be judged
in terms of whether they work. That view was attractive at certain moments to
Wittgenstein in 1929–32, as well as to some members of the Vienna Circle. But we
have seen that by 1927, Ramsey was, if you like, exploring an instrumentalism about
all beliefs, save logical and mathematical ones. He was arguing against the very project that required the instrumentalist move, if that move applies only to disputed classes
of propositions. He was arguing against the picture in which there is an elementary
language of verifiable propositions and then a secondary language composed partly
of propositions that are constructed from the elementary language in truth-functional
ways, and partly of statements that require another kind of justification, a justification
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in terms of success or convenience. He was arguing for a pragmatism in which all our
beliefs, outside logic and pure mathematics, are habits for meeting the future.
That is, while it may be the case that Ramsey’s view of infinity had changed,45 and
while it may be the case that he retained the Tractarian programme for certain ­purposes,
he was committed to being a pragmatist for all judgements, save mathematical ones, at
least as far back as the 1926 ‘Truth and Probability’ and ‘Mathematical Logic’. And he
asserts the general claim at least twice in ‘General Propositions and Causality’:
since all belief involves habit, so does the criticism of any judgment whatever, and I do not see
anything objectionable in this.
[GC: 150]
it belongs to the essence of any belief that we deduce from it, and act on it in a certain way.
[GC: 159]
One of the main points of ‘General Propositions and Causality’ is that ‘variable hypotheticals involve causality no more and no less than ordinary beliefs’. There is nothing
especially problematic about open generalizations and infinity—many predicates can
be thought of as ranging over an infinite number of objects. Many ordinary beliefs are
in the same boat as generalizations.46 So when Ramsey says ‘Many sentences express
cognitive attitudes without being propositions’ (GC: 146), I read him as demoting the
importance of propositions in the primary language, and elevating the importance of
all those varied beliefs in the ordinary and theoretical secondary language. Within the
realm of cognitive claims, he distinguished mathematical/logical propositions, primary
propositions (in the Tractarian sense), generalizations and causal laws, and conditionals
(indicative and counterfactual). But they are all cognitive or aimed at truth.
We shall see that in his unfinished book manuscript, Ramsey starts with the idea
that we need a unified account of belief. In ‘General Propositions and Causality’, his
strategy is, rather, to examine kinds of beliefs one by one. After dealing with generalizations, his next target is the logician who holds that conditionals are to be analysed in
terms of truth-conditions. Here too Ramsey adopts a pragmatic (or epistemic, or
commitment-based) account, in which conditionals are relativized to our accepted
beliefs and evaluated in terms of how they play out in action. His talk of doubt and
fixing belief is resonant with Peirce’s language:
If two people are arguing [about the question] ‘If p will q?’ and are both in doubt as to p, they
are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and arguing on that basis about q . . . We
can say they are fixing their degrees of belief in q given p.
[GC: 155]
45
See Potter (2011: 125f.) and Methven (2015: ch. 9) for excellent discussions of both Ramsey and
Wittgenstein on the infinite.
46
Holton and Price think this is evidence that Ramsey’s view in ‘General Propositions and Causality’ is
‘unstable’ and that he didn’t see the rule-following problems. They recommend to him that he abandon the idea
of a genuine proposition and adopt global pragmatism. On my reading, Ramsey was already there (or most of
the way there). For a more complete engagement with the Holton–Price position, see Misak (forthcoming d).
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Conditionals are also rules for judging (GC: 154). When I accept a conditional, I commit
myself to acquiring the disposition to judge q whenever I judge p.47 I might not in fact
acquire the disposition, because I might be irrational or inattentive, but that does not
affect my commitment. Ramsey gives the following example of how even a commitment to a counterfactual conditional can be a cognitive attitude. If a man has a cake
and decides not to eat it because he thinks it will make him ill, we can judge him mistaken even if he does not eat the cake. On the standard view, the material conditional ‘If
I eat this cake, I will become ill’ comes out true, since its antecedent is false. But Ramsey
argues that we have different ‘degrees of expectation’ as to the counterfactual outcome,
and in disputing about the proper degree of expectation we can ‘introduce any fact we
know, whether he did or could know it’ (GC: 155). These expectations are general in
that we expect the same probabilities in similar cases. So if he knew that I carefully
baked the cake with the finest ingredients, that I am an excellent baker, that I know he
has no food allergies or aversions, and that I bear no ill will toward him, we might
judge that he is irrational in maintaining his conditional or his worry about the cake.
If all these things hold, but he does not know them, then we might merely judge him
mistaken. The fact that we can ‘dispute with him or condemn him’ requires an explanation, which is unavailable to those who think of conditionals as material conditionals.
As Mellor puts Ramsey’s point: to accept a conditional is not to believe ‘if p then q’
precisely as one believes an unconditional p or q, but that does not mean conditionals
are not beliefs, made true by facts (2012: 38).
As Mellor also argues, singular beliefs, general beliefs, and conditional beliefs are all
dispositions to behave, but those dispositions do not have a uniform look to them—
they are dispositions to do quite different things. Mellor’s thought can be extended, on
Ramsey’s behalf, in fruitful ways along the following lines. Ramsey takes the model or
map metaphor in the Tractatus, on which a picture in the elementary language is a
model of reality, and turns it into a tool for getting along in the world: ‘A belief of the
primary sort is a map of neighbouring space by which we steer’ (GC: 146).48 Part of his
point, I think, is that when you meet the future with a primary, simple, singular belief,
you act on the truth of it—beliefs of the primary sort are dispositions to direct action.
Other beliefs, such as open generalizations, involve dispositions to acquire other
beliefs. When you meet the future with a generalization, you employ a rule that has you
acting on autopilot when you encounter an instance to which the generalization
47
Ramsey is not quite right, or at least not quite complete, here. Conditionals are asserted on the supposition that the antecedent p is true, not that I judge p, or that anyone judges p, or that p may rationally be
judged. This is why I can say ‘If Reagan was a KGB agent, no one will ever judge that he was’, even though,
if I judged the antecedent to be true, I would simultaneously judge that I judged the antecedent to be true,
and so would retract my affirmation of the conditional rather than affirm the consequent. (See Lewis 1986:
155–6.) Ramsey is right that when I accept a conditional, one thing I do is commit myself to judging q when
I judge p. But we need to add on his behalf that another thing I commit myself to is to acquire the disposition to judge q whenever I suppose that p is true. I thank Ian Rumfitt for discussion on this point.
48
He then introduces the problem with infinite conjunctions: ‘if we professedly extend it to infinity, it is
no longer a map; we cannot take it in or steer by it’ (GC: 146).
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applies.49 When you meet the future with a conditional belief ‘if p then q’, then you also
are disposed to acquire other beliefs: you are disposed to believe q if you believe p.
We shall see that this idea of different kinds of beliefs having different functions
was something that Wittgenstein would later make much of. He compares our use of
language to looking into the cabin of a locomotive:
We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the
opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it
is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it
brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro.
[PI: 12]
A full examination of Ramsey’s way of analysing (in the non-strict sense of that word)
all the ways we use language would require much nuance, but the general way his argument unfolds ought to be clear enough: the dispositions to behave that issue from
belief will not have a uniform structure. Thus, different metaphors will come into play.
Sometimes the map metaphor is apt: beliefs are like maps by which we steer. Sometimes
the rule metaphor is apt: beliefs are rules that we follow, by, for instance, adopting further beliefs in appropriate circumstances.
However, there is more going on in ‘General Propositions and Causality’ than I reckon
Mellor would allow, for Ramsey is here even more tempted to sign up to what he takes
to be Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth. It is worth quoting extensively from the end
of the paper:
Suppose the human race for no reason always supposed strawberries would give them stomach-­
ache and so never ate them; then all their beliefs, strictly so-called, e.g. that if I eat strawberries
I shall have a pain, would be true; but would there not really be something wrong? Is it not
a fact that if they had eaten them they wouldn’t have had a pain? No, it is not a fact; it is a consequence of my rule . . . If we regarded the unfulfilled conditional as a fact we should have to
suppose that any such statement as ‘If he had shuffled the cards, he would have dealt himself
the ace’ has a clear sense true or false, which is absurd. We only regard it as sense if it, or its
contradictory, can be deduced from our system . . . But their system, you say, fitted all the facts
known to them; if two systems both fit the facts, is not the choice capricious? We do, however,
believe that the system is uniquely determined and that long enough investigation will lead us
all to it. This is Peirce’s notion of truth as what everyone will believe in the end; it does not apply
to the truthful statement of matters of fact, but the ‘true scientific system’. What was wrong with
our friends the strawberry abstainers was that they did not experiment. Why should one
experiment? To increase the weight of one’s probabilities . . .
[GC: 161]
Ramsey is almost right. This is almost Peirce’s notion of truth. Ramsey’s version of it is
that what is true is what can be deduced from our best system. Peirce, however, would
49
This strategy is not unlike Levi’s ‘routine expansion’ (1980: §2.2).
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have not liked the indicative conditional in Ramsey’s passage—we have seen that he
thought a true belief is one that would be believed were we to subject it to as much further testing as would be fruitful. But Ramsey is right to see that, on Peirce’s theory of
truth, the strawberry-abstainers can be criticized for their belief that eating strawberries causes stomach-ache, for if they had experimented they might have come to a
better system of belief than the one they ended up with. Ramsey is pretty close to
articulating and adopting Peirce’s theory.
Note that all sorts of statements not in Russell’s or Wittgenstein’s primary language—
open generalizations, conditionals, theoretical entities, and on and on—will be part
of our best system. We expect that our natural ontological attitude will prevail—
that, in the end, our beliefs (e.g. that all sorts of entities exist independently of us)
will be left in place.50 Indeed, a realism about causes and effects, and perhaps even
time,51 is presupposed by the pragmatist account of beliefs—beliefs are caused by
facts and evaluated in terms of their effects. But of course, we could be mistaken
about any of our assumptions. They and the theories that require them could turn
out to be wrong.
Ramsey’s pragmatism, like Peirce’s, holds that our beliefs centrally involve habits,
and that we evaluate those habits in terms of whether they serve us well, in a robust
sense of ‘serve’. Their pragmatism has it that beliefs should be evaluated based on
both hindsight (whether the belief-formation method was connected to the facts) and
foresight (whether the belief continues to work, fitting with future experience, other
well-grounded beliefs, and enabling successful action). The first kind of evaluation is
minimal—we can say nothing more about the facts than that we assume there to be
some and that we want to have our beliefs caused by them in some way that we cannot
make precise. But we can draw a practical conclusion from this vague thought: we
should continue to experiment in order to get indications of whether our beliefs are
connected to the facts. We can draw the same practical conclusion, in a less vague way,
from the second way we evaluate beliefs: we should continue to experiment to see what
system of belief works best. The philosophical conclusion about truth is that what
really does work best is what is true.
Ramsey stops just short of drawing this conclusion in ‘General Propositions and
Causality’. He was pretty clear, though, that all our beliefs are habits with which we meet
the future. His solution to the problem of general and causal propositions—the problem that maps can’t be infinitely extended—is that such propositions are not infinite
conjunctions, but automatic rules with which we meet the future. But I have argued
that part and parcel of his solution is that there is no special problem about evaluating
universal statements—no problem that would call for the answer that they, and only they,
are evaluated as mere habits with which we meet the future. Rather, this draft paper
50
See Lillehammer (forthcoming) for how this debate has played out in the hands of the late Cambridge
pragmatists Blackburn and Price.
51
See Mellor (2001).
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r­ epresents Ramsey’s treatment of a few species of belief, showing how they are habits
we use to meet the future. While this treatment of open generalizations, causal statements, and conditionals proceeds in relative isolation, the treatment offered is one
Ramsey thought applied to—and, perhaps, hoped eventually to demonstrate with
respect to—every kind of statement. The first sentence in the printed version (the version
printed by Braithwaite) starts with ‘Let us consider the meaning of general propositions.’ But in Ramsey’s manuscript, which was left incomplete as a mere sketch or draft,
he first wrote and then half crossed out this opener:
The problem of philosophy must be divided if I am to solve it: as a whole it is too big for me.
Let us take first the meaning of general propositions.52
The manuscript was not even given a title by Ramsey. It was Braithwaite who gave it the
title ‘General Propositions and Causality’, making it seem that the paper’s conclusions
applied only to this one kind of belief. But Ramsey’s intention, I suggest, was to eventually solve the problem of philosophy by taking all propositions and showing how their
meaning is grounded not in their reducibility to the primary language, but in their
imbuing us with habits of action. In this paper, he was merely making a start on the
project with general propositions, conditionals, and causal or law-like statements.
6.7 On Truth
Let us turn now to Ramsey’s unfinished book manuscript, which we have reason to
believe he was working on during and after he drafted ‘General Propositions and
Causality’.53 It was clearly his foremost philosophical concern during the last year of his
life. In January 1928, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am thinking this weekend of taking up my
book again. I’ve got most of the next 3 days (counting Sunday) free for it’.54 He wrote to
a friend in March 1929:
I’ve been awfully busy this term and what spare time I’ve had has been rather occupied by
Wittgenstein, who has arrived to finish the PhD he was at before the war. I am his supervisor!
He is in much better spirits, and very nice, but rather dogmatic and inclined to repeat explanations of simple things. Because if you doubt the truth of what he says he always thinks you
can’t have understood it. This makes him rather tiring to talk to, but if I had more time I think
I should learn a lot from discussing with him. Next term I shall as I have been let off supervision on the pretext of writing my book.
[King’s College Archives WJHS/85]
Ramsey managed to write three drafts of the book before he died in January 1930, with
some chapters more complete than others. There are also some scattered pages of notes.
We need to take this pieced-together manuscript seriously as the vehicle of his final
52
53
54
Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 9781/2.
‘General Propositions and Causality’ is dated, in Ramsey’s hand, ‘Sept 1929’.
King’s College Archives FPR/2/212.
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thoughts and as his attempt to bring together and improve on the ideas he presented
in his various late papers. Most of those papers were also drafts and sets of notes, not
polished and published arguments. He initially intended to call the book Truth and
Probability, a substantial expansion of the paper by that name. But he soon realized
that the problem of truth was difficult enough to merit a stand-alone book, and he split
the project in two—a book on truth and a book on logic. The two were together to form
a system:
I feel rather excited about my book, and clearer about the difficulties in planning it, i.e I see new
difficulties, I haven’t solved them. Everything turns so on everything else that it is hard to see
how you can arrange it satisfactorily.
[King’s College Archive FPR/2/212]
In 1991 Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer edited and published the manuscript as On
Truth. It has not attracted the attention one might expect, given the respect Ramsey
commands.55 In this section, I shall present the core of Ramsey’s position and then in
§6.8 I will offer an interpretation, with special weight on the pragmatism in it.
We have seen that when Ramsey, post-1926, expresses the equivalence thought
about truth, he immediately follows it with the claim that one must proceed with a full
analysis of belief and assertion. His view of truth in the book manuscript has not
changed in this and other fundamentals. Truth is still primarily an attribute of
‘thoughts and opinions and only derivatively of sentences’ (OT: 84) and is not a relation between a proposition and a fact. Beliefs are still dispositions to behave, and
Ramsey remains a common-sense realist about those dispositions. A boy’s belief that
the Norman Conquest was in 1066 need not be always present in his mind, but the
belief would be manifested if the occasion arose, just as a poker remains strong even if
it is never subjected to strain (OT: 43–4).56 We are unlikely to know the underlying
structure of either disposition, but we simply infer that they exist. Feeling, too, remains
part of Ramsey’s account of belief. Indeed, Ramsey here explicitly agrees with Russell
that a ‘belief-feeling’ or an image can also express a judgement and move a person to
action (OT: 48). And Ramsey is still determined that we must first specify the definition of truth or the meaning of ‘it is true that p’, then go on to the question of what it is
for a belief to be the belief that p. What is especially new is that he locates his discussion
of truth in the context of what he takes to be the three main candidate theories of truth:
correspondence, coherence, and pragmatism.
His very first words57 in the ‘Introduction’ echo Peirce’s assertion that logic is a
normative science, and Ramsey brashly rejects other views of logic by suggesting
that everyone knows that logic is not descriptive:
55
Sahlin (1990), Majer (1991), Glock (2005), and Rumfitt (2011) are exceptions. But this is a short list
of commentators for such an important work, and no one attempts to explicate the whole of it.
56
Recall Peirce’s example of the diamond that lies unscratched on the ocean floor.
57
See also NPPM: 227: ‘Logic is, as Peirce sayd [sic], self-control.’
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It is a commonplace that Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics have a peculiar position among the
sciences: whereas all other sciences are concerned with the description and explanation of what
happens, these three normative studies aim not at description but at criticism. To account for
our actual conduct is the duty of the psychologist; the logician, the critic, and the moralist tell
us not how we do but how we ought to think, feel, and act.
[OT: 3]
This might be taken to be a commitment to the position in the Tractatus, in which
some domains of discourse describe and others prescribe. But that, I think, would be a
mistake. For one thing, Ramsey’s example of a descriptive or ‘natural’ domain, which
putatively contrasts with normative ones, is psychology (see OT: 4), hardly a plausible
candidate for the domain of atomic statements. Whatever distinction Ramsey retains
between description and prescription, there is not much metaphysics built into it. He
intends to talk of the rationality and truth of all beliefs in ‘natural terms’ (OT: 4).
Ramsey goes on to say that the logician does not have exclusive purchase on the
question of how we should think, for each science must answer for its own ‘domain’ the
question ‘what is true?’ (OT: 3). Truth, that is, is the concern of all the sciences, not
merely of logic, and so all the sciences are in that sense normative. Ramsey thinks that
‘the whole purpose of argument is to arrive at truth’ (OT: 3), and his project is to give us
a holistic account of how the truth predicate ranges over all statements—or, at least,
over all those statements with a claim to being truth-apt.
Further, and again like Peirce, Ramsey thinks that logic, with aesthetics and ethics,
is not only ‘normative’ but is also ‘definable in (ordinary factual) natural terms’ (OT: 4).
Logic, ethics, and aesthetics are part of ‘natural science in its widest sense’ (OT: 4). All
disciplines seek truth, a truth that is both ineliminably natural (what really works) and
ineliminably normative (what we ought to believe). He says:
in regard to the primary logical value of truth, all the logician can do is to determine its
meaning; it is for him [alone] to tell us what truth is, but which opinions are true we shall learn
not merely from logic but from all the sciences, each in its own domain.
[OT: 81]
With respect to the domain of economics, for instance, he agrees with Keynes that
economics is a moral science that employs mathematics, rather than a mathematical
science. For Ramsey, economics, like all normative sciences, involves substantive
evaluative claims, is grounded in human behaviour and psychology, and is sensitive to
the facts. Ramsey’s project is one of breaking down the barrier between the descriptive
and the prescriptive. It is the kind of sophisticated project I have argued elsewhere
(2013) is the best of pragmatism: to see how genuine norms and evaluation might
arise from natural human practices. Of course the big question for this kind of pragmatism, to slightly modify Hume’s point, is whether we can really get an ‘ought’
from an ‘is’. Can the naturalist, who eschews transcendental concepts such as God,
The Rational, Platonic Forms, etc., make sense of normative notions such as truth
and warrant?
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Ramsey wants to theorize not only about truth, but also about those actual normative inquiries. He tells us that since ‘psychologists grossly neglect the aspects of their
subject which are most important to the logician’, philosophers have to take on some of
the psychological work themselves. But whoever undertakes the work must see that:
The three normative sciences: Ethics, Aesthetics and Logic begin . . . with psychological investigations which lead up, in each case, to a valuation, an attribution of one of the three values:
good, beautiful, or rational, predicates which appear not to be definable in terms of any of the
concepts used in psychology or positive science. I say ‘appear’ because it is one of the principal
problems of philosophy to discover whether this is really the case.
[OT: 4]
He notes that we might get different answers for the different sciences of value—‘for
instance, that whereas goodness and beauty could be defined in terms of our desires
and admirations, rationality introduced some new element peculiar to logic, such as
indefinable probability relations’ (OT: 4). We have seen, however, that this does not
appeal to Ramsey. He is set against taking any key philosophical concept like goodness
(Moore), propositions (Russell), or probability relations (Keynes) as indefinable. His
own view is that values of any kind ‘are definable in natural terms’, again, as long as we
take ‘natural’ to be suitably broad. It is clear that Ramsey does not want to end up with
a reductive behaviourism. He does not want to reduce normative notions or take questions of what we ought to do to be answerable simply by reference to what we happen to
do. He takes the relationship between behaviour, psychology, value, and facts to be an
intertwined whole. Ramsey’s naturalism, like Peirce’s, is a complex and liberal one.
In another draft of the Introduction, he stakes out the territory:
With regard to the meaning of any concept of value such as goodness, beauty, truth or validity
there are three main schools of opinion which may, perhaps, be called idealist, realist and naturalist. With the idealists such as Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet I shall not deal; their writings
seem to me to be almost entirely nonsense; the living issue is between the realists and the
naturalists.
[OT: 82]58
Ramsey again comes down on the side of the naturalist—the kind of naturalist who
talks of norms. This kind of naturalist insists, for instance, that ‘the rightness of actions
is related to the intrinsic value of their consequences’ (OT: 82). He repeats that one
might take a different attitude with respect to different kinds of value. But here he offers
a different reason for thinking that a unified account will win the day: the arguments
are so similar in all fields that they should hold (or not) for all of them. We can see,
though, from the fact that he crossed out ‘beauty’ in this draft, that he wavered about
whether judgements about aesthetics are part of our natural, yet epistemically evaluable body of knowledge. I shall examine these issues in a sustained way in the next
58
Throughout On Truth, Rescher and Majer give in brackets the portions of the text Ramsey struck out.
I give the text with Ramsey’s strike-throughs instead.
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s­ ection. For now, let us consider Ramsey’s arguments against realism and for a normative naturalism/pragmatism.
Realists in logic, Ramsey says, include both those who hold that ‘truth or validity are
unanalysable’ as well as those who hold that truth and validity ‘involve in their ultimate
analysis one or more distinctively logical predicates or relations, such as a unique kind
of correspondence or indefinable property relations’ (OT: 83). He means to include,
that is, Moore, the pre-Analysis of Mind Russell, and the Tractarian Wittgenstein,
whose positions he has been opposed to since 1921. He then notes, but crosses out:
‘The principal upholders of naturalism in logic in recent years have been the pragmatists’ (OT: 83). What he does not cross out is that the ‘pragmatists and behaviourists,
and in his recent works . . . Mr. Russell’ have opposed the ‘almost universal view’ of the
realists. These pragmatists and behaviourists argue ‘that all the notions used in logical
criticism can be defined in terms of natural qualities and relations, such as are involved
in ordinary psychological investigations’ (OT: 83). This is the view that Ramsey will
take, although he is sure that the insane behaviourists are not on his side and he is not
sure that all the pragmatists are on his side (we shall see he has James in mind). He is
also not sure that Russell is on his side. For Russell’s position is ‘peculiar’ in that it
seems to be in tension with other things he accepts (OT: 83). Ramsey, of course, is right
to see that much of what Russell holds is contrary to pragmatism, complicating his
statement in ‘Facts and Propositions’ that he derived his pragmatism from Russell.
Ramsey offers us a hybrid position. He gives us a hint in the introduction that he will
not be rejecting all of the realist’s claims: ‘Truth is an attribute of opinions, statements,
or propositions . . . [which] in a preliminary way we can explain . . . as accordance with
fact’ (OT: 3). A deleted note expands the point:
Logic cannot be altogether contained in psychology, because the soundness of our thought
depends on that thought agreeing with its object, and hence in part on the properties of the
object, to an extent not in general regarded as belonging to psychology.
[OT: 5]
Ramsey, like Peirce, wants to have it both ways. Although he has aligned himself
with the naturalist/pragmatist against the realist, he is unwilling to give up on some
things the realist holds dear. He will not be the sort of naturalist who thinks that
whatever belief the evidence points to is ipso facto true. It may be that the evidence
was not connected in the right way to the facts. But he will be a naturalist nonetheless,
holding that we cannot understand normative notions such as evidence, rationality,
and truth apart from human practices, psychology, and cognition, and that a search
for evidence, rationality, and truth untainted from human practices is a fruitless and
unrealistic search.
The nature and role of psychology is clearly of major importance in Ramsey’s theory
of truth and rationality. It is also especially important, as Suppes (2006) notes, for the
kind of subjective probability and decision theory of which Ramsey was a pioneer.
Decision theory must accept individual differences in the initial assignment of
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­ robabilities—it must accept that strength of belief will vary from person to person
p
and that these variances will be partly driven by psychology. Suppes has excavated
some interesting remarks of Ramsey’s in which he makes it clear that the then-new
Freudian theory was unlikely to make psychology a systematic science (2006: 49f.).
Ramsey did not think that the science of psychology was going to give us all the answers,
nor did he think any particular antecedent degree of belief in a proposition will be
‘uniquely determined as the rational one’ (TP: 78). A person’s ‘original expectations may
within the limits of consistency be any he likes; all we have to point out is that if he has
certain expectations he is bound in consistency to have certain others’ (TP: 85). That is,
while psychology will play an important role in setting a person’s initial expectations,
there are constraints on how the person ought to proceed. But apart from the occasional
remark such as this, Ramsey tended to leave the subject of psychology under-theorized.59
Perhaps he would have remedied that if he had had more time.
Chapter 1 of Ramsey’s manuscript is titled ‘The Nature of Truth’. It is an exploration
not of how to identify truths, but of what ‘this word “true” means’, ‘of what character
is it that we ascribe to an opinion or a statement when we call it “true” ’ (OT: 6). Alas,
it is ‘a word which we all understand, but if we try to explain it, we can easily get
involved, as the history of philosophy shows, in a maze of confusion’ (OT: 6). He
reiterates his view that truth is primarily predicated of ‘mental states, such as beliefs,
judgments, opinions, or conjectures’ (OT: 6). But truth cannot be predicated of all
mental states—only those with both ‘propositional reference’60 and ‘affirmative or
assertive character’. A mental state has propositional reference if it is a belief, hope,
wondering, etc. that such-and-such. As examples, Ramsey offers his belief ‘that the
earth is round’ or his opinion ‘that free trade is superior to protection’ (OT: 8). As Ian
Rumfitt puts it, the question of a statement’s truth and falsity does not arise for
Ramsey unless it has content (Rumfitt forthcoming). While all kinds of ‘merits’
might accrue to a belief, such as ‘good or bad’, ‘true or false’, ‘held with a higher or a
low degree of confidence, for good or for bad reasons, in isolation or as part of a coherent system of thought’ (OT: 8), the ‘kind of merit in a belief to which we refer in calling
it true can be easily seen to be something which depends only on its propositional
reference’ (OT: 9).
‘So important is this character of propositional reference, that we are apt to forget
that belief has any other aspects or characters’ (OT: 85). Ramsey, though, is less apt
than others to forget that belief has other characters. It also must have, crucially, the
character of being a habit or a disposition to behave. These propositional attitudes
(attitudes with propositional reference and affirmative and dispositional character)
are the ones that Ramsey is interested in and to which he reserves the labels ‘belief ’ and
‘judgment’ (OT: 46).
59
He did, however, have an interest in the practical efficacy of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and
personally benefited from analysis.
60
Ramsey picks up the terminology of propositional reference from Russell. See §5.3.
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He also reiterates his lack of what one might call capital-M Metaphysical commitment
when he talks of ‘propositions’. Only those hardy verbalists can persuade themselves of
the existence of entities such as propositions. What Ramsey means by ‘propositional
reference’ is just that a belief ‘is necessarily a belief that something or other is so-and-so’
(OT: 7). Ramsey is interested in the range of so-and-so’s to which the truth predicate
can be applied, or in exploring propositional reference without any preconceived
notion of what its objects must be.
Ramsey then makes his familiar deflationary move, ‘explaining’, he says, the
meaning of truth: ‘a belief is true if it is a belief that p, and p’ (OT: 9). The following
three expressions are ‘all equivalent, in the sense that it is not possible to affirm one of
them and deny another without patent contradiction’: (i) the earth is round; (ii) it is
true that the earth is round; (iii) anyone who believes that the earth is round believes
truly (OT: 12). In an earlier draft, he says:
Even if this is not the correct definition, it still expresses something which arises necessarily
from the nature of truth, something with which the proper definition is certainly compatible.
And so this is all we require to take our bearings with regard to some famous doctrines, such
as Pragmatism and the Correspondence and Coherence Theories.
[OT: 89]
Any theory of truth that denies the equivalence of those three expressions ‘is quite
certainly wrong’ (OT: 89).
Ramsey suggests that it doesn’t matter if ‘a belief is true if it is a belief that p, and p’ is
the correct definition of truth. He is more interested in it as a truism or a platitude that
constrains our theorizing about truth. He tells us that there are two questions we
can answer. The first is: ‘Given propositional reference, what determines truth?’ The
answer is: ‘a belief is true if it is a belief that p, and p’. That ‘is merely a truism, but
there is no platitude so obvious that eminent philosophers have not denied it’ (OT:
12). Indeed it is ‘so obvious that one is ashamed to insist on it, but our insistence is
rendered necessary by the extraordinary way in which philosophers produce definitions of truth in no way compatible with our platitudes’ (OT: 12–13). The second is
‘the question as to what constitutes propositional reference’ (OT: 89): the question
of what is it for a belief to be a belief that p.61 Ramsey thinks that the first question ‘is
a very small part and much the easiest part of its analysis’ (OT: 14). The work to be
done, once we have the truism in place, is to say what it is to believe that something
is the case (OT: 19). We need to say what ‘we mean when we speak of a judgment
that A is B, or say that so-and-so judges that A is B’ (OT: 103). The theory of truth
requires a theory of what it is to believe something. As Loar says, that is ‘hardly a
trivial matter’ (1980: 59).
61
See Methven (2015: 147) for this way of putting Ramsey’s point.
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Ramsey is aware that, although he has not used the word ‘correspondence’ in
setting out the truism, his position ‘will probably be called a Correspondence
Theory of Truth’ (OT: 11). It will look as if he holds that the belief that p is true if
and only if it corresponds to a fact. But while Ramsey recognizes that the correspondence theory ‘amounts in a sense to the same thing as ours’ (OT: 89), he maintains
that we are left unable to ‘describe the nature of this correspondence’ until we
determine the nature of meaning (OT: 11). And ‘we may be sceptical’ that the theory of
meaning at which we arrive will posit ‘any simple relation of correspondence
applicable to all cases’ of true belief (OT: 11). Ramsey asks us to consider the belief
that Jones is a liar or a fool. It seems that a full-blooded correspondence theorist
must explain the truth of this belief by appeal to its correspondence to the specious
disjunctive ‘fact’ that Jones is either a liar or a fool. While the correspondence theorist probably has a clean enough answer to that query, we have seen that Ramsey
runs similar but more powerful arguments concerning universal, causal, and negative
beliefs, and I will argue that he runs one concerning ethical beliefs as well. The conclusion is that the correspondence conception cannot make sense of the truth-aptness of
most of our beliefs.
Ramsey thus thinks his view ‘superior’ to the correspondence view because it is ‘able
to avoid mentioning either correspondence or facts’, two philosophically problematic
notions (OT: 90). He asks the correspondence theorist what the relation between a
belief and the world might be. Does a belief resemble the world? Ontological accounts
of truth, such as the correspondence theory, which single out a particular kind of entity
as the one required to ground the truth of any belief or statement, do not make good on
their promise to set out in a clear way how a proposition might get the world right.
Ramsey does not explain meaning (and so truth) in terms of reference—still less in
terms of a causal theory of reference. Instead, he wants to give meaning a clear analysis
in concrete terms pertaining to practical activity and the fit between our expectations
and experience, and then proceed to illuminate reference to worldly objects by
accounting for it on the basis of that view of meaning. All that said, he does not eliminate causes. We bet that causes make it into our best theories, and so we (rightly) believe
all sorts of causal hypotheses. Ditching the correspondence theory does not require
ditching causes and facts.
Another objection to the correspondence theory is that correspondence to the facts
simply does not figure in our use of the truth predicate in making judgements. It is here
that the ‘plausibility’ of the coherence theory lies. It makes the following argument against
correspondence:
If I make a judgment, and claim that it is true, this cannot be because I see that it corresponds
to a fact other than itself; I do not look at the judgment and the fact and compare them . . .
[OT: 39]
We have seen that Ramsey makes a similar argument against Keynes’s mysterious
probability relations.
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But like Peirce, Ramsey thinks that as long as it is taken in a common-sense way, the
correspondence idea does no harm (OT: 90).62 We can adopt it ‘in a vague sense’ (OT: 11).
‘It seems possible’, he says, to replace his truism with a ‘periphrasis’ or indirect expression in terms of correspondence, but that periphrasis is going to be shakier than the
truism. He puts the point differently in different drafts, but the sentiment is always
the same: ‘this talk of correspondence, though legitimate and convenient for some
purposes, gives . . . not an analysis of truth but a cumbrous periphrasis, which it is misleading to take for an analysis’ (OT: 19). Sure, a true belief is one that ‘corresponds to
the facts’. But we must not specify that any further than to say that correspondence
is the type—‘or types, since [it] may be different with different forms of belief ’—of
relation between thinking that such-and-such is the case and such-and-such’s actually
being the case (OT: 90).
Ramsey thinks even less well of the coherence theory, notwithstanding its one good
argument against correspondence. He takes the coherence theory—in his mind the
view of the idealists Joachim and Bradley—to make no reference to facts and to hold
that truth must ‘lie within the circle of our beliefs and not pass outside them to an
unknowable reality’ (OT: 25). It fails to speak to the propositional reference of beliefs,
and so, in Ramsey’s opinion, it fails to speak of truth: ‘The beliefs of a man suffering
from persecution mania may rival in coherence those of many sane men but that does
not make them true’ (OT: 94). The coherence theory is ‘absolutely irreconcilable’ with
the truism.
Ramsey is trying to understand propositional reference—what we mean when we
say ‘I believe that A is B.’ The correspondence theorist answers by appeal to a relation
between the belief and reality. This amounts to ‘shirking our duty’ because the correspondence relation itself is so problematic. The coherence theorist answers without
appealing to any reality at all. It shirks its duty by turning its back on the truism. The
rest of Ramsey’s manuscript is an attempt to meet that duty—to say what it really is to
believe that A is B. His answer is indebted to ‘the inventor of Pragmatism, C. S. Peirce’.
Pragmatism, Ramsey says, is ‘the view that by a true belief is meant one which is useful’
(OT: 91). He takes Peirce to hold: ‘a belief that A is B [is] roughly a belief leading to such
actions as will be useful if A is B, but not otherwise’ (OT: 91). This certainly is a rough,
unfinished, and not terribly transparent thought—Ramsey here jots down ‘wanted
note on Peirce’.63 But Ramsey grasps Peirce’s idea sufficiently enough—enough to see
that the pragmatists ‘had a laudable desire for an account of truth which went deeper
than the mere formal reduction of truth to reference’ (OT: 92).64 Ramsey too wants to
62
We have seen that James also asserted that his pragmatist account of truth was compatible with correspondence. But he did not have Peirce’s theory of meaning backing up that claim.
63
OT: 94, n. 13. In the original manuscript this remark does not occur in the form of a footnote, but as
a reminder to himself to say something about Peirce here. Ramsey marks footnotes by asterisks, but this
remark is in square brackets. See RP 001-01-03.
64
Rescher and Majer’s On Truth reports a sheet of ‘miscellaneous jottings’ in which Ramsey seems to be
asserting that Peirce, Meinong, and Höfler bring an ‘extraneous’ idea into the definition of truth (OT: 24).
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give such a deep account, without severing ‘the connection between truth and reference’ as he thinks James sometimes does (OT: 93).
One might argue that there is a kind of circularity in what Peirce and Ramsey have in
mind, given the occurrence of ‘A is B’ in both what is to be explained and in the explanation of it. These two pragmatists would respond that because neither of them is offering an analysis or reductive definition of truth, the question of circularity is not
pressing. Ramsey, like Peirce, wants to articulate an account of truth on which ‘copying
and pragmatism are both elements in the true analysis which is exceedingly complicated, too complicated for us to hope to give it accurately’ (OT: 42). The line of thought
then breaks off. But the complexity of the analysis of what he labels his ‘naturalistic’
or ‘pragmatist’ or ‘behaviourist’ account of truth does not, Ramsey thinks, present
an insurmountable obstacle to the theory. For we have seen that he has little faith or
interest in neat and tidy analyses.
Ramsey grew up with Russell and Moore’s attack on the pragmatist theory of truth,
and he is well aware that his reading of pragmatism is not theirs. He thus needs to clear
away some debris that might cause misunderstanding. He says that pragmatism, like
the correspondence theory, ‘is not simply to be mocked at . . . What is ludicrous, is not
the general idea’ of pragmatism, but ‘the way in which William James confused it especially in its application to religious beliefs’ (OT: 91). What outraged Russell was James’s
suggestion that if a belief in God is useful for me, I ought to believe that it is true.65 We
have seen that Moore employs the example of belief in hell in order to attack Jamesian
pragmatism. So does Ramsey. In one of his most important passages about pragmatism,
he begins:
To say a man believes in hell means, according to the pragmatists that he avoids doing those
things which would result in his being thrown into hell.
So far, so good for the pragmatists—this is the dispositional account of belief Ramsey
shares with them.66 He continues:
Such conduct will be useful to the man if it really saves him from hell, but if there is no such
place it will be a mere waste of opportunities for enjoyment.
This is a point we have seen him make in ‘Facts and Propositions’: the belief that p will
be useful only if p. He continues:
But this stray, unnumbered page and the particular sentences in question are some of the least legible and
comprehensible in Ramsey’s entire corpus. See RP 001-10-01.
