Epilogue: Ramsey’s Ubiquitous Pragmatism

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.