Steven Methven

ABSTRACT There is, in the Ramsey Archive at the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh, a note, written in 1929, in Ramsey's hand and mostly in German, consisting of twenty paragraphs the contents of which deal, in large part, with the infinite and generality. In this article, I provide an English translation of that note, followed by a philosophical commentary. The purpose of the commentary is to bring out the connections and, most importantly, the differences between Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's thought on these topics in 1929.

ABSTRACTIn ‘Universals’, Ramsey declares that we do not, and cannot, know the forms of atomic propositions. A year later, in a symposium with Braithwaite and Joseph, he announces a change of mind: atomic propositions may, after all, be discoverable by analysis. It is clear from the 1926 paper that Ramsey intends this to be a revision of the 1925 claim. Puzzlingly, however, Ramsey does not mention analysis in 1925. My task in this article is to provide a justification for that change of mind. My argument consists of two parts. I first show what relation holds between the negative 1925 assertion and the more positive 1926 assertion which allows us to read the latter claim as a retraction of the former, as Ramsey appears to have intended it. Then I shall argue that the retraction of the 1925 claim is forced upon Ramsey by reflection on the fact that three theses, all of which he held in or around the relevant period, are, rather surprisingly, revealed to be inconsistent.

The identity conception of truth holds that a thinkable is true just in case it is a fact. As such, it sets itself against correspondence theories of truth, while respecting the substantive role played by truth in respect of enquiry. In this article, I motivate and develop that view, and, in so doing, promote a particular conception of sense. This allows me to defend the view from two substantial criticisms. First, that the identity conception of truth is incoherent in respect of its treatment of objects in the realm of reference, and, second, that it is committed to a view of the world in which ordinary objects have no place.

Cora Diamond has recently criticised as mere legend the interpretation of a quip of Ramsey's, contained in the epigraph below, which takes him to be objecting to or rejecting Wittgenstein's Tractarian distinction between saying and showing. Whilst I agree with Diamond's discussion of the legend, I argue that her interpretation of the quip has little evidential support, and runs foul of a criticism sometimes made against intuitionism. Rather than seeing Ramsey as making a claim about the nature of propositions, as Diamond does, we should understand him as making a claim about the grammar of the logical connectives. Such a view coheres with the extant evidence of the nature of Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's 1929 philosophical encounters. It is also compatible with attributing to Ramsey a recognition of Wittgenstein's distinction and with denying that criticising it is the lesson of the quip.