65
We’re fortunate to be able to hear Russell say just this in a 1959 interview <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tP4FDLegX9s>. In answer to the question of whether he thinks there might be a ‘practical reason’
for some people to believe in God, Russell replies, gesturing at the Jamesian account of truth: ‘It seems to
me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because
you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.’
66
That is made even more clear by the emphasis found in another draft: ‘And according to the pragmatist
when we say that a man believes in hell we mean that he avoids doing those things which would result in
his being thrown into hell’ (RP 001-01-03).
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But besides this primary utility there are other ways in which such conduct may or may not
be useful to the man or others; the actions from which a belief in hell would cause him to
abstain might bring disasters in their train either for him or for others even in this present
life. But these other consequences of the belief, whether useful or not, are clearly not relevant to its propositional reference or truth . . . William James . . . included explicitly these
further kinds of utility and disutility, which must obviously be excluded if pragmatism is to
have any plausibility, and thought that the truth of the belief in hell depended not on
whether hell in fact existed but on whether it was on the whole useful for men to think
it existed.
[OT: 91–2]
Like Peirce and Santayana, Ramsey thinks that when we talk about the usefulness of a
belief that p, we must consider whether or not p—in this case whether there really is
a hell.
We have seen that Russell and Moore could not in their own minds shake James’s
account of truth loose from other aspects of pragmatism, despite their attraction to
some of those other aspects (Russell to behaviourism, Moore to the common-sense
rejection of scepticism). Ramsey is not so blinkered about the Jamesian position being
the whole of pragmatism:
Such absurdities . . . form no part to the essential pragmatist idea, even if they constitute its chief
attraction to some minds; . . . in regard to [the question of propositional reference], we shall see
that pragmatism has a considerable contribution to make.
[OT: 92]
Ramsey thinks that the pragmatist need not make what he takes to be James’s
­mistake—holding that ‘p is true’ is equivalent to ‘p is useful,’ or defining, in James’s own
words, truth as ‘the expedient in the way of our thinking’ (P: 106, emphasis removed).
Ramsey pulls quotes from James’s Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth that make
him worry that James denies the truism—that he is committed to the possibility that
someone ‘could think both that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon and that
someone else’s opinion that Shakespeare wrote them might be perfectly true “for him” ’
(OT: 15). If the reader turns back to §4.4, where the full passage in which James
employs the Shakespeare example is reproduced, she will find that Ramsey’s worry is
not ill motivated. For James seems in that passage to say that a belief can be true for me
and an inconsistent belief be true for someone else.
Ramsey thought that Peirce, on the other hand, understood that the link between
truth and usefulness is a link that explicates propositional reference: it tells us
something about what it is to believe that A is B. The non-ludicrous pragmatist, that is,
acknowledges the truism and goes beyond it by telling us what it is for a particular
belief to be the belief that A is B. That explanation will appeal to the belief ’s causes and
effects. As we have seen, Peirce’s answer to the question ‘What is it to believe that A is
B?’ is as follows: a person believes that A is B only if (i) his mental state was put in place
by a method sensitive to whether A is in fact B; (ii) he plans to act as if A is B; and (iii) he
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commits himself to holding his belief in a manner responsive to subsequent experience,
and so to abandoning it if the facts prove recalcitrant or ‘lamentable’.
Ramsey’s answer in On Truth follows Peirce’s thinking. He is interested in judgements that such-and-such, and is less interested in instinctive responses, such as the
chicken’s ‘belief ’ discussed in ‘Facts and Propositions’.67 ‘It’s a fly’ is a judgement;
brushing it off is not (OT: 50). Judgement, so construed, is expressible in words and
is marked by an ‘affirmative attitude’, hence it is ‘capable of truth and falsity’ (OT: 52).
Sounding very much like Peirce, he says that a judgement has ‘the felt quality . . .
characteristic of assertion as opposed to doubt or inquiry’, as well as ‘effects on subsequent thought and conduct’ (OT: 52).68 Although we have seen that Ramsey does
not think that the felt quality needs to always be present, he remains of the view that
judgements or beliefs involve habits, as well as a quality, felt when appropriate, that is
opposed to doubt. This means that beliefs or judgements are not reducible to effects
on conduct.
Nonetheless, such belief-habits are to be assessed by whether, or to what extent, they
work, in some non-crude sense of ‘work’. We have also seen him hold that the dimension of usefulness relative to epistemic assessment is such that the belief that p will be
useful only if p. In On Truth, Ramsey presses this thought home. My belief that arsenic
is poisonous will manifest itself by my abstaining from ingesting it. This is a useful
habit for me to have. But it is useful because of ‘objective’ factors—for instance, that
arsenic is actually poisonous (OT: 89, 92; TP: 66). Like Peirce, Ramsey requires beliefs
to be sensitive to the facts.
This connects with an important topic that lies just beneath the surface in a number
of passages, the topic of how Ramsey conceived of the difference between a belief that p
and a desire that p. A crucial difference is that the belief is sensitive to p’s being the case
in a way the desire isn’t. Here we might borrow a later example of Anscombe’s (2000
[1957]: §32). If, entering a grocery store, I express my desire to buy butter rather than
margarine, and yet through inattention I end up buying margarine, the failure is in my
behaviour rather than in my mental state. There would be no irrationality in my maintaining my desire even when it turned out to be unrealized. The desire holds, despite
the facts. But if a detective, following me and taking down a list of my purchases, notes
that I bought butter when in fact I bought margarine, the failure is in the detective’s list
rather than in my behaviour. If he were to realize the discrepancy, it would be irrational
of him to maintain his belief that I did as his list said. His belief must be sensitive to
the facts.
67
He does not, however, say that instinctive habits are to be disregarded. He thinks that a conditioned
reflex, if it is a response in thought as well as in action, is best thought of as a judgement (OT: 48–53). See
Suppes (2006: 47) for the importance of Ramsey’s broadening of the concepts of rules and habits to include
instinctual ones.
68
Ramsey sets his view of what counts as a judgement against Cook Wilson’s (as expressed in the latter’s
1926 Statement and Inference). Ramsey, unlike Cook Wilson, is happy for either a reasoned conclusion or
a belief formed on little or no reflection (even a ‘prejudice’) to be counted as a judgement (OT: 52).
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We might add that if a belief happens to be useful for accidental reasons, its usefulness is not relevant to its truth. Say I believe that arsenic is poisonous, so I step
away from the chemist who is holding a sample, and it turns out that the chemist also
has an infectious disease, which I have also thereby avoided. This particular dimension of the usefulness of my belief that arsenic is poisonous is not related to the truth
of ‘arsenic is poisonous’. Again, following Peirce, Ramsey holds that sensitivity to the
facts is partly constitutive of belief and how we evaluate it. A belief that p is a disposition to act as if p, a disposition formed in a way that is sensitive to whether p. On this
view, a belief that p (unlike a desire that p) is incorrect unless p. Here ‘incorrect’
doesn’t mean ‘not true’. Rather, an incorrect belief is a substandard product.69 That is,
Ramsey’s position isn’t merely the tautology that a belief that p is false unless p, but
the substantive claim that we ought not believe that p unless p. Of course, our judgement is always fallible, but the rational person always at least tries to align her judgements with the way things are.
This is the contribution of the ‘copying’ idea to that complicated analysis of truth.
Ramsey, unlike his opponents Joachim and Bradley but again like Peirce, does not
want to turn his back on our connection to objective reality. For that would be turning
against the ‘realistic spirit’, as Ramsey uses the term. It would fail to capture the way we
really use the concept of truth.
We also find in On Truth, more clearly and in more detail, all the elements of
Peirce’s model of inquiry, centred on the movement from doubt to belief. First,
beliefs centrally involve dispositions to behave. Ramsey’s belief that the Cambridge
Union is in Bridge Street does not flicker across his consciousness very often, but it
‘is frequently manifested’ by his turning that way when he wants a book from the
Union Library, or by his becoming conscious of it when he wants to think of an example of a belief-habit. He goes there ‘habitually’, without having to think (OT: 44–5),
and the example comes easily to his mind. The link between belief and disposition
is one that links belief to action, including action of thought. Moreover, it is not a
link of equivalence, although the very ‘meaning’ of ‘belief ’ is tied up with dispositions to act. Dispositions are necessary but not sufficient for belief. It is simply that ‘it
[is] impossible to give any satisfactory account of belief or even of thought without
making any reference to possible resulting action’ (OT: 45).
Secondly, what we take to be states of knowledge always remain fallible and uncertain.
The usual account of knowledge, Ramsey says, requires that a judgement be true; that
we be certain or fully confident in it; and that it be well grounded (OT: 56–7). Some
have thought that knowledge must be so well grounded as to be either self-evident
or deducible from self-evident premises. Ramsey expands on his Peircean argument
against his logical analyst friends. He says that ‘most of what we ordinarily call know­
ledge does not satisfy this severe standard’. What we think of as scientific knowledge is
never ‘rigidly demonstrated’. Even if it is highly unlikely that we are mistaken with
69
I owe this way of putting the point to Ian Rumfitt.
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respect to, say, direct experience, it ‘cannot be proved impossible that we are not’ (OT: 57).
Neither are the so-called ‘self-evident’ or ‘necessary laws of thought’ infallible, as the
history of geometry and the fact that we sometimes make mistakes in mathematics show
(OT: 58–9). The one exception is the laws of logic—like the Tractarian Wittgenstein,
Ramsey takes them to be tautologies and so not genuine judgements (OT: 64). For
the rest, Ramsey picks up on precisely Peirce’s distinction and terminology to bring
together two commonsensical views that are apparently in tension with each other:
there are some claims that we justifiably believe to be true, and yet there are no
(substantive empirical) claims that we know with certainty. We can make judgements ‘with practical certainty which is not however so complete, that we might not
be brought to abandon them if they came into conflict with other beliefs’ (OT: 63).
Against a background of settled beliefs, any particular belief might be thrown
into doubt:
In general the beliefs on which we act are true, but when just one of them turns out to be false,
as for instance when the Union has moved, our attention is fixed on that one and our conduct
condemned as erroneous in one particular respect.
[OT: 100]
Belief or judgement includes any opinion in which we have ‘sufficient confidence’ to be
willing to take it as a basis for ‘future thought and action, and regard its truth temporarily at any rate, as a settled question’ (OT: 46). While the terms ‘settled question’ and
‘practical certainty’ are straight out of Peirce, we have seen that Ramsey makes better
sense of them by offering an account of partial belief.
Ramsey reiterates what he said in ‘Truth and Probability’ about how complex it will
be to unpack the content of any particular belief. A belief cannot be understood as a
simple disposition to act, since in any given case which particular act it issues in will
depend on which other mental states it is accompanied by. He says:
[No] particular action can be supposed to be determined by this belief alone; his actions result
from his desires and the whole system of his beliefs, roughly according to the rule that he
­performs those actions which, if his beliefs were true, would have the most satisfactory
consequences.
[OT: 45]70
But however difficult it will be to give an adequate dispositional account of belief, it is
a task that must be undertaken. For Ramsey does ‘not think it is possible to understand the propositional references or truth or falsity of thoughts without considering
the effects they have on our acting either directly or indirectly through dispositional
beliefs’ (OT: 101).
70
Ramsey thus anticipates Davidson’s focus on the complex interchange between desire, belief,
and action. Davidson sees this, saying that he independently discovered the central result in ‘Truth and
Probability’ (the method of disentangling the influences of beliefs and desires on behaviour), only to find
that he too had been prey to the ‘Ramsey Effect’ (Davidson 1999: 32).
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Ramsey’s manuscript is unfinished. Importantly, it remains unsettled on the matter
that we have been touching on throughout this chapter: does pragmatism give us a
satisfactory account of the truth of beliefs in every domain, or only of the truth of
beliefs in certain disputed classes—open generalizations, statements about theoretical
entities, and so on? His corpus of late work, that is, does not fully eradicate the tension
between (i) a global pragmatism in which all our beliefs with assertoric character aim
at truth (i.e. at being beliefs which succeed for reasons connected to the way things are)
and (ii) a bifurcated position in which only some of our assertive beliefs are truth-apt
(or describe the facts) while the others admit only of some other kind of cognitive
status. Holton and Price opt for (ii). I think that On Truth gives us a good indication of
the direction in which Ramsey was travelling: toward a unified or global pragmatist
view of truth. What tips the balance for me is that Ramsey gives us a clear argument for
the global position. It runs from a general account of beliefs (as habits with which we
meet the future) to the idea that true beliefs are habits that work (and work because of
the way things are). I take this to be Ramsey’s position partly because of the persistence
of the argument from 1926 until his death, and partly because he spends so much
time arguing against the picture in which only beliefs in the primary language are factstating. In the next two sections, I will expand on and augment the textual evidence for
what I take to be Ramsey’s compelling version of global pragmatism.
6.8 Ethics and Pragmatist Naturalism
We have seen that Ramsey is not at all tempted by a hard behaviourism that reduces
meaning and truth to human behaviour. Nor is he tempted by the soft view that he took
James to articulate, in which a belief ’s meaning and truth amount to our wanting to act
on it. Keynes again gets him exactly right: Ramsey is ‘attempting to distinguish a
“human” logic from formal logic on the one hand and descriptive psychology on the
other’ (1978 [1931]: 339).
We have also seen that Ramsey’s attempt is of a piece with Peirce’s analysis of what
we are doing when we assert that something is the case. Ramsey (rightly) takes Peirce
to hold that what it is to believe, judge, or assert that A is B is to make some commitments, for instance, about the usefulness of ‘A is B’ and about aligning our future
behaviour as if A is B. Indeed, the way I have articulated Peirce’s position over the last
two decades is remarkably similar to Ramsey’s understanding of him. I have put it as
follows. Part of what we are doing when we assert that p is asserting that it stands up to
the evidence here and now; that it fulfils the local aims we have in inquiry; and that we
came to believe it by a method not extraneous to the facts. But we are also betting that
the belief will, or would, continue to hold good in these ways throughout the future
course of inquiry, although of course there might be fluctuations in our belief or we
might be mistaken in our bets. But if a belief really were to be the best it could be in
the way of belief, then it would be true.
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Ramsey returns pragmatism to its origins—to the founding days when Peirce and
Wright compared having a belief to taking bets on the future, evaluated in terms of
how they were put in place and whether they are successful. Recall that Holmes,
echoing Chauncey Wright, says that a belief in a necessary cause is a bet on how the
universe will behave in its contact with us. In asserting causal connections, that is, we
are not describing the metaphysical features of things. Rather, we are putting our faith
in, or we are betting on, certain courses of action rather than others. That is precisely
Ramsey’s position in ‘General Propositions and Causality’:
But now for the main point. The world, or rather that part of it with which we are acquainted,
exhibits as we must all agree a good deal of regularity of succession. I contend that over and
above that it exhibits no feature called causal necessity, but that we make sentences called
causal laws from which . . . we proceed to actions . . . and say that a fact asserted in a proposition
which is an instance of causal law is a case of causal necessity.
[GC: 160]
I suggest that the best way to read Ramsey is as follows. In inquiry and in ordinary
day-to-day life, we are in effect placing countless bets or adopting countless beliefs—
singular and general, conditional and causal, normative and scientific—with which we
meet the future. Ramsey bets that the Union is in Bridge Street. The civil engineer bets
that her calculations are accurate and fit for the purpose of holding up the bridge. The
critical-care physician bets that a certain treatment will save the patient. The politician
bets that by stimulating the economy, more jobs will be created. These bets or beliefs
come with different probabilities attached, and it might be that, for instance, the
critical-care physician, faced with low probabilities, has a warranted and even true
belief (‘the best treatment for this patient is Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation’)
despite the fact that the patient dies.
Perhaps one also bets that it is right to treat strangers with respect, to refrain from
cheating on one’s taxes, to keep one’s promises, and to support local and international
charities. One of the core features of pragmatism is that it does not, at the outset, preclude these kinds of attitude from being genuine beliefs, evaluable in terms of how they
play out in action. Here, too, Ramsey is a pragmatist. He mounts no prima facie case
against including value judgements under the umbrella of inquiry, rationality, and
truth. It may be that in the end we decide that these statements should not be included
under the scope of our cognitive activity. But Ramsey, with all pragmatists, sets up his
concepts of belief, inquiry, and rationality in a way that does not make it impossible to
make a case for ethical and aesthetic inquiry, and even, we shall see, inquiry into the
meaning of life. He, like all pragmatists, is a naturalist, but everything depends on what
one counts as ‘natural’. The pragmatist does not prejudge matters from the outset by
counting as natural terms only those terms employed by, say, the physical sciences. My
suggestion is that not only did Ramsey set things up so that the question of whether
conditional, causal, universal, and ethical beliefs are cognitive attitudes aimed at truth
remains live, but that he was inclined to be a cognitivist about these beliefs. I shall now
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focus on ethical beliefs, having already made my case for the others. Ramsey, however,
threw a spanner in the works of his ethical cognitivism. I shall argue that this was inadvertent and unfortunate, and that we ought to extract it for him.
In 1925, Ramsey read a provocative paper titled ‘On There Being No Discussable
Subject’ to the Apostles. Most of the papers presented to this ‘Cambridge Conversazione
Society’ have left minimal material trace. Ramsey’s paper is not even mentioned in
the minute book, and it is written in a quick and rough scrawl, unlike his other Apostles
papers. But after he died, it was pulled from his manuscript remains by Braithwaite,
edited quite significantly,71 and printed in the The Foundations of Mathematics and
other Logical Essays under the title ‘Epilogue’. None of the many other more sober
and polished papers he presented was reproduced. Unfortunately, the paper has led
opinion-makers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, A. J. Ayer, and R. M. Hare to the view
that Ramsey is one of the ‘modern founders of emotivism’ (MacIntyre 1981: 20).72
Indeed, Braithwaite’s baffling retitling of the paper encourages MacIntyre to describe
it as ‘the Epilogue to The Foundations of Mathematics’, as if Ramsey had written a book
called The Foundations of Mathematics and decided that this paper was a fitting
­conclusion to it.
The meetings of the Apostles were marked by irreverence. In Russell’s words, the
group held to the principle that ‘there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing
considered shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation’ (A: 58). Sidgwick
noted that ‘No consistency was demanded with opinions previously held—truth as we
saw it then and there was what we had to embrace and maintain’ (Lubenow 1998: 33).
The group would meet to choose topics, and a member would at a subsequent meeting
present a short paper, often provocatively titled. After discussion and debate, a vote
would be taken, which might or might not have anything to do with the paper read.
The minutes usually do not record the topic of the paper, but rather a humorous marker
of it, along the lines ‘Put or Take?’ or ‘Does black equal white?’ or ‘Can we stand the
voice of God as a father-in-law?’ The vote on this last topic included the following
adolescent, to say the least, qualifications: Braithwaite votes no, ‘unless there is a
handsome dowry to compensate for her barrenness’; Keynes votes yes, ‘provided its
daughter is dutiful to me’.73 Wittgenstein couldn’t stand the lack of intellectual and
moral seriousness, and in effect resigned in 1913 just two months after his election,
dismissing the Apostles as having nothing to discuss.74 While some meetings of the
Apostles had the philosophical integrity of more sober groups such as the Moral
71
Braithwaite left out some phrases that make the paper obviously Apostolic (‘our brother Russell’s
recent phenomenal lecture’ becomes ‘Russell’s recent lecture’), and he changed the meaning of some
sentences: for instance, ‘phenomenal conversation’ becomes ‘ordinary conversation’.
72
See Hare (1959: 570), Ayer (1949: 171), and, more recently, Pianalto (2011: 253–4). See Mahon (2013)
for a good discussion.
73
King’s College Archives, KCAS/39/1/16, meeting of Saturday December 3, 1921, in Keynes’s room,
with Ramsey as moderator.
74
See Lubenow (1998: 46) and Cambridge University Library, Add MS 60732, 32–3.
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Sciences Club,75 Ramsey’s ‘On There Being No Discussable Subject’ falls more on the
side of irreverence and play, with one serious point, I shall suggest, made at its end.
In this paper, Ramsey explores, tongue in cheek, the idea that there is no longer any
subject suitable for discussion—suitable, that is, for discussion by the Apostles. It seems
probable, to say the least, that this topic was prompted by Wittgenstein’s parting remark
about the Apostles not having anything to discuss. Wittgenstein’s agreeing to accept
his election to the Apostles was considered a coup, and even had the Society been used
to resignations, it would have been a blow to have Wittgenstein then reject it.
Ramsey runs through some arguments for the idea that there is nothing to discuss,
seeming to agree with that reasoning. He begins with ‘there is nothing to know except
science’, and since most of us are ignorant about most of the sciences, we cannot really
discuss them (DS: 245). Notice that this does not show that science is not a subject
matter fit for discussion, but merely that the present company cannot discuss it.
Another argument is that ‘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’ (DS: 246). There
goes philosophy as a subject matter for discussion, courtesy of Wittgenstein.
Ramsey’s apparent dismissal of ethics comes in the context of a paper Russell had
presented to the Apostles earlier in 1925 titled ‘What I Believe’.76 Ramsey reports
Russell as putting forward a philosophy of nature based entirely on logic and the physical sciences (hence, a philosophy of nature discussable only by those with considerable technical expertise) and a philosophy of value based on human desires and how
they might be satisfied (hence, a theory of value that is actually part of psychology, also
one of those technical sciences discussable only by experts). Ramsey then delivers the
thought that has made so much mischief:
Of course his main statement about value might be disputed, but most of us would agree that
the objectivity of good was a thing we had settled and dismissed with the existence of God.
Theology and Absolute Ethics are two famous subjects which we have realized to have no real
objects.
[DS: 246–7]
Out go religion and ethics. They are to be either ‘reduced to psychology’ or dismissed
as non-referring.
Indeed, Ramsey suggests that no question of value is discussable by the Apostles, or
by most people. What ‘we’ tend to do with respect to questions of value is indulge in a
comparison of our own experiences and feelings and our arguments are ‘feeble’. With
respect to ethics, ‘we are still at the stage’ in which one person says he would feel guilty
75
Indeed, pragmatism was sometimes discussed in a serious way—for instance, in 1927, an old paper of
Ferenc Békássy’s (from 1912–14) titled ‘Fare or Farers: i.e. Belief and Satisfaction’ was reread. See King’s
College Archives: KCAS/39/6/1/Békáassy for the paper and KCAS/39/1/16 for the minutes. Ramsey wasn’t
present that day.
76
Russell wrote or delivered a number of pieces with the same title. This one will be printed in the
forthcoming CP 17.
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if he were inconstant in his affections, and another says he wouldn’t feel guilty at all,
with no clear procedure for resolving their difference in attitudes (DS: 247). Aesthetics,
when discussed by the Apostles, is also just a matter of comparing the feelings a particular work of art gives me with those it gives you (DS: 248). Ramsey’s point, I submit,
is that we are not inclined to discuss any of these matters in a serious way, not that we
cannot discuss them. It is just that ‘what we really like doing’ is to compare our experiences and feelings (DS: 248). Ramsey, that is, is not seriously endorsing emotivism.
The emotivist reaction against Moore, inaugurated by Ogden and Richards’s 1923
The Meaning of Meaning, was common enough in Ramsey’s Cambridge.77 Braithwaite,
for instance, argued that most putative ethical judgements ‘are not judgments at all, but
expressions of emotions or volitions’ (1928b: 138).78 Moore’s student Austin DuncanJones called the new emotivism ‘out and out naturalism’—in fact, ‘the most extreme
kind of naturalistic theory which could be found’ (1933: 499). It is the extreme version,
in which normative notions are reduced to behaviour or to psychology, that gave (and
continues to give) naturalism its bad name. Ramsey was never on board with it. He was
looking for a naturalism more like the one the pragmatists had in mind—one, I suggest, that brings the ethical, and perhaps even the aesthetic under our cognitive scope.
Such a broad naturalism is perfectly in step with his general theory of belief and truth,
which has us evaluating our dispositions to behave.
If we set aside ‘On There Being No Discussable Subject’, we find Ramsey frequently
arguing or suggesting that genuine debates, and well-supported resolutions of them,
can be had with respect to normative matters. He was fully engaged in them himself.
For example, in his 1928 ‘A Mathematical Theory of Saving’, he launched a major
discussion about intergenerational justice, and argued that views in which we discount future generations’ well-being are ‘ethically indefensible’ (1928: 543). And
in some of the other papers that Ramsey read to the Apostles, he takes on ethical
­matters as if they are matters for serious inquiry. These include papers asking
whether it is not selfish for the philosopher or mathematician not to do something
that would directly improve the lot of others; engaging in an imaginary conversation
with John Stuart Mill about depression and the ‘theory of life’; and discussing socialism
and equality of income.
But we must turn to On Truth for his most systematic, albeit unfinished, treatment
of meta-ethics. He says there that one of the principal problems of philosophy is to
discover whether a subject matter such as ethics can be reduced to positive science;
or is about undefinable properties; or is similar enough to our other inquiries to
think of it as part of our natural, yet normative body of belief and knowledge. We
have seen that he inclines to the latter, wavering only over whether aesthetics is cognitive. That wavering seems reasonable. On the one hand, if any indicative sentences
77
It is strange that, while Moore writes copious comments in the margins of his copy of The Foundations
of Mathematics, his pencil is silent, but for a few ‘?’s on ‘Epilogue’ [Cambridge University Library Add 8875
17/1/100]. See Misak (forthcoming b) for more on how Moore’s position played into this debate.
78
In the next sentence, though, he leaves room for a ‘residue that are really judgments of propositions’.
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are mere d
­ isguised expressions of taste or emotion, aesthetic judgements seem the
likeliest. Some of them can seem not dissimilar to ‘Red beer is tastier than stout.’ On
the other hand, we have considerations such as the following that support a cognitivist treatment of the aesthetic: we hold people responsible for the consistency of
their aesthetic judgements (in a way we typically do not for the consistency of their
emotions); we argue and give evidence for or against our aesthetic judgements
(indeed we call them j­ udgements); we take those who make them to incur commitments to behave in particular ways; and we often evaluate aesthetic judgements as
more or less well founded. Even in the least cognitive example above, if we replace
‘red beer’ with ‘petrol’, it seems obvious that the sentence is now false, and so has
assertoric content. All of this suggests that perhaps aesthetics, too, is a discourse that
aims at truth. As Ramsey says, the asking of this question is one of the principal
problems of philosophy. An emotivist or an extreme naturalist would not have
wavered at all and would not have expressed this kind of open-minded preliminary
stance on ethics and aesthetics.
In On Truth, Ramsey lays out the possible options as follows:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
the good is a simple and indefinable property (Moorean realism)
the good is irreducibly complex (idealism)
there is no such subject as ethics (emotivism, which is one kind of naturalism)
his own position (another kind of naturalism)
We have seen in §6.7 that he dispatches idealism without much argument, saying
that the idealists’ view is ‘almost entirely nonsense; the living issue is between the
realists and the naturalists’ (OT: 82). With respect to Moorean realism, we have
seen that he argues against the idea that any property might be objective and unanalysable. Indeed, Ramsey objected to the entire realist, logical atomist picture that
backstopped Moore’s idea that the good might be a simple and indefinable property. Ethical beliefs do not correspond to simple facts, because nothing does.
Correspondence-talk is not the right way to talk about truth and our standards for
achieving it.
This rejection of the picture that underpins realism has an implication for Ramsey’s
attitude toward the third option, emotivism. He refused to stand on the ground upon
which emotivism is built. If we don’t have something like a logical atomist picture as a
contrast, we will not be tempted to see ethics as non-referring and merely expressive of
emotion. And if we don’t start with a picture that divides fact and value, we will be
better able to make sense of whether and when our value judgements do aim at getting
something right. Ramsey’s pragmatist alternative is to start, generally, with beliefs and
their evaluation. He starts with a general account of how we try to get things right and
leaves room for the idea that we try to get things right when we think about value.
Notice that one problem would disappear for the Ramseyan cognitivist—a problem
to which Ramsey would have been alert. In 1921, Guy Cromwell Field, then at
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Liverpool, published Moral Theory, in which he noted that, on Moore’s indefinabilist
view of ethics, it is unclear how we could be motivated by the good:
Mr. Moore is compelled to say that the goodness of a thing must be thought of as a reason for
aiming at it. But on his theory how can this be so? How can it be a motive for action? We are
told that it is a simple quality which we perceive immediately. But our mere cognition of it
cannot move us to action.
[Field 1921: 56–7]
We have to desire the good, as well as perceive it, and Field thinks that on Moore’s view,
it must be ‘merely a matter of taste whether we desire what possesses this simple,
indefinable quality or not, just as it is whether we like a particular colour or not’. But for
Ramsey, motivation in ethics is not a special problem in need of a special solution.
There is an internal connection between an ethical belief and a disposition to behave,
and that is because there is an internal connection between any genuine belief and a
disposition to behave. Motivation, that is, comes downstream from the dispositional
account of belief.
This is not to say that other questions will not arise in place of the question about
motivation. For instance, can this position leave room for akrasia? Since a sincere
assertion about the good expresses a disposition to act, it seems as though it will never
be the case that I believe ‘φ-ing is the best thing to do, all things considered’ and yet
find myself more strongly disposed to refrain from φ-ing.79 Ramsey has the materials
with which to solve this problem: he has that complex account of how our beliefs combine with our desires, and of how we can isolate beliefs and desires in the causal nexus
by looking at how people behave. It may be that akrasia does indeed fall out of the picture, replaced, when all things really are considered, by the idea that a stronger set of
beliefs and desires overwhelms my belief that φ-ing is the best thing to do.
Ramsey’s picture is as follows. What it is to have a belief is to act on it, in a suitably
complex set of ways, and if we have belief-habits with respect to ethical matters, and
can evaluate those habits (given our desires), then ethical beliefs fall under our cognitive scope. Ramsey did not say enough about how we might make sense of beliefs about
the ‘good’, but he points the pragmatist/cognitivist down what I think is a promising path.
That path is not the one taken in the Apostles paper, which I have argued has instead led
many down a mistaken and dead-end alleyway with respect to Ramsey’s intentions.
Nonetheless, ‘On There Being No Discussable Subject’ is important to understanding
one thing about Ramsey’s theory of value. At the end of the paper, Ramsey’s tone turns
serious. He allows, I suggest, for a limited role for Jamesian consequences—a role
confined to questions concerning the value or meaning of life. Even in this highly
personal domain, we might be able to give reasons for our attitudes—reasons of a
Jamesian sort—and remain sensitive to experience.
79
I thank Griffin Klemick for this way of putting the point.
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Russell’s ‘What I Believe’ had repeated some of the claims he had made in his 1903
‘The Free Man’s Worship’. Russell was trying to carve out a place for human value in a
Godless universe. Here he is, giving his picture of that universe, and then exhorting us
to the attitude that, in his view, constitutes the proper response:
[A]ll the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and . . . the whole
temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in
ruins . . . Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
[FMW: 66–7]
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I
love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is
none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their
value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold;
surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the
open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional
humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour
of their own.
[WIB: 348]
Braithwaite in 1920 referred to the ‘temperamental pessimism’ Russell expressed in
‘The Free Man’s Worship’.80 Wittgenstein hated the fact that Russell wrote of such
‘intimate’ matters, and he made that distaste clear to Russell.81 The debate, that is, was
well known and intense, and the Apostles would have picked up quickly on any allusion to it. It did not need much by way of explicit introduction.
Enter Ramsey. He was just as much a non-believer as Russell. But against that background of agreement, he was carving out his own distinctive view of value. He ends the
paper with a poignant passage in which he tells us where he seems ‘to differ from some
of my friends’.
My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground
is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don’t really
believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and
possibly animal sensation. 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 a 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
80
King’s College Archives RBB 2/1. 81
See McGuinness (1988: 108ff.).
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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.
[DS: 249–50]
Of course, Ramsey really did believe in astronomy, and of course he did believe in
saving for the future. His point, I suggest, is twofold. First, he is presenting us with an
account of the animating spirit of pragmatism: unlike Russell, whose imagination was
captivated by the hard beauty of formal logic and the vast expanses of lifeless space,
Ramsey is committed to starting his philosophy with human beings. Secondly, granted
that it is a value-neutral fact that the world will cool and die, we are nonetheless able to
evaluate our beliefs about what meaning life holds for us. Such beliefs are assessed
partly in terms of whether they ‘are more admirable or more conducive to a happy life’.
At the end of the last sentence in the long passage quoted above, he wrote and struck
out ‘which go more smoothly’ (RP: 007–06–07). It is better to be optimistic than
depressed, as our activities will go more smoothly. That is, Ramsey can give reasons for
his beliefs about the meaning of his life, and he can give reasons for pitying Russell and
Wittgenstein for their despair. We can deliberate about whether there is meaning in life
and, if so, what it consists in.
But surely here James is right that, at least to some extent, when we say that a particular view captures the meaning of life more satisfactorily than another, this ‘means
more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently’ (P: 35). James, like Russell and Wittgenstein, wondered whether
there was any meaning at all to life. His Varieties of Religious Experience was widely read
in 1920s Cambridge. We have seen that James’s despair, the ‘sick soul’ he described in
that book, attracted Wittgenstein. James’s quest to bring the question of the meaning
of life under the scope of inquiry, I conjecture, was of interest to Ramsey. In a particular class of belief, we might invoke both the usual kind of consequence (that a belief is
in some way objectively better for our activities) and a Jamesian kind of consequence.
For with respect to this class of belief, we do not think there is a single correct view of
what makes life ‘go best’. Each person to some extent determines the relevant standard
for himself. Moreover, as Ramsey admits in some notes that were part of his thinking
through On Truth, James was right to see that in some domains, willing to believe
brings about some facts. He says, with reference to what we would now call the placebo
effect:
Nor do I want to can we defend the ‘fundamental postulate of all logic’ that ‘Experiencing
makes no difference to the facts’ in which . . . ‘experiencing’ must be taken widely enough to
include judgment and belief. For the success of M. Cone is alone enough to show that believing
that a thing will happen can often make it happen, at any rate in the medical field.
[RP 001-07-01]
Jamesian consequences are not entirely out of place in inquiry.
With respect to the question of the meaning of life, we can ask the following kinds of
question. Does the focus on the human rather than the astronomical vantage point on
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the universe result in more satisfaction for me? Having discovered that there is no
higher, transcendent purpose to life, does focusing on the meaning we create for ourselves prove more beneficial than being miserable? Ramsey answers ‘yes’, although, as
with any matter, he might be wrong about that. All sorts of reasons will be in play,
including ones that pull against him. For instance, perhaps someone would argue that
optimism leads to our ignoring existential risks, such as environmental degradation or
the destruction of the planet by a comet. Even here, even when we allow the success of
a belief to include an emotional satisfaction, our beliefs, if they are to be genuine
beliefs, must be debatable and evaluable. The alternative is what we shall see is a
Wittgensteinian quietism, in which a form of life stands protected from the give and
take of reasons. But Wittgensteinian quietism did not, to say the least, attract Ramsey.
Braithwaite ends his obituary of Ramsey thus:
Unlike many intellects, his had not been garnered into print; and the best of his mind is utterly
destroyed. Such an event would lead us to question the ‘purpose’ or the ‘meaning’ of life, had
not Frank Ramsey taught us that these are nonsense questions.
[Braithwaite 1930: 216]
This is a lovely way to end an obituary, but a more accurate representation of what
Ramsey thought would seem to be this: my answer to questions about the purpose and
the meaning of life must be sensitive to what makes life go best for me, both subjectively
and objectively, as well as for humanity as a whole. In this way, Ramsey picks up on an
important thought of James’s, but keeps it in precisely the right place.
Indeed, if we take the best from Peirce, James, and Ramsey, we are in possession of a
powerful and subtle view of human inquiry. Different kinds of consequences and
behaviours flow from different kinds of beliefs. For instance, open generalizations are
rules which will have us act on autopilot (the belief that ‘All humans are mortal’ is such
that when its holder encounters a human, she will judge it to be mortal), whereas many
ethical judgements (‘one should not kill a human’) will require us to take much more
context and complexity into account before they issue in behaviour. Moreover, the
kinds of reasons involved in evaluating our beliefs will vary. Beliefs about the world,
mathematics, ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life will be responsive to different
kinds of reasons and facts. And it may be that in the end we answer this ‘principal
problem for philosophy’ negatively for, say, aesthetics and the meaning of life. This is,
I submit, a powerful and promising account of making sense of our aspirations to
getting things right in our various domains of human endeavour.
6.9 A Step beyond the Redundancy Theory to the
Pragmatist Theory of Truth
Ramsey died before fully figuring out the ‘considerable contribution’ pragmatism
makes to the theory of truth. But we have seen that he had time enough to make some
important advances. The pragmatist holds that inquirers should assess their beliefs or
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habits according to whether they lead to success. One of Ramsey’s advances is to add
that our actions reveal the degree or strength of our beliefs. Another is to expand
on Peirce’s idea that the expectations and behaviours associated with a belief vary
with the kind of belief it is. A third advance, the subject of the present section,
is to modernize Peirce’s idea that the pragmatist account of truth incorporates the
correspondence insight.
Ramsey, we have seen, takes the equivalence thesis ‘the belief that p is true iff p’ to
be important. But he then makes a point that I have argued Peirce too might well
have made.82 Ramsey wants to accept the equivalence platitude that what it is to
assert that p is true is to assert p itself, and then take a step beyond that platitude to
a more robust account of truth. If we want to understand what truth is, we must
analyse belief, judgement, and assertion—what is meant by saying that a person’s
belief is a belief that p. That is, while Ramsey rejects ontological theories of truth
such as that of the logical analysts, he does not want to rest content with what we now
would call a ‘semantic’ theory—a theory that takes truth to be merely a device in our
language for disquotation, and not a property at all. This is a load-bearing plank in
Ramsey’s bridge between Peircean pragmatism and a certain kind of contemporary
pragmatist, exemplified by Hilary Putnam.83 My own recommendation is that we
should travel across that bridge, and not stay put with a pure equivalency, redundancy,
or disquotationalist position.84 But a little more needs to be said about just how
Ramsey might cope with some of the issues that arise from his going beyond the
equivalence schema.
