A philosopher is only sincere when he lives as his philosophy commends, or, conversely, when his philosophy reflects who he truly is. By this criterion, Frank Ramsey is probably one of the sincerest philosophers ever lived. His pragmatic and humanistic philosophy is, to a great extent, a beautiful reflection of his vigorous and enthusiastic personality; consequently, some knowledge of the latter will corroborate an understanding of the former. This is what Cheryl Misak’s brilliant biography of Ramsey enables us to do: it delivers a delicate balance between the intellectual and the personal aspect of Ramsey’s life, situates his philosophical works in the context of his life, and thus provides us with a profound understanding of what Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy is about.
The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with Ramsey’s childhood, and introduces the intellectual background in Cambridge at the time. The second recounts his undergraduate life, his impressive presence as a young prodigy in Cambridge, and his emotional struggles during the period. The third focuses on his astonishing achievements in philosophy, mathematics and economics during the half decade he had before his death.
Misak in general deals with these incredibly wide-ranging academic topics at ease and makes them highly accessible to the readers without much professional knowledge in the area. Wherever she feels inadequate, she resorts to relevant experts in the field and asks them to write a page-long exposition of the topic which she then puts in the ‘boxes’ of her book. The boxes, however, are less impressive than the other contents. They are too short to supply much information for both the layman and the professional: the former will find it too compressed and the latter may find it too cursive. Other than that, the book is a brilliant masterpiece. It combines width and depth, the personal and the academic, and is written in a suitably lucid and concise manner. This review provides some background to the book and knits some key points in it so that its gist makes better sense to the readers.
Ramsey is, without much doubt, one of the greatest pioneers of pragmatism. It is therefore useful to first explain what pragmatism is. Following Daniel Williams,[i] I see pragmatism as consisting of the following three pillars:
- Primacy of the practical,[ii] or the replacement of “copying” by “coping”.[iii] According to pragmatists, what we do is prior to what we say, and saying is a kind of doing. By uttering sentences in a language, we do not attempt to represent the world “as it is anyway”;[iv] rather, language is primarily a special kind of act, in order to communicate, cooperate, and cope with the vicissitudes of the world. This is pragmatism as anti-representationalism (championed by Richard Rorty): language is not a mirror that reflects the world;[v] rather, it is (according to the Later Wittgenstein) a toolbox that we use to serve our various practical ends.[vi]
- Human contingency. Pragmatists deeply recognise the contingency of our own perceptive and cognitive faculties, and encourage us not to project our own productions onto the world (common examples: morality, causation, induction, time…). As William James famously puts it, ‘the trail of the human serpent is… over everything’.[vii] This is echoed by contemporary pragmatists like Huw Price, whose pragmatism as global expressivism seeks an understanding of our language and vocabularies in terms of our “contingent, shared dispositions” and “practical stances”.[viii]
- Social pragmatism about normativity.[ix] For pragmatists, all normativity is ultimately derived from social facts. That is to say, there is nothing divine above us, nothing that we should be responsible for other than our fellow human beings. The more obvious example is moral phenomenon, whose normativity is more commonly seen as social. The less obvious examples are intentionality and meaning: for pragmatists, both are normative (one can believe or speak rightly or wrongly), and therefore both are social. A certain term means what it does (which implies that we should apply it in this way) simply because we – the language community – do use it in a certain way, and there is nothing over and beyond this fact that could endow anything with normativity.
I see these three pillars as being underpinned by the common theme of humanism. It is humans that have all kinds of practical ends, that have contingent faculties and contingent languages, and that are essentially social beings. While the “metaphysical” philosophy concerns itself with objective reality, absolute truth and external facts, the pragmatist philosophy focuses on the human perspective, human ends and human choices. Ramsey is a pragmatist insofar as the emphasis of human perspective and the concern for human wellbeing lie at the centre of his philosophy. As he himself puts it: “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.”[x]
There are multiple examples, throughout Ramsey’s unfortunately short life, that can testify to this claim. In very early stages of his academic career (when he was still an undergraduate), he argued against John Maynard Keynes’s account of probability and justification of inductive inference, on the ground that both probabilistic and inductive inference are psychological rather than objective.[xi] For Keynes, probability is an objective relation between any set of premises and a conclusion, something we can directly perceive and cannot be further analysed. Ramsey, on the other hand, is suspicious of any property that is both objective and unanalysable; he reverses the order of Keynes’s explanation, and argues (more extensively in his later “Truth and Probability”) that probabilistic knowledge is to be understood in terms of subjective degrees of belief, which were to be measured by one’s willingness to bet. Similarly, contrary to Keynes’s attempt to underpin induction by his hypothesis of limited variety of properties in nature, Ramsey argues that we should believe in induction simply because it is a good habit and it works, and despite that we cannot give any non-circular justification for induction, “In this circle lies nothing vicious”.[xii] This is surely a kind of pragmatism: for him, it is our psychology and our habits, instead of properties of nature, that underlie our various practices of inference.
