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Epilogue: Ramsey’s Ubiquitous Pragmatism

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Book chapter

Change log

Abstract

Ramsey’s late piece ‘General Propositions and Causality’ begins with a discussion of the logical status of unrestricted generalizations — claims of the form ‘(x)F(x)’. Ramsey argues against his own earlier view that a sentence of this form should be treated as an infinite conjunction. However, as he puts it, “if it isn’t a conjunction, it isn’t a proposition at all.” He goes on to put causal judgements in the same non-propositional box, noting that what he has offered is a "psychological analysis" of causal judgement, not a metaphysics of causation — the latter, he thinks, turns out to be the wrong mode of enquiry in this case. In modern terms, what Ramsey has sketched is a pragmatist or expressivist view of causation. In this paper I relate Ramsey to later manifestations of the same pragmatist move, in Cambridge and elsewhere; and discuss the question whether Ramsey himself does or should think that this pragmatism is a 'global' view, applicable to all our judgements.

Description

Title

Epilogue: Ramsey’s Ubiquitous Pragmatism

Keywords

Is Part Of

The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century

Book type

Publisher

'Published for THE BRITISH ACADEMY by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS'

ISBN

9780197266168