Ramsey seems to sound a note of Wittgensteinian quietism when he says:
[W]hat is the meaning of ‘true’? It seems to me that the answer is really perfectly obvious, that
anyone can see what it is and that difficulty only arise[s] when we try to say what it is, because
it is something which ordinary language is rather ill-adapted to express.
[OT: 9]
We have seen, however, that Ramsey is in sharp disagreement with Wittgenstein’s idea
that what we cannot say, we must pass by in silence. While Wittgenstein believed that
the philosopher must stay away from saying anything about the meaning of truth,
Ramsey is committed to trying to say what truth is, however ill suited ordinary language is to express it. Indeed, what follows the above passage is an attempt to use logic
to clear up some problems for ordinary language, along the lines of Russell’s theory of
definite descriptions.
In that attempt to say what truth is, we have seen Ramsey argue against any view of
truth that would reject the equivalence platitude, or would sever the link between
82
I’ve made this argument in Misak (2004 [1991], 1998, 2007, 2015). The sheer number of these attempts
indicate how difficult it is to get it right.
83
See Misak (2013: 241ff.) for an account of how Putnam’s pragmatism moves beyond the equivalency
schema. I too am in this camp.
84
Each of these terms gets used in different ways by different philosophers.
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beliefs and the world. But he thinks that the platitude must not be taken to suggest that
there might be a literal translation between our beliefs and objects in the world. As
soon as Russell and others try to make the vague correspondence thought more precise, we lose most of our beliefs in the process. He is also suspicious of the beguiling
metaphors that underlie realist views. He thinks that once we see that ‘p is true’ asserts
simply that p, we can stop worrying about correspondence and its metaphors and proceed with the real work. The important task is to ask what propositional reference is. It
is at this stage that he makes his pragmatist move, which links truth to action, without
defining it in terms of action or reducing it to action. In perfect step with Peirce’s
account of meaning, in which there is more to understanding a philosophical concept
than knowing its definition, Ramsey thinks that, like the correspondence idea, pragmatism gives us one ‘element’ of the analysis of what it is to truthfully assert a proposition.
Both pragmatism and correspondence are ‘in complete harmony’ with his account of
truth (OT: 91).
One might ask how these two elements—the equivalence platitude and pragmatism—
can live together in Ramsey’s philosophical household. In The American Pragmatists,
I asked a similar question of Rorty, who also wanted both. The answer for Rorty is negative. He cannot hold on to the platitude and pragmatism simultaneously. For his brand of
pragmatism turns its back on the idea that truth has something to do with getting the
world right, and that idea is built into the platitude. The answer for Ramsey and Peirce, by
contrast, is that at least in principle they can hold on both to the idea that truth is connected to the way things are and that truth is connected to the success of human belief
and inquiry. For they argue that we manage to successfully deal with the world by having
beliefs that get the world right, in some minimal, non-correspondence sense of ‘right’.85
One way my question gets put to pragmatists (for instance, by Russell) is whether
the principle of bivalence—the principle that for every well-formed sentence p, p is
either true or false—is imperilled by pragmatism. That principle seems to be at odds
with the pragmatist part of the elucidation of truth, but is upheld by the platitude.
Peirce, of course, saw the full force of this question. His response was to argue that the
principle of bivalence is not a law of logic or a necessary truth, but rather a regulative
assumption of inquiry: something we must assume with respect to any question we are
trying to answer. He tries to find a way of upholding what is important in bivalence
without committing himself to its holding for every meaningful statement.
Ramsey’s line on bivalence is largely similar in structure to Peirce’s, and interesting
where it differs. Bivalence, for Ramsey, is not a law that holds for all sentences. Recall
his idea in ‘General Propositions and Causality’, that if we regard unfulfilled conditionals as facts, we should have to suppose that any such statement as ‘If he had shuffled
the cards, he would have dealt himself the ace’ is determinately true or false. I have
presented the case for reading Ramsey as arguing that the way we make sense of the
truth or falsity of counterfactual statements is to think about whether they would be
85
See Godfrey-Smith (1996: 168) for a similar description of this version of pragmatism/naturalism.
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part of our best theory. If we cannot have a reasonable opinion about whether they
would be part of our best theory, ‘we say “You can’t say what would have happened”,
which sounds like a confession of ignorance, and is so indeed . . . but not because “what
would have happened” is a reality of which we are ignorant’ (GC: 161). Some counterfactual conditionals will be warranted and not others, and this is not underpinned by
metaphysics, but by how inquiry would unfold.
Ramsey, that is, suggests that it is our system of belief that allows us to make assertions about unfulfilled conditionals, open generalizations, probability, and causality.
We employ these kinds of judgement in order to ‘meet the future’, and we evaluate
them in terms of whether they enable us to meet the future well: in terms of whether or
not our beliefs and our system work in all the important ways we want them to work.
Moreover, there is something objective to go on here. In the counterfactual example
above, if there is something about the distribution of the cards, the stacking of the
deck, and so on that settles ‘our expectation, vague or clear’, then we have something to
assert about how things would likely have turned out had he shuffled, and how they
would turn out if we were to shuffle and draw again.
Ramsey also discusses bivalence in ‘Theories’, a draft piece whose date is supposed
to be 1929. Here he distinguishes ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ systems, terminology he
finds in the work of the physicist Norman Campbell (1920). Wittgenstein also began
to use the expressions ‘das erste System’ and ‘das zweite System’ in 1929, without
defining them, but we have seen the same kind of distinction made in the Tractatus,
as well as in the work of Russell and the Vienna Circle. The primary system or language
is that of immediate experience, the language of sense-data—the language, as
Wittgenstein later put it, describing objects with ‘no owner’.86 The secondary system
or language is the language of physical objects, hypotheses, and theories, as well
as our ordinary language.
In ‘Theories’, Ramsey invented a technical innovation that Hempel (1958: 80) later
named a ‘Ramsey sentence’, which he and other philosophers have utilized for their
own ends. Carnap, for instance, in his 1958 ‘Observation Language and Theoretical
Language’, argued that theoretical entities could be defined away by Ramsey sentences. David Lewis (1972) argued that Ramsey sentences could allow us to analyse
or reduce mental terms to physical terms. A Ramsey sentence, for instance, can give
an implicit definition of pain in terms of its causal role, by conjoining the various
causal and behavioural platitudes about it that we accept, as follows (in highly
abbreviated form): ∃x∃y∃z∃w (x tends to be caused by physical state y and y entails
a bodily injury and x tends to cause physical states z and w and z entails crying and w
entails writhing).
Ramsey, however, was interested in explicit definition, I suggest, primarily as a technical problem that he could solve. In some companion notes to the notes that
Braithwaite published after Ramsey’s death as ‘Theories’, he says:
86
PI: §398. See Boncompagni (forthcoming b) for an excellent discussion.
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some economy ought to be possible, but it is not clear how without a good deal of thought. That
makes indeed a good exercise.
[RP 005-17-01]
He asks whether we can ‘reproduce the structure of our theory by means of explicit
definitions within the primary system’, as ‘Russell, Whitehead, Nicod and Carnap all
seem to suppose that we can and must do this’ (Th: 120). He finds an ingenious way of
doing so, but he worries that ‘the arbitrariness of the definitions makes it impossible
for them to be adequate to the theory as something in process of growth’ (Th: 130).
And in his notes, he flat-out rejects the idea that the secondary system is uniquely
determined by the primary system. He worries that the project of deductively reconstructing our theory of the world from experience leads to solipsism:
Solipsism in the ordinary sense in which as e.g. in Carnap the primary world consists of my
experiences past present and future will not do. For this primary world is the world about
which I am now thinking . . .
[NPPM: 66]
In some even more hurried notes on Wittgenstein, piled with negatives, Ramsey gestures at the same point:
W says nonsense to believe in anything not given in experience not merely different in kind.
For to be mine, to be given in experience is its formal property to be a genuine entity. Other
people’s s.d. [sense-data] and my s.d. i.e. those attached to my body as other people’s to their
bodies are logical constructions . . . Take the criterion of he sees to be the meaning of he sees.
Similar I see—I see. Then I see is also connected with reality (visual appearance) other than
how his seeing is, and this is that the world is my world.
[RP 004-21-02]
If I can only believe with certainty in my own experience and what can be constructed
out of it, then I am locked into my own world. This solipsistic thesis, if not unbelievable,
is, Ramsey thinks, at the very least unrealistic. Wittgenstein fully understood that
the picture put forward in the Tractatus shows ‘how much truth there is in solipsism . . .
The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that
language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world’ (T: 5.62). Ramsey’s
own view is that we need the irreducible secondary system, which is full of hypotheses, laws, and claims about the existence of worldly objects, if we are to think
about the world at all. Indeed, we have seen that in On Truth, he argued that an issue
that requires attention is the range of beliefs to which the truth predicate can be
applied.87 The fact that he considered whether ethical and aesthetic beliefs are in
that range would make no sense if he aimed at a reduction of the secondary to the
primary language. So while Ramsey explored in ‘Theories’ the inter-theoretic reduction
between a secondary language and the primary language, his conclusion is that we
87
Rescher and Majer (1991: xv) see this clearly and put the point in precisely this way.
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go beyond the primary language when we theorize and when we make ordinary
assertions.
But there is an important, new point to excavate from this paper. Ramsey also suggests that what our theories are talking about can be taken to exist. He says in those
companion notes mentioned above: ‘That superfluous elements should be rejected
from a theory means here that they are an unnecessary complication of language, not
that we should refrain from assuming things to exist’ (RP 005-17-01). Stathis Psillos
puts Ramsey’s argument in ‘Theories’ thus:
We treat our theory of the world as a growing existential statement. We do that because we want
our theory to express a judgement: to be truth-valuable. In writing the theory, we commit ourselves to the existence of things that make our theory true and, in particular, to the existence of
unobservable things that cause or explain the observable phenomena. We don’t have to do this.
But we think we are better off doing it, for theoretical, methodological and practical reasons. So
we are bold. Our boldness extends a bit more. We take the world to have a certain structure (to
have natural joints) . . . We don’t want our theory to be true just in case it is empirically adequate. We want the structure of the world to act as an external constraint on the truth or falsity
of our theory. So we posit the existence of a natural structure of the world (with its natural
properties and relations). We come to realise that this move is not optional once we have made
the first bold step of positing a domain of unobservable entities.
[2006: 85–6]
His position, rather than being reductionist or constructionist, is more along the lines
of what Fine these days calls our natural ontological stance, in which the entities and
relations that show up in our best theories are quite reasonably taken to exist. Just as in
‘General Propositions and Causality’, Ramsey, in ‘Theories’, does not want to eliminate
causation, for instance. Yes, there is ‘nothing . . . beyond the regularity to be called causality’—there is only ‘this conduct of ours’ of making ‘sentences called causal laws’ on
the basis of this regularity (GC: 160). But that just shows that we must take a ‘realistic
view’ about causality by rejecting the kinds of realism that hold that there are facts
about causes. Ramsey’s way of being a realist is by being a Peircean pragmatist. Causes
will be in our best theory, we bet. But this is merely a bet. Psillos uses the term
‘Ramseyan humility’ to mark Ramsey’s thought that we must not foreclose on the
possibility that our theory will not be uniquely determined, or that it might be determined in a way that we do not anticipate.88
Psillos does not identify Ramsey’s argument as particularly pragmatist. But it is a
perfect summary of what in The American Pragmatists I have called Peirce’s modest,
fallibilist, low-profile justification of the assumption of those entities and principles
that we seem to require. Peirce said, ‘I am not one of those transcendental apothecaries, as I call them—they are so skillful in making up a bill—who call for a quantity of
big admissions, as indispensable Voraussetzungen of logic’ (CP 2. 113, 1902). To show
that a belief is unavoidable for us does not show that it is true, but, as Hookway puts
88
He is building on David Lewis’s paper ‘Ramseyan Humility’, posthumously published in 2009.
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Peirce’s point, it provides a strong reason for hoping that it is true and for regarding it as
legitimate in our search for knowledge (1999: 181).
We are now in a position to bring into our field of vision another way of getting at
Ramsey’s distinctive pragmatist move with respect to bivalence. He considers the view
in philosophy of science that we would now call holism about the meaning of theoretical terms: what provides for the verification of a theoretical statement is our whole
interconnected system of belief, not some isolated bundle of empirical content. This
position is often meant to show how statements about unobservable entities, such as
the very small and the very large, are meaningful and truth-apt, despite the fact that
they seem not to be verifiable by observation. Ramsey sees that the argument might be
deployed in additional ways:
[T]his view can be extended to include not merely what appear to be statements about facts
which could not be observed, but also all statements apparently about facts which have not or
will not actually be observed. So that questions about cosmogony, or the back of the moon, or
anything no one has ever seen may not have any independent meaning, but only be about what
it would be best for us to say in order to get a satisfactory scientific system. If this were so, ‘The
back of the moon is made of green cheese’ might be both ‘true’ and ‘false’, equally satisfactory
‘theories’ having been found, one of them containing that sentence or rather allowing it to be
deduced, and the other containing its contradictory.
[OT: 34]
Ramsey rejects the view contained in the last sentence, which results in a relativism in
which baldly inconsistent beliefs could both be true. He also rejects the whole idea on
which this kind of philosophy of science rests: that some of the statements of science
can be defined ‘by means of a “dictionary” in such a way that they can be proved true
and false by observation’ and that others have more ‘aesthetic’ merits (such as simplicity, elegance, or other so-called pragmatic criteria) (OT: 33). On the contrary, Ramsey
thinks ‘our ordinary statements about the external world express definite judgments,
which are true or false’ (OT: 34). But notice that in the above passage Ramsey has
alerted us to the Peircean solution to the problem of buried secrets. If our best theory
would have it that the dark side of some far-flung planet is not made of green cheese,
then we are justified in saying that it is not made of green cheese. Beliefs about far-flung
planets, theoretical entities, and other hard or impossible verify matters play a role in
our system of belief, and so that system imparts meaning and truth-values to them.
We saw that Peirce thought that assumptions such as bivalence were regulative
assumptions of inquiry. At the end of ‘Theories’, Ramsey says something similar. The
assumptions, for instance, that nature changes gradually and not by leaps, or that
nature is simple:
can only be laid down if we are sure that they will not come into conflict with future experience
combined with the causal axioms . . . To assign to nature the simplest course except when
experience proves the contrary is a good maxim of theory making, but it cannot be put into the
theory in the form ‘Natura non facit saltum’ except when we see her do so.
[Th: 135]
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On my reading of Ramsey, a principle such as the simplicity of nature is a principle that
is reasonable to invoke when making our theories, except when nature proves to the
contrary. It may be that our best theory has it that nature (or a part of it) is simple, and
if so, nature is simple. Ramsey took ill as he was working through this position, and it
turned out that he was to run out of time. But he was making room for both the equivalence truism and pragmatism to coexist in his philosophical household: for bivalence
and a human account of truth to coexist.
In this, as in so much else, Ramsey is perfectly in step with Peirce. Both adopt a position on which possibility, generality, and necessity are real, but not in a metaphysically
heavy way. Both think that we take a judgement ‘as a basis for our future thought and
action, and regard its truth temporarily at any rate, as a settled question’ (OT: 46). If we
have full belief in some claim (or at least if we are very sure of it), then we ‘think that
such and such is or was the case without any feeling of doubt and unless something
made us pause to think we should be prepared to act on our judgment’ (OT: 46). Many
of our general beliefs and our beliefs about what is possible or necessary are like this, as
are countless other of our beliefs about all manner of things.
Ramsey, we have seen, improves on Peirce by providing us with a way of thinking
about those cases in which we are less sure: he gives us a way of measuring partial belief.
There are beliefs we take as lacking any live challenge and so feel no doubts about, and
then there are beliefs we take to be challenged not so that they fail altogether, but are put
into question to some significant degree. Regarding the latter, we may retain some
measure of confidence. Our judgements ‘vary in the degree in which they could survive
cross examination’ (OT: 46). Notice that there is a clear line of thought leading from that
last idea to saying, with Peirce, that a belief that would survive all cross-examination is
true. If one embraces the above descriptions of our feelings of confidence in our beliefs
and of the way they dispose us to act, and also thinks that epistemic norms of evaluation
apply to them, this will naturally pull one toward pragmatism about truth. It will naturally pull one towards the position that if a belief would satisfy all our norms—working
well, fitting with our other well-grounded beliefs, capturing what we observe in a simple
and elegant way, paying attention to the facts—then there is nothing more we could ask
of it. I hope to have shown that Ramsey felt this pull, even if he did not live to make a full
assessment of just how far he wanted to go.
When it comes to knowledge, Ramsey is clearer that he is willing to take the
pragmatist step. In the short 1929 piece titled ‘Knowledge’, he says that a belief is an
item of knowledge if it is true; if we believe it fully or are practically certain; and if it is
produced by a reliable process.89 Both Ramsey and Peirce, that is, think that settled
judgements count as knowledge if they stand up to all evidence and if they are obtained
by a reliable process that takes account of how things are. We have seen how Peirce
89
There is some dispute about whether Ramsey meant by ‘certain’ that we believe it fully or whether he
meant absolute certainty. See Olsson (2004) for the latter argument, which I think can be seen to be mistaken once we take everything else Ramsey said about certainty into account. Ramsey is also often seen as
the first explicit proponent of what is now called reliabilism in epistemology, but it will be clear from what
I say here that the matter is complicated.
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makes the point: a belief is true if it would be permanently settled (or permanently
reliable), and belief would resign as false if we discovered it to be put in place by a
method not sensitive to the facts or if we found it to be unreliable. Here is Ramsey
saying something very similar:
We say ‘I know’ . . . whenever we are certain, without reflecting on reliability. But if we did
reflect then we should remain certain if, and only if, we thought our way reliable.
[K: 110]
We have followed Ramsey along a winding path and find ourselves at a considerable
distance from the deflated truism. He argues that there is nothing more to ‘p is true’
than the assertion that p. But that just means that if we want to find out about what it is
for p to be true, we had better find out what we are committed to in asserting p. If we
unpack the commitments we incur when we assert or believe, we find that we have
imported the notions of facts (vaguely conceived), experimentation, and standards for
good belief. There is no further notion of truth at issue—no property over and above
genuine assertibility and fit with our aims and future experience. This is the naturalism
of Peirce and Ramsey. It is not stripped of norms, as a pure functionalist or behaviourist would have it, but, rather, is as thick with norms as are our practices of assertion
and inquiry.
Some contemporary pragmatists, such as Robert Brandom and Michael Williams,
refuse to take this normative step from the equivalence thought to the standards
embedded in assertion and inquiry. They fail to see, as Price puts it, that disquotational
truth is too thin to play a proper role in an adequate theory of assertion, commitment,
and judgement (2011: 16). They would do well, I suggest, to return to Ramsey. For one
thing, they would then retain a notion of constraint by ‘objective factors’, without
which they appear to be as cut adrift from the world as Rorty.
Much more work would be required to draw out the differences and similarities
between Ramsey and contemporary pragmatists carefully and adequately. My aim,
rather, has been to outline the promising position shared by Ramsey and Peirce. That
position maintains that there are epistemic norms that go beyond intersubjective
warrant. These additional norms lead to a more robust conception of truth than the
deflationist would like. But, as Ramsey saw, if we accept the truism, we commit ourselves
to making room for these norms.
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7
Wittgenstein: Post-Tractatus
7.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I shall argue that the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein embodied a
pragmatist spirit, as well as many specific pragmatist tenets, despite overtly deriding it
as a theory of truth and meaning.1 Those pragmatist themes in the later Wittgenstein
have not gone unnoticed.2 Recently, however, it has been suggested that the engagement with pragmatism is distinctive of the phase of Wittgenstein’s thinking toward the
end of his life. Moyal-Sharrock thus argues for a ‘third Wittgenstein’ who is a kind of
‘logical pragmatist’, of the Peircean (rather than Jamesian) variety.3 But I shall argue
that those distinctively pragmatist themes appealed to Wittgenstein as early as 1929.
Indeed, I shall argue that there was an important pragmatist turning point at just that
juncture. The turning point was due to Ramsey and I hope that by the end of this
chapter, my label ‘the post-Ramseyan Wittgenstein’ will seem a reasonable one.
One must tread carefully through Wittgenstein’s work, for he often spoke in what
Hacking terms the ‘try-out’ voice, giving his claims such prefixes as ‘it is as if . . . ’ or ‘one
might want to say here . . . ’ (Hacking 2014: 32). There is also some mountainous and
contested territory in Wittgenstein scholarship that I will not try to climb. My hope is
that an approach to Wittgenstein that starts from his relationship to Ramsey and pragmatism will shed some new light on these debates. For I shall argue that Wittgenstein,
between 1929 and 1932, turned away from the position he expressed in the Tractatus
and toward ordinary language largely due to the pressures of Ramsey’s pragmatism.
He then took what he learned from Ramsey and moved towards a different sort of
pragmatism—one that Ramsey would not have liked, had he lived to see it.
While I shall argue Wittgenstein’s adoption of certain elements of pragmatism came
largely from Ramsey, it was accompanied by some independent knowledge of the classical pragmatists. Rush Rhees4 suggests that Wittgenstein read Peirce’s ‘The Probability
1
What I say about the later Wittgenstein had its origins in a piece written with David Bakhurst for the
Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein. Although I learned a tremendous amount from my co-author and
have drawn on what we wrote together, the position stated here should be taken as mine and not attributed
to Bakhurst, though I hope he would agree with much of it.
2
See e.g. Bernstein (2010), Boncompagni (forthcoming c), Brandom (2008), Haack (1982), Goodman
(2002), Nubiola (1996), Pihlström (2012), and Howat (2013).
3
See (2004a) and (2004b).
4
Rhees (2002: 13). Rhees quotes Wittgenstein engaging a question of Peirce’s about induction.
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of Induction’, one of the papers collected in Chance, Love and Logic. He also would have
had some exposure to Peirce through Ogden and Richard’s 1923 The Meaning of
Meaning, and he knew a little of Peirce’s logic, as Russell discussed Peirce’s algebra
of dyadic relations in The Principles of Mathematics (§27). More importantly, as I noted
in the Introduction to this book, Wittgenstein was a serious reader of James. In §7.7,
I shall speak to James’s effect on Wittgenstein, which has to do mostly with how we
should think about religion and forms of life. James was of great value to Wittgenstein
with respect to thinking about the meaning of life. We have seen that Russell and
Ramsey took up the question of how, in a sparse, logical analyst world, there might be
meaning in and for human lives. But Wittgenstein was appalled by their answers,
thinking them materialist and devoid of the sacred. We shall see that his own postTractatus answer drew on James. But it should be noted that there are other connections as well. For instance, Wittgenstein argues very much along Jamesian lines that
action is a complex part of what James called the ‘great blooming, buzzing confusion’
of experience and life:
How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety
of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole
hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment,
our concepts, and our reactions.
[RPP II: 629]
But we shall see in the pages that follow that Wittgenstein grew less enamoured of
the Tractarian quest for certainty and clarity and more interested in human logic,
largely due to questions that Ramsey was raising for it. We have seen that some of those
questions were about specific problems such as the colour exclusion problem. But it
was not so much these questions of Ramsey’s that upset the Tractarian picture. The
more important objections were to the method of doing philosophy that turns its back
on common ways of speaking. It was Ramsey’s insistence that we concern ourselves
with diverse kinds of propositions and that we have no need for the atomistic structure
to underpin or to contrast them, that moved Wittgenstein away from his early picture.
We must concern ourselves with human belief, rather than with the purely formal relation between thought and the world. It was Ramsey who sowed the seeds of this idea,
which becomes the hallmark of the later Wittgenstein.
I shall also argue, however, that the remnants of the logical analyst picture interfered
with Wittgenstein’s assessment of pragmatism. We have seen that in The Analysis of
Mind, Russell could not accept a pragmatist account of belief because he thought that a
theory of belief had to be definitive of belief. It had to reduce belief to some x. We will
see that Wittgenstein too could not disabuse himself of this way of thinking of a theory.
He felt that pragmatism must be a theory or a definition of truth and was thus blinkered to its real intentions, intentions that were not miles away from his own.
In the next two sections of this chapter, I shall make a case for the far-reaching influence of Ramsey’s pragmatism on Wittgenstein. The evidence needs to be painstakingly
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excavated from Wittgenstein’s notebooks and from the general context of what was
going on in Cambridge and Viennese philosophy at the time. For Wittgenstein wore
few of his intellectual debts on his sleeve.5
7.2 Wittgenstein and Ramsey, 1929
Wittgenstein, after his long war interlude, eventually returned to Cambridge at the
­beginning of 1929. The homecoming was fraught, as he had wanted assurances from
Keynes about spending sustained quality time with him, and Keynes was wary of
giving such assurances, lest the burden become excessive. Keynes had resisted replying
directly to Wittgenstein’s entreaties for a year, preferring to send encouraging messages through Ramsey. One gets a glimpse of the nature of these difficulties in a 1929
letter from Keynes to Wittgenstein, trying to clear up yet another misunderstanding:
What a maniac you are! Of course there is not a particle of truth in [the subject of the misunderstanding] . . . The truth is that I alternate between loving and enjoying you and your conversation and having my nerves worn to death by it. It’s no new thing! I always have—any time
these twenty years. But ‘grudge’ ‘unkindness’—if only you could look into my heart, you’d see
something quite different.
[McGuinness 2012b: 170]
Ramsey, too, had experienced the ups and downs that were inevitable in any relationship with Wittgenstein. We saw in §6.2 that some of them had to do with the
way Wittgenstein engaged in philosophical discussion. Others had to do with nonphilosophical matters. In 1927, Wittgenstein and Ramsey had a falling out over some
matter ‘not connected with logic’, prompting a letter from Wittgenstein that started
‘Dear Mr. Ramsey’ and asked him to send a response to a logical point not directly, but
via Schlick as an intermediary.6
But despite the occasional hard feelings between them, Ramsey and Wittgenstein
were close friends, intellectually and personally. As we saw in §6.2, in the early 1920s
Ramsey made frequent visits to Wittgenstein in Puchberg, and he was the one who
put the effort into getting Wittgenstein back to Cambridge. In 1924, he wrote to
Keynes from Vienna, delivering a fraught message from Wittgenstein that he would
come only if Keynes would devote considerable time to him and extend him an invitation to stay in the country. Ramsey says to Keynes that one good that would come of
Wittgenstein’s return is that with ‘me to stimulate him, he might do some more very
good work’ (McGuinness 2012b: 149). Keynes finally wrote to Wittgenstein, and when
5
Ryle tells us that Wittgenstein ‘gave the impressions, first, that he himself was proud not to have
studied other philosophers—which he had done, though not much—and second, that he thought that
people who did study them were academic and therefore unauthentic philosophers’ (1970: 11); see also
Glock (2006 and forthcoming).
6
Wittgenstein’s letter—together with Ramsey’s reply, in which he also tries to explain the uncomfortable
circumstances to Schlick—is reprinted in McGuinness (2012b: 158–61).
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Wittgenstein arrived, he did stay with him, and then with the Ramseys for ‘longer than
was really decent’, as McGuinness puts it (2012b: 6).
The stimulating engagement Ramsey had anticipated was cut short, as this turned
out to be the final year of Ramsey’s life. But in that year, the conversation was sustained
and serious. Frances Partridge, who stayed with the Ramseys on visits to Cambridge,
says of Wittgenstein that ‘He and Frank appeared to admire and respect each other
greatly, and he was a frequent visitor’ (1981: 159).7 Partridge liked Wittgenstein very
much, especially ‘for his devotion to Frank’ (Chisholm 2009: 129). As an indicator of
the closeness of the relationship, perhaps it suffices to note that when Wittgenstein was
afraid he would die before finishing a piece of work, he would make a fair copy of his
writing during the day and ‘give it to Frank Ramsey for safe-keeping’.8 Wittgenstein’s
pocket diary shows that he had an arranged meeting with Ramsey every few days for
the whole of Michaelmas Term 1929, until Ramsey fell ill.
During those few months, Wittgenstein and Ramsey dominated Cambridge
philosophy. Arthur MacIver, an Oxford graduate student in philosophy who visited
Cambridge for two terms in 1929–30, thought that they together formed the
‘Cambridge Left Wing’.9 He saw them as a unit:
I greatly shocked Drury and Cornforth this morning by asserting that what Ramsey and
Wittgenstein said last night was quite certainly false: I think they regarded such a saying as
blasphemy. I find it very difficult to attack the presuppositions of Cambridge philosophy
without offending Cambridge susceptibilities.
[MacIver, unpublished: 20]
Fania Pascal recalled Wittgenstein’s performances at the Moral Sciences Club:
It was mostly students who came to these gatherings that were presided over by Professor G. E.
Moore; and Wittgenstein was the disturbing (perhaps disrupting) centre of these evenings. He
would talk for long periods without interruption, using similes and allegories, stalking about
the room and gesticulating. He cast a spell.
[Pascal 1981: 30]10
Russell notes that the spell could be broken only by Ramsey:
He [Wittgenstein] always vehemently repudiated expositions of his doctrines by others, even
when those others were ardent disciples. The only exception that I know of was F. P. Ramsey . . .
[MPD: 112]
7
Leavis, too, reports that Ramsey was one of the few philosophers that Wittgenstein rated highly
(1981: 63–4).
8
Leavis (1981: 74).
9
MacIver takes that Left Wing to hold ‘philosophy to be merely a matter of the right use of language,
as also mathematics, all else being empirical science and such things as aesthetics merely complicated
branches of psychology’ (unpublished: 19). We have seen that this isn’t quite right. But it can be forgiven as
a quickly formed impression.
10
Pascal had just received her Ph.D from Berlin. She is talking about 1930–1, but 1929–30 were no different. See also Emmet (1996: 74).
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MacIver reports that the discussion after a paper of Broad’s at the Moral Sciences Club
‘was entirely dominated by Wittgenstein and Ramsey’ and that he was surprised at
‘the meekness with which Broad lay down to Ramsey and Wittgenstein’ (MacIver,
­unpublished: 22).
Of his conversations with Ramsey in 1929, Wittgenstein writes: ‘They’re like some
energetic sport and are conducted, I think, in a good spirit . . . They educate me into a
degree of courage of thinking’ (McGuinness 2006: 23). In the 1945 Preface to the
Philosophical Investigations, he writes of the Tractatus:
since I began to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I could not but recognize grave mistakes in what I set out in that first book. I was helped to realize these mistakes—
to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas
encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations
during the last two years of his life.
[PI: 4]
We have seen that Ramsey felt himself especially busy in 1929, with most of his spare
time occupied by conversations with Wittgenstein.
It shall soon be clear why I go to the trouble above to establish that the discussions
between Ramsey and Wittgenstein were frequent and significant. This was the year
that Wittgenstein’s position was at a turning point, or as Holton and Price put it, a
U-turning point (2003: 325). Ramsey, I shall suggest, was largely responsible.
We have already seen that the philosophical outlooks and positions of Wittgenstein
and Ramsey were at some distance from each other during the 1920s. While Ramsey
was interested in the technical aspects of the Tractatus, he did not share Wittgenstein’s
conviction that there is something deep that lies beyond what is sayable. And while
Wittgenstein was receptive enough to the technical interventions, he marked the more
substantial, more philosophical, distance with his own brand of criticism. In 1930, he
looked back on their relationship:
But in the long run it didn’t really go well. Ramsey’s incapacity . . . for reverence, disgusted me
more and more as time went on . . . He was a very adept and clever critic when one put one’s
ideas before him. But his criticism didn’t help one to advance: it only stopped and sobered
one . . . He had an ugly mind.
[McGuinness 2012a [2011]: x]
He also said, again not long after Ramsey’s death: ‘Ramsey’s mind repulsed me.’11
Wittgenstein thought Ramsey did not take seriously the profound problems of
­philosophy. In 1931, he remarked:
Ramsey was a bourgeois thinker. I.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some
particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state—or at least he did not like
11
April 1930, MS 183, 6f. Translated in Klagge and Nordmann (2003: 15).
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doing so—but on how this state might reasonably be organized. The idea that this state might
not be the only possible one in part disquieted him and in part bored him. He wanted to get
down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations—of this state. This is what he was
good at and what really interested him; whereas real philosophical reflection disturbed him
until he put its result (if it had one) to one side and declared it trivial.
[CV: 17]
And here he is in 1933, suggesting that Ramsey wanted to solve local problems using
mathematics and current knowledge:
One of the temptations that we must resist while philosophizing is to think that we must make
our concepts more exact than they are, according to the current state of our insight. This deviation leads to a kind of mathematical philosophy, which believes that it must solve mathematical problems to achieve philosophical clarity. (Ramsey). We need only a correct description of
the status quo.
[MS 115: 71]
We have seen that Ramsey did indeed want to clear up human problems. But he wanted
to solve the philosophical ones as well. Recall his inclination to start off ‘General
Propositions and Causality’ with ‘The problem of philosophy must be ­divided if I am
to solve it: as a whole it is too big for me.’ It was this attitude of Ramsey’s that irritated
Wittgenstein: the idea that the problems of philosophy were solvable by tackling them
individually. What irritated Ramsey, in turn, were Wittgenstein’s quietist or mystical
tendencies: the idea that we must honour the insolubility of some of the problems of
philosophy. Wittgenstein also was quick to announce in the preface to the Tractatus
that he had found ‘on all essential points, the final solution for the problems’. But in the
next sentence he says this just ‘shows how little is achieved when these problems are
solved’.
We can put it this way. Ramsey was not open to Wittgenstein’s charge that he was
immune to the big and profound problems of philosophy. In many of his draft papers
and especially in his final book manuscript, he set out to work through a general theory
that might solve those profound problems of truth, meaning, and the nature of value.
He also thought that the route to working through them had to go via human problems
and practices. That was the mark of his pragmatist, or realistic, spirit. But, contra
Wittgenstein, he thought that much is achieved when we do this.
An exchange of letters between G. E. Moore and Sydney Waterlow, a member of
the intellectual circle that surrounded Ramsey and Wittgenstein and an editor of the
International Journal of Ethics, sheds some light on this clash of intellectual temperaments.
Waterlow thought Wittgenstein was ‘right in substance’, ‘however flawed his expression may be’ (UL Add 8W/8/25). In July 1931, Waterlow wrote to Moore, having
just read The Foundations of Mathematics:
If I say that my outstanding impression on a first reading of Ramsey is the contrast between
his quite extraordinary powers and his immense vitality on the one hand, and on the other
the poverty of his Weltanschauung, I don’t much advance matters. For what is it to have a
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Weltanschauung? Yet I feel sure it is wrong that there should be such a contrast; something has
gone terribly wrong. His drift towards stating everything in ‘pragmatic’ terms could not, however arguable, put the wrong right; of that I feel equally sure, for I still obstinately cling, like
you . . . to the conviction that there is objective truth, goodness, etc. But what I mean by clinging
to such conceptions as ‘absolute’ & ‘objective’, I haven’t the faintest idea.
[UL Add 8W/8/28]
Moore was not able to visit Waterlow to have the discussion ‘about first and last things’
that Waterlow wanted (UL Add 8W/8/28). But he replied as follows:
I quite agree with what you say about Ramsey. I think his Weltanschauung, without objective
values, is very depressing. Wittgenstein finds this too: he calls Ramsey a ‘materialist’; and what
he means by this is something very antipathetic to him. Yet he himself doesn’t believe in objective values either! He thinks they’re nonsense, but important nonsense. For my part, I still
­believe what I believed when I wrote Principia Ethica. I gather this doesn’t at all satisfy you; but
I can’t believe any more.
[Paul 2012: 117]
Waterlow, in reply, challenged Moore’s assertion that Wittgenstein had a strained
­approach toward objective value, and he amplified his indignation about Ramsey’s
­attitude: ‘there is a cocksureness in his attitude, which I feel to be cosmically inappropriate’ (UL Add 8330 8W/8/29). But he did think that while ‘a Russell or a Keynes can
never grow out of that pertness . . . R seems to have been so good that he might have,
had he lived’.
The shared concern of Waterlow and Moore (and attributed also to Wittgenstein)
is that Ramsey’s world-view, in trying to account for value in terms of what is best for
human beings, is left devoid of ‘objective’ or ‘absolute’ or real value. It is this criticism
that Wittgenstein articulates by calling Ramsey a ‘materialist’. I have argued that
Ramsey did not reduce value to behaviour or action, trying instead to build objectivity and normativity into the idea of what works best for humans. Nonetheless,
Ramsey’s world-view was certainly sparser than Wittgenstein’s. For Wittgenstein’s
was full of the mystical, religious, and unknowable. It was marked by the quality
Keats called negative capability—being ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.12 Ramsey, we have
seen, was set against such mysteries, as he was to Moore’s unanalysable phenomena, thinking them to be myths or illusions. His worry about Moore is the
worry gestured at in the correspondence between Waterlow and Moore: what kind
of property could Moore’s unanalysable goodness be? Ramsey thought that instead
of accepting such an account and then trying vainly to square it with our actual
practices of appraising our beliefs, we should allow our practices to dictate which
metaphysical account we should accept. Wittgenstein complained that Ramsey’s
criticism did not advance his philosophy—it merely stopped and sobered him. But
12
Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 22 December 1817; reprinted in Keats (1899: 277).
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Ramsey thought that Wittgenstein’s philosophy needed sobering up and recommended
a dose of naturalist, yet normative, remedies.
So while we should reject Wittgenstein’s verdict that Ramsey is a materialist in any
crass or obviously undesirable sense, we can nonetheless make sense of Wittgenstein’s
reticence about embracing Ramseyan pragmatism as issuing from his perception that
such a pragmatism is too ‘materialistic’ and too interested in first-order, down to earth,
inquiry. In 1930, in one of the drafts of the preface to the book that eventually became
the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein expresses his wariness of the idea that
­science has value in philosophy:
It is all one to me whether or not the typical western scientist understands or appreciates my
work, since he will not in any case understand the spirit in which I write.