Another telling example is Ramsey’s treatment of truth and propositions. He famously proposes a deflationary account of truth, which claims that all we need to know about truth consists of the following platitude: ‘a belief that p is true iff p’ (this is vulnerable to the Frege-Geach point that truth predicates can be embedded in complex sentences. However, Ramsey’s insight inspires modern pro-sentential and minimalist theories of truth which survive and thrive). This simple analysis, however, only constitutes a small part of the analysis of truth; the main heavy-lifting work is to be done by asking what it is for a belief to be a belief that p. For Ramsey, this is to be spelt out in functionalist terms, in terms of its place in the complex web of causes and effects,[xiii] of what tends to produce the belief and what the belief tends to produce, and thus of what the belief is disposed to do for us. This highly original pragmatist analysis of truth and meaning helps to lift the mysterious veil in front of these two concepts, and inspires later (broadly speaking, pragmatic) philosophers to develop more sophisticated accounts along these lines (such as Putnam’s functionalism,[xiv] Millikan’s biological version of success semantics,[xv] Horwich’s[xvi] and Price’s[xvii] minimalism, etc.).
Apart from the more theoretical endeavours, Ramsey’s pragmatism is also reflected in his enthusiasm and involvement in political movements. During his undergraduate times, he actively participated in the post-war socialist movements (as a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society) and became increasingly concerned with the welfare of the working class. His later works in economics (tax and savings) and his academic engagement with Keynes and Pigou are, to a great extent, motivated by concerns of social justice and utility optimisation. And in political and moral philosophy, he encourages us to always focus on the realistic questions (‘What is the world like? How to make it better?’) instead of abstract ones (‘the so-called paradox of self-government’), as the latter could only lead us to ‘fairy tales’ instead of truths.[xviii]
As Misak notes and stresses throughout her book, Ramsey’s pragmatic philosophy which places humanity at its centre, at least in part, stems from his vigorous and passionate personality. The general point is powerfully illustrated by Fichte: ‘a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.’[xix] The ‘soul’ of Ramsey, as Keynes describes in his obituary, has a boyish enthusiasm, a ‘spontaneous gurgling laugh’, an honesty of mind and heart, and a relentless curiosity towards all sorts of knowledge (philosophy, mathematics, logic, economics, politics…).[xx] Naturally, this kind of personality gives rise to a vigorous philosophy centred around humanity and a concern for its wellbeing. This is manifested most clearly in one of Ramsey’s most famous passages:
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 that mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you.
This paragraph can be further illustrated by putting Ramsey in contrast with Wittgenstein, even though they eventually get to similar places. The early Wittgenstein is “the king of representationalism”, as Robert Brandom puts it:[xxi] in Tractatus he gives the most elaborate account of how languages and thoughts represent the world. The Later Wittgenstein, to the contrary, is “the king of anti-representationalism”: in Philosophical Investigations he entirely refutes his previous work and develops a highly pragmatic account of language, truth, and the world (which is close to, but more sophisticated than, Ramsey’s view on these matter; it is only natural as Ramsey died so young). Misak argues, in this book, that Wittgenstein’s subversive change is to some extent due to the influence of Ramsey. In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and lived with Ramsey for a while, and during the time they exchanged a lot on their philosophical views. As Misak documents in detail, Ramsey’s critique of the Tractarian project during this time is a substantial factor which leads Wittgenstein to see his previous project as indefensible and come along to the pragmatist side.