[CV: 7]
Science, Wittgenstein thought, threatens our capacity for wonder. ‘Man has to
­wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again’ (CV: 5).
We shall see another divide open up between their views, this time one that is native
in pragmatist thought. While talk of a ‘divide’ is of course itself divisive and perhaps
generally to be guarded against, in this instance there is justification for identifying
one, for at least the first set of protagonists themselves (Peirce and James) recognized it
and thought it important. Since Wittgenstein’s location in the dispute only begins to be
identifiable late in his life (in, for instance, On Certainty), Ramsey was not around to
see or comment on it. And as is often the case with divides among those with much in
common, those on either side tend to wander into the other’s territory and then pull
back. This is especially true of James and Wittgenstein, who frequently move away from
and then toward what I have been calling the more objective position. At times they
suggest that there is no truth to be had in inquiry, or that there is no point in talking of
a truth that might lie beyond what is currently believed, and other times they see such
a point. Peirce and Ramsey, on the other side, more steadily argue that the very concept
of belief (Peirce), or a belief ’s being the belief that p (Ramsey), presupposes that there is
something objective, beyond our current beliefs, that we are attempting to get right.
Another way of putting the dispute is that James and Wittgenstein tend to focus on
language and on the social construction of beliefs and norms, while Peirce and Ramsey
tend to focus on inquiry and how it produces reliable and stable belief.
7.3 Wittgenstein’s 1929 Pragmatism
Some Wittgenstein scholars think that Ramsey’s ideas made only a minor contribution
to Wittgenstein’s later thought. Wolfgang Kienzler, for instance, says that ‘nowhere
have they led to an endorsement in Wittgenstein’s notes; none of the basic ideas of
the later Wittgenstein can convincingly be traced to a stimulus by Ramsey’.13 In what
13
Kienzler (1997: 75–6). The translation is from Glock (2005: 42), who tends toward Kienzler’s conclusion.
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follows, I hope to show this to be erroneous. While Wittgenstein might have been badtempered about Ramsey’s criticisms, he did not ignore them, but rather developed certain of his ideas as a response to the stimulus they provided.
The first substantial mention of pragmatism in Wittgenstein’s work comes the day
after Ramsey’s death. During the 1929–30 Christmas break, Wittgenstein had travelled to Vienna for conversations with Waismann and Schlick. He returned to
England to find that his friend had taken ill. He was at Guy’s Hospital with Ramsey
and his wife, and on the evening of Saturday 18 January he left for Cambridge to prepare for his first lecture of the term. Ramsey died a few hours later, in the early hours
of 19 January.14 On the 20th, Wittgenstein gave his lecture. The notes taken by Moore
indicate that the lecture, which may have been prepared in advance, is in step with the
picture theory of the Tractatus.15 But on that day he also made a long and substantial
entry in his notebook, and what he wrote sheds much light on his attitude to pragmatism. These remarks appear in MS 107, one of a set of extensive philosophical notebooks. They are key to understanding the transition from Wittgenstein’s position in
the Tractatus to his later views, as well as to understanding the impact of Ramsey on
Wittgenstein.16
Wittgenstein gave a typescript of selected remarks from the notebooks 105–8 to
Russell in 1930, to be used as part of the package of materials required in order to renew
his Trinity research fellowship. A version of that typescript was published after
Wittgenstein’s death as Philosophical Remarks, and material from the notebooks
appeared almost twenty years later in the posthumously published Philosophical
Investigations.17 The notebooks thus might be seen as comprising a very first draft of a
project that continued to evolve over much of the remainder of Wittgenstein’s life. But
the remark of most interest to us—the part of the 20 January entry regarding pragmatism—was not selected by Wittgenstein for his Trinity synopsis, although other parts of
the 20 January entry were. Hence, we can find his discussion of pragmatism only in the
unpublished manuscripts. It is worth reproducing almost all of the 20 January entry, so
that Wittgenstein’s most extensive remarks on pragmatism will be finally and fully in
print. This will enable us to explore Wittgenstein’s attention and attraction to pragmatism during this important transitional period. Here it is:
Sentences [Sätze]—that is, what we ordinarily call so: the sentences [Sätze] of our everyday
use—seem to me to work differently from what in logic is meant by propositions [Sätzen], if
there are such things at all.
14
Frances Partridge, an old school friend of Ramsey’s wife Lettice, was with her during these final days,
and we owe to her diarizing the account of Wittgenstein’s presence at Ramsey’s deathbed. See Partridge
(1981: 170–1) and Chisholm (2009: 129–30).
15
The notes can be found in Stern et al. (forthcoming).
16
What I say about the remarks in MS 107 builds on the pioneering work of Anna Boncompagni (forthcoming a, forthcoming b).
17
See Nedo (1996) for a detailed account of how parts of the many notebooks became Philosophical
Remarks and then the Philosophical Investigations.
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And this is due to their hypothetical character. Events do not seem to verify or falsify them
in the sense I originally intended—rather there is, as it were, still a door left open. Verification
and its opposite are not the last word.
Is it possible that everything I believe to know for sure—such as that I had parents, that
I have brothers and sisters, that I am in England—that all this should prove to be false? That is,
could I ever acknowledge any evidence as sufficient to show this? And then, could there be
even more reliable evidence showing that the first kind of evidence was deceptive?
When I say ‘There is a chair over there’, this sentence refers to a series of expectations.
I ­believe I could go there, perceive the chair and sit on it, I believe it is made of wood and I expect
it to have a certain hardness, inflammability etc. If some of these expectations are disappointed,
I will see it as proof for retaining that there was no chair there.
Here one sees how one may arrive at the pragmatist conception of true and false: A sentence
is true as long as it proves to be useful.
Every sentence we utter in everyday life appears to have the character of a hypothesis.
A hypothesis is a logical structure. That is, a symbol for which certain rules of representation
hold.
The point of talking of sense-data and immediate experience is that we are looking for a nonhypothetical representation.
But now it seems that the representation loses all its value if the hypothetical element is
dropped, because then the proposition does not point to the future any more, but it is, as it
were, self-satisfied and hence without any value.
Experience says something like ‘It’s nice elsewhere too and this is where I am anyway’. And
it is through the telescope of expectation that we look into the future.
It makes no sense to speak of sentences, if they have no instrumental value.
The sense of a sentence is its purpose.
When I tell someone ‘There is a chair over there’, I want to produce in him certain expectations and ways of acting.
It is terribly hard here not to get lost in questions that do not concern logic. Or rather it’s
terribly hard to find the way out of this tangle of questions, in order to contemplate it as a whole
from the outside.
[MS 107: 247–50]18
This passage is riveting for anyone interested in Ramsey, Wittgenstein, and pragmatism.
Wittgenstein says here that he sees how one can arrive at the pragmatist account of
truth, and from here on in his work, he relies on the pragmatist’s notion of ‘expectations’
as an important, if not always explicit, concept in his explications of meaning.
We have seen that by 1929, Ramsey had adopted the pragmatist view that open
generalizations, causal beliefs, and hypotheses are habits with which we meet the future.
Wittgenstein was fully persuaded by Ramsey on the matter of open generalizations.
He took his ‘biggest mistake’ in the Tractatus to be the identification of generalizations with infinite conjunctions.19 He also corrected himself with respect to the ­related
18
Wittgenstein’s paragraph breaks are preserved as they are written. The translation is due to the separate but combined (by me) efforts of Anna Boncompagni and Joachim Schulte.
19
See von Wright (1982: 151, n. 28), as well as Moore’s notes on Wittgenstein’s lecture of 25 November
1932 (Stern et al.: forthcoming).
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matter of hypotheses, both in conversations with Schlick and Waismann and in his
lectures of 1929–32. We have seen that Wittgenstein saw in the Tractatus that hypotheses do not fit into what is sayable in the primary language. He repeats that thought in
his conversations with the Vienna Circle. A hypothesis ‘from the outset’ has ‘a completely different grammatical structure’, in virtue of which its verification is never
finally complete: ‘it follows from no single proposition and from no set of single propositions’ (WVC: 210). In his new explication of its grammatical structure,
Wittgenstein pretty nearly replicates Ramsey:20
There is a different kind of generality which applies to hypotheses. A proposition can be verified; a hypothesis cannot, but is a law or rule for constructing propositions and looks to the
future—i.e. enables us to construct propositions which say what will occur and which can be
verified or falsified.
[Easter Term 1930, Lecture A IX; in LC1: 16]
The use of a hypothesis is to make inferences about the future.
[Academic Year 1931–2, Series C, §VII; in LC1: 83]
Hypothesis and proposition.
A hypothesis goes beyond immediate experience.
A proposition does not.
Propositions are true or false.
Hypotheses work or don’t work.
[Miscellaneous Notes of Desmond Lee, 1929–31; in LC1: 110]
A hypothesis is a law for constructing propositions, and the propositions are instances of this
law. If they are true (verified), the hypothesis works; if they are not true, the hypothesis does
not work. Or we may say that a hypothesis constructs expectations which are expressed in propositions and can be verified or falsified. The same words may express a proposition to me, to
you a hypothesis.
[Miscellaneous Notes of Desmond Lee, 1929–31; in LC1: 110]
Ramsey had argued that a variable hypothetical is not ‘strictly’ a proposition at all,
but ‘a formula from which we derive propositions’ (GC: 159). Wittgenstein adopts
that Ramseyan position—including its minimization of the importance of the
‘strict propositions’ of the primary language and its insistence that secondary statements are epistemically evaluable, since they yield expectations that can be met or
fail to be met. Wittgenstein now agrees that hypotheses, which reside entirely in the
secondary language, are rules for meeting the future, and are to be evaluated in
terms of whether or not they work. Indeed, in the final passage above (LC1: 110),
Wittgenstein comes close to linking, without identifying, the truth of a hypothesis
with whether or not it works. The hypothesis constructs expectations, which are
20
Hacker (1996: 71) also notes that it is ‘plausible to suppose’ that Ramsey imparted his idea that
hypotheses are rules to Wittgenstein. I hope to show Hacker’s surmise to be right.
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expressed in propositions. If those propositions are verified, they are true, and the
hypothesis works.
While the nature of a hypothesis is that it can never be fully verified, the flip side of
the coin is that a fully verifiable proposition is self-satisfied and is of little use or ­interest.
If we take seriously both sides of the coin—if we add Wittgenstein’s new thoughts
about hypotheses and how we evaluate them to his worries about the epistemic value
of the primary language—we are close to a general Peircean pragmatist account of
truth, of the sort Ramsey was articulating. That is, once the logical analyst framework
articulated in the Tractatus is put into question, the central phenomena for philosophy
are hypotheses that yield expectations which are fulfilled or not fulfilled—hypotheses
that work or do not work. In 1929–30, when Wittgenstein was grappling with Ramsey’s
objections to the Tractatus and his proffered pragmatist solutions, he was, I submit,
persuaded by the pragmatist account of meaning as use. A key thought in MS 107 is:
every sentence we utter in everyday life appears to have the character of a hypothesis. A few
days earlier, Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook that, although the words of our
­language all look alike, they have a very wide variety of uses, just like the handles in a
train driver’s cabin.21 This passage is preceded by a remark about how difficult it is to
think through the relationship between the ‘I. und II. Systems’22—the primary and secondary languages. The structure of the Tractatus is collapsing. The foundational primary language lies in ruins, and what is left standing used to be called the secondary
system, but now is the whole of what concerns the philosopher.
In 1929, Cambridge England philosophers accepted that pragmatism is in part the
position that our beliefs must be u
­ nderstood in terms of the expectations that arise
from them. There can be no doubt that this was due to Ramsey’s influence, for he was
the only person in Cambridge who really understood the non-Jamesian, Peircean version of pragmatism. We find MacIver talking of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism about
hypotheses on 4 February 1930 when—just a few weeks after Ramsey’s death—he
writes after a lecture of Wittgenstein’s:
I think he succeeded in explaining to us what he meant by ‘propositions’ and ‘hypotheses’, but
it did not seem to me very new and to a great extent reminded me of Kant, though he has a
pragmatist theory of science, which is of course un-Kantian.
[unpublished: 58]
MacIver, that is, saw Wittgenstein as a pragmatist. It was Moore who ‘was still
criticising Russell and was concerned for some time with the point that the truth
of such statements about the present moment as “That is a blackboard” does not
depend upon the truth of any statements or expectations about the future’ (MacIver
­unpublished: 74).
21
This thought, unlike the pragmatist thoughts expressed on 20 January, does make it into PR (§§13–14)
and PI (§12).
22
Entry of 12 January 1930 (MS 107: 231–2).
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Pragmatism was clearly the subject of vigorous debate in Cambridge in 1929.
Wittgenstein’s place in that debate at that time was as follows. He was in the process of
rejecting the idea that there is a primary language for the description of immediate
experience—a language whose meaning is entirely independent of any hypothetical
elements, and so whose statements can be known with total certainty. He said to
Schlick and Waismann in December 1929:
I used to believe that there was the everyday language that we all usually spoke and a primary
language that expressed what we really knew, namely phenomena. I also spoke of a first system
and a second system. Now I wish to explain why I do not adhere to that conception any more.
I think that essentially we have only one language, and that is our everyday language. We need
not invent a new language or construct a new symbolism, but our everyday language already is
the language, provided we rid it of the absurdities that lie hidden in it.
[WVC: 45]
He does not explain here why he has abandoned his old conception. But Waismann
titles this section ‘Solipsism’. Recall that Ramsey worried that if we focus on the primary
system, we are led to solipsism, with particular reference to Carnap. The branch of
the Vienna Circle that tried to ground knowledge in private sense-data eventually
foundered on this issue. Such a reduction results in solipsism, since sense-data do not
give us access to the world, but only to how the world ‘appears’ or ‘seems to me’. My
suggestion is that it was Ramsey who made Wittgenstein worried that the primary
language leads to a dead end, and it was Ramsey who convinced Wittgenstein to think
of hypotheses and all sentences of ordinary language as habits with which we meet
the future.
What all of this makes visible is that in 1929, while Wittgenstein was struggling with
his Tractarian self, he was at times linking the correctness (if not the truth) of a hypothesis to whether or not it works—to whether or not the expectations that arise from it
are met and would continue to be met. The ‘access’ (Zugang) or the route to pragmatism is the trail Ramsey cuts. But in this transitional stage, Wittgenstein remained in
the grip of the logical analyst picture, in that at times he says that, since a hypothesis
always remains open, it can never be completely verified, and hence ‘for it there is not
truth and falsity’ (MS 107: 250). That is, if we think of hypotheses in terms of expectations, we must abandon the idea of truth for them. Evaluation of expectations does
not give us certainty. He eventually became more wary of the whole idea of truth,
although we shall see that he cannot neatly be put into the box containing the kind of
pragmatist who thinks that truth is a concept we should abandon. Perhaps only his
self-appointed successor Richard Rorty belongs there.
I suggest that it would not be a stretch to call Wittgenstein’s transitional position (the
position he occupied between the Tractatus and his later work) his ‘1929 pragmatism’.
On that view, the strict propositions—the statements in the primary language that
are not rules for meeting the future—are too self-contained to be of any value. The
only exceptions to the valuelessness of the primary language are the statements of
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logic and mathematics. In the above conversation with Schlick and Waismann,
Wittgenstein continues:
Our language is completely in order, as long as we are clear about what it symbolizes. Languages
other than the ordinary ones are also valuable in so far as they show us what they have in
common. For certain purposes, e.g. for representing inferential relations, an artificial symbolism is very useful. Indeed, in the construction of symbolic logic Frege, Peano, and Russell
paid attention solely to its application to mathematics and did not think of the representation
of real states of affairs.
[WVC: 46]
This fencing off of artificial languages is also found in Ramsey. It is not a commitment
to the idea that there is a primary language out of which we can construct the rest of
our system of belief. Wittgenstein could not be clearer in the consecutive23 passages
below that he does not want to try to analyse all our knowledge in terms of only the
building blocks of sense-data and logic. Like Peirce and Ramsey, he wants to say that
our beliefs must be connected to experience, but that the philosopher cannot get any
more precise than that:
All that’s required for our propositions (about reality) to have a sense, is that our experience in
some sense or other either tends to agree with them or tends not to agree with them. That is,
immediate experience need confirm only something about them, some facet of them.
[PR: §225]
It is very difficult to talk about the relation of language to reality without talking nonsense or
without saying too little.
[MS 107: 205]
But he continues, pulling away from Ramsey:
I do not now have phenomenological language, or ‘primary language’ as I used to call it, in
mind as my goal [of the project of analysis]. I no longer hold it to be necessary. All that is
possible and necessary is to separate what is essential from what is inessential in our
language.
[PR: §1]
We shall see that the later Wittgenstein’s focus was on our language, and less on how
that language might be related to reality. I have tried to show that this shift is made in
the autumn of 1929,24 when he settles into the idea that the essential feature of our
grasp of a belief ’s meaning is our ability to use it as an instrument in our practical activities. We understand a belief when it facilitates and does not obstruct the way we do
23
The first and the third remarks ended up in two very different places in a typescript that Wittgenstein
cut-and-pasted from his notebooks, and hence in two very different places in Philosophical Remarks. The
second remark can be found only in the notebook. Stern notes that ‘The original manuscript volume entry
starts with “I no longer hold it to be possible” ’ (1995: 136).
24
Hintikka and Hintikka (1986: ch. 5) and Stern (1995: §5.2) also date the rejection of the foundational
status of the primary language to October 1929.
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things—when it properly guides our actions. Hence, a sentence that cannot be verified
in any way is a ‘wheel turning idly’ (WVC: 65).25 For any proposition other than those
of mathematics and logic, its sense is its purpose:
What does it mean to understand a proposition? This is connected with the general question
of what it is what people call intention, to mean, meaning. Nowadays the ordinary view is, isn’t
it, that understanding is a psychological process that accompanies a proposition[?] . . . I now
believe that understanding is not a particular psychological process . . . It is true that various
processes are going on inside me when I hear or read a proposition . . . But all these processes
are not what I am interested in here. I understand a proposition by applying it.
Understanding . . . is operating with a proposition. The point of a proposition is that we should
operate with it.
[WVC: 167]
This will become the idea that, for most instances in which we ascribe meanings to
words, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI: §43). The secondary
­language becomes more important than the primary, and the secondary language is
not restricted to the realm of the hypothetical, or laws for constructing propositions.
Like Ramsey, Wittgenstein will take expectations to be a more diverse category than
that. The secondary language just is our language—the whole of it.
In his discussions with the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein goes on to say something
even more Ramseyan. He understands who Napoleon is even though he doesn’t understand it ‘without interruption’. He is not aware of it all the time, like he would be aware of
a toothache: ‘this knowledge does not have the form of a state but that of a disposition’
(WVC: 167). He has come round to Ramsey’s dispositional view of meaning and belief.
Indeed, at times he even makes the Peircean move of taking the meanings of mathematics and logic to be grounded in their consequences for action, namely, calculation and
experimentation:
It does not make any difference that in the one case I perform actions, while in the other
I merely write down and delete signs, for what I am doing in the calculus is an action too. Here
there is no sharp boundary.
[WVC: 170]
Understanding the rules of a calculus consists in ‘exactly the same thing’ as understanding the words of a language: ‘I operate with them.’
The project of the Tractatus was an attempt to conclusively ground our knowledge
in experience and logic. Just like every other project of finding a logical and experiential calculus for language, it came unwound. I have argued that it was Ramsey who
pulled at the loose strings. In the Preface to the Investigations, however, Wittgenstein
credits the economist Piero Sraffa, with whom he met frequently during the years
25
This metaphor is best known through its later inclusion in PI (§271). For more on Wittgenstein’s
earlier use of it, see Boncompangni (forthcoming b).
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1929–30, as the prompt for his change of mind. Norman Malcolm corroborates
Wittgenstein’s report:
One day . . . when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must
have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’, Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to
Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his
chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical
form of that?’
[Malcolm 1958: 69]
Before Sraffa’s arrival in Cambridge, he had been part of a circle that included Antonio
Gramsci, who emphasized the importance of human practical activity or praxis to
meaning. Amartya Sen was a student of Sraffa’s and got Sraffa’s take on Wittgenstein from
the great economist himself. While Sraffa could not remember the particular ­occasion
related by Malcolm, he told Sen that ‘I argued with Ludwig so often and so much that my
fingertips did not need to do much talking’ (Sen 2003: 1242). Sraffa was unimpressed
with, as Sen puts it, Wittgenstein’s ‘austere and ultimately artificial . . . rules’ and with the
idea that a proposition and what it describes must have the same logical form (2014:
118–19). That is not how actual human beings communicate. Sraffa thought his point
‘was rather obvious’. He eventually became ‘somewhat bored’ by and ‘had to stop’ his
weekly conversations with Wittgenstein, something that upset Wittgenstein very much.26
Sraffa and Ramsey formed another of those formidable Cambridge intellectual
­alliances and they too were engaged in frequent communication. As Ramsey lay ill in
January 1930 he bemoaned having to postpone the regular conversations he and Sraffa
were planning to have in the coming term. I suggest that they each engaged the battle
with Wittgenstein, Ramsey doing so in print as well as in person. He tentatively and
gently in his 1923 critical notice of the Tractatus, but by 1929 he was making his point
more aggressively. For instance, in some 1929 notes titled ‘Philosophy’, Ramsey says
that one method (‘Ludwig’s’) is to ‘construct a logic, and do all our philosophical analysis entirely unselfconsciously, thinking all the time of the facts and not about our
thinking about them, deciding what we meant without any reference to the nature of
meaning’ (NPPM: 46). Ramsey thinks that this is the ‘wrong’ method, as it ‘leads to an
impasse’ (NPPM: 46). Definition, he says, only goes so far—we need to explain the way
words are used, ‘and in this explanation we are forced to look not only at the objects
which we are talking about but at our own mental state’ (NPPM: 47).
Ramsey, that is, explicitly set himself against Wittgenstein by eschewing a method
limited to analytic or reductive definition and insisting that ‘we cannot neglect the
­epistemic or subjective side’ (NPPM: 47). He ends this page of notes with: ‘Ludwig’s
primary world contains no thought’ (RP 003-30-05). Wittgenstein, we will see, eventually eschewed any appeal to our own mental states, and in his later work insisted that all
we can talk about is our practices. That is, he was won over to Ramsey’s way of thinking,
but developed that way of thinking in a way more extreme than Ramsey.
26
See Sen (2014: 120), Monk (1990: 487).
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A decade after after Ramsey’s death, Wittgenstein was still thinking about Ramsey’s
barb that he was a scholastic, but he was wary of what he took to be Ramsey’s own
corrective:
Ramsey was right in saying that in philosophy one should be neither ‘woolly’ nor scholastic.
But yet I don’t believe that he has seen how this should be done; for the solution is not: being
scientific.
[MS 163: 57v. 1941]27
Wittgenstein, no doubt, did not want to be seen as an adherent of the overly scientistic
position that the Vienna Circle had infamously adopted, and he remained of the view
that Ramsey erred in this direction. But Ramsey thought that philosophy must steer
clear of two poles: abandoning profound philosophical questions and fiddling with
formal matters. Analytic philosophy, that is, must try to answer the questions of philosophy without being captivated by logical symbolism. And it must answer them
without being woolly, or imprecise. As Paul Grice, one of the few philosophers, in my
view, to understand where Ramsey stood, put it: ‘to borrow words from Ramsey, that
apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become
an instrument of scholasticism’ (1986: 61).
We shall see in the remainder of this chapter that the later Wittgenstein—we can,
I think, now call him the post-Ramseyan Wittgenstein—unequivocally abandoned the
idea that an analysis of ordinary language into primary language is possible. There is
no tidy logical calculus of rules, no logical substructure to language, that points us
to an ‘occult’ relation in which all meaningful concepts stand (PI: §38). Our ordinary
linguistic practices do not admit of any justification that might be built on such a
structure (PI: §124). In 1936, he says:
Formerly, I myself spoke of a ‘complete analysis’, and I used to believe that philosophy had to
give a definitive dissection of propositions so as to set out clearly all their connections and
remove all possibilities of misunderstanding. I spoke as if there was a calculus in which such a
dissection would be possible. I vaguely had in mind something like the definition that Russell
had given for the definite article, and I used to think that in a similar way one would be able to
use visual impressions etc. to define the concept say of a sphere . . . At the root of all this there
was a false and idealized picture of the use of language.
[PG: 211]
He ultimately came to the view that the difference between the primary and secondary
systems is already resolved in ordinary language:
[t]here is no need of a theory to reconcile what we know about sense data and what we believe
about physical objects, because part of what we mean by saying that a penny is round is that we
see it as elliptical in such and such conditions.
[MS 106: 102–4]
27
See also MS 152: 93–4 and MS 164: 67, where he is also ‘gegen Ramsey’—against what he sees as
Ramsey’s tendency to take philosophy to be an empirical science.
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In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that we must leave language as it stands. Under pressure from Ramsey and Sraffa, he came to see that it is not good enough to analyse the
narrow primary language, leaving everything else unsaid. Rather, we must look to
the rich and diverse language of expectations.
In what follows, I shall show how the later Wittgenstein picture was infused with
pragmatist themes, which bear some similarity not only to those found in Ramsey, but
also to those present in the work of Peirce and James. We shall see that Wittgenstein
continued to toggle between seeing that his position shared something important with
pragmatism and being hostile to it. I shall suggest that one issue that caused this
wavering was the question of whether the job of the philosopher is description or
whether it is criticism. I shall argue that Wittgenstein retains two duelling thoughts
from his earlier period. The philosopher must be quiet (i.e. must not criticize our
ordinary linguistic practices), but the ordinary inquirer must be critical. How, we
might well ask, can we pull the philosopher apart from the inquirer? We also might
well ask the question of how Ramsey would have viewed the pragmatist themes developed by his friend. I surmise that he would have found the later Wittgenstein swinging
too far away from the scholastic end of the pendulum and erring on the woolly side.
7.4 The Primacy of Practice and Meaning as Use
Once Wittgenstein had come to fully reject the picture theory of language, his back
remained turned to it until his death in 1951. Indeed, much of his later work can be
seen as a forceful restatement of his 1929–30 insights about why his approach in the
Tractatus is wrong:
It is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are
used . . . with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (This includes the author
of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)
[PI: §23]
The basic evil of Russell’s logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is is
illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed as understood in full
generality.
[RPP I: §38]
In the Tractatus, he was determined to leave ordinary language as it is, but he was also
determined to say something general about the structure of language from the logician’s standpoint. In his later work he is interested, rather, in the full range of our ‘actual
language’ or in the full generality of language. He says:
We see that what we call ‘proposition’, ‘language’, has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is
a family of structures more or less akin to one another.—But what becomes of logic now? . . . The
preconception of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole inquiry around.
[PI: §108]
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He turns his inquiry to our actual use of language, and this ascription of primacy to
concrete linguistic practice remains in place for the rest of his life. In order to understand phenomena such as knowledge, mind, and meaning, we must place them in their
relation to human activity, viewing them as aspects of ‘the natural history of human
beings’ (PI: §415). He sometimes crystallizes this insight in the claim that meaning
is use: ‘it is the particular use of a word only which gives the word its meaning’ (BB: 69).
A bit more cautiously, he says:
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all­—this
word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
[PI: §43]
It would seem that, like Peirce, Wittgenstein thinks that we must not begin with
vagabond thoughts with no human habitation, but with human beings and their
conversation:
When philosophers use a word—‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition/sentence’, ‘name’—
and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually
used in this way in the language in which it is at home?—What we do is to bring words back
from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
[PI: §116]
That sounds very much indeed like a statement of a pragmatic maxim about meaning
or understanding. Explications of philosophical notions find their terminus in an
appeal to practice. Wittgenstein, like James, expresses this maxim in shorthand
through a slogan borrowed from Goethe: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’—In the beginning
was the deed (OC: §402). In terminology more like Peirce’s, he says: ‘The grammar of
the word “knows” is evidently closely related to that of “can”, “is able to”. But also closely
related to that of “understands” ’ (PI: §150).
The above passage from the Investigations may seem to indicate that Wittgenstein
not only thinks that we must turn to use to discover the meanings of our concepts,
but that he also thinks the attempt to discover the essences of things is inappropriate
or confused. But that is not quite right. He complains about the spirit that ‘informs
the vast stream of European and American civilization’: it is not interested in the
‘essence’ of the world, but merely in ‘an onwards movement, in building ever larger
and more complicated structures’ (PR: 7). We have seen him make this charge against
pragmatism. He did not like any theory about essences that had a scientific character. But he does think that philosophy must be interested in the essence of the
world. In the Tractatus, he required this interest to remain in the realm of the unsayable. In his later work, it might be fair to say that he takes a more sideways-on
approach to thinking about the essence of the world. But he still does not like any
theory of that essence.
The received view of meaning, which Wittgenstein, as well as all the self-styled pragmatists were reacting against, is what we would now call a representationalist theory,
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in which words name things, and the meaning of an assertion is given, fundamentally,
by the conditions under which it correctly represents its object. Beliefs or propositions correspond to or map onto the world, and are true if they get the world right and
false if they do not. Wittgenstein and the pragmatists can be seen as seeking to replace
such a theory with the view that (roughly) the meaning of an assertion is given, fundamentally, by the way we use it, especially as a basis for action. This sets them all
against any one-dimensional theory of meaning and it sets them against what we
might call any snapshot theory of meaning, which takes meaning to be fixed by a particular isomorphism. Think of the map metaphor. The picture theory of meaning in
the Tractatus held that an elementary sentence is a map of the atomic facts, something
like a snapshot of the landscape. We might think that on the later Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, the meaning of an expression is like a map we use for getting around
the landscape. But Wittgenstein did not think that the idea that meaning is use could
be captured in any one metaphor. He says for instance: ‘Asking whether and how a
proposition can be verified is only a special form of the question “How do you
mean?” ’ (PI: §353). There are many things we might do with words, expressions, or
propositions, and we need to be alert to all the uses, not just ones that let us get around
in the world.
Wittgenstein illuminates the relation between meaning and use by introducing the
notion of ‘language games’, which model the ‘process of using words’ in particular situations. The meaning of an expression is linked to the rules for its use. Such rules are
exemplified by the practices that are constitutive of them, and understanding them is a
matter of acquiring a technique, entering a custom, learning a practice. Wittgenstein
again extends his point even to mathematics:
This is how one calculates. Calculating is this. What we learn at school, for example. Forget this
transcendent certainty . . .
[OC: §47]
But while language may also be embedded in ‘the stream of thought and life’ (Z: §173)
or in our non-linguistic practices and our natural reactions and activities, it cannot be
reduced to such behaviours. For this would be, per impossible, to explain it in terms of
ends and purposes that are external to it.28 Language is autonomous (Z: §320), as are
the particular ‘games’ or practices that constitute it.
All this Peirce could have accepted, save Wittgenstein’s conclusion that such insights
preclude theorizing about meaning. Wittgenstein retains from the 1929–30 dispute
with Ramsey his severe opposition to theory:
we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place.
[PI: §109]
28
See Bakhurst (1995).
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Stephen Mulhall (2001: 42) thus argues that Wittgenstein’s talk about use, or ‘the life of
the sign’ (BB: 4), is really an alternative to talking about meaning, not a theory of
meaning at all. But if all theorizing and all explanation must disappear, to be replaced
by description, one might ask what that alternative might be. What could possibly be
left as a task for philosophy?
Wittgenstein’s answer is to take a therapeutic approach. The philosopher advances
no theses (PI: §128), but assembles ‘reminders for a particular purpose’ (PI: §127),
namely, to attain a ‘perspicuous representation’ or ‘a clear view of the use of our words’
(PI: §122). Once we have that clear view, no problems remain for us to solve. We ought
to be ‘capable of stopping doing philosophy’ (PI: §133), despite the ongoing yearning
to keep at it. Here we find a strong thread of continuity with the Tractatus, in which the
task of philosophy is ‘to demonstrate’ to the person who raises metaphysical problems
‘that he [has] failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (T: 6.53), and
thereby to dissolve the problems raised. In the Tractatus, that clarity was to come via
the logical analyst route—the philosopher must show how a sign stands for simple
objects, or else conclude that it is meaningless. In the later work, that clarity is to come
by examining the ordinary use of our expressions.
It might be thought that there is a continuity here also with Peirce and James, who
envisioned pragmatism as ‘a method only’ (P: 31). But Wittgenstein continued to
reject what he saw as the pragmatist project. For Wittgenstein does not believe that
pragmatism is a method only. We shall see that in his last work, On Certainty, he
distinguishes his position from pragmatism because pragmatism, he thinks, is a
Weltanschauung—a substantive philosophical theory or an ‘-ism’. As if in answer to
Wittgenstein, Peirce writes: ‘It will be seen . . . that pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung
but is a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear’ (CP 5. 13,
n. 1, c. 1902). One might not unreasonably conclude that, despite Wittgenstein’s
demurrals, he does indeed share a philosophical method or a low-profile theory with
the pragmatists, one which looks to the use of our concepts in actual practice to determine their meaning.
But Wittgenstein puts an obstacle in the way of that conclusion as well. He denies
even that we may speak of a single or general method: ‘There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were’
(PI: §133d). It is Wittgenstein’s treatment of method in terms of therapy, as opposed to
­inquiry, which signals the real meta-philosophical difference here. Wittgenstein never
­departed from the Tractarian view that philosophy, done properly, ‘just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything’ (PI: §126). Philosophy
‘leaves everything as it is’ (PI: §124). It looks as if there can be no philosophical inquiry
into anything. So while Wittgenstein’s remarks at times bear affinities to a pragmatism
that says that philosophical explanations must focus on the use of our concepts in
inquiry and life, Rorty may have been right in interpreting him as ultimately committed to a more radical position that attempts to bring philosophy to a close, and
replace it with therapy.
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This radical position would have been an outrage to Peirce, who held philosophy to
be a vital part of human inquiry aimed at truth. It would have been perhaps less of an
outrage, but still unacceptable to James, who, like Peirce, sought to quell only spurious
metaphysical disputes, not philosophy as a whole. And had Ramsey lived to see the full
development of Wittgenstein’s inclination to do away with philosophy, one can safely
say that he would have put even more distance between his position and Wittgenstein’s.
For we have seen that Ramsey, like Peirce, wanted philosophy to play a role in solving
real problems. He worried in the late 1920s that Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy was
a scholasticism akin to working out a system for standardizing our terms for colours of
beer. That this was a long-standing disagreement between the two is made clear by a
remark of Wittgenstein’s about Ramsey, made in the summer of 1929:
R does not comprehend the value I place on a particular notation any more than the value
I place on a particular word because he does not see that in it an entire way of looking at
the object is expressed; the angle from which I now regard the thing. The notation is the last
expression of a philosophical view.
[MS 105: 10–11]
We have seen that Wittgenstein in 1929–30 moved away from the idea of a strict notation as the last expression of a philosophical view. But he replaced what Ramsey saw as
a useless expression of a philosophical view (a notation) with the idea that we cannot in
any way express a philosophical view. All we can say is that we are immersed in a
­language game or form of life. We cannot say anything normative, anything by way of
a meta-philosophy, about those language games or forms of life. Or, perhaps more
­accurately, we can say whatever we like, but it will be nonsense.29 This is not quite the
same sense of nonsense as occurs in the Tractatus. For the later Wittgenstein thinks
that when we try to say something about forms of life we are expressing a confusion,
the final stage of our philosophical hankerings for explanation and theories where
none are required. We are, as James Conant puts it, over-reaching or trying to speak
‘outside language-games’ (Conant 1998: 250).
So the dispute between Ramsey and Wittgenstein would have continued, in that the
problem identified by Ramsey arises for the later Wittgenstein as well. The Philosophical
Investigations seems to be an investigation of language games, forms of life or practices,
and the way they shape our language-use and knowledge. But the substance of the
book undercuts its meaningfulness in the same way (though for different reasons
than) the substance of the Tractatus undercut its meaningfulness. Here again we also
seem to need to climb and then kick away a ladder. Here again we discover that philosophy cannot get us out of conceptual thickets, and we discover that via employing
philosophy, this time the philosophy of the Investigations. Why, Ramsey would have
asked, is normative philosophy a language game that must not be played? Why is the
philosophy that constitutes the Investigations not a theory or an approach to meaning,
29
I owe this way of putting the point to Steven Methven.
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alternative to the approach of the Tractatus? Ramsey, that is, would have been just as
unsatisfied with Wittgenstein’s later point about philosophical nonsense as with his
earlier one. He would have thought that Wittgenstein was engaged in reasoning about
meaning and the primacy of practice, fully engaged in the business of giving explanations and accounts, and so cannot pretend to be so radically deflationist.30
Here is but one of countless examples of this apparent contradiction, from the transitional period. In a meeting with the Vienna Circle, in which Wittgenstein decried
explanations, he asserted that axioms in mathematics are the rules according to which
we play the opening positions of the game we play (WVC: 119). But why not call that
an explanation, or indeed a theory, of what mathematical axioms are? What else might
it be if not that? Similarly, it is hard not to see Wittgenstein’s insights about meaning as
forming an explanation of what meaning is.
Indeed, to invoke a notion he employed to great effect (albeit in a different sense),
his position on meaning might be said to bear a ‘family resemblance’ to that of the
pragmatists. That resemblance can be summed up as follows. Wittgenstein and the
pragmatists think that to understand the meaning of an expression, we must look to its
use. But none of them thinks that this entails that meaning is identified with use.
Wittgenstein tells us in the next-to-last passage of the Tractatus that he is giving us
elucidations. Perhaps we might use this term to identify a certain kind of theory of
meaning. Elucidations are not steps of a ladder to be kicked away (as suggested in the
Tractatus) nor definitions that reduce or analyse or theorize the phenomenon away (as
Moore and the early Russell would have liked), but are a certain kind of explanation
that throws light on a phenomenon. We have seen that Wiggins has suggested this was
precisely Peirce’s method: we try to get a fix on a concept, or leverage on it, by showing
its engagement with our practices. If that is the contrast Wittgenstein is marking—the
contrast between reductive analysis and something like pragmatic elucidation—well
and good. It does not follow from the abandonment of the reductive project that one
has no theory at all. Wittgenstein himself had much to say that, while not amounting to
anything like a grand theoretical system, certainly can be described as a low-profile,
pragmatist sort of theory. One can read much of the rest of this chapter as trying to
­excavate that theory.
To place my interpretation of the later Wittgenstein in terms of a distinction that
Meredith Williams has made prominent, I think the ‘constructive’ reader makes the
best sense of Wittgenstein. The constructive reader sees Wittgenstein as criticizing one
theory (such as representationalist and reductive theories of language) and in doing so,
putting forward a new approach. Here ‘Wittgenstein’s thought is seen as continuous
with the philosophical tradition, though offering radically new theories’ (Williams
2010: 1). I have suggested that read constructively, Wittgenstein is a pragmatist of a
Peircean kind. But I suspect that Wittgenstein himself would have been in favour of the
‘resolute’ reader who ‘takes the style of arguing to be the central feature of Wittgenstein’s
30
See Horwich (2013: vii) for the use of this term to describe Wittgenstein’s approach.
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task, which is to change in a profound way our entire attitude towards the philosophical project’ (Williams 2010: 1). Here Wittgenstein’s aim is not to replace one theory
with another, but to get rid of theory altogether. If we read him resolutely, he is a different breed of pragmatist, the kind that Rorty has made popular. Indeed, on the resolute reading, we might think that Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, granted the
merit of Ramsey’s critique of the scholasticism of the Tractatus and moved entirely
over (too far over) to what Ramsey called the epistemic or subjective side. He became,
if you like, too extreme a pragmatist.
7.5 Truth
Wittgenstein’s remarks on truth have given rise to a number of conflicting interpretations. He employed one or another version of the equivalence truism—‘p’ is true
if and only if p—as early as 1914.31 That, combined with his focus on the diversity of
language games, has led Sabina Lovibond to portray him as arguing that language
is seamless or homogenous. Any meaningful sentence whatsoever describes reality.
Moral propositions and arithmetical propositions, for example, are as fact-stating as
any other kind of language, simply in virtue of being contentful and assertoric. Once
we drop all ‘invidious comparisons between different regions of discourse’, we are
led to a kind of pragmatist32 conception of truth for all propositions (Lovibond 1983:
25).33 Truth in ethics, as everywhere, consists in ‘conformity to the consensual standards of sound judgment’ (1983: 43), for ‘there is nothing else for it to be’ (1983: 42).
The pragmatist would indeed find this position congenial.
But as Blackburn notes against Lovibond, Wittgenstein frequently expressed a
dismissive and impatient attitude to the introduction of the idea of truth as
somehow containing the key to some or all of our language games. Wittgenstein
proposed and then retained throughout his life—particularly in the cases of ethics,
mathematics, and the ascriptions of mental states—‘a use of indicative sentences
that is not correctly thought of in terms of describing a truth or a fact, or of corresponding with a state of affairs’ (Blackburn 2010: 208). I have suggested that it is this
contrast between truth-as-correspondence and no-truth-at-all that has misled
many, Wittgenstein included. Be that as it may, Wittgenstein certainly was wary of
the concept of truth. Blackburn notes that Wittgenstein’s wariness leaves him
without a compelling answer to a looming problem: it is an obvious feature of
our language games that we use ‘true’ and ‘false’ ‘pretty promiscuously,’ leaving it
See N: 9, PI: §136, and RFM: Appendix §6.
She calls it ‘expressivist’, but contemporary usage has not gone that way; ‘expressivist’ is now firmly in
place as the view that some regions of discourse require pragmatist treatment and some do not.
33
Sara Ellenbogen (2003) also argues for a reading of Wittgenstein in which what makes it correct to call
a statement true is that we agree on the criteria whereby we call it true. She contrasts this position with a
different kind of pragmatism—the Peircean kind.
31
32
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unclear how Wittgenstein could maintain that ­discourses are not truth-apt without
radically revising our ordinary view of them (Blackburn 2010: 212).
Matters are not entirely cleared up when we turn to those places in which
Wittgenstein explicitly addresses the question of whether he is committed to a conception of truth and whether that conception might be of the pragmatist kind. One thing
we can say is that, no less than Russell, Moore, and Ramsey, he rejected what was
thought of as the Jamesian position on truth:
But you aren’t a pragmatist? No. For I am not saying that a proposition is true if it is useful.
[RPP I: §266]
If I want to carve a block of wood into a particular shape any cut that gives it the right shape is
a good one. But I don’t call an argument a good argument just because it has the consequences
I want (Pragmatism).
[PG: 185]
As Moyal-Sharrock puts it, Wittgenstein rejected pragmatism because he thought that
meaning is use, not usefulness (2004b: 171).
But I have argued that Wittgenstein glimpsed the existence of a more sophisticated—­
Ramseyan—pragmatism about truth, and that he was attracted to it. Indeed, in the
following passage, he registers the similarity between his view and the pragmatist
stance on truth:
‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’—What is true
or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is
agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.
[PI: §241]34
It appears that Wittgenstein thinks that human agreement determines what is true and
false because he, like the pragmatists, holds that we arrive at our beliefs as part of our
form of life, which we cannot step outside of in order to identify a transcendent standard
for the evaluation of our beliefs. Perhaps he is only set against the kind of pragmatism
that says that individual beliefs are true or false here and now because human agreement decides them to be so. We have seen that Peirce and Ramsey were also set against
that kind of pragmatism, yet Wittgenstein seems not to have wanted to explicitly adopt
their more sophisticated accounts.
He directly addresses pragmatism and truth in a more careful way in his
Cambridge Lectures of 1930–2. These were the years immediately after Ramsey’s
death, in which Wittgenstein was moving from the position in the Tractatus to that
expressed in his later philosophy. In 1931, he comments on some work of C. D. Broad,
34
Notice the similarity in structure to Ramsey’s idea in ‘General Propositions and Causality’ that the
Peircean account of truth holds not for statements of matters of fact, but for our system of belief.
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in which Broad gave the standard snappy summaries of the three rival theories of
truth.35 The notes taken by Wittgenstein’s students have him saying:
Broad suggested that there were three ‘theories of truth’, the Correspondence Theory, according
to which truth is the correspondence of judgement and fact, the Coherence Theory, according to
which truth is coherence with some system of other judgements, and the Pragmatic Theory,
according to which truth is what works.
[LC1: 75]
Wittgenstein takes exception to this way of carving up the philosophical landscape:
Philosophy is not a choice between different ‘theories’. It is wrong to say that there is any one theory of truth, for truth is not a concept. We can say that the word has at least three meanings; but
it is mistaken to assume that any one of these theories can give the whole grammar of how we use
the word, or to endeavour to fit into a single theory cases which do not seem to agree with it.
[LC1: 75]
Whether an application has a use in practice depends on the kind of life we lead. The pragmatic
criterion of the truth of a proposition is its usefulness in practice. But the person who says this
has in mind one particular use of ‘useful’: its use in the lab, say, to predict the future.
[LC2: 142]
These are important passages for understanding Wittgenstein’s relation to the pragmatist account of truth. Echoing Ramsey (who is echoing Peirce), Wittgenstein rejects the
idea that any theory of truth that reduces truth to what corresponds to the facts, or
what coheres with our other beliefs, or what is successful, will be viable. Our use of the
truth predicate involves all these notions and, since our task in working out the
meaning of ‘p is true’ is to examine its use, we must not try to cram all its functions into
a straightjacket theory. Peirce, Ramsey, and Wittgenstein each think that their own
views about truth preserve the central ideas of the various theories of truth, and preserve the truism ‘p is true iff p’.
In his remarks concerning Broad’s classification, Wittgenstein did not comment on
correspondence, except to say that ‘George V is King of England’ is an example of a
judgement that corresponds to a fact. But he did comment on the other two ‘theories’.
He suggests that in a court of law, it is the coherence theory that holds sway: ‘statements
are often taken as true if they are coherent with the rest of the facts, even though it may
not be possible to verify them’ (LC1: 75). His illustrations of the pragmatic theory, by
contrast, are taken from science. In science, a hypothesis’s being such that we can work
with it in practice is what counts for its truth:
The hypothesis that there are electrons is taken as being true because in practice you can work
as if it were the case. So also Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is accepted because it works in
35
MacIver tells us that Broad was giving such lectures in 1929 as well. Broad, he says ‘was criticising
Pragmatism, and that so unfairly that even I, who do not love the Pragmatists, was offended, and Cornforth,
who does not ordinarily take notes of lectures, filled his note-book with swear-words’ (MacIver: unpublished: 18).
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practice. Thus Euclidean space is used for everyday purposes, and relativity for immeasurable
and astronomical distances. To decide between them would need a great deal of empirical
evidence, and this is certainly the sense of truth we apply to them.
[LC1: 75]
Wittgenstein seems to be affirming in the above passage what he takes to be the pragmatist account of truth, in what he takes to be its proper place. Since different hypotheses work better or worse in different contexts, they are taken to be true in one context
and not in another. Euclidian space works for everyday purposes, and relativity theory
works for the long distances the physicist is interested in. That would be pretty close to
James’s view of truth, as he sometimes articulates it. But Wittgenstein’s last sentence
indicates that he might be tempted by a more Peircean pragmatist account of truth,
one that James, at his best, accepts as well. Once we had finished gathering a great deal
of empirical evidence, we could decide between our respective hypotheses. It is a
belief ’s really being workable in this way that amounts to truth.
This is on the surface compatible with (or even identical to) the general but notstrict analysis of truth offered to us by Peirce and Ramsey. But Wittgenstein concludes
his discussion of the three theories of truth by repeating that each conception of truth
has its place and that we must not aspire to a unified theory of truth:
But we do also use the word true of a ruler, which is a sense not ascribable to any of the other
examples given. Thus it is nonsense to try to find a theory of truth, because we can see that in
everyday life we use the word quite clearly and definitely in these different senses.
[LC1: 76]
The truth predicate is embedded in of our form of life—it is a concept that must be
analysed, and analysed variously, in terms of its use in the practices in which it is heavily implicated.
That is, the temperamental difference between Wittgenstein and the pragmatists
colours this issue as well. Wittgenstein always takes a piecemeal, non-general approach,
and is resistant to thinking of a unified account or theory of truth, even if that unity
arises out of, and is sensitive to, diverse practices. I suggest that on the more general,
unified pragmatist approach, one can still get the diversity that Wittgenstein wants.
Peirce happens to think most about how beliefs would work in the domains of science,
statistical inference, and mathematics. Holmes’s interest is in giving us an account of a
belief ’s working in law, and C. I. Lewis gives us an account of a belief ’s working in ethics.36 Ramsey gives us an account of how beliefs in generalizations, causal laws, and
counterfactual conditionals are evaluated as working or not. On the unified approach
to pragmatism, if any of these beliefs would cohere with our other beliefs, be responsive to the facts, and stand up to all the appropriate reasons and evidence, then they are
true. But what this looks like will differ from domain to domain.
36
See Misak (2013).
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Wittgenstein would perhaps reply that this would not count as a theory of truth
because it does not pretend to offer an understanding of the meaning of ‘p is true’
more fundamental than seeing all the various uses of it we employ. But this just is
the pragmatist theory of truth. That is, the pragmatist is in complete agreement
with Wittgenstein, except for not sharing his allergy to the word ‘theory’. The pragmatist argues that once we understand the uses of the truth predicate, we will
understand truth as something we aim at, and as the status a belief enjoys when it is
the best it could be. That is, the pragmatist bundles up all the uses of ‘true’ into some
general thoughts that then constitute the pragmatist theory of truth. Wittgenstein
is dead set against any such general view. But his own account is not so far off that of
the pragmatists. That he refuses to call it a theory, and hence refuses to call it pragmatism, is simply due to the contrast his earlier work provides. By ‘theory’, he means
the unifying pure system he thought he delivered in the Tractatus. But the fact that
it is possible to overreach in one’s theorizing—the fact that one can misconstrue the
aim of philosophy—does not prevent us from doing philosophy at all. It does not
prevent us from embracing what I have been calling a lower-profile theory that is
not over-ambitious, but recognizes the diversity of kinds of beliefs and domains
of inquiry.
7.6 Rule-Following, Privacy, and Behaviour
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had argued that, unlike the laws of science, the laws of
logic are rules that underpin yet transcend all descriptive discourse. In his later work,
he presents an opposing account of what a rule is. We shall see in §7.8 that his position
in On Certainty seems to be that the rules that govern our linguistic practice are not
transcendental, but are simply the presuppositions of our practices, adopted without
reasons. In the Investigations, he argues along similar lines. Our way of following a
rule is ultimately grounded not in independent reasons or in anything objective, but
merely in our practices of calling certain ways of going on correct or mistaken. And
those practices are not themselves further grounded. That, if you like, is the later
Wittgenstein’s metaphysics—or better, non-metaphysics—of rule-following. Only
within a language game can rules be objectively correct.
He sets out to answer the following ‘paradox’: ‘no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the
rule’ (PI: §201). A rule always outruns any finite set of actions, and so it seems that we
are never in a position of being able to judge whether someone is following the rule we
think they are following. Kripke (1982) famously read Wittgenstein as providing a
sceptical answer to the paradox. Suppose you have never added numbers greater than
50 before and you are asked to perform the computation ‘68 + 57’. We want to say that
you will apply the addition function as you have applied it before, and that you will
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calculate the correct answer to be ‘125’. But it could be that the rule of addition that you
have been following requires that, for input numbers greater than 50, you are to increase
the first number not by increments of 1, but by increments of 2, so that 68 + 57 = 182.
Nothing about your past practice justifies you in giving the answer 125 rather than
182. The problem is a variation on the problem of induction: nothing in past practice
determines future practice to go on in the same way. Indeed, Wittgenstein shows that
the problem is actually worse than that by putting pressure on the very idea of ‘the
same way’, questioning whether we really even understand what it is for different token
behaviours to count as compliant with a rule.
Another way of putting the argument is to question first-person private access to
mental states. For the rule-following argument applies in the first person as well. I am
never in a position of being able to judge whether I am following the rule I think I am
following. I do not have access to some private understanding of what I am doing
when I follow the rule of addition. I only have my past practice, which does not determine my future practice. Hence the connection to Wittgenstein’s argument against
the possibility of having a private language, a language in which words ‘are to refer to
what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations’ (PI: §243).
Such a language, Wittgenstein argued, would be unintelligible to both the ­outside
­observer and to the user of the language, for he would be unable to establish meanings
for its words. Wittgenstein thinks ‘it’s not possible to follow a rule “privately”; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing as following it’ (PI:
§202). Similarly, I cannot privately exhibit pain to myself in the way that I can publicly
exhibit it to others, for when I try to privately express it to myself, there are no criteria
at all for my ascription of pain. There are no criteria of correctness (PI: §258). The
phenomenologist or introspectionist is wrong to think that we have privileged access
to our inner states.
Notice the depth of the problems about meaning we’re landed in by the rule-­
following considerations. We cannot solve them by appeal either to public or to private
criteria. It seems that there is no rationale at all for our rules and meanings. Hence
Kripke’s sceptical reading of Wittgenstein. Notice also that there would be a rational
basis, indeed a foundation, if there were a language of the sort that appeared in the
Tractatus, the kind of language the later Wittgenstein repudiated, under pressure
from Ramsey. That pressure involved the charge that the primary or private language
is self-satisfied and useless. It also involved the worry that taking the primary language to be foundational leads to solipsism. One wishes that Ramsey had been
around to have had a conversation with the later Wittgenstein about what it is to
follow a rule. As it stands, we have only hints of how it might have gone. For instance,
in a draft table of contents for On Truth, Ramsey titles a chapter as follows: ‘5. The
Logic of Truth [= Inductive Logic]’ (Rescher and Majer 1991: xi). Like Peirce, he
thought that his account of induction, far from being in tension with the pursuit of
truth, was an integral part of it.
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At one point Wittgenstein gestures to how the debate might have unfolded:
F. P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a ‘normative science’.
I do not know exactly what idea he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to one
that dawned on me only later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words
with games, calculi with fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must
be playing such a game.—But if someone says that our languages only approximate to such
calculi, he is standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what
we were talking about in logic were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic
for a vacuum.
[PI: §81]
What dawned on Wittgenstein is that he in effect agreed with Ramsey that our language cannot be conceived of as logic, if that is taken to be a system of ideal rules
or calculi. That would be logic for a vacuum. Wittgenstein now wants none of that.
He now agrees with Ramsey that the idea that our linguistic behaviour aims to
approximate to a logically perfect language or that our words have any fixed atomic
meaning is illusory. The question is whether, once the logical analyst picture is left
behind, there is a solution to the sceptical problem that then rushes in. If there is no
ideal language that grounds our ordinary language, then what grounds rule-following
and meaning? In order to get past the paradox, Wittgenstein suggests that we need to
see the grounds for our rules and meanings not in a calculus or a certain fact, but in
the practice of a language game. That is, Wittgenstein tries to show us that the worries
about rule-following can be put to rest.
So Kripke’s idea that Wittgenstein’s response to the rule-following problems is a kind
of scepticism only makes sense if we acquiesce to the contrast that Wittgenstein gave
up, under the influence of Ramsey. We saw that Ramsey thought that once we focus on
a human normative logic, we have a solution to sceptical problems. Some habits are
better bases for action than others, and while we cannot ground those habits in something ideal and indubitable, we have a rough and ready human, fallible understanding
of what it is to employ them and evaluate them.
It may be that Wittgenstein would have contempt for such an answer as missing the
depth of the question. But such a response would be complicated by his thoughts about
‘criteria’37 or ‘grammar’, or logically sufficient evidence for the application of a concept.
Those thoughts appear in the Investigations and in the Blue Book, notes taken on his
lectures between 1933–5. He says in the latter:
It is part of the grammar of the word ‘chair’ that this is what we call ‘to sit on a chair’ . . . in the
same way to explain my criterion for another person’s having toothache is to give . . . an explanation concerning the meaning of the word ‘toothache’. When we learnt the use of the phrase
‘so-and-so has toothache’ we were pointed out certain kinds of behaviour of those who were said
to have toothache . . . Now one may go on and ask: ‘How do you know that he has got toothache
37
It is interesting that in that hurried note of Ramsey’s on Wittgenstein’s solipsism, he uses the word
‘criterion’.
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when he holds his cheek?’ The answer to this might be: ‘I say, he has toothache when he holds
his cheek because I hold my cheek when I have toothache’. But what if we went on asking:—
‘And why do you suppose that toothache corresponds to his holding his cheek just because
your toothache corresponds to your holding your cheek?’ You will be at a loss to answer
this question, and find that here we strike rock-bottom, that is we have come down to
conventions.
[BB: 24]
These conventions or criteria, according to Wittgenstein, are ‘defining’. The deepest we
can go (the rock-bottom) is a matter of convention.
Note that Wittgenstein also used the example of the chair in MS 107 in 1930, when he
was coming round to Ramsey’s view that beliefs issue in expectations. When he later
turns his attention to criteria, he rearticulates a version of the dispositionalist/pragmatist
idea: we cannot attribute a particular mental state to anyone—even to ourselves—unless
there is a way of independently verifying it by appeal to observable behaviour. That
verification is a matter of seeing whether the right criteria are employed. Like Ramsey,
Wittgenstein thinks that it is no good thinking of the mental state as a qualitative
feeling. We must look to behaviour.
But there is a significant difference between them. It is pretty clear that Ramsey
would have agreed with Wittgenstein that there is no determinate fact that constitutes
a rule or a mental state, and also that there is no determinate fact that entails that a
piece of behaviour represents following a given rule or the existence of a mental state.
But he would not have agreed with Wittgenstein that the bedrock is a matter of convention. At times Wittgenstein says that such conventions are techniques that we
adopt, not at our pleasure, but because they work. Mathematicians, for instance, do
not quarrel over the result of a calculation and ‘this is an important fact’ (PI: 226).
Having mastered the techniques, there is a kind of psychological certainty to be had.
That is a pragmatist thought that Peirce and Ramsey might accept. But for those criteria whose application cannot be clearly defined and agreed upon, Wittgenstein’s
position seems to entail that mere convention or community carries the rule or belief.
Ramsey would, I surmise, think that Kripke was right: Wittgenstein must be a sceptic
about meaning.38
The pragmatist agrees that convention is important. It summarizes the results of all
our inductively tested abductive inferences. But why is that summary or that background body of belief so vital? The pragmatist’s answer is that it enables successful
thought and action, broadly construed. Induction is vital in an inquiry aimed at truth
or at indefeasible beliefs. And those indefeasible beliefs will include beliefs about the
shape of our rules. We have seen that Peirce offers a solution to the problem of induction and, by extension, to the sceptical problems Wittgenstein presents concerning
38
Crispin Wright (1984) also reads Wittgenstein this way. Detractors include John McDowell (1984)
who argues that Wittgenstein’s ‘bedrock’ is a normative concept, and Baker and Hacker (1984) who argue
for a different kind of Wittgensteinian normativity: to understand a rule is to grasp an ‘internal relation’
between a rule and its potential extension, and is thus a technique or ability.
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rule-following and knowledge of mental states. Actual behaviour does not determine
between (i) for any numbers x and y, the answer to x + y is equal to x and y, taken
together and (ii) for any numbers x and y, the answer to x + y is equal to x and y, taken
together, except for values of x and y greater than 67 trillion, in which case the answer
is equal to 0. Nonetheless, we have in our current best system, all sorts of beliefs about,
for instance, the stability of our addition function. So we are justified in believing (i),
which has worked and fit with other things we believe, and, we bet, will continue to do
so. If such rules fail to be reliable, we will reassess.
The pragmatist thus tries to meet the sceptical challenge as follows. The empirical
evidence does not fully determine rules, but only on a conception of philosophy
where we seek full determination or full certainty does that pose a sceptical problem.
Our fallible beliefs and rules have been put in place by a thus-far-reliable method—
one that invokes fallible inferences to the best explanation. Thus, they are not arbitrary. While rules outrun the evidence for them, just as open generalizations outrun
the evidence, we can, nonetheless, evaluate them. They are habits with which we meet
the future and they are evaluated in terms of whether they are successful or not, a success that will be linked to the facts. This is not an answer that would have made the
early Wittgenstein happy. That is of course fine, for Wittgenstein rightly turns his
back on his early position. But interestingly, it is also not the answer that would have
made the later Wittgenstein happy. For the rock-bottom, for the pragmatist, is not
­convention, but reliability.
The question then arises for Ramsey scholars whether Ramsey thought that only
some or all beliefs are to be assessed in terms of their reliability. We have seen that
Holton and Price take him to hold that only some beliefs, such as generalizations and
beliefs about causal laws, are rules with which we meet the future. They take him to
be an expressivist about generalizations and laws. In contrast to propositions in the
ordinary empirical domain, these beliefs must in the first instance be treated as
expressions of non-cognitive attitudes. They are mere commitments for meeting the
future. My reading of Ramsey has him ultimately arriving at the view that we must
not found our semantics on the idea of a class of indicative fact-stating propositions
against which to contrast these disputed classes. All our truth-aimed beliefs are
­habits or rules with which we meet the future. Ramsey holds that every belief
entails the following of a habit, but, as we saw, different kinds of habits are tools we
use for doing different kinds of things. Our evaluation of these habits and of whether
we are correctly following them will differ across different domains. Of course, a
distinction between ordinary empirical judgements and other kinds of judgements
survives, for these are distinguishable kinds of beliefs. But this distinction, seen
through a pragmatist lens, will not track the distinction between factual and nonfactual, or cognitive and non-cognitive, domains of judgements. Indeed, we have
seen that Ramsey thought the question of which kinds of belief are cognitive and which
are not to be one of the principal problems for philosophy, and his best, prematurely
ended, effort answered it by arguing that there is no significant distinction of
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this sort—no ‘bifurcation’—between, for instance, beliefs about the good and beliefs
about middle-sized dry goods.
We have also seen that Ramsey was echoing Peirce when he called logic a normative s­ cience. If one fails to understand that, then one fails to read PI: §81 correctly.
Edward Minar, for instance, says that Wittgenstein’s remark is one made against
Ramsey: that Wittgenstein is taking exception to the notion that meaning is ‘fixed or
justified by the sort of pre-existing, independent standards that the ideal suggested
by Ramsey’s slogan is designed to provide’ (2011: 277). But that is not what Ramsey
meant by ‘logic is a normative science’, and Wittgenstein would have known that. In
Peirce’s elaboration of the idea, logic is self-controlled reasoning. As Ramsey saw,
‘Logic is, as Peirce sayd [sic], self-control’ (NPPM: 227). It is concerned with criticism, not with mere description and explanation of what happens. But this criticism
need not—indeed, must not—involve an appeal to non-human, transcendent ideals.
Logic is the study of a particular kind of conduct, and what is normative about it is
that tries to find habits of reasoning and inference that do not lead us astray. Ramsey’s
elucidation of Peirce’s idea that logic is a normative science is that logic must be a
human logic.
The later Wittgenstein agrees. While we might wish to account for our practices as
approximations to calculi with fixed rules, we cannot. There is nothing necessary about
our adopting one way of going on as opposed to another. There is no perfect model to
which we may compare our actions. That quest for perfection was part of the quest
in the Tractatus, and it was one of the things Ramsey objected to so vociferously.
Neither Ramsey, nor the later Wittgenstein, nor any pragmatist, thinks that the rules
we follow are such that they ‘never let a doubt creep in, but stop up all the gaps’ (PI:
§84). What it is to follow a rule is not a matter of our linguistic practices being fixed in
some timeless way, justified by some pre-existing independent standard.
But, I suggest, Ramsey provides a better answer than Wittgenstein to the question
about how we can tell which rule we are following. For Wittgenstein, the ultimate
foundation is ungrounded convention. Ramsey would have argued that we can ground
our rule-following-ascriptions by appeal to what the rule-follower says and does under
various circumstances, and that we can make sense of evaluating a rule by seeing how
well it allows the rule-follower to navigate those circumstances. Ramsey would have it
that what it is to follow a rule is to adopt behaviour that seems to accord with a way of
going on (a way of meeting the future) and that we evaluate the rule by seeing if it
serves us well as the future unfolds. That does not give us certainty that we are indeed
following a particular rule, but again, the pragmatist decries such a quest for certainty.
What we are after in the individuation and evaluation of our rules is not a guarantee,
but rather, a reliable endorsement of their efficacy or success, construed appropriately.
Methven provides an account of Ramsey, Wittgenstein, and rule-following that proceeds along lines similar to my own. He sets out Wittgenstein’s questions as follows.
What could we possibly be asking for when we ask whether there are better or worse ways
of organizing our linguistic and inferential practices? How might one correct someone
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for having gone wrong according to a rule? Do psychological laws govern one’s use of
an expression or one’s following of a rule? Methven argues that for Ramsey, ‘implicit
knowledge of those laws is evidenced by explicit knowledge of how one would react or
what one would say in some hypothetical situation’ (2015: 234). He too reads Ramsey’s
answer to Wittgenstein as a certain kind of pragmatist response. The very notion of
inquiry is underwritten by an assumption that long enough investigation will yield a
‘true’ scientific system which is uniquely determined (2015: 236). Methven argues that
‘Given such an end, it would seem that there would be better or worse rules we might
adopt for governing our practices of induction and assertion’ (2015: 236). The question
is: ‘which rules we ought to follow, which psychological laws or dispositions would be
the best or correct laws or dispositions for us to develop in respect of our talk and
thought’ (2015: 235)? I think Methven is on the whole right,39 although I am not in
favour of invoking the ‘true scientific system’, but rather, I would appeal to the idea that
we evaluate rules in light of whether they fulfil our values in inquiry—values that
­include successful prediction and action, coherence with other well-grounded beliefs,
elegance, simplicity, and so on.
Both Wittgenstein and Ramsey think that to conclude that someone is following
a rule, all we can do is examine their behaviour. No fact, no intention, constitutes
the correctness of a rule-following ascription. But Wittgenstein seems to think that
ascriptions that someone is following a rule are only justified within a convention that
is not obviously evaluable, whereas Ramsey thinks that we can evaluate our behaviour
and practices. This difference will only be amplified in what follows.
7.7 Religion, Ethics, and Forms of Life
We have seen that between 1929 and 1931, Wittgenstein rejected the logical analyst
picture, giving rise to a number of deep questions. For instance, without the security of
a logical calculus, we must ask whether rule-following is backed by anything. But while
Wittgenstein was on the whole eager to explore such implications of the abandonment
of his old picture, he was reluctant to let go of one particular part of it. In the Tractatus,
religion, ethics, and what is meaningful in life were never to be part of the elementary
calculus; nonetheless, they had a kind of special status. Wittgenstein continues, in his
later philosophy, to attempt to build a protective fence around these domains.
We have also seen that when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, Ramsey
peppered him with objections to what he saw as Wittgenstein’s incoherent attempt
to say or at least gesture at what he himself insisted cannot be said. Ramsey was
39
Another difference (besides the one discussed in the text) is as follows. Methven thinks that Ramsey
doesn’t take counterfactual claims to be truth-functional or fact-stating. I too think Ramsey rejects a truthfunctional account of counterfactuals—they aren’t truth-functions of atomic propositions. That’s because
he thinks that no proposition is a truth-function of atomic propositions. But I think that on his pragmatist
account of how to evaluate the truth of propositions, counterfactuals can be evaluated and hence are
truth-apt.
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joined by others, whom Wittgenstein certainly took less seriously. Julian Bell, for
­instance, put his objections in verse form, published in The Venture in February 1930.
Bell’s ‘An Epistle’ is subtitled ‘On the Subject of the Ethical and Aesthetic Beliefs of Herr
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Doctor of Philosophy) to Richard Braithwaite ESQ, MA (Fellow
of King’s College)’. He had initially planned to address the poem to Ramsey, but
Ramsey had died as he was finishing it.40 Its theme is Wittgenstein’s ‘line of argument’
with respect to values. I reproduce a slice of it:
On the world’s walls the fluttering values beat –
Like drunken mot’rists skidding down a street –
Unknown, touched, tasted, heard, smelled, undescried,
The values ring the bell, but stay outside.
All statements men can make, or false or true,
Have facts for predicate, and object too.
All this admitted, it were clearly seen
That statements about value nothing mean.
…
For he talks nonsense, and he statements makes
Forever his own vow of silence breaks:
Ethics, aesthetics, talks of day and night,
And calls things good or bad, and wrong or right.
The universe sails down its charted course,
He smuggles knowledge from a secret source:
A mystic in the end, confessed and plain,
He’s the old enemy returned again;
Knowing by his direct experience
What is beyond all knowledge and all sense.
[McGuinness 2012b: 175–6]
One of Bell’s objections is not so different from Ramsey’s: Wittgenstein cannot help
but break his own vow of silence, or make statements that are self-confessed nonsense.
Bell adds the less philosophical objection that Wittgenstein is the return of the moralistic conservative, whose Victorian values were thought to have been replaced by
something much more freeing. Wittgenstein was always quick to point out the irreverence and flippancy of others,41 and it’s unsurprising that he thought Bell more
lacking in reverence than Ramsey. He scorned the Apostles as ‘all those Julian Bells’
(McGuinness 2006: 26).
I have been drawing some parallels between Wittgenstein and the pragmatists, parallels that I argue survive Wittgenstein’s wariness about pragmatism’s orientation
­toward epistemology, inquiry, and theorizing. But there was one part of the pragmatist
corpus of which Wittgenstein was not wary. He was a spiritual man, and James’s idea
40
41
Stansky and Abrahams (2012: 142).
MacIver notes that he thought Cornforth ‘flippant’ (unpublished: 80).
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that religious experience could give us flashes of insight attracted him. As Russell
Goodman has argued, Wittgenstein admired James as a deep thinker, one who could
see the profound problems of philosophy (2002: 62–3). Wittgenstein, as always,
pulls no punches:
Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called ‘loss of
problems’. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any
more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes
­immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.
[Z: §456]
We have seen that Wittgenstein sometimes counted Ramsey among the shallow
­philosophers who do not feel the force of the deep problems. But he thought that
James was different. In 1912, during Wittgenstein’s first stay in Cambridge, he wrote
to Russell:
Whenever I have time I now read James’s ‘Varieties of religious exp’. This book does me a lot of
good. I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve
me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me
to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the 2nd part of Faust).
[McGuinness 2012b: 30]
Wittgenstein thought that James’s writing on religious experience was good for his
soul—good for helping to humanize him and for dealing with his despair.42 Many years
later Wittgenstein commended Varieties to his friend Maurice Drury as ‘a book that
helped me a lot at one time’ (Drury 1981: 121).
Wittgenstein thought ‘James is a rich source, not for the philosophy of psychology
but for the psychology of philosophers’.43 He thought James was on to something profound. He told Drury that one must not try to ‘give some sort of philosophical justification of Christian beliefs, as if some sort of proof was needed’ (Drury 1981: 117).
The beauty of religions is grounded not in their accurately describing reality, but in
their role as ‘the ways in which people express their religious feelings’. We have seen
that this was one of James’s arguments in ‘The Will to Believe’, and that in The Varieties
of Religious Experience, he followed this line further, exploring in detail the significance of religious ideas in personal life.
In the Tractatus. Wittgenstein regarded religion, together with ethics, aesthetics,
and all matters of value, as ‘transcendental’ (T: 6.421). They go beyond the world:
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value.
[T: 6.41]
42
It also did him some philosophical good. As Arif Ahmed pointed out to me, James anticipates the
Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblance. See VRE: 30–1.
43
MS 165: 182. See Glock (forthcoming) for the translation.
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His position had not changed in 1929. In that year, he presented a short paper to
the Heretics Society titled ‘A Lecture on Ethics’. It was an odd venue for the talk, for the
Heretics Society was a group founded by Ogden to challenge religion. Nonetheless,
the lecture drew a large crowd. MacIver noted after the talk: ‘Wittgenstein made a magnificent speech—though there was little in it that was not in the “Tractatus”—though it
was wasted on the Heretics, who cannot appreciate religious feeling’ (unpublished: 31).
In it, Wittgenstein reiterated the idea that ethical matters cannot be stated in words, as
they go beyond the facts: ‘Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will
only express facts’ (1965: 7). And he made it even clearer that he took ethics to be a
broad category:
Now instead of saying ‘Ethics is the enquiry into what is good’ I could have said Ethics is the
enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is
the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way
of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that
Ethics is concerned with.
[1965: 5]
When we try to express truths about any of these matters we misuse words. Thus
Wittgenstein in 1929 was still in the grip of the contrast so prominent in the logical
analyst stance. He imagines his opponent to be one who says that we simply ‘have not
yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and
religious expressions’ (1965: 11). Both he and pragmatist would reply that if that’s what
is being sought, we won’t get it for ethical matters. The pragmatist would say that to aim
at a logical analysis is to seek an unattainable, fanciful dream. There are more appropriate, more realistic, things we should aim for in r­ eflecting on our ethical judgements.
Wittgenstein would say that as philosophers, we can’t even say that.
At times, he seems unable to live up to his quietism. In December 1930, Wittgenstein
reports Schlick saying that in theological ethics, there are two conceptions of ‘the
essence of the good’. One is that the good is good because it is what God wants, and the
other is that God wants the good because it is good. Wittgenstein thinks that:
the first interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is good. For it cuts
off the way to any explanation ‘why’ it is good, while the second interpretation is the shallow,
rationalist one, which proceeds ‘as if ’ you could give reasons for what is good . . . If there is any
proposition expressing precisely what I think, it is the proposition ‘What God commands, that
is good.’
[WVC: 115]
That sounds like an explanation of the good. But he demurs:
Is value a particular state of mind? Or a form attaching to some data or other of consciousness?
I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was
false but because it was an explanation. If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say,
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No, no! That does not interest me. Even if this theory were true, it would not interest me—it
would not be the exact thing I was looking for.
[WVC: 116]
On Wittgenstein’s view, ‘What is ethical cannot be taught . . . Here there is nothing to be
stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first
person’ (WVC: 117).
This idea, of course, is found in the Tractatus. What is different is that he starts to
buttress it by appeal to the further ideas of God and ethical and religious stances or
forms of life. In 1939–40, he gave a course of lectures on these topics, the student notes
of which were later published as Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology,
and Religion. In them, we again find the Tractarian idea that similarities in surface
grammatical between religious and factual statements mislead us into believing that
these two kinds of expressions are fundamentally similar. In religious discourse, ‘we
use such expressions as: “I believe that so and so will happen.” ’ But Wittgenstein argues
that we ‘use them differently to the way in which we use them in science’ (LAPR: 57).
We can be certain about religious matters, quite apart from questions of evidence. For,
in religious controversies:
Reasons look entirely different from normal reasons. They are, in a way, quite inconclusive. The
point is that if there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business. Anything that
I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence me.
[LAPR: 56]
Religious doctrines ‘are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions’ (LAPR: 57).
The attitude that licenses us in accepting them is ‘faith’ or taking them as ‘dogma’
(LAPR: 57). For the meaning of religious and ethical expressions, and the significance of our religious and ethical practices, are grounded in their role in our lives.
While this idea is less elusive than what we find about ethics in the Tractatus, it is still
a little hard to come to grips with. Contrary to appearances, religious terms do not
refer to entities, and religious explanations of events are not causal. Neither are religious stories historical narratives. Rather, religious beliefs are ‘pictures’ that we can
make use of in our lives. Since ‘[p]ractice gives the words their sense’ (CV: 97), to
embrace religious belief is:
(something like) passionately committing oneself to a system of coordinates. Hence although
it’s belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of judging life.
[CV: 73]
An ethical stance is an individual, personal response to the world.
While all this shows James’s strong influence, the epistemological cast of James’s
arguments cannot have pleased Wittgenstein. Part of the argument of ‘The Will to
Believe’ centres on whether we are justified in believing in God, given the dearth of
evidence. We have seen that in Varieties James takes religious belief to be subject to
revision in light of a certain kind of perceptual experience. And as important as he found
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James’s exploration of ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude’ (VRE: 34; italics removed), it is hard to believe Wittgenstein had sympathy
with the optimism one can find in James’s pragmatism. James writes:
Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a
better promise as to this world’s outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is
this meliorism.
[P: 63]
The idea that a philosophical method might aim at progress or meliorism was
anathema to Wittgenstein. His outlook ‘was typically one of gloom’.44
Wittgenstein places himself in the Jamesian context (not addressing James
specifically):
Life can educate you to ‘believing in God’. And experiences too are what do this but not
visions, or other sense experiences, which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but e.g. sufferings of various sorts. And they do not show us God as a sense experience does an object,
nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts,—life can force this
concept on us.
[CV: 97]
Although there is much here with which James would agree, the crucial difference is
that Wittgenstein does not think of God’s existence as a hypothesis, confirmable or
disconfirmable by any kind of empirical evidence. If experience has a role in religious
commitment, Wittgenstein construes this role as merely causal, not epistemic. In committing to a religion, we adopt a way of living without basing its adoption on evidence.
Hence he thinks it is wrong-headed to inquire, as James inquires in Varieties, into the
merits of the evidence that supports belief in God’s existence. Accepting God’s existence is a matter of ‘shaping’ one’s life a certain way (CV: 97), but the decision to do so is
not based on reasons, practical or evidential.
Wittgenstein is thus a kind of fideist—someone who takes religion and reason to be
independent of, and perhaps even hostile to, each other. The scientist and the religious
person operate in ‘entirely different ways of thinking’ (LAPR: 55). The scientist is
immersed in a language game in which reasons are given, and where empirical success
counts for (and its absence counts against) the truth of a belief, while the religious
person is not. Hence, if you ask what grounds or evidence someone has for a religious
commitment, you have asked a wrong-headed question. Evidence is not the sort of
thing r­ equired in order to justify religion. Religious ‘belief ’ is something like a passionate, individual commitment to a way of life. We cannot, and hence, must not, look
for a further justification of it.
Braithwaite put forward a not dissimilar view in his 1955 Eddington Memorial
Lecture, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief. He asked whether religious
44
Von Wright (1955: 543). See also McGuinness (1988: 292ff.).
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belief is meaningful, noting that God is not directly observable and that the hypothesis
of God’s existence is not a refutable scientific explanation of empirical facts in the
world. We have seen that he was inclined in the direction of emotivism in ethics, and in
An Empiricist’s View he argues that religious statements are like moral statements in
that they are ‘declarations of adherence to a policy of action, declarations of commitment to a way of life’ (1955: 15). The upshot is that our practice of making indicative
statements is bifurcated, with religious and moral ways of life being expressions of an
individual commitment, protected from criticism that might arise out of experience.
Wittgenstein, although not concerned in his later work with how the empiricist might
hold onto religious belief, was more or less on the same page.
Here difficult questions begin to press in on Wittgenstein. On his account, why
should one adopt any particular form of life? Does the adoption of one way of life
­instead of another really admit of no rational support at all? And if so, does that
not make all forms of life equally worthwhile, even those that are depraved?
Wittgenstein addresses a question like this in On Certainty. His answer, I think,
should trouble us:
why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore
and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one?
I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of
a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.
[OC: §92]
Wittgenstein’s position seems to be more radical than James’s. It is also less obviously
coherent. For how can someone—a king, a believer in a god—maintain an unswerving
commitment to his own belief while acknowledging that others are just as irrevocably
committed to their incompatible forms of life, without any irrationality on their parts?
To take the religious case, if the picture of God’s grace is to uplift me, I cannot believe
that it is merely a picture. I cannot think that there is in fact nothing that my redemption consists in, except perhaps in producing a mood by the use of a metaphor. One
wants to ask, moreover: a metaphor for what?
The worry can be put more concretely by way of analogy.45 If one throws one’s support behind a football team, one receives various practical and emotional benefits:
a football fan has his emotions evoked when watching the sport, he feels a part of a
community of fans, and he experiences solidarity with others through cheering or
commiserating together at matches. And of course a fan can maintain an unswerving
commitment to his team, and be uplifted by it, while acknowledging that other fans
are just as irrevocably committed to different teams, without any irrationality on their
parts. But Wittgenstein is more serious about religion than that. Indeed, advocates of
Wittgensteinian fideism will complain that such analogies only reveal a missing of the
point and a hollowness of spirit. But now, once again, we cannot avoid the deep tension
45
I owe the analogy to Griffin Klemick.
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in Wittgenstein’s view. If our ‘beliefs’—ethical, religious, or otherwise—are mere commitments to a chosen or inherited form of life, and if we could just as well have ended
up with another form of life, why should we feel so strongly about them?
This question is one that the pragmatist of Wittgenstein’s sort has to address. It is a
question about where to draw the boundaries of a community or a form of life. It is
not so pressing a question for Peirce and Ramsey (and their successors C. I. Lewis
and Donald Davidson). They argue that everyone with whom we can talk, disagree,
and so forth must be thought of as a member of the community of inquirers. Indeed,
they argue that any particular disagreement makes sense only against a background
of agreement. Their concern for truth and objectivity leads them to use this premise
to argue that, since we can meaningfully disagree about questions with anyone we
can recognize in the most minimal sense as another rational agent, the class of those
we perceive as members of our most basic form of life must be no narrower than the
class of those we perceive as rational agents. James and Wittgenstein (and their successor Richard Rorty), on the other hand, sometimes suggest that a form of life is a
much more finely individuated thing, something in which epistemic agents agree
only contingently. But then they cannot avoid the conclusion that, at least possibly,
we could recognize other rational agents with whom we could not enter into dialogue and inquire about a shared question—agents who could think and act differently from us, without any shared reasons bearing on the question of which way of life
is better to adopt. Any pragmatist who would demarcate forms of life in this pluralist
way must face the question of how we might individuate them and how we might
evaluate them. In addition to these worries, I have argued that the practical implications of such pluralism are d
­ isastrous for a shared life in that ‘each to his own’ leads to
‘might is right’ (Misak 2000).
At least on occasion, Wittgenstein suggests that we can view the whole of human
language-use and the activities that constitute it as a single, unified language game. In
the German text of PI: §7, he says that he shall call the whole of our linguistic activity
‘das “Sprachspiel” ’, suggesting that there is only one language game.46 Schulte (2010)
thus reads him as suggesting that a form of life is a biological notion, signifying a form
in which the life of the human race finds expression. There is but one basic human
community, with different ways of going about one’s life within it. We have seen that
at other times he is clear that by reflecting on different language games, we come to
­appreciate the diversity of language and the myriad ways that words can have or lack
meaning. This question of what kind of pragmatist Wittgenstein is—‘one community’
or ‘many’—will continue to press in on him as we turn to his thoughts about doubt
and certainty.
46
Hacker and Schulte, in their translation, render the phrase ‘a “language-game” ’. Anscombe, by contrast,
renders it ‘the “language-game” ’ in the third edition. I’m indebted here to Griffin Klemick. See also MoyalSharrock (2004a), who argues that, for Wittgenstein, our foundations are related to our biological form
of life.
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7.8 On Doubt and Certainty
Wittgenstein’s last philosophical endeavour was titled On Certainty, and it is his
most strikingly pragmatist work. It was put together postumously from notes, as
was much of Ramsey’s work. But unlike Ramsey, Wittgenstein was sharply aware
that this was to be his last philosophical effort. He knew that he was dying from
cancer, and at the end of February 1951, he gave up his treatments and declared:
‘I am going to work now as I have never worked before.’47 On 16 April, he wrote
to Malcolm:
An extraordinary thing has happened to me. About a month ago I suddenly found myself in
the right frame of mind for doing philosophy . . . It’s the first time after more than 2 years that
the curtain in my brain has gone up.
[McGuinness 2012b: 479]
At the heart of On Certainty lies what amounts to a Peircean account of belief and
doubt, one that links belief and knowledge to action that does not let one down. We
have seen that in the 1930 MS 107, when Wittgenstein was setting out how one might
be a pragmatist about truth, he said:
Is it possible that everything I believe to know for sure—such as that I had parents, that I have
brothers and sisters, that I am in England—that all this should prove to be false? That is, could
I ever acknowledge any evidence as sufficient to show this?
[MS 107]
In On Certainty Wittgenstein returns to this pragmatist theme with renewed and final
focus.
In the late 1920s and the 1930s, Moore had lectured on the question of what we can
know with certainty and Wittgenstein had engaged with him on the issue. Of special
interest to Wittgenstein was Moore’s purported proof of an external world. He now
returned to those matters, rereading Moore’s two papers in defence of common sense.
On Certainty is an attack on Moore’s way of answering the important question he had
posed: what is the status of our ordinary, common-sense beliefs? Wittgenstein thinks
that Moore cannot help himself to the conclusion that the existence of the external
world, the existence of other minds, the reality of time, and so on are proved because
they are common sense. Wittgenstein does not want to prove, from the fact that he
cannot doubt that his hand is before his eyes and that the external world exists, that
he does have a hand and that it is before his eyes. Such indubitable beliefs have a special
status, but it is not that they are proved to be true.
It is important to see that Wittgenstein, Moore, James, and Peirce all agree on a substantial point. They all want to defend our holding, with some kind of certainty, the
beliefs we cannot doubt. We saw in §4.5 that Moore criticizes James’s version of this
thesis, yet offers a not-too-dissimilar account of how we are justified in believing to be
47
See Monk (1990: 577).
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true all sorts of things that we do not doubt. Wittgenstein now criticizes Moore, yet
offers a not-too-dissimilar account of how we do not doubt all manner of propositions.
All four great philosophers agree on a fundamental pragmatist insight (one that Hume,
properly read, also had): we do and must act on our body of undoubted belief and, as
Peirce put it, it is spurious to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt
in action.
An allied shared point is that in order for doubt to be real, we need grounds for it. We
saw how Peirce argued that ungrounded doubts are ‘tin’ or ‘paper’ doubts. Here is
Wittgenstein’s echo:
But what about such a proposition as ‘I know I have a brain’? Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt
are lacking! Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it.
[OC: §4]
Wittgenstein adds another of the essentials of Peircean pragmatism: no attempt to
­revise human knowledge can start from scratch, aspiring to establish knowledge on an
indubitable foundation of certain belief. He describes knowledge as ‘an enormous system’ (OC: §410), and the question whether to hold or to abandon a particular part of it
makes sense only against accepting the rest of it, most of which cannot at the same time
be called into question. Wittgenstein says: ‘A doubt that doubted everything would not
be a doubt’ (OC: §450). Doubt must be not only properly motivated, it must be purposeful: ‘A doubt without an end is not even a doubt’ (OC: §625).
So, for Wittgenstein, as for all the pragmatists, we can only doubt a particular belief
against a background of undoubted belief that we are prepared to act upon. In what
amounts to a nice summary of the pragmatist position on this matter, he says:
the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are e­ xempt
from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic
of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
[OC: §§341–2]
We again have the idea that it is the deed that is telling. Wittgenstein’s thought here is
not too far from Ramsey’s point that we need to look at a person’s actions to see what
she really believes. As Wittgenstein puts it, when I say that I know something, I ‘shall
act with a certainty that knows no doubt, in accordance with my belief ’ (OC: §360).
Belief and knowledge are tied to action:
‘I know all that.’ And that will come out in the way I act and in the way I speak about the things
in question.
[OC: §395]
If I say ‘I know that that’s a foot’—what am I really saying? Isn’t the whole point that I am certain of the consequences—that if someone else had been in doubt I might say to him ‘you
see—I told you so’? Would my knowledge still be worth anything if it let me down as a clue in
action?
[OC: §409]
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Peirce had Descartes in mind as a foil, but Wittgenstein had his earlier self in the
Tractatus and the Vienna Circle as examples of how not to think of the grounding of
our knowledge. In the alternative pragmatist picture—set out so explicitly by Peirce
and, consciously or not, adopted by Wittgenstein in On Certainty—we must start from
where we find ourselves, already possessed of an interconnected body of belief upon
which we act, and against which we assess new evidence and potential beliefs.
In one of the passages above, and throughout On Certainty, Wittgenstein speaks of
some propositions having the special status of being hinges on which other propositions turn. It is not perfectly clear how, or even the extent to which, he distinguishes
these hinge propositions from the mass of propositions that form our background
body of belief, which are also exempt from doubt. At times, he speaks of hinge propositions as including very particular indexical and empirical claims such as ‘This is my
hand’ (OC: §§412–14), ‘I have never been to Asia Minor’ (OC: §419), and ‘I am in
England’ (OC: §§420–1). He sometimes says that these propositions ‘lie apart from the
route travelled by enquiry’ (OC: §88). They are ‘removed from the traffic’ or ‘shunted
into an unused siding’ (OC: §210), suggesting that some beliefs are in the traffic or not
shunted off to the siding. Some beliefs, that is, are up for grabs in inquiry, and others
are not. That would seem to be in direct conflict with Peirce’s fallibilist thought that any
of our beliefs, including the regulative assumptions of inquiry, could find themselves
subject to doubt. At least, it seems a contradiction if Wittgenstein meant to suggest that
those beliefs removed from the traffic could never return to it. But barring that reading
for the moment (we shall return to it later), Wittgenstein’s thought here is close to
Peirce’s: what we do not doubt in our hearts and actions, we must not try to doubt in
our philosophy.
But sometimes Wittgenstein uses a metaphor straight out of the Tractatus that suggests that hinge propositions are not particular empirical claims, but rather, they have
a special and general status that makes them serve as ‘the scaffolding of our thoughts’
(OC: §211) or our ‘frame of reference’ (OC: §83). In the Tractatus, the propositions said
to comprise the scaffolding were ‘logical’ or such that they show the ‘necessary features
of sign use’ (T: 6.124). The scaffolding metaphor in On Certainty seems to indicate
something like that kind of certainty—something of a very different nature from
claims such as ‘I am in England.’ For Wittgenstein also uses the phrases ‘grammatical
proposition’ (OC: §58) or ‘norm of description’ (OC: §321), and these seem significantly different from the kind of empirical hinge proposition listed above. Grammatical
propositions define the rules by which language games are to be played. They include
definitions (analytic and ostensive), such as ‘Every rod has a length’ (PI: §251); exemplifications; mathematical propositions; and remarks about the ‘geometry’ of colour,
such as ‘Nothing can be red and green all over.’ The certainty of such propositions is
guaranteed by their role as rules of the language.48
48
See Glock (1996: 152) for a good discussion of the types of grammatical proposition.
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Wittgenstein wonders whether the difference between grammatical and ordinary
undoubted propositions might be fluid:
Isn’t what I am saying: any empirical proposition can be transformed into a postulate—and
then becomes a norm of description. But I am suspicious even of this. The sentence is too general. One almost wants to say ‘any empirical proposition can, theoretically, be transformed . . . ’,
but what does ‘theoretically’ mean here? It sounds all too reminiscent of the Tractatus.
[OC: §321]49
That is, Wittgenstein sees that he is edging up to his abandoned position, and so he
tries to resist any effort to distinguish empirical hinges from ones that seem like postulates or rules of language.50
Another issue on which Wittgenstein is elusive is as follows. Whatever comprises
the category of hinge propositions, it remains unclear just how Wittgenstein wants us
to understand the kind of certainty he identifies for them. At times he seems to adopt
an unfortunate infallibilist position about any proposition we do not doubt, a position on which one is closed-minded. His imagined interlocutor says, and then
Wittgenstein replies: ‘ “But, if you are certain, isn’t it that you are shutting your eyes in
face of doubt?”—They’ve been shut’ (PPF: §331). He seems, that is, to at times treat
hinge propositions as fixed and not open to the challenges of inquiry. Peirce, James,
and Ramsey would see harm in any such infallibilism, for they would argue that
­inquiry will never be motivated if our eyes are shut to doubt. They would think that
Wittgenstein’s picture does not encourage the rule that Peirce said ‘ought to be
inscribed upon every wall in the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry’
(CP 1. 135, 1899).
But as always, the interpretation of Wittgenstein here is a delicate matter, likely
to disintegrate in one’s hands. For at other times, he seems to put forward the more
sensible view that undoubted propositions are subject in principle to confirmation or
refutation. No matter how secure propositions might be, there is no guarantee that
they will not legitimately be called into question in the future. To employ another of his
metaphors: the riverbed can shift.51 If this is Wittgenstein’s position, it is precisely the
pragmatist point that if knowledge is to be possible at all, then at any given moment a
large number of beliefs must be taken for granted, while each must remain in principle
subject to revision, even the beliefs that comprise the scaffolding or the bank of the
river (OC: §§99–100).
See also OC: §§309, 96, 97, 144, 336, and 52.
There is a robust secondary literature on whether Wittgenstein in the end distinguishes different
kinds of hinge propositions. See Moyal-Sharrock (2004a) for the answer ‘yes’, and Putnam (1987) for the
answer ‘no’. While the textual evidence is less than determinate, I’m with Putnam here.
51
In 1941, Dewey employed the same metaphor: ‘The stream may be compared to the social process,
and its various waves, wavelets, eddies, etc., to the special acts which make up social process. The banks are
stable, enduring conditions, which limit and also direct the course taken by the stream . . . But the permanence and fixity of the banks, as compared with the elements of the passing stream, is relative, not absolute.
Given the lie of the land, the stream is an energy . . . which forms and reforms its own banks’ (1988 [1946]:
118–19).
49
50
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Some Wittgenstein scholars will think that the worry I articulate about the infallibilist
passages in On Certainty and elsewhere simply betrays the fact that I am in the grip of
classical epistemology and fail to see the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s proposals.
Baker notes that Wittgenstein’s account of criteria and certainty ‘appears to be incoherent’ according to the conventional wisdom of classical epistemology (1974: 170).
But they are not incoherent, Baker suggests, if we see Wittgenstein as turning his back
on Cartesian epistemology and its questions about how we can know whether sentences are true. Wittgenstein, that is, must be seen for the ‘constructivist’ that he is.
But the epistemology that I am relating Wittgenstein’s later work to is not the
Cartesian kind, which takes as its goal absolute certainty, or ‘the impossibility of
doubt’ (Baker 1974: 158). The kind of epistemology to which I am relating
Wittgenstein is the pragmatist epistemology that also rebels against the Cartesian
project. That is, pragmatism starts from a place not so different from where the later
Wittgenstein starts: with the settled beliefs that we do not doubt. And pragmatism
sees our epistemic goal to be to arrive at those beliefs that will not be overturned by
doubt or by future experience. My worries are put from that pragmatist perspective,
and hence the burden remains on those scholars of Wittgenstein to show why they
think the pragmatist is wrong, if they indeed think that.
We have seen that Peirce calls indispensable propositions ‘regulative assumptions of
inquiry’. We need to assume that there is an external reality and that our most basic
beliefs about it are true; that our observations can be explained; that there are answers
to the questions into which we are inquiring; and that there are real things, the nature
of which is independent of our beliefs and can be discovered through investigation.
But Peirce remains adamant that although their acceptance may be a condition of
inquiry, such regulative assumptions come with no guarantee, logical or otherwise. If
inquiry demands, for instance, that we accept the principle of bivalence, we do so by a
‘saltus’—an unjustified leap. These deeply entrenched assumptions remain ‘hopes’, not
necessary or transcendental truths.
Wittgenstein also uses the word ‘assumption’, but very rarely. Here is one instance:
If I say ‘we assume that the earth has existed for many years past’ . . . then of course it sounds
strange that we should assume such a thing. But in the entire system of our language-games it
belongs to the foundations. The assumption, one might say, forms the basis of action, and
therefore, naturally, of thought.
[OC: §411]
On one reading, Peirce would entirely agree with this statement. He would disagree
only if Wittgenstein thought that what we assume stands beyond or beneath proof,
investing ‘the basis of thought’ with transcendental certainty. There would be disagreement only if there is a distinction between conceptual truth and empirical truth in
Wittgenstein’s thought that is absent in Peirce’s. And we have seen that Wittgenstein
does not want to go the transcendental route. So perhaps he is simply making Peirce’s
point about regulative assumptions.
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The matter may have been more straightforward had the editors of On Certainty
carefully and consistently translated Wittgenstein’s frequent use of the word Sicherheit
as ‘security’, as opposed to ‘certainty’, and had Wittgenstein not used Gewissheit, or
‘certainty’, alongside Sicherheit.52 It is interesting that he does not use the words
‘common sense’ in On Certainty. But he uses it in the notes he dictated to his classes in
1933–4, known as the Blue Book, a precursor to the Investigations. His general point in
these notes is that, contra Moore, there is no common-sense answer to the sceptic:
One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not by restating the views
of common sense.
[BB: 58–9]
That seems a fair objection to Moore, although we have seen that Peirce’s ‘critical
­common-sensism’ is more subtle, or at least more critical, than Moore’s. Peirce did not
think that by pointing to his hand, he thereby proved he had a hand. But he did think
that the pragmatist epistemology was a response to the sceptic and should silence him.
For the sceptic’s doubts are not real doubts. We do not act on them. This seems to be
Wittgenstein’s point as well. Some beliefs are, at any given time, exempt from doubt,
because otherwise we lose our bearings. We lose the moorings that enable all our practical endeavours and action in the world.
Perhaps the differences within the pragmatist family (Wittgenstein included) on the
matter of doubt and certainty stem from different characterizations of this loss. For
Peirce and Ramsey, doubt prevents us from going on with inquiry and causes our theories and actions to crumble. For James (to some extent) and Wittgenstein, it prevents
our going on with life. But this is in the end an insignificant difference, as Peirce does
(and Ramsey surely would) argue that we cannot go on with anything if we do not have
a body of belief or a language with stable conventions on which to act. Our lives would
be altogether different, to say the least.
One way of thinking of the issue is that Peirce and Ramsey would argue that inquiry is
part of life. Wittgenstein says that when we ask ‘What is the reason why the King in chess
may move only one square in any direction?’ we cannot expect anything but the answer
‘That’s how the game is played’, together perhaps with some historical facts about the
evolution of chess. But the game of life, as we know it, is played with an attentiveness to
learning, to asking questions, and to seeking knowledge, be this in grand or ordinary
ways. Inquiry is embedded in all our practices, including basic conversation with each
other, in which disagreement or agreement assumes that we are striving to get things right.
The real difference, I submit, is as follows. Both Peirce and Wittgenstein argue that
there is no certain, ultimate justification for our deeply entrenched assumptions. But
Wittgenstein holds that truth is always relative to a language game, and the language
game is not itself justified or unjustified. It is beyond justification. Similarly, it makes no
52
See Boncompagni (forthcoming c).
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good sense to say that we are unjustified or justified in cleaving to this or that grammatical
proposition. They are taught to us through customs, or we learn them naturally.
While Peirce would agree there is no truth apart from a system of meaning and inquiry,
he does not think that entails that regulative assumptions lie outside the scope of
justification.
Wittgenstein might reply that this just invites us to reformulate the question: why
are we playing this game rather than another? Surely not because it pays:
Does a man think, then, because he has found that thinking pays?—Because he thinks it advantageous to think? (Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?)
[PI: §467]
Wittgenstein argues that we do not, for instance, rely upon induction because the
­practice leads to success. If a game proves beneficial to play, this ‘may be the cause of its
being played, but it is not the ground’ (OC: §474). It simply is our practice to rely on
induction—induction simply is our standard for good reasoning. He puts it thus:
ultimately we run out of justifications for our actions and must content ourselves with
saying ‘This is simply what I do’ (PI: §217). Explanation must come to an end somewhere when we try to give anything like a deep justification of our beliefs or practices.
But we have seen Peirce and Ramsey object to the project of giving those ‘deep’ justifications and they too insist that induction is a part of our standard of justification. But
they reject the crude sense of ‘pay’ that Wittgenstein deploys against his opponent,
whom he surely thinks of as the pragmatist.53 Indeed, Wittgenstein himself was not so
uninterested in successful action and what works. In the Investigations, he seems to
acknowledge that we sometimes rely on inductive inferences because we have found
that it pays to do so. For instance:
[T]here are fewer boiler explosions than formerly, now that we no longer go by hunches in
­deciding the thickness of the walls, but make such-and-such calculations instead . . . So sometimes
one thinks because it has been found to pay.
[PI: §§469–70]
We might wonder where Wittgenstein draws the line—what makes it acceptable
to appeal to practical success in grounding our beliefs in some cases, but not in
others? He would say that only in science and engineering—the realm of boilers—is
what is important action and what works. But to that we should counter that he also
thought, more generally, that we need to employ our concepts in successful ways. Our
words and sentences, after all, are instruments like the handles on ­different machines.
Whatever we make of this to-and-fro, a question arises for Wittgenstein’s eschewal
of such an appeal in the case of induction: how can Wittgenstein criticize Ramsey
for his ‘materialism’ and then give this apparently merely descriptive account of
53
Schulte (forthcoming) suggests that Wittgenstein’s bewährt would be better translated as ‘has proved
reliable’ or ‘proved successful’. Anscombe’s ‘pays’ encourages us to think of pragmatism. Perhaps she had
some first-person insight into Wittgenstein’s intentions.
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i­ nduction, and countless other of our beliefs and practices, as simply ‘what we do’? Did
Wittgenstein, at the end of his life, fully come round to a naturalism stronger, or less
normative, than Ramsey’s? We have seen that Wittgenstein reads (and, I have argued,
misreads) Ramsey’s naturalism as being too interested in science, whereas Wittgenstein
says that all we need is ‘a correct description of the status quo’ (MS 115: 71). But one
wants to raise a hand here and remind him that science is very much a part of the
status quo.
We have seen in this section that there are strong connections between Wittgenstein’s
final thoughts and pragmatism. At times he sees them: ‘So I am trying to say something
that sounds like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung’
(OC: §422). On my reading, what Wittgenstein meant in claiming that a world-view
was getting in the way of his embracing pragmatism is that he did not want to adopt
pragmatism as a theory of truth (or, indeed, as a theory of anything else), but only as a
method. The Weltanschaulicher character of pragmatism—that is, its being an ‘-ism’ or
a positive theory or explanation—disturbed him.
But I have also suggested that Wittgenstein should not be disturbed by theories of
the sort the pragmatists wanted to give, so close to practice and so far from a calculus
that would put the phenomena in a straightjacket. He himself puts arguments and
positions forward, just like any other philosopher. His aims in the Tractatus were
indeed overly ambitious, searching for a foundational theory. But he is not entitled to
reject the kind of modest theory Peirce and Ramsey were trying to articulate. It seems
that Wittgenstein is being thwarted by his own Weltanschauung—the one that prevents
him from accepting any kind of theory at all.
As it happens, he was not always averse to using the term Weltanschauung to
describe his own stance. In the Big Typescript, we find:
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It designates
our form of representation, the way we look at things. (A kind of ‘Weltanschauung’, as is apparently typical of our time. Spengler.)
[BT: 307]
A version of this remark is imported from the Typescript to the Philosophical
Investigations, in the form of an unanswered question: ‘(Is this a “Weltanschauung”?)’
(PI: §122). I want to answer that, yes, the way of looking at things put forward in
Wittgenstein’s later work might as well be called a world-view. It is not, however, a high
metaphysical theory that offers pure definitions, abstracted from what James called the
concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. It is a kind of pragmatist
theory that tells us to look at our practices if we want to understand our philosophical
concepts.
The residual difference, which is likely to be recalcitrant to my efforts to resolve it, is
that Wittgenstein thought pragmatism too epistemological in orientation. The central
notions in pragmatism’s style of thinking are belief and inquiry. On that picture, the
knower constructs and sustains a conception of the world on the basis of experience as
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it stems from practical engagement with reality. The knower is the inquirer concerned
to order and categorize, theorize, and explain in order to solve problems and, thereby,
to act successfully. Wittgenstein does not like this way of thinking about knowledge.
He writes:
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it
because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which
Id
­ istinguish between true and false.
[OC: §94]
Now, every pragmatist (and, indeed, every sensible person) will agree with him that we
inherit or acquire a view of the world. But whereas Peirce adds that we then inquire
into the correctness of those parts that get thrown into doubt and James views this
inherited background as comprised of ‘discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors’
preserved through the ages,54 Wittgenstein does not portray it as emerging out of or
sustaining inquiry. For him, we inherit a world-picture as we acquire language.
Language ‘did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination’ (OC: §475). Our worldviews and language games are unsupported. They are unsupported not only when we
acquire them, but also throughout subsequent practice and inquiry: the l­anguage
game ‘is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like
our life’ (OC: §559).
In the passages leading up to OC: §422 (i.e. the section containing his remark that,
appearances to the contrary, he is not a pragmatist), Wittgenstein discusses empirical
propositions that are ‘a foundation for all my action’ (OC: §414). Again, for him, there
is no reason—rational or pragmatic—why we embrace such propositions. He ‘would
like to regard this certainty . . . as a form of life’, and so as lying ‘beyond being justified
or unjustified’ (OC: §§358–9). ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is—one might
say—forms of life’ (PPF: §345). Insofar as this makes good sense, this seems to be
Wittgenstein’s final position. It is clearly not a full embrace of Ramseyan pragmatism.
Perhaps we should see it as a new version of pragmatism, picked up and so labelled in
the 1970s by Richard Rorty.
54
P: 83; italics removed.
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Conclusion
One thing that should be clear at the end of this book is that by 1930 there was no
­excuse in Cambridge England to identify pragmatism with the view that truth is what
happens to work or what happens to be thought useful. Russell had exposure to a range
of pragmatist positions when he was at Harvard in 1914, and from 1927 Ramsey had
been actively promoting a sophisticated version of pragmatism, in which beliefs are
evaluable instructions for action or bets with which we meet the future. To turn the
­tables on Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, perhaps it was useful for them to use what
Ramsey termed a ludicrous version of pragmatism as an easy target for their arrows.
But it was not good philosophy.
Another thing that ought to be clear is the extent of the pragmatist influence on not
only Ramsey, but also on Russell and Wittgenstein. Russell’s early criticism of James on
truth has obscured the extent to which James and other pragmatists influenced him on
so much else. Wittgenstein’s wariness of any kind of theory has obscured the extent to
which Ramsey (and Peirce, through Ramsey) influenced him. This means that Rescher
and Majer are wrong to assert in their Introduction to On Truth that ‘Since it remained
unpublished, it obviously exerted no historical influence’ (Rescher and Majer 1991:
xvi). The ideas expressed in On Truth, the culmination of Ramsey’s thought, had a
major impact on Wittgenstein and thus on the direction of a significant movement in
the history of philosophy.
So what can we say about the more sophisticated version of pragmatism? Indeed,
after canvassing such a diversity of pragmatist positions, can we even identify a set of
themes, incorporation of which makes a philosopher a pragmatist? In capturing all
of the various pragmatist positions in our sweep, it may seem that we no longer know
what pragmatism is. Perhaps all we can say our many pragmatists hold in common is a
link between belief and action, and the idea that our body of background beliefs or
assumptions must be taken seriously in philosophy, inquiry, and life. Even with respect
to these basics, there is some controversy, for Wittgenstein was hesitant to put his position
in such terms. But while his anti-epistemological and anti-theoretical stance may make
him seem the odd-man-out with respect to even the assertion that a belief is in part a
disposition to act, I have argued that we can nonetheless read him as being committed
to this in his later work.
If I have been at all persuasive, then it is fair to conclude that Peirce, James, Ramsey,
and Wittgenstein all were pragmatists in the following way. They rejected phenomenologist or introspectionist accounts of meaning and belief, requiring meaning and
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belief to be linked to behaviour. We have seen differences in how they construed that
linkage, but the similarity here far outweighs those differences. None of them want to
be extreme behaviourists, and in putting distance between themselves and that ‘insane’
behaviourism, they each carved out a distinctive brand of pragmatism, Wittgenstein’s
aversion to the label notwithstanding.
It is important to note that if these basic tenets of pragmatism seem uninteresting
in that they do not provide a handy straw man to knock down, then that is already an
advance on the debate. For we have seen that part of the problem is that Russell, Moore,
and Wittgenstein (and others, such as Broad) set out the pragmatist position in a form
that was bound to fail. Only Ramsey in Cambridge England sought to get the best out
of pragmatism. If it turns out that many philosophers are pragmatists in that they agree
that belief is linked to a policy of action and that our body of background belief has
cognitive weight, then that is a conclusion I shall be happy to have contributed to.
But of course, there is more to pragmatism than that. A commitment to action only
determines the content of the belief, not what kinds of action the belief should declare
for, nor whether it is a good belief to have. The next step in pragmatism is to see that, if
beliefs are connected to our actions and expectations, then they can be evaluated in
terms of whether those actions are successful and those expectations are met. The pragmatist account of belief, that is, leads directly to a pragmatist account of truth, in which
truth is not to be understood as a static or inert relation between a proposition and the
world, but must be understood primarily in terms of what is deserving of b
­ elief. I have
argued that Peirce and James offered different accounts of what counts for good belief,
in that Peirce required the success of belief to be connected to how things are, whereas
James was less consistent on this point. I have also argued that while Russell and Moore
never took the step to any form of pragmatist account of truth, Ramsey and Wittgenstein
were certainly attracted to (different) versions of it. Ramsey argued that we must start
with belief and how to evaluate it, and when we do that, we must take into account the
way things are. He died before fully explaining the ‘considerable contribution’ this pragmatist idea makes to the theory of truth. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, expressed
wary and occasional allegiance to the idea that truth is what is good by way of belief,
quietism being his dominant theme. While it might seem that Wittgenstein was on his
own, in sitting on the fence here, we have also seen that elements of quietism about
truth are present in Schiller and James.1 They might be seen as ­developing a pragmatist
position that says that philosophers should not speak of truth, but only of what is good
in the way of belief. The debate between the truth-oriented approach and the truthdenying approach is one of the pressing matters that every pragmatist must take a stand
on. There are others as well, matters which also take us to some of the most weighty and
difficult matters facing both philosophers and ordinary inquirers.
The first issue is how to demarcate the community of inquirers, or what Wittgenstein
would call a form of life. Is the community in which our beliefs are forged and our
1
We can add Dewey to that list as well.
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epistemic standards located local or are we all part of the same community as far as
knowledge or truth is concerned? Peirce thinks that the community must be individuated
in as expansive a way as possible, lest objectivity be abandoned. Ramsey does not
­address this matter head-on, although we have seen that he is willing to consider any
creature who can act as having habits of action, if not full assertions. Recall the chicken
and its habits regarding kinds of caterpillar. Wittgenstein wavers on whether a form of
life is like a ‘tribe’ or whether there is just one form of life. James also wavers, sometimes agreeing with Peirce, but at other times saying that in some instances a belief can
be true in virtue of being what is best for a particular inquirer to believe. I have argued
that the best kind of pragmatism is one that takes the community to be wide and open.
Otherwise, we lose our grip on normative notions such as truth, rightness, disagreement, and improvement.
This leads us to a second issue: whether beliefs such as those listed above are such
that they might reasonably be taken to aim at truth. We can ask, that is, whether i­nquiry
is bifurcated—whether there are domains of inquiry in which we set our beliefs the
standard of corresponding to mind-independent reality, and domains in which we
seek a lesser, pragmatic kind of success. One entry-point into this debate is to say that
the pragmatist has to tell us what counts as an expectation relevant to belief evaluation.
Can that include expectations limited to a single subject, involving the subject’s emotional satisfaction? Or must the expectations relevant to belief evaluation be, for want
of a better word, more objective than that? Here we find James and Wittgenstein
making common cause, at least with respect to religious belief, while Peirce and
Ramsey require that expectations be sensitive to how things are, whatever that
amounts to in the domain of inquiry in question. With respect to religious belief, we
have seen that Peirce and Ramsey argue that the entities posited in religion—e.g. God
or hell—either exist or do not, so the expectations arising from beliefs about them
must not be mere expectations for how believing in God or hell affects me personally.
I have argued that the position articulated by Peirce and Ramsey presents us with a
powerful way of understanding how beliefs in domains such as ethics might be objective or truth-apt. We are able to consider the full diversity of beliefs and ask whether
they are evaluable, and if so, what kinds of reasons and evidence come into play for
them. Ramsey, we have seen, was starting to articulate a comprehensive pragmatist
view in which we can evaluate beliefs such as open generalizations, causal statements,
conditionals, and statements about ethical matters. The door is open for the pragmatist
to develop a rich and nuanced account of belief evaluation aimed at truth for ethics
and other supposedly non-cognitive domains. Ramsey even seems to have been
exploring the Jamesian idea that for a limited domain of issues, having to do with
beliefs about the meaning of life, reasons can take the form of how various beliefs
make life go for their believers.
A slightly different entry point into the bifurcation debate is to ask whether one’s
pragmatism is global or local. The global, or comprehensive, or thoroughgoing pragmatist assumes no fundamental distinction between fact and value, for instance, and
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gives a pragmatist account of all judgements. The local pragmatist or expressivist
thinks that some limited class of our indicative statements constitutes a fact-stating
discourse, or a primary system, or a language that correctly and literally describes
facts. On the expressivist view, only the non-fact-stating discourses are to be given a
pragmatist interpretation. To use a felicitous phrase of Price’s,2 the proposition can be
‘sized up’ differently. Some philosophers (the early Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and
the members of the Vienna Circle) size it up narrowly, so that only the propositions
of logic and direct observation count as genuine propositions. Others (Peirce, James,
and, I have argued, Ramsey) size it up broadly, so that causal laws, generalizations,
and statements in mathematics,3 ethics, and perhaps even aesthetics are genuine propositions. They too can be classed as falling under our cognitive scope—the scope
of evaluation, rationality, and truth. The term ‘cognitive’ here is due to Ramsey4 and
I have argued that from 1926 on he was in the process of abandoning the bifurcation
project for a global pragmatism.
There is a real question about whether local pragmatism is really a kind of pragmatism at all. Pragmatism arose out of a rejection of the correspondence theory.
Anti-correspondence (or these days anti-representationalist) arguments, that is, help
motivate pragmatism. That seems to pull against the very idea of a local or expressivist
pragmatism. For expressivism requires a class of fact-stating or fact-corresponding
statements with which to contrast the disputed classes. Those anti-correspondence
arguments are so much part and parcel of pragmatism that it might be thought (and
I do think) that expressivism is no pragmatism at all.
We can come to the same conclusion via a different route. The classical pragmatists
started with a rejection of the fact–value dichotomy. They argued that all perceptions
and beliefs (not just ethical ones) involve interpretation, interests, and evaluation.
These arguments about the omnipresence of value are so fundamental to pragmatism
that a position like expressivism, which starts off with a dichotomy between what we
can know by way of pure fact and what is laden with value, can hardly be seen as being
within the pragmatist tradition.
All this leads to the conclusion that the pragmatist, at least in the first instance,
must be open to whether ethical and aesthetic commitments might be genuine beliefs
aimed at truth. Ramsey was right to see that, after carefully considering beliefs about
the good, or the beautiful, or the meaning of life, we might decide that some of them
are more like expressions of taste, not falling under our cognitive scope. If that were the
upshot, then one could be a pragmatist and end up holding that, say, some or all ethical
beliefs do not fall under our cognitive scope. But as Ramsey says, this is one of the principal questions for philosophy to try to solve. It is not one of the aims of this book to
Price (forthcoming).
Perhaps only Peirce thought this about mathematics and logic.
4
I have employed the term ‘cognitive’ on Peirce’s behalf before I encountered Ramsey’s use of it. See
e.g. Misak (2000).
2
3
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provide a definitive solution, although the reader will rightly conclude that I am
inclined towards an ethical cognitivism.
I have argued that Ramsey, although he was less steady about it, was also a thoroughgoing pragmatist. Indeed, if we stick to the philosophical materials he either
published or was clearly intending to publish, and put in suspension those notes and
the hastily scribbled Apostles draft that Braithwaite printed, we get a very different
picture of Ramsey than the familiar one. The core of those materials are ‘Facts and
Propositions’, ‘Truth and Probability’, and On Truth. From them we see that Ramsey
started with the pragmatist account of belief as a habit of behaviour and asked how we
evaluate such habits. The less steady Ramsey, which we see in the papers Braithwaite
titled ‘General Propositions and Causality’, ‘Theories’, and ‘Epilogue’ came into being,
I suggest, for two reasons. First, unlike Peirce, Ramsey did not see mathematics as
fitting nicely into the behavioural nexus. And, secondly, his early immersion in the
Russellian/Tractarian picture at times made him turn to it when he tried to articulate
the touchstone to how things are.
I have argued that Ramsey spent his brief philosophical life moving away from
and battling against that Tractarian picture. In On Truth, he finally gave up on
thinking about atomic facts, while keeping the idea that there are facts, leaving the
matter vague. This lack of specificity was not an oversight, but rather, a principled
understanding, one he shared with Peirce, that we make a philosophical mistake if
we try to set out the nature of these facts. As Peirce put it, as soon as we try to do so,
interpretation enters our account. Nonetheless, part of what truth requires is that
there be something to get right or wrong, even if as soon as we try to articulate what
that something is, we give an account of it that is freighted with our concepts,
values, and interests. An objector might want to throw Ramsey’s quip back at him
here: what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either. But all Peirce and
Ramsey mean is that assertions are bound to bring in the facts. That is, they must be
responsive to how things are. And they can say that without going into more detail.
The difference between that position and Wittgenstein’s quietism might look to be
a hairline difference, but this is one hairline that can fracture and split a tradition
into two.
Wittgenstein is even harder to summarize on the issue of bifurcation. It is clear that
in the Tractatus he sized up the proposition such that some statements picture the
world and have sense, while others do not picture the world and are nonsense. I have
argued that when he encountered Ramsey’s objections and when he saw how his distinction between primary and secondary language was playing out in the hands of the
Vienna Circle, he moved to the other extreme. He abandoned the primary language
as useless, and focused entirely on ordinary language. I have suggested that we can
read the later Wittgenstein as being a kind of radical pragmatist. There is no primary
language, and there are no philosophical meta-distinctions to be made between
domains of statements in ordinary language. We have our different practices within
our ways of life, and we learn something from attending to those differences. But none
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of those differences amount to the philosophical framework in which one kind of
belief latches onto the facts and other kinds of belief deal in expectations. All
our beliefs deal in expectations. The difficulty with this reading is that Wittgenstein
would have demurred at saying something this general and this reminiscent of a
philosophical theory.
It will be clear where my own sympathies lie. I have argued that there is a sophisticated pragmatism that ought to be at the forefront of contemporary philosophical
debates about truth, rational belief, and knowledge. That pragmatism is a kind of
amalgam of Peirce and Ramsey. It starts with the idea that a belief is in part a habit or a
disposition to behave. A belief must have consequences or expectations of whatever
sort are relevant to the particular domain of inquiry in question. This kind of pragmatism then proceeds to ask what it is to evaluate beliefs, and the answers will be different
for different kinds of beliefs—scientific, mathematical, ethical, general, counterfactual,
and so on. Inquiry is unified, objectivity is preserved, and beliefs and ways of life are
criticizable. Plenty of questions remain for this kind of pragmatist, but the benefits
are clear. For instance, there is no begging the question against value judgements being
aimed at truth, and there is an answer to the sceptic or relativist who would focus on
the human nature of belief and inquiry in order to argue that there is no truth and
­objectivity to be had at all.
I have tried, throughout this book, to address the question of normativity—a
question that must be addressed by any pragmatist or naturalist. How can genuine
norms, standards, and values arise from our natural reactions and activities, our perceptions of salience, our interests, and so forth? How can the normative arise out of
these descriptive features of our natural selves? Such questions lie at the very heart
of philosophy and of life. Just by putting them in this way, it will be clear that I am
trying to reclaim the term ‘naturalism’ from those who use the banner to advertise a
view that reduces meaning, truth, goodness, and so on, to brain states, behaviour, or
some other restrictive notion of the ‘factual’. We should turn, rather, onto the more
expansive naturalist path that Peirce and Ramsey travelled. That is the path that weaves
between the stony ground where an elementary language and logic are supposed to
give us clarity and certainty, and the swamp where it is supposed that because that
kind of language and logic cannot capture every legitimate human belief, there is
nothing at all to say.
The reader might disagree with me that this is the best direction for pragmatism, and
philosophy as a whole, to take. But I trust I have shown that he or she should reject the
standard story about the relationship between philosophy in Cambridge Massachusetts
and in Cambridge England. The pragmatism of the new, upstart, Cambridge, far from
finding no ground to grow in the old Cambridge, thrived there in the first two decades
of the 1900s. Russell brought back some Jamesian and Peircean seeds from his visits
to America. A more robust Peircean seedling was imported by Victoria Welby and
C. K. Ogden, who gave it to the young Frank Ramsey. Ramsey nurtured it and transplanted
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287
it in Wittgenstein. Far from being an unwanted foreign weed, it successfully took root
and is now regarded as part of the English landscape.
It would be interesting to trace how that position then manifested itself in subsequent generations of Cambridge England philosophers in the work of Bernard
Williams, Edward Craig, Hugh Mellor, Simon Blackburn, Huw Price, and others.
Indeed, it is a rueful fact that the glory days of pragmatism at Harvard ended with the
era of C. I. Lewis’s students Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, and
Morton White. One can hardly find pragmatism there now, whereas it is growing
strong in the old Cambridge.
Mellor, on the fiftieth anniversary of Ramsey’s death, edited an excellent volume of
papers called Prospects for Pragmatism: Essays in Memory of F. P. Ramsey. It may seem
that despite Mellor’s prompt, these prospects failed to materialize and that pragmatism
did not follow down the path that Peirce and Ramsey had marked out for it, but rather
wandered down an alternative route, mapped out by James, Wittgenstein, and Rorty.
No doubt part of the reason for this is that the full import of the pragmatism of Peirce
and Ramsey has been denied to us through reasons of fate—Peirce’s lack of success in
academia and Ramsey’s early death. In my view, we would do well to return to their
path. Whether or not the reader agrees with me on that matter, at the very least I hope
to have complicated the story in an interesting and helpful way.
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Names Index
Abrahams, William 265 n.
Acero, Juan José 140 n., 171
Ahmed, Arif 266 n.
Aikin, Scott 39 n.
Albany Review, the 105
American Philosophical Association, the 3
Anscombe, G. E. M. 120 n., 210, 271 n., 278 n.
‘Apostles’, the/Cambridge Conversazione
Society 126 n., 155, 163, 215–20, 265, 285
Aristotelian Society, the 75, 96, 166
Aristotle 31 n., 39, 138
Atkins, Richard 25 n.
Austin, J. L. xi
Ayer, A. J. 72, 87 n., 158 n., 186, 215
Bacon, Michael 69 n.
Bain, Alexander 12, 18–20, 26
Baker, G. P. 261 n., 276
Bakhurst, David 231 n., 250 n.
Baldwin, Thomas 145 n., 165 n., 182
Békássy, Ferenc 216 n.
Bell, Julian 265
Bergson, Henri 59, 83
Berkeley, George 141
Bernstein, Richard 231 n.
Blackburn, Simon 170, 172, 198 n., 254–5, 287
Boltzmann, Ludwig xi, 128
Boncompagni, Anna 2 n., 170, 225 n., 231 n.,
239 n., 240 n., 277 n.
Bosanquet, Bernard 202
Bouwsma, O. K. 4 n.
Boyd, Kenneth 25 n.
Bradley, F. H. 57, 75–7, 83, 93, 94, 96, 202,
207, 211
Braithwaite, R. B. 2, 5, 106 n., 126 n., 147, 155–8,
159, 173, 174, 183, 190, 192 n., 199, 200 n.,
215, 217, 220, 222, 225, 265, 269, 285
Brandom, Robert 5 n., 230, 231 n.
Brännmark, Johan 180 n.
British Academy, the xi, 75
Britton, Karl 4 n.
Broad, C. D. 235, 255–6, 282
Brouwer, L. E. J. xi
Buchler, Justus 85 n.
Burch, Stephen 159 n.
Burke, F. Thomas 62
Calderoni, Mario 83
Carnap, Rudolf 73 n., 128–30, 133, 135–6,
137 n., 186–7, 225–6, 243
Cambridge Magazine, the 85
Campbell, Norman 225
Carus, Paul 1, 3, 83
Chadwick, J. A. 166 n.
Chalmers, David 140 n.
Chisholm, Anne 234, 239 n.
Clifford, W. K. 39, 63, 65
Cohen, Morris Raphael 3, 85
Conant, James 125 n., 127 n., 252
Cook Wilson, John 83, 84, 210 n.
Cornell University 75
Cornforth, Maurice 234, 256 n., 265 n.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford 75
Costello, Harry 138–9
Craig, Edward 287
Davidson, Donald 212 n., 271
Descartes, René 17, 20, 274, 276
Dewey, John 4, 5, 29, 57, 61, 75, 80, 104,
107, 112 n., 136, 137 n., 139, 140, 142–3,
275 n., 282 n.
Diamond, Cora 125 n., 126 n., 127 n., 191 n.
Dokic, Jérôme 170 n.
Donaldson, Tom 51 n.
Drury, Maurice O’C. 120, 234, 266
Dummett, Sir Michael A. E. xi
Duncan-Jones, Austin 217
Dunham, Jeremy 142 n.
Duran, Jane 105
Eeden, Frederik van 83
Einstein, Albert 130, 145, 256
Eliot, T. S. 139, 140 n.
Ellenbogen, Sara 254 n.
Emmet, Dorothy 33, 234 n.
Encyclopedia Britannica 85
Engel, Pascal 170 n.
Feigl, Herbert 119, 130, 136, 154 n.
Fernandes, Alison 48 n.
Field, Guy Cromwell 218–19
Fine, Arthur 34, 227
Fisch, Max 39 n.
Frank, Philipp 128–9, 136–7
Frege, Gottlob xi, 1, 39, 95, 96, 194, 244
Freud, Sigmund 70, 204
Gabriel, Gottfried 96
Glock, Hans-Johann 168 n., 200 n., 233 n.,
238 n., 266 n., 274 n.
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308
names index
Godfrey-Smith, Peter 7 n., 58 n., 224 n.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 59, 249, 266
Goodman, Nelson 42, 287
Goodman, Russell 5 n., 55, 231 n., 266
Gramsci, Antonio 246
Grattan-Guinness, Ivor 104 n.
Green, T. H. 202
Grice, Paul 247
Griffin, James 125
Griffin, Nicholas 94 n., 117
Haack, Robin 231 n.
Hacker, P. M. S. 1 n., 94, 127 n., 131 n., 165 n.,
241 n., 261 n., 271 n.
Hacking, Ian 35, 117, 155, 192 n., 231
Hahn, Hans 129 n., 130
Hardwick, Charles 42, 79–85
Hare, R. M. 215
Harrod, R. F. 156
Harvard University 11, 50, 57, 75 n., 85, 104,
105, 138–40, 145, 281, 287
Hegel, G. W. F. 33–4, 94, 107, 111
Hempel, Carl 132, 225
Heney, Diana 25 n.
Heretics Society, the 85, 159, 267
Hertz, Heinrich xi
Hintikka, Jaakko 120 n., 135, 244 n.
Hintikka, Merrill B. 120 n., 244 n.
Hobbes, Thomas 158
Höfler, Alois 207 n.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 1, 18, 192, 214, 257
Holroyd, Michael 5, 157
Holton, Richard 191 n., 193–4, 195 n., 213,
235, 262
Hookway, Christopher 2 n., 24 n., 25 n., 30, 227
Horwich, Paul 30 n., 253 n.
Howat, Andrew 41 n., 231 n.
Howe, Mark DeWolfe 192
Hume, David 42–3, 55, 94, 125, 141, 201, 273
Huxley, T. H. 65, 83
Hylton, Peter 94–5
International Group for the Study of Significs,
the 83
International Journal of Ethics, the 72
International Library of Psychology, Philosophy,
and Scientific Method, the 85, 118, 157
International Society for Significs, the 83
Jackman, Henry 106 n.
Jackson, A. C. 5
James, Henry 52, 83, 92
James, William ix–x, 1–7, 13, 17, 23, 24, 26, 29,
37, 50, 52–74 passim, 75–82, 83, 91–4, 95,
98, 99, 103–4, 104–13, 113–16, 119, 123,
126, 127, 129, 138–42, 145–6, 149, 150–1,
157, 165, 168, 169, 179 n., 183, 184, 192,
203, 207 n., 208–9, 213, 219, 221–2, 231,
232, 238, 242, 248, 249, 251, 252, 255, 257,
265–6, 268–71, 272, 275, 277, 279, 280,
281–7
Joachim, Harold H. 207, 211
Johns Hopkins University 39
Johnson, W. E. 156
Jourdain, Philip 104
Journal of Philosophy, the 77
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the 20
Jowett, Benjamin 83
Kallen, Horace Meyer 93, 98, 115
Kant, Immanuel 12, 31 n., 34–5, 48, 50, 74, 124,
127, 242
Kappy Suckiel, Ellen 62 n., 112 n.
Kasper, Maria 130
Kasser, Jeff 43 n., 46 n.
Keats, George 237
Keats, John 237
Keats, Thomas 237
Keynes, John Maynard 97, 117, 118, 119, 122,
126, 156, 158–9, 160 n., 173, 175–6, 180,
201, 202, 206, 213, 215, 233–4
Kienzler, Wolfgang 238
King’s College, Cambridge 4, 156, 265
Kitcher, Philip 29
Klagge, James 235 n.
Klein, Alexander 53 n., 55 n., 67, 138
Klemick, Griffin 103 n., 219 n., 270 n., 271 n.
Knox, Howard 64, 67, 112
Kraut, Robert 7 n.
Kremer, Michael 125 n.
Kripke, Saul 258–61
Landini, Gregory 117 n.
Langton, Rae 34
Leavis, F. R. 117 n., 234 n.
Legg, Catherine 40 n.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 146
Leighton, Joseph 77
Lenzen, Victor 138–9
Leuba, James 72
Levi, Isaac 47 n., 48, 175 n., 180, 197 n.
Levine, James 97, 140 n., 145 n., 151 n.
Levine, Steven 56 n.,
Lewis, C. I. x, 3, 5, 35, 40, 85, 139, 155, 157, 178,
189–90, 257, 271, 287
Lewis, David 47, 196 n., 225, 227 n.
Lewy, Casimer 159 n.
Lieb, Irwin C. 83 n.
Lillehammer, Hallvard 198 n.
Linsky, Bernard 139 n.
Loar, Brian 168, 205
Locke, John 58, 94, 141
Lovibond, Sabina 254
Lubenow, Victor 215
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names index
Mach, Ernst xi, 128
MacIntyre, Alasdair 215
MacIver, Arthur 154, 234–5, 242, 256 n.,
265 n., 267
Madden, Edward 52, 66
Magdalene College, Cambridge 84, 155
Mahon, James Edward 215 n.
Majer, Ulrich 5, 168 n., 191 n., 200, 202 n.,
207 n., 226 n., 259, 281
Malcolm, Norman 246, 272
Marion, Mathieu 191 n.
Maurin, Anna-Sofia 177 n.
McDowell, John xi, 261 n.
McGuinness, Brian 86, 117 n., 119, 121, 131,
132 n., 159 n., 161, 162, 187 n., 220 n., 233,
234, 235, 265, 266, 269 n., 272
McTaggart, J. M. E. 83, 91, 93, 94
Meinong, Alexius 207 n.
Mellor, D. H. 12 n., 170 n., 171, 183 n., 192 n.,
196–7, 198 n., 200 n., 287
Menzies, Peter 44 n.
Metaphysical Club, the 1, 192
Methven, Steven 28 n., 124 n., 126 n., 157 n., 160 n.,
168 n., 174 n., 188, 195 n., 205 n., 252 n., 263–4
Mill, John Stuart 35, 55, 68, 75, 194, 217
Minar, Edward 263
Mind 12, 75–7, 82, 84, 88, 96, 141, 160,
166 n., 190
Monist, the 16, 21, 33, 82
Monk, Ray 5 n., 144 n., 246 n., 272 n.
Moore, G. E. x, 1, 3–4, 11, 16 n., 53, 57, 61, 63, 65,
67, 74, 75, 76, 85 n., 87–8, 91, 93, 94–8, 99,
100, 103, 112, 113–16, 117, 122, 126, 134,
139, 142 n., 156, 157, 161, 170, 186, 191, 202,
203, 208–9, 217–19, 234, 236–7, 239, 240 n.,
242, 253, 255, 270, 272–3, 277, 281, 282
Moral Sciences Club, the 102, 129, 131, 155,
162, 167, 168, 174, 234, 235
Morrell, Lady Ottoline 4, 92, 104, 119, 142
Moyal-Sharrock, Danielle 231, 255,
271 n., 275 n.
Mulhall, Stephen 251
Mulligan, Kevin xi n.
Nation, the 65, 79, 83, 104
Nedo, Michael 239 n.
Neurath, Otto 74, 83, 132, 137 n.
Newton, Isaac 5, 30, 157
Nicod, Jean 86, 226
Nordmann, Alfred 235 n.
Nubiola, Jaime 231 n.
Ogden, C. K. 3, 6, 11, 16, 83, 84–7, 118, 143,
155, 157, 159, 161, 168, 217, 232, 267, 286
Olsson, Erik J. 229 n.
Oxford, University of xi, 1, 4, 57, 71, 75, 77,
187, 234
309
Partridge, Frances 234, 239 n.
Pascal, Blaise 64
Pascal, Fania 117 n., 234
Passmore, John 6 n.
Paul, Margaret 5 n., 159 n., 162, 189 n., 237
Peano, Giuseppe 244
Peirce, Charles Sanders ix–x, 1–7, 11–51
passim, 52–4, 57, 59, 60–2, 64–7, 72–4, 77,
79–81, 82–4, 85–6, 88, 91, 99, 104–5,
107–13, 115, 116, 124, 126–7, 136, 138–40,
145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 157–9, 162, 165,
166, 168–9, 170–1, 173–4, 176–83, 184,
186, 192, 194, 195, 197, 197–8, 200–3,
207–12, 213–14, 222–4, 227–30, 231–2,
238, 242, 244, 245, 248–53, 254 n., 255–7,
259, 261, 263, 271, 272–80, 281–7
Pereboom, Derk 140 n.
Perry, Ralph Barton 62 n., 71, 139, 141
Petrilli, Susan 83 n., 84, 143 n.
Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko 83 n.
Pihlström, Sami 231 n.
Poincaré, Henri 83
Pollock, Sir Frederick 83, 192
Popper, Karl 7
Popular Science Monthly 11
Potter, Michael 195 n.
Prague Congress, the 128
Pratt, J. B. 65–6
Price, Huw ix, 44 n., 191 n., 193–4, 195 n.,
198 n., 213, 230, 235, 262, 284, 287
Priestley, Raymond Edward 122
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113
Proops, Ian 92 n., 94 n., 98 n., 127 n., 160 n.
Protagoras 77
Proudfoot, Wayne 68 n.
Psillos, Stathis 227
Putnam, Hilary 5 n., 37 n., 223, 275 n., 287
Quine, W. V. O. 35, 38 n., 74, 92, 188, 287
Ramsey, Frank ix–xi, 1–7, 11, 12, 15–17, 19, 20,
23–7, 28 n., 35, 39, 41, 43, 46, 47 n., 48, 53,
61, 63, 65, 68, 70, 73, 82, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92,
94, 97, 98, 103, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 117,
121, 122–3, 125, 126, 127, 128 n., 129–30,
131, 132, 135 n., 136, 137, 140, 147, 151 n.,
152, 153, 154, 155–230 passim, 231–2,
233–48, 250, 252–4, 255–7, 259–64, 265–6,
271, 272, 273, 275, 277, 278–80, 281–7
Ramsey, Lettice 239 n.
Rawls, John 74
Reichenbach, Hans 128
Rescher, Nicholas 5, 200, 202 n., 207 n., 226 n.,
259, 281
Reynolds, Andrew 37 n.
Rhees, Rush 231
Richards, I. A. 83 n., 85–7, 143, 155, 217
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310 names index
Richardson, Alan 41 n.
Rorty, Richard ix–x, 38 n., 92, 224, 230, 243,
251, 254, 271, 280, 287
Rosenthal, Abigail 73 n.
Roth, Robert 55 n.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 106
Royce, Josiah 50, 57, 61, 93, 138–40, 145
Rumfitt, Ian 165, 171–2, 196 n., 200 n., 204, 211 n.
Russell, Bertrand ix–xi, 1–6, 11–12, 53, 54, 55,
57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 74, 75, 76,
81–2, 83–4, 85 n., 86–7, 91–113, 114–15,
117–22, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137, 138–54
passim, 156, 158–9, 161, 162–5, 166, 172–4,
177, 178–9, 182, 183, 185, 186–8, 189,
190–1, 192, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204 n.,
208–9, 215, 216, 220–1, 223, 224, 225, 226,
232, 234, 239, 242, 244, 247, 248, 253, 255,
256, 281–2, 284, 285, 286
Russell, Dora 159 n.
Rylands, Dadie 157
Ryle, Gilbert xi, 233 n.
Sahlin, Nils-Eric 2 n., 160 n., 168 n., 174 n.,
177 n., 180 n., 191 n., 200 n.
Santayana, George 4, 34, 66–7, 77, 93, 109,
157, 209
Savage, Leonard J. 178
Scheffler, Samuel 45
Schiller, F. C. S. x, 4, 57, 61, 64, 75–82, 83–4,
91 n., 92–3, 103, 104–5, 107–8, 110–11,
113, 139, 142, 143, 144, 148, 189, 282
Schinz, Albert 52
Schlick, Moritz xi, 86, 128–31, 135–6, 187, 233,
239, 241, 243–4, 267
Schmitz, H. Walter 83 n.
Schröder, Ernst 105, 139
Schulte, Joachim 240 n., 271, 278 n.
Scott, F. J. D. 11 n., 80
Sellars, Wilfrid 28 n.
Sen, Amartya 246
Shaw, George Bernard 61
Sheffer, Henry M. 39, 139
Shieh, Sanford 189 n.
Short, T. L. 15 n., 25 n., 35 n.
Sidgwick, Henry 83, 215
Signifische Kring 83
Slaughter, J. W. S. 82 n.
Smith, Alys 93
Spencer, Herbert 83
Sprigge, Timothy L. S. 113
Sraffa, Piero 245–6, 248
Stansky, Peter 265 n.
Stern, David xi n.,137 n., 239 n., 240 n., 244 n.
Stern, Robert 34 n.
Stevenson, C. L. 87 n.
Stout, G. F. 83, 84, 93
Strachey, Lytton 5, 157
Strawson, Sir P. F. xi
Sturt, Henry 77
Suppes, Patrick 2, 176, 203–4, 210 n.
Tejedor, Chon 125 n.
Tiercelin, Claudine 2 n., 38
Tönnies, Ferdinand 83
Trinity College, Cambridge 91, 95, 140, 155,
156, 159, 239
Uebel, Thomas 129 n., 131 n.
Venn, John 39, 83
Venture, the 265
Victoria, Queen 82
Vienna Circle, the xi, 17, 83, 86, 92, 98, 99 n.,
103, 118, 125, 128–9, 131–3, 136, 150, 154
n., 158, 183, 194, 225, 241, 243, 245, 247,
253, 274, 284, 285
Waal, Cornelis de 12 n.
Waismann, Friedrich 83, 128, 130–1, 134–6,
239, 241, 243, 244
Ward, James 142 n.
Waterlow, Sydney 236–7
Watson, J. B. 144 n., 147, 177
Welby, Lady Victoria 3, 6, 12, 16, 25, 38, 42, 79,
80, 82–5, 104–5, 138, 143–4, 148, 286
Wells, H. G. 266
Weyl, Hermann 191 n.
White, Morton 287
Whitehead, Alfred North 95, 130, 226
Whyte, J. T. 170 n.
Wiggins, David xi, 15, 28, 35 n., 253
Williams, Bernard 287
Williams, Meredith 253–4
Williams, Michael 230
Winchester College 159
Winetrout, Kenneth 80
Wittgenstein, Hermine 117
Wittgenstein, Ludwig ix–xi, 1–2, 4–7, 12, 17, 27,
51, 53, 55, 59, 67, 68, 73, 82, 85 n., 86, 91,
92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99 n., 100, 103, 116,
117–37, 141–2, 144, 151 n., 152, 156,
158–9, 160–3, 166, 170–1, 172–3, 182,
183–6, 188–9, 190, 191, 194, 195 n., 197,
198, 199, 203, 212, 215–16, 220, 221–3, 225,
226, 231–80 passim, 281–7
Woods, James 139–40
Wright, Chauncey 1, 42, 52–3, 65, 67, 192, 214
Wright, Crispin 261 n.
Wright, G. H. von 1, 86, 159 n., 161, 162,
240 n., 269 n.
Wrinch, Dorothy Maud 86
Wundt, Wilhelm 55
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/22/2016, SPi
Subject Index
a priori 22–3, 124, 125, 175, 180
abduction/abductive/inference to the best
explanation 41–2, 49, 109, 139, 261–2
abstract entities 94
abstraction, method of 17, 31, 158
acquaintance 54, 91, 98–103, 120 n., 145, 168
action x, xi, 17, 19–22, 24, 25, 30, 32, 38, 62, 66,
88, 96, 106, 107–10, 142, 146–50, 158, 166,
168–75, 177–9, 182, 183–5, 189, 194, 195,
200, 210 n., 212, 214, 219, 232, 237, 245,
258, 260, 270, 273–4, 276–8, 280, 281–2
belief/thought and 7, 17, 22, 26, 62, 107–10,
142–3, 154, 169, 171–5, 177, 179, 196, 207,
211, 212, 223–4, 229, 244–5, 250, 261,
272–3, 281–2
consequences for 20, 26
habit(s) of 19, 20, 24, 146, 148, 151, 199, 283
plans for 172, 178
reflex/voluntary see reflex(ive)/voluntary
rule(s) for 21–2
self-controlled see self-control
successful 24, 26, 45, 169, 170–2, 198, 261,
264, 278, 282
aesthetics ix, 39, 128, 201–2, 217–18, 222, 234 n.,
265, 266, 284
affirmative character 204, 210
agency/agent ix, 25, 44, 57, 170, 192, 271
ideally rational 174, 180 n.
theory of causation see causation, agency
theory of
theory of probability see probability, agency
theory of
akrasia 219
ampliative 41–2, 179
analytic philosophy ix, 6, 100 n., 103, 136,
140, 247
analytic realism see realism, analytic
animal 147, 149, 163, 220
assertion(s)/assertive/assertoric/assert 7, 24–6,
28, 30, 31, 50, 81, 85, 96, 120, 126, 129, 160,
164, 166–7, 169, 173, 192, 196 n., 200, 204,
210, 213, 214, 218–19, 223–5, 227, 230, 237,
250, 254, 264, 283, 285
assertibility 230
atoms/atomic 58–9, 99 n., 100–2, 120, 137, 142,
160, 172–3, 184, 201, 250, 260, 264 n., 285
background (of beliefs/commitments) xi,
17–18, 74, 98, 109, 135, 212, 232, 261, 271,
273, 274, 280, 281–2
Bayesian(s) 5, 46 n.
beauty/beautiful 123, 129, 139, 155, 195, 202,
221, 266, 284
behaviour(s)/behavioural 2, 6, 17, 19, 20, 24, 55,
126, 143–5, 147–9, 150, 167–9, 173, 174,
176, 183–5, 187, 188, 194, 201, 202, 210,
212 n., 213, 217, 222, 225, 232, 237, 249,
250, 259–64, 282, 285, 286
James’ account of 55
behaviourism/behaviourist(s) 17, 19, 20, 139,
140, 144, 145 n., 147, 150, 151–2, 154 n.,
168, 170, 173 n., 176, 177, 183, 202, 203,
208, 209, 213, 217, 230, 249
about meaning see meaning, behaviourist
theory of
about mental states see mental state(s),
behaviourist theory of
Dewey’s 140, 143
‘insane’ 168, 174, 203, 282
belief ix–x, 2–3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17–30, 33, 34,
37, 38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 55, 61, 62, 63–7, 69,
71, 72, 81, 85, 93, 96–8, 99, 101, 102,
105–12, 114, 116, 125 n., 142–4, 147–52,
154, 158, 162–5, 166–70, 172–82, 183, 184,
188, 192, 193, 195–9, 200, 203–12, 213, 214,
217, 219, 221, 222, 223–5, 227–30, 232, 238,
244, 255 n., 257, 258, 261, 262, 268–70,
272–4, 277, 279, 281–3, 285–6
background body of see background
common-sense 18, 74, 116, 272
consequences of 15, 20, 26, 36–7, 61–2, 65–7,
101, 105–6, 110, 167, 176 n., 185, 209, 212,
221, 222, 286
degree(s) of/partial 5, 21, 26, 43, 45–8, 109,
158, 166, 174–81, 195, 204, 212, 229
dispositional account of 3, 6, 18–20, 109, 158,
174, 176–7, 183–4, 208, 212, 219, 245
feeling of 20, 47, 53 n., 151, 164, 170–2,
176–7, 179 n., 200, 229
fixation of 22–4, 45, 74, 195
norm of 23, 26
of the primary sort 191, 192, 196
religious/in God ix, 37, 63–5, 67, 69–70,
108–9, 184, 208, 268–70, 283
revision of see revision
theoretical/practical 25 n.
belief-habit(s) 19, 21, 210–11, 219
bet(s)/betting 25, 30, 35, 45, 174, 177–8, 192,
206, 213–14, 227, 262, 281
‘bettabilitarian’ 192
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312
subject index
bifurcation (thesis)/bifurcated 7, 151 n., 193,
213, 263, 270, 283–5
bivalence, principle of 49–51, 113, 224–5,
228–9, 276
calculus/calculi 135, 245, 247, 260, 263, 264, 279
of probabilities see probability, calculus
‘Cambridge Left Wing’ 234
Cartesianism/Cartesian 17, 20, 276
categories 31, 74, 84, 86, 138–9, 149
causal law(s)/statement(s) x, 33, 56, 125, 144,
148, 190, 192, 193, 195, 198, 199, 214, 227,
257, 262, 283, 284
causal properties/relations 163, 169–72, 177
causal role 170, 172, 225
causation/causality 123, 143, 155, 167, 192, 195,
225, 227
agency theory of 44 n., 192
certainty 18, 29, 42–3, 47, 91–2, 102–3, 110,
116, 150, 176, 212, 226, 229 n., 232, 243,
250, 260–3, 271, 272–7, 280, 286
practical 18, 212
classical pragmatism/pragmatists 7, 57, 80, 102,
149, 231, 284
cognition/cognitive/non-cognitive 17, 18,
31–3, 57, 78, 99–100, 128–30, 138, 140, 145,
166, 171, 192–3, 195–6, 203, 213–14,
217–19, 262, 282–4
cognitivism/cognitivist 214–15, 218–19, 285
coherence 27, 30, 207, 257, 264
theory of truth see truth, coherence theory of
colour exclusion problem, the 160, 232
commitment(s)/commit(s) 20, 28, 30, 41, 93,
129, 135, 136, 164, 173, 176 n., 195, 196, 210,
213, 218, 227, 230, 262, 268–71, 282, 284
metaphysical/ontological 11, 101, 157, 205
common sense/common-sense 56, 73–4, 108,
115–16, 143, 157, 207, 209, 272, 277
belief see belief, common-sense
realism see realism, common-sense
community ix, x, 29, 38, 39, 45, 49, 62, 67, 235,
261, 271, 282–3
complex/complexes 56, 87, 95, 96, 100–2, 120,
160, 163, 218
infinitely 95, 163
concepts ix, xi, 12, 13, 15, 45, 54, 56, 58, 65, 80,
94, 96–7, 99, 100–1, 128–9, 156, 168, 172,
173, 185–6, 201, 202, 210 n., 214, 232, 236,
247, 249, 251, 278, 279
conceptual systems 59
conditional(s) x, 19, 40, 109, 157, 190–1, 195–9,
214, 224–5, 283
counterfactual 190, 192, 195–6, 224–5, 257,
264 n., 286
indicative 14, 195, 198
material 40, 196
subjunctive 14, 49
confirmation(s) 66, 81, 183, 275
consciousness 20, 21, 32, 52, 55–7, 59, 71–3, 93,
95, 141, 145–6, 149–50, 211, 267
mystical/ordinary 68–72
consequences 12, 15, 25, 35–7, 40, 41, 53, 61,
62, 65, 67, 80–1, 95, 101, 106, 110, 150, 152,
176 n., 183, 197, 202, 209, 212, 222, 255,
273, 286
emotional/for the individual 37, 61, 65–7,
110, 219, 221
practical/for action 20, 26, 36, 62, 105, 150,
167, 174, 185, 245
conservative 265
consistency 6, 115, 135, 176, 178, 180, 204,
215, 218
logic of see logic, of consistency
constitutive/constitute 11, 23, 109, 211, 250
construction/constructionist/
reconstruction(ist) 78, 98, 135 n., 136–8,
143, 168, 171, 191, 244
logical 100–1, 226–7
social 238
content(s)/contentful 25 n., 26, 31, 56, 58, 62,
127, 130–1, 133, 148, 150, 151, 158, 164,
167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 183, 190, 192 n.,
204, 212, 218, 228, 254, 282, 285
pragmatist theory of see meaning, pragmatist
theory of
contradiction(s) 72, 124, 134–5, 170, 180, 184
convention(s)/conventional 16, 25, 261–4
correspondence theory of truth see truth,
correspondence theory of
criterion/criteria 13, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 64, 178,
183, 184, 226, 228, 259–61, 276
of meaning see meaning, criterion of
of truth see truth, criterion of
critical commonsensism 18, 73
decision theory 5, 174, 178, 203
deduction(s)/deductive 36, 41–2, 128, 160, 176,
179–80, 226
deflationism/deflationist 253
about truth see truth, deflationism about
definition(s)/defining/definitive 13–15, 28, 37,
39, 53, 61, 87, 96, 139, 148, 158, 160, 179 n.,
185–6, 189–90, 224, 225–6, 232, 246–7,
253, 261, 274, 279
dictionary/nominal/verbal 28, 110, 112,
147–8, 152, 186
of truth see truth, definition of
ostensive 132
degree(s) of belief see belief, degree(s) of
democracy 111
depression 70–1, 217
descriptions, Russell’s theory of 102, 185, 223
descriptive 7, 77 n., 154, 193–4, 200–1, 213, 258,
278, 286
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subject index
desire(s) 21–2, 24, 63–4, 78, 107, 110, 146–7,
149, 169–72, 174, 177, 202, 210–12,
216 219
diagram(s)/diagrammatic 35–6, 39, 194
disagreement 120, 171, 193 n., 271, 277, 283
disposition(s) 3, 14, 18–20, 22, 26, 29, 33, 38, 48,
49, 108, 150–1, 168, 170, 174, 183, 185,
192–3, 196–7, 200, 204, 211–12, 217, 219,
245, 264, 281, 286
dispositionalism/dispositionalist/
dispositional 25–6, 261
account of belief see belief, dispositional
account of
account of meaning see meaning,
dispositional account of
doubt(s) 5, 11, 17–25, 30, 41, 64, 66, 73–4, 111,
116, 121, 125–6, 150–1, 164, 176, 179, 189,
195, 210–12, 229, 237, 263, 271, 272–7, 280
‘paper’ or ‘tin’ 17, 116, 126, 273
dualism(s) 99, 139, 145
Dutch Book 178
dyadic see triadic/dyadic
economics 5, 40, 157, 158, 174, 178, 201
elementary 117, 120–1, 125, 128, 132–3, 136,
160, 194, 196, 250, 264, 286
elucidation(s) 122, 253, 263
pragmatic 28, 224, 253
emotion(s)/emotional 24, 33, 37, 53 n., 66–7,
86, 105–6, 108–10, 133, 191, 217–18, 222,
270, 283
emotivism see ethics, emotive view of
empirical 22, 30, 37, 49 n., 50, 54, 66–7, 77, 121,
128, 133, 194, 212, 227–8, 234 n., 247 n.,
257, 262, 268–70, 274–6, 280
empiricism/empiricist 12, 15, 35, 48, 54, 57, 58,
65, 69, 71–3, 77, 85 n., 91–4, 100–1, 105,
107, 129, 136, 140–1, 189, 194, 270
British/classical 12, 18, 54–5, 58–9, 95, 98
logical 103, 128, 136–7
radical 54, 57, 68, 141
entertain/entertaining 106, 108–9, 126, 150,
163, 181
epistemic 29, 54, 66, 72, 127, 141, 166, 176, 184,
192, 195, 202, 210, 229, 230, 241, 242, 246,
254, 258, 269, 271, 283
truth as 28, 104, 230
epistemology/epistemological 5, 7, 100, 116,
150, 168, 229, 265, 268, 276–7, 279, 281
Cartesian 276
Moore and Russell’s 93, 102, 107, 151
Peirce’s 18
Wittgenstein’s 6, 276
equality of income 217
equivalence thesis see truth, equivalence thesis
about
error 33–4, 63, 99, 176
313
essences 249
ethics/ethical 38, 39, 72, 79, 81, 86–8, 123–4,
126–7, 128, 132–4, 155, 161, 178, 195, 222,
254, 257, 264–8, 270–1
absolute 216
as a normative science 39, 201
as inquiry/aimed at truth ix, 7, 17, 28, 38–9,
53, 81, 150, 178, 214, 222, 254, 283–6
cognitivism/non-cognitivism 214–15,
217–19, 283–5
emotive view of 86–8, 133, 215, 217–18, 270
expressivist view of 193–4
Moore’s account of 87, 218–19, 236–7
motivation in 219
Ramsey on 195, 201–12, 206, 214–19, 226,
283–6
evaluation/evaluate/valuation 3, 20, 24–5, 45,
66, 111, 126, 134, 169, 192–3, 195, 198, 201,
211, 214, 217–19, 221–2, 225, 229, 241–3,
255, 257, 260, 262–4, 271, 282–6
evidence 3, 6, 17, 23–5, 28–9, 32, 39, 43–5, 47,
63–4, 66–9, 71, 73, 79, 81, 108–9, 113,
115–16, 132, 152, 179, 182, 191, 203, 213,
218, 229, 240, 257–8, 260, 262, 264, 268–9,
272, 274, 283
evidentialism/evidentialist 67
Clifford’s 63
evolution/evolutionary ix, 24, 82, 158, 163
existential graphs 12, 84
existential propositions 191 n., 193, 227
expectation(s) 12, 22, 35–6, 137, 148–9, 151–2,
170, 174, 177, 196, 204, 206, 223, 225,
240–3, 245, 248, 261, 282–3, 286
experience 4, 12, 15, 18, 22–3, 24, 27, 29, 30,
31–9, 40–3, 45–6, 51, 53–9, 61, 66, 71–2,
73–4, 77–81, 82, 84, 92, 95–6, 98, 110, 112,
124, 126–7, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141–2, 144–5,
146, 149–50, 158, 168, 179, 183, 191–3, 198,
206, 210, 212, 219, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232,
240–1, 243–5, 265, 269–70, 276, 279
and cognition 54, 57–8, 74
atomistic picture of 58
immediate 135, 225, 240–1, 243–4
inner/outer 36, 38, 56
mystical 68–73
perceptual/sensory 15, 56, 92, 146, 152,
268–9
pure 56, 59, 141
recalcitrant 18, 23, 149
religious 68–73, 124, 266
stream of 168
the force of 17, 33, 36
experiment(s)/experimentation/
experimenting 33, 36, 45, 48, 54, 68, 70, 81,
137, 194, 197–9, 230, 245
of living 68
thought 36
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314 subject index
explanation 35, 37, 41–3, 49, 100, 134–5, 186,
201, 208, 209, 246, 250–3, 260, 263, 267–8,
270, 278–9
inference to the best see abduction
explanatory power 30, 41, 178
expressivism/expressivist x, 7, 193–4, 254 n.,
262, 284
external relations 100, 123
external world, the 33, 35, 56, 78, 83 n., 92,
99, 101, 110, 116, 135, 138, 141, 146,
228, 272
fact/value dichotomy 126, 218, 283–4
facts 6, 22–4, 36, 42–3, 46–9, 57, 66, 74, 79,
81, 97–8, 107, 110, 111, 115–16, 120,
121, 123, 128, 130, 133, 142, 143, 147,
152–3, 160, 162–5, 166–7, 179 n., 180,
181, 184, 187–9, 191, 192, 196–8, 202,
203, 206, 207, 210, 213, 218, 221, 222, 224,
227–30, 246, 256, 262, 265, 267, 270,
284–6
as independent of us/transcendent 62, 79, 96,
116, 151, 285
atomic 101–2, 120, 137, 250, 285
correspondence/correspond(s) to 101, 147,
167, 206–7, 256
extraneous to the 22–3, 81, 113, 169, 213
molecular 102
negative 102–3, 121, 153, 167, 170
pictures of/picturing 120–1, 153, 188
pointing toward/away from 152–3, 166–7
sensitivity/sensitive to the 201, 210–11, 230
fallible/fallibilism ix, 18, 29, 32–4, 127, 153, 182,
188, 192, 211, 227, 260, 262, 274
about mathematics 35, 212
falsehood(s)/falsity ix, 25, 49, 61, 65, 80, 97–8,
102, 116, 120, 132, 147, 153, 166, 204, 210,
212, 224, 227, 243
objective 102, 166
family resemblance 253, 266 n.
feeling(s) 19, 22, 31, 32, 47, 53 n., 54–5, 69, 92,
133, 134, 151, 164, 176–7, 200, 216–17, 220,
229, 261, 269
of belief see belief, feeling of
religious 70, 72, 266–7
fideism/fideist 269–70
fix(ing) belief see belief, fixation of
form(s) of life 135, 222, 232, 252, 255, 257, 268,
270–1, 280, 282–3
foundationalism 92, 103, 150
freedom 31, 58, 80, 215
Freudian theory 204
functionalism/functionalist 230
about meaning/content see meaning, causal/
functionalist theory of
about mental states see mental state(s),
functionalist theory of
future 14, 20, 24–5, 45, 49, 61, 69, 114, 132, 150,
171, 178, 180, 186, 192–9, 212–14, 217,
220–1, 225–6, 228–30, 240–3, 256–7, 259,
262–3, 275–6, 281
general propositions 103, 151 n., 163, 193, 199
generality 38, 229, 241
global pragmatism/pragmatist(s) 7, 64, 195 n.,
213, 283–4
God’s existence, hypothesis of 3–4, 13, 37, 67,
72–3, 269–70
goodness/the good 87, 123, 125, 133, 139, 202,
218–19, 237, 263, 267, 284, 286
as indefinable 87, 97, 133, 202, 218–19
as that which God commands 267
grammar 135–6, 249, 256, 260
surface see surface grammar
grammatical form/structure 26, 102, 241
grammatical proposition 274–5, 278
grounding/grounded/ungrounded 40, 44, 65,
87, 111, 144, 150, 161, 187, 189, 194, 198,
199, 201, 211, 229, 245, 258, 263, 264, 266,
268, 273, 274, 278
habit(s)/habitual 13, 16, 19–22, 24, 37, 39, 44,
47 n., 48, 51, 55, 57, 84, 144–9, 151, 158,
168–9, 177, 180–3, 192–5, 198–9, 204,
209–11, 213, 219, 223, 260, 262–3, 283,
285–6
belief- 19, 21, 210–11, 219
hinges/hinge propositions 273–5
history 49, 77, 79, 81, 106, 150, 152, 249
of thought/philosophy ix, x, 1, 5, 6, 35, 53,
117, 128, 139 n., 140, 204, 212
holism/holist(ic) 17, 35, 201, 228
of the mental see mental state(s), holism
about
hope(s) 34, 48–50, 109, 111, 127, 179, 182,
204, 276
humanism 4, 57, 75, 77, 139, 189
hypothesis/hypotheses 15, 17, 22, 35–6,
41–2, 46, 48–50, 54, 65–8, 73, 106, 108–9,
125, 137, 142, 152, 206, 225–6, 240–3,
256–7
of God’s existence see God’s existence,
hypothesis of
sceptical 182
hypothetical 28, 175, 187, 195, 240, 243, 245,
250, 264
idealism 50, 57–8, 76–7, 91, 93–5, 98–100, 141,
145, 202, 207, 218
absolute 33, 57, 75, 77, 107
linguistic 26
(neo-)Hegelian 33, 107, 111
Oxford 77
personal 76–7, 79
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subject index
Russell and Moore’s revolt against 93–8
transcendental 48
implication 139, 189, 191
indefeasibility/indefeasible 24, 29, 30, 53, 261
indefinable/unanalysable 97, 126, 163, 202–3
probability relations as see probability,
Keynes’ indefinabilist theory of
the good as see goodness, as indefinable
truth as see truth, as indefinable
indispensability arguments 50
index/indices/indexical 16–7, 33, 193, 274
access to the world 12, 59
induction/inductive 36–7, 41–3, 92–3, 106,
109–10, 123, 125, 179–80, 231 n., 259, 261,
264, 278–9
Humean scepticism about 42–3, 125, 259
justification/reliability of 43, 182, 278
infallible/infallibilism 32–3, 38, 51, 54, 150,
152, 176, 212, 275–6
inference(s) 20, 39, 42–5, 47 n., 100–1, 123, 150,
168, 180–1, 189–91, 241, 263
abductive/to the best explanation
see abduction
deductive see deduction(s)
inductive see induction
statistical 42–3, 180, 257
inferential relations 244
infinite/infinity 45, 47, 103, 132, 158, 176,
190–1, 193–5, 196 n., 198
conjunctions 126 n., 190–1, 196 n., 198, 240
infinitesimals 37
initial (expectations/degrees of belief) 180,
203–4
inquiry ix–x, 7, 11–12, 15, 17–18, 20–2, 24,
27–30, 34–43, 45, 48–50, 51 n., 53–4, 73–4,
81–2, 110, 113, 114, 122, 126, 136, 178–80,
185, 191, 210, 211, 213, 214, 221–2, 224–5,
230, 237–8, 248–9, 251–2, 258, 264, 265,
274–80, 281, 283, 286
aim(s)/goal(s) of 22, 27–30, 39–40, 179,
213, 261
end of 28–9, 49
first-order 48, 136, 238
method(s) of 11, 35, 81
Peirce’s two branches of 36
regulative assumption(s) of see regulative
instinct(s)/instinctive 24, 40, 55, 64, 67, 109,
149, 155, 169, 210
instrument(s)/instrumental 74, 85, 143, 194,
240, 247, 278
value 240
instrumentalism/instrumentalist 194
intellectualism/intellectualist(s) 57–8, 60,
75, 81
intention(s) 12, 22, 32, 38, 58, 169, 245, 264
intentionality/intentional states 38, 170, 174
interests 45, 56, 62, 77–8, 284–6
315
intergenerational justice 217
intersubjective/intersubjectively 77 n., 149, 230
internal relation(s)/internally related 28, 95,
261 n.
interpretation(s) ix, 12, 16–17, 27, 32–4, 48, 53,
57, 100, 138–40, 174–5, 267, 284–5
introspection/introspectionist 20, 55, 147,
259, 281
intuition(s) 20, 32–3, 87, 99, 125
isomorphism/isomorphic 101, 113, 153,
191, 250
Jamesian pragmatism 3, 68, 91, 94, 110, 165,
208–9, 231, 242
judgement(s) 24, 29, 43, 51, 81, 96–9, 102, 124,
144, 147, 150, 166–8, 181 n., 191, 193–5,
200, 206, 210–12, 217, 223, 225, 227,
229–30, 256, 262, 284
aesthetic 202, 218
ethical/value 38, 87, 150, 214, 218, 222,
267, 286
multiple relation theory of 97, 142
perceptual 32–5, 146
suspend 63
justification 41, 108, 142, 176, 227,
247, 277–8
of logical/mathematical belief 123, 139
of religious belief 69, 266, 269
pragmatist 116, 182, 194
knowledge ix, 7, 13, 20, 23, 32–5, 41, 43, 45,
46, 49, 54–6, 57 n., 59, 62, 65, 69, 73–4, 78,
81, 91–3, 98–101, 103–4, 116, 124, 125,
130, 133, 135, 138–43, 145–6, 149–52,
154, 157, 168, 173 n., 179 n., 180, 182,
187, 190, 193, 195, 202, 211, 217, 228,
243–5, 249, 252, 262, 264, 265, 272–5,
277, 280, 283, 286
behaviourist analysis of 151–2, 173 n.
by acquaintance/by description 54, 91,
98–9
pragmatist theory of 108, 151, 173 n.,
229, 275
Ramsey’s theory of 229
triadic/dyadic theories of 138, 145
language ix, 5, 7, 16, 32, 54, 82–3, 86, 93,
98, 105, 110, 117, 121, 123–4, 126,
129–30, 143–4, 147–8, 169, 172–3, 188,
197, 223, 225, 227, 234 n., 238, 242–5,
247–50, 252–5, 259–60, 271, 274–5, 280,
284, 286
and its relation to the world 102, 117–18,
120, 126, 129–30, 132, 143–4, 244
artificial 244
as homogenous/seamless 254
elementary see elementary
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316 subject index
language (cont.)
limits of 121, 123, 133–4, 226
logic of 118, 123, 188
logically ideal/perfect 92, 102, 117, 122, 161,
185, 260
of science 83, 92, 128
ordinary 2, 120, 123–5, 136, 175, 223, 225,
231, 243–4, 247–8, 260, 285
primary/secondary see primary/secondary
private 259
Welby’s view of 82–4
language game(s) 250, 252, 254, 258, 260, 269,
271, 274, 276–7, 280
law(s)/law-statements 20, 38, 42, 54, 132, 146,
169, 178, 191 n., 192, 194, 212, 224, 226,
241, 262, 264
causal see causal law(s)
for constructing propositions 241, 245
logical 41, 49, 127, 212, 224, 258
natural/physical 103, 132, 134, 149,
192, 258
of probability 175 n.
local pragmatism/pragmatist(s) 7, 132, 194,
283–4
logic ix, 5, 11, 12, 24, 35, 38, 39–41, 43, 45, 49,
67, 72, 79, 91, 95, 98, 107, 115, 123, 127,
128, 138–9, 144, 147, 153, 155, 157, 158,
176, 182–3, 185, 189, 194, 195, 200–3, 212,
216, 223, 224, 233, 239, 240, 244, 245, 248,
258, 260, 263, 273, 284, 286
as a normative science 24, 39, 179, 200–2,
260, 263
as rooted in a social principle 45
deductive 128, 176
definition of 39
Dewey on 142–3
empiricism about 35, 37, 194
formal 4, 12, 40, 81, 98, 123, 128, 129, 158,
159, 172, 174, 175, 179, 180, 189, 213, 221
Frege’s 95
human 159, 179–80, 189, 190, 213, 260, 263
inductive 180, 259
larger 180
lesser 180
mathematical 40, 52, 95, 104, 105, 156, 157
of consistency 174, 176, 180
of discovery 180
of inquiry 24
of language see language, logic of
of partial belief 174
of probability 174
of relations 31
of truth see truth, logic of
Peirce on/Peirce’s 3, 35, 37, 39–41, 45, 66,
86, 139, 171, 179, 194, 227, 232, 245, 263,
284 n.
quantificational 39, 95
symbolic 104, 105, 244
three-valued 135
Wittgenstein’s Tractarian account of 121,
123–4, 130–2, 134, 194, 212, 245–6
logical analysis/atomism 2, 37, 82, 87, 99–100,
102–4, 118, 120, 124–6, 132, 134, 136, 141,
148, 157, 163, 165, 166, 184–7, 192, 211,
218, 223, 232, 242, 243, 251, 260, 264, 267
logical connectives/constants/operators 102,
123, 160, 163
logical construction(s) 100–1, 226
logical empiricism see empiricism, logical
logical form 120, 126, 160, 163, 246
logical positivism see positivism, logical
logical pragmatist 231
logical structure 130, 240
logical truth see truth, logical
logically ideal language see language, logically
ideal
logicism 95
low(er)-profile/modest (theories) 28, 122 n.,
158, 227, 251, 253, 258, 279
map 16, 191 n., 196–8, 250
materialism/materialist 146, 155, 232,
237–8, 278
about mental states see mental state(s),
materialism about
about probability see probability, materialistic
view of
mathematics/mathematical ix, 5, 35–6, 40, 81,
83 n., 91–2, 95, 110, 123, 131, 135, 143, 147,
150, 151, 155–9, 163, 174, 175, 178, 194–5,
201, 212, 217, 222, 234 n., 236, 244–5, 250,
253, 254, 257, 261, 274, 284–6
and experience 17, 35–7, 81, 139, 194, 212,
222, 257, 284 n.
foundations of xi, 5, 83 n., 95, 117, 131, 158
logic see logic, mathematical
truth see truth, mathematical
meaning 11, 13–15, 17, 30 n., 36, 38, 46, 82–4,
86, 98, 102, 110, 118, 120, 122–4, 127–8,
130–1, 133, 141, 143–7, 150, 157, 166–8,
171, 173–4, 180, 184–8, 190, 199, 202, 206,
207 n., 213, 224, 226, 228, 236, 240, 243,
245–7, 249–53, 254, 259–61, 263, 268–71,
278, 285, 286
analysis/definition/reductive account of 15,
17, 224, 253
and sensory effects 13, 15
as habit 13, 199
as use 5, 75, 81, 82, 147–8, 186, 242, 244–5,
249–51, 253, 255
behaviourist theory of 17, 20, 144–5, 168,
170, 173–4, 188, 213, 249, 281–2
causal/functionalist theory of 17, 86, 144,
148, 170, 183, 188
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subject index
criterion of 15, 124, 131, 226
dispositional account of 183, 245
of life 119, 193, 214, 219–22, 232, 264, 267,
283–4
of truth see truth, definition of
picture theory of see picture theory,
Wittgenstein’s
pragmatist theory of/pragmatic maxim
and 13, 15, 17, 36, 60–2, 129, 171, 173, 182,
206, 231, 246, 249, 251, 253
representationalist theory of 249, 253
verifiability and 131, 183, 228
meet(s)/meeting the future 186, 192–9, 213–14,
225, 240–1, 243, 262–3, 281
mental image(s)/image-proposition(s) 56,
150–1, 153
mental state(s) 20, 23, 27, 54–5, 109, 149, 164,
166, 204, 209–10, 246, 254, 259, 261–2
behaviourist theory of 17, 20, 168
functionalist theory of 183
holism about 171–2, 212
materialism about 145–6
meta-ethics 217
meta-philosophical 251–2, 285
metaphysics/metaphysical 1, 11, 27–8, 30, 31, 35,
37, 41, 48, 57, 60, 69–70, 74, 78–9, 94, 98 n.,
99 n., 100, 111, 116, 121, 124, 128, 130,
132–3, 137, 147, 158, 192, 201, 214, 225,
229, 237, 249, 251, 258, 279
anti- 11, 258
as a natural science 34
commitments see commitments,
metaphysical
of mind 26
spurious 132, 252
method/methodology 15, 22–3, 27, 28, 40, 45,
54, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 93, 100, 102, 106,
125, 128, 131, 136, 139, 152, 176, 177, 180,
198, 209, 212 n., 227, 246, 251, 253, 262
analytical 101, 185
of abstraction see abstraction, method of
of inquiry see inquiry, method(s) of
philosophical/philosophy as 5, 121, 138, 232,
246, 251, 269
pragmatism as 251, 279
scientific 26–7, 41, 50, 106, 138
sensitive to experience/the facts 23, 113,
213, 230
Miller’s Principle 47
minimalism see truth, deflationism about
minimum vocabulary 100
modal 192–3
modest theory see low(er)-profile
molecular 102, 184
monism 73, 95, 146
neutral 53, 55, 140, 149
Russellian 140 n.
317
mysticism/mystical/mystic 30, 68–72, 118–21,
123, 125 n., 127, 130, 133, 147, 160, 161,
236–7, 265
natural ontological attitude/stance 34, 198, 227
naturalism/naturalist(s) 6–7, 71, 72, 77, 81, 127,
142, 201–3, 208, 214, 217–18, 224 n., 230,
238, 279, 286
naturalistic fallacy, the 87
necessary truth see truth, necessary
necessity 6, 78, 160, 192, 229
causal 214
logical 123, 160
metaphysical 74
negative capability 237
negative facts see facts, negative
neutral monism see monism, neutral
nominalism/nominalist 14, 38
nonsense 4, 100, 122–5, 127–9, 133, 159, 161,
183, 185, 187–8, 202, 218, 222, 226, 237,
244, 252, 253, 257, 265, 285
norm(s)/normative 6, 20, 23, 25–7, 29, 38, 77 n.,
99, 126, 170–2, 182, 186, 188, 201–3, 214,
217, 229–30, 237–8, 252, 260, 261 n., 263,
279, 283, 286
of description 274–5
science(s) see science(s), normative
objectivity/objective ix–x, 6, 7, 12 n., 15, 33, 34,
59, 61, 63, 76, 87, 94, 96–8, 111, 112, 144,
148, 152–4, 158, 166, 170, 182, 187, 192,
194, 218, 221, 225, 237, 238, 258, 261, 271,
283, 286
factors 166, 169–71, 210, 211, 216, 230, 237
falsehoods see falsehood(s), objective
probability see probability, objective (view of)
reference see reference, objective
truth see truth, objective
values 237
version of pragmatism 3, 53, 62
observation(s) 36, 49, 54, 91, 110, 123, 125, 128,
145, 147–50, 180, 228, 276, 284
Occam’s Razor 164
ontology 92 n., 102, 103
open generalizations/variable hypotheticals x,
163, 186–7, 190–1, 193, 195–6, 198–9, 213,
222, 225, 240–1, 262, 283
operationalist/inferentialist pragmatisms 62
ordinary language see language, ordinary
organic unity 95
other minds 92, 100–1, 107, 272
Oxford folly, the 187
Pascal’s wager 64
past, the 74, 113, 182
Peircean pragmatism/pragmatist 2 n., 20, 66, 157,
165, 180 n., 223, 227, 242, 254 n., 257, 273
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318
subject index
perception x, 31–2, 35, 56, 68, 107, 147, 148,
150, 175, 179, 238, 284, 286
dyadic theory of 145
James’ theory of 53, 56–8, 138, 141, 145
perceptual judgements see judgement(s),
perceptual
personal identity 54
personalism 4, 75
phenomenal 151, 168, 171
phenomenalist 150
phenomenologist/phenomenological 244,
259, 281
philosophical theory 191, 251, 286
physicalist 150
physics 40, 68, 81, 146, 149–50, 175
picture theory, Wittgenstein’s 120, 122, 126,
160–1, 239, 248, 250
piecemeal 18, 74, 188, 257
pistic character 164
Platonic Forms 201
politics/political 38, 68, 106, 140, 158
positivism/positivist(s) 7, 72, 79
logical 73, 128
post-Ramseyan Wittgenstein 231, 247
practice(s) xi, 6, 12, 13, 15, 27, 28, 38, 45, 48–50,
76, 100, 102 n., 104, 105, 112, 113, 126, 172,
175, 187–9, 191, 201, 203, 230, 236–7,
246–8, 249–53, 256–7, 258–60, 263–4, 268,
270, 277–80, 285
primacy of 5, 142 n., 253
scientific 108
pragmatic elucidation see elucidation(s),
pragmatic
pragmatic maxim, the 12–16, 27, 36–7, 44, 53,
60–1, 79–80, 123, 249
pragmaticism 14, 33, 61
praise/blame 181, 191
presupposition(s) 50, 53, 83, 98, 127, 258
primary/secondary (systems) xi, 125, 132, 134,
135 n., 187, 191–6, 198–9, 213, 225–7,
241–8, 259, 284–5
Principal Principle, the 47
Principle of Indifference 46
private (meaning/language) 17, 45, 96, 144, 150,
243, 259
probability 11, 37, 43–8, 91, 157–8, 160, 174–7,
181, 225
agency theory of 44
and single case problem see single case
problem
Bayesian view of
calculus 48, 175
conceptualism about 46–7, 174 n.
frequency/frequentist theory of 45, 174–6
Keynes’ indefinabilist theory of 97, 126, 175,
202, 206
materialistic view of 46
objective (view of) 43–8, 158, 174–6, 181
propensity theory of 48
Peirce’s theory of 12, 37, 43–9, 157, 174,
179, 181
subjective (view of) 43, 46–8, 174, 176, 203
problem of buried secrets 49, 114, 228
propositions, the nature of 96, 98, 117, 162
propositional attitudes 204
pseudo-propositions/pseudo-sentences
130, 133
pseudo-science 81
psychoanalytic/psychoanalysed 161, 204
psychologistic 97
psychology x, 24, 52–4, 72, 110, 138, 141, 143,
144, 146, 147, 149, 201–4, 213, 216–17,
234 n., 266
qualitative 19, 31, 149–50, 261
quietism 126–7, 222–3, 236, 282, 285
radical empiricism see empiricism, radical
Ramsey sentences 135 n., 225
Ramseyan humility 227
Ramseyan pragmatism/pragmatist 6, 175, 238,
255, 280
rationality 6, 45, 174, 201–3, 214, 284
realism/realist(s) 3, 14, 38, 57–8, 75, 93–4, 98,
100, 103, 116, 146, 191, 198, 202–3, 218,
224, 227
about dispositions 14, 38, 200
about time 198
about truth see truth, realism about
analytic 99–100, 142
bankruptcy of 92
common-sense 92, 200
direct 95
Platonic 94
realistic spirit/account 188, 191, 211, 227,
236, 267
reality/realities 4, 27–9, 33–5, 37–8, 41, 45, 50,
53, 56, 58–60, 69, 72, 76, 78–80, 96, 98, 100,
102, 104, 110–11, 113, 118, 120–3, 126, 129,
132, 144, 148, 158, 166, 181–2, 191, 196,
207, 211, 225–6, 244, 254, 266, 272, 276,
280, 283
reasoning 14, 33, 36, 38–42, 66, 81, 103, 147,
158, 176, 181–2, 189–90, 216, 253, 263, 278
self-controlled 263
reasons 23–5, 28–30, 45–6, 49, 64–5, 78, 95,
150–1, 167, 168, 182, 192–3, 204, 211, 213,
219, 221–2, 227, 258, 267–9, 271, 283
reduction/reductionism/reductionist 17,
19 n., 38 n., 98, 137, 149, 151, 183, 207,
226–7, 243
redundancy theory of truth see truth,
redundancy theory of
reference/referring 30, 87, 148, 164, 193, 206–9
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subject index
causal theory of 206
non- 216, 218
objective 148, 152
propositional 204–5, 212, 224
to non-existent entities 102
reflective equilibrium 74
reflex(ive)/voluntary 55, 149, 168, 210
regulative 22, 29, 41, 48–50, 53, 77 n., 113, 192,
224, 228, 274, 276, 278
relativism/relativist 2, 228, 286
version of pragmatism 53
reliabilism 229 n.
reliability/reliable 30, 43–4, 73, 229–30, 238,
240, 262–3, 278
of induction see induction, justification of
religion(s)/religious belief(s) ix, 6, 22, 26, 63–5,
67–70, 73, 81, 108–9, 124, 132–3, 184, 208,
216, 232, 264, 266–70, 283
religious experience see experience, religious
representation 16, 28, 126, 161, 170, 240, 244,
251, 279
triadic theory of 16
representationalism/representational(ist)
193–4, 284
theory of experience/sensation 56, 58
theory of meaning see meaning,
representationalist theory of
theory of truth see truth, representationalist
theory of 28
responsibility for assertions 25
revision/revise (beliefs) 30 n., 33, 38, 77 n., 83,
128, 235, 255, 268, 273
rule, following a/rule-following 6, 195 n., 258–64
saltus 50, 276
satisfaction 4, 24, 61, 66–7, 109–10, 216 n.,
221–2, 283
saying/showing distinction (in Wittgenstein),
the 126 n., 127
scaffolding, the 127, 220, 274–5
logic as 124
scepticism/sceptical 111, 126, 141, 143, 152,
182, 184, 188, 209
about induction 42
about rule-following 258–62
about the external world 116
scholasticism/scholastic 31, 105, 137, 185, 247
of Wittgenstein 137, 247–8, 252, 254
science(s) ix, 7, 17, 26–7, 29, 34, 37, 39, 41, 45,
48, 50, 52, 54, 64, 68, 69, 81, 83, 92, 96, 101,
106, 110, 121–2, 125, 128, 132, 133, 135 n.,
136, 147, 149, 150, 152, 174, 176, 178, 185,
201–2, 204, 214, 216–17, 220, 228, 234 n.,
238, 242, 247 n., 256–7, 258, 268, 278–9
demarcation problem for 7
exact 37, 130
inductive 93, 106, 110
319
normative 24, 39, 176, 179, 183, 200–2,
260, 263
of meaning 82
of religion 70
philosophy of 5, 228, 242
pseudo- see pseudo-science
scientific method see method, scientific
scientific theory/theories 69, 123, 125, 144, 186 n.,
secondary system see primary/secondary
(systems)
self-control 22, 200 n., 263
self-evident 163, 211–12
semantics/semantic 5, 15, 48, 62, 102, 164, 184,
193, 194, 262
logical atomist 126
success 170–2
theory of truth see truth, semantic theory of
sensation 74, 92, 95, 150, 170, 186, 220, 259
James’ view of 54, 58–60, 140–1, 145, 149
Russell’s view of 92, 100, 140–1, 145–7, 149
sense-data 91, 99, 101, 141, 149, 185, 225–6,
240, 243–4
senses, the 13, 31–2, 36–7, 58, 69, 72, 100, 141
Sheffer stroke 39
significs 82–4
signs 122, 124, 245, 251
Ogden and Richards’ theory of 85–6
Peirce’s theory of 12, 15–7, 83–4, 86
Russell on 143, 148
triadic theory of 85
Welby on 82–4, 143, 148
simples/simple objects 99–100, 120, 148, 251
simplicity 30, 56, 153, 178, 228–9, 264
single case problem 44–5, 181
socialism/socialist 155, 217
solipsism 83, 99, 107, 188, 226, 243, 259, 260 n.
state(s) of affairs 120–1, 133, 244, 254
statistics/statistical 5, 39, 42–3, 157, 158, 174–5,
180, 257
stream of thought 53, 55, 141, 250
structure 15, 45, 58, 77, 81, 95, 101, 118, 120,
132, 147, 157, 161, 185, 186 n., 197, 200,
224, 226–7, 232, 248, 249, 255 n.
grammatical 102, 241
logical 130, 240, 247
subconscious, the 69–70, 72
subjectivity/subjective 13, 17, 19, 28, 33, 59,
62, 77, 82, 98, 166, 182, 187–8, 193, 246,
254, 285
probability see probability, subjective
(view of)
version of pragmatism 61–3
success/successful 2, 6, 24, 26–7, 39, 44–5, 49,
64, 78, 111, 142 n., 159, 169–72, 182, 195,
198, 214, 222–4, 256, 261–4, 269, 278, 280,
282–3
semantics see semantics, success
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320
subject index
suffering(s) 37, 269
supernatural/supernaturalist 71–3, 267
surface grammar 118, 194, 268
synechism 37
synthetic (statements/inference) 43, 131, 179
taste 22, 218–19, 284
tautology/tautologies/tautologous 121, 123–4,
130–1, 147, 160, 184, 194, 211–12
theology/theological 26, 34, 52, 216, 267
theoretical entities see unobservable/theoretical
entities
theoretical virtues 30
theory of life 217
therapy/therapeutic 251
third Wittgenstein 231
time 18, 21, 26, 29, 30 n., 33, 54, 62, 70, 112,
114, 132, 138, 160, 191, 220, 245, 263, 272,
273, 277
realism about see realism, about time
tool(s) 188, 196, 262
of language 248
of logic 95, 98
Tractarian 99 n., 100, 129, 131, 137, 152, 160 n.,
173, 191–2, 195, 203, 212, 232, 243, 251,
268, 285
transcendental 124, 127, 144, 201, 227, 258,
266, 276
accounts of truth see truth, as transcendent
arguments 11
idealism see idealism, transcendental
transcendentalist 50
triadic/dyadic 16, 32, 84–5, 138–9, 145, 232
Tripos 155
true scientific system 197, 264
truth ix–x, 2–7, 11–12, 32–3, 35, 36, 39, 50, 53,
60–71, 75–8, 80–1, 91–2, 94, 96–9, 102–5,
106 n., 107, 110–16, 126, 130, 132, 141, 142 n.,
147–8, 151–4, 155, 157–8, 161–2, 165,
166–8, 170–2, 173, 179, 181, 183, 187, 193 n.,
196, 198, 200–13, 214, 215, 222–30, 236,
238, 242, 243, 254–8, 269, 272, 276–8,
282–6
aim(ing) at x, 15, 22–3, 25–30, 39–40, 61, 66,
176, 193, 201, 213, 214, 218, 252, 258,
261–2, 283–4, 286
and inquiry 12, 20, 28–30, 110, 224, 238,
252, 278
as absolute/absolutist theories of 60, 112,
142 n.
as disquotational 223, 230
as epistemic/non-epistemic 28, 104, 258
as indefinable/indefinabilist theories of 97,
165, 203
as indefeasible/forever stable 30, 45, 53, 261
as man-made/humanized 111, 113–14
as mutable/eternal 62, 64, 74, 92, 95, 113–14
as the expedient in our thinking 62, 115, 209
as the good in the way of belief 61, 282
as transcendent/transcendental accounts
of 11, 27, 30, 104, 276
as what works/pays x, 2, 39, 62, 64, 76,
106–7, 113, 116, 165, 198, 241, 243,
256–7, 281
coherence theory of 200, 205–7, 256–7
correspondence theory of 3, 27–8, 32, 34, 96,
102, 110, 120, 142, 153–4, 200, 203, 206–7,
218, 224, 254, 256
criterion of 97, 107, 110, 142 n., 152,
254 n., 256
definition of 28–9, 110–12, 113, 152, 200,
205, 207 n., 208, 209, 224, 232
deflationism about 30, 167, 182, 205, 230
equivalence thesis about x, 30, 161, 165,
167–8, 200, 205, 223–4, 229–30, 254, 256
in ethics 28, 254, 283
instrumental 4, 61
James’ account of 3, 53, 59, 60–7, 80, 105,
109–12, 113–16, 138, 140, 208–9, 213, 255,
257, 281
logic of/doctrine of 39, 180, 259
logical 49, 95, 130, 171, 184
logical atomist/analyst theory of 2, 102,
163, 223
mathematical 81, 92, 95, 130
necessary 50, 224
objective 34, 237
Peirce’s account of 20–30, 49, 53, 158, 165,
174, 197–8, 242, 255 n., 257
pragmatist affirmation/rejection of ix–x, 53,
62, 282, 286
pragmatist theory of x, 2–3, 5, 7, 20, 27, 51 n.,
61–3, 77 n., 93, 103–4, 107, 111–12, 115,
136–7, 139, 141, 149, 151 n., 153–4, 172,
174, 180, 182–3, 193 n., 197, 200, 206–9,
213, 222–30, 231, 232, 240, 242, 254–8,
264 n., 272, 279, 282
Ramsey’s theory of 165, 166–72, 180–3,
200–13, 217, 222–30, 255, 257
realism about 26–7
redundancy theory of x, 165, 167, 182
representationalist theory of 28
scientific 38, 92, 137
semantic theory of 223
truth-aptness/truth-apt 31, 148, 164, 193, 201,
206, 213, 228, 255, 283
truth-conditions 164, 170, 195
truth-functions/truth-functional 125, 184, 190,
194, 264 n.
truth-maker 102
truth predicate, the 30, 104, 201, 205, 206, 226,
256–8
truth-tables 190
truth-values 28, 70, 98, 228
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/22/2016, SPi
subject index
tychism 37
type/token distinction, the 16, 157
understanding, the 54, 69, 145
universal generalizations 103, 121, 190, 194
universals 14, 99, 164, 177 n., 191
unobservable/theoretical entities 7, 135 n., 164,
198, 213, 225, 227, 228
utility/usefulness 30, 40, 45, 76, 107–8,
114, 169, 174, 177, 181, 209–11, 213,
255–6
use-conditions 186–7
value judgements/statements x, 124, 214,
218, 286
variable hypotheticals see open generalizations
321
verification/verifiability 65, 67, 72–3, 113, 142,
152, 228, 240–1, 261
verificationism/verifiability principle 17, 72,
128–9, 131–2, 183–4
volition(s)/volitional 55, 66, 217
voluntarism see will to believe, the
warrant/warranted 26, 41, 67, 70, 72, 102, 150,
178, 201, 214, 225
intersubjective 230
Weltanschauung 236–7, 251, 279
will, the 19, 149
to believe 63–72, 76, 77, 103, 105, 108
wooliness/wooly 247–8
world as it is independently/in itself, the 12, 57,
95, 140