However, despite all this, they still differ in their philosophical temperaments, rooted in their different personalities. Wittgenstein is constantly unhappy or even painful. He recommends “serious thinking”, reverence, and purity. He, as Frances Marshall describes, does not find the world his friend. He wants to get to the bottom of “essence” of all things. Ramsey, on the other hand, is constantly smiling and delightful, light and irreverent; he sees Wittgenstein’s problem as profound ones, but decides to answer them on a human scale nonetheless. When they eventually reached a similar place, Wittgenstein anguished and bemoaned, while Ramsey being cheerful about it. Wittgenstein found it a depressing truth that our rule-following behaviour might not be rationally justified and merely “something animal”; Ramsey, however, delighted in precisely this fact, in seeing nothing divine and essential, in being able to live lightly and pragmatically. As Ramsey wrote, foreshadowing his later conversation with Wittgenstein: “The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you.”
And finally, it is useful to place Misak’s new masterpiece in more context in order to better understand it. Misak is a pragmatist herself, and indeed one of the most famous contemporary pragmatists. As Brandom comments, no one has done more to transform and improve our understanding of the tradition of pragmatism than what Misak has done (and is doing).[xxii] In her 2013 book, The American Pragmatists,[xxiii] she distinguishes two substantially distinct strands of American pragmatism: one runs from C.S. Peirce to C.I. Lewis and then to mid-20th century analytic philosophers like Wilfried Sellars and W.V.O. Quine. The other runs from William James to John Dewey, and finally to Richard Rorty. She recommends the first, the “rationalist” strand, emphasising the importance of logic and rigorous thinking, and sees the second – the “romantic” strand – as the regressive wing of pragmatism, commending literature and art as superior to science and logic.
Then, in her 2018 book, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein,[xxiv] she quite originally identifies a line of influence from Peirce to Ramsey, and Ramsey to Wittgenstein. Approaching the end of his undergraduate days, Ramsey came to read some works by James and Peirce. He, like Russell, did not think much of James, but he thought that a lot can be learnt from Peirce’s pragmatist perspective (especially his account of belief). He recorded his understanding and approval of Peirce in his diary in 1924, and acknowledged Peirce’s influence explicitly in his later paper “Truth and Probability”. Misak accurately identifies the influence, as well as Ramsey’s influence on Wittgenstein, and thereby separating a strand of pragmatism which she calls Cambridge pragmatism, represented by Ramsey and Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, and later taken up by Simon Blackburn and Price in the beginning of 21st century.
Her new work on Ramsey, as I see it, can be best understood as a continuation of her effort in identifying and synthesising the rich pragmatist tradition. Pragmatism is not only a philosophical theory; it is a way of thinking about the world and ourselves. It is a meta-level framework that changes how we see and live our lives. This is a point that, in its nature, cannot be made in a purely theoretical way; it has to be illustrated with convincing examples, and this is what Misak’s previous works – and in general, the previous literature on pragmatism – lacked. Ramsey is the perfect example that Misak eventually found. By telling a story of his life and philosophy, Misak not only exposes how pragmatism is closely connected to life, but also establishes an epitome of a true pragmatist, one who is often smiling and delightful, honest and open, who has a profound love for life and for fellow human beings, who focuses on the practical and the realistic rather than the abstract, who has a relentless curiosity and enthusiasm towards all kinds of experiences and knowledge, and who, in Joseph Schumpeter’s memorable words, has a “sheer excess of powers”.[xxv]
[This review was originally published in Critique, issue. MMXXI.]
[i] Williams, Daniel, (2018). “Pragmatism and the predictive mind”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17(5): 835-859.
[ii] Brandom, Robert, (1994). Making it Explicit. Harvard University Press.
[iii] Rorty, Richard, (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press.
[iv] Williams, Bernard, (1986). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Routledge.
[v] Rorty, Richard, (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press.
[vi] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.
[vii] James, Williams, (2000). Pragmatism and Other Writings. Penguin Books.
[viii] Price, Huw, (2011). Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford University Press.
[ix]A term copied from Robert Brandom’s lectures on pragmatism in 2020. See https://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/.
[x] Ramsey, Frank, (1925). “On There Being No Discussable Subject”. Published posthumously under the title “Epilogue” in Ramsey (1931).
[xi] Ramsey, Frank, (1922). “Mr. Keynes on Probability”. The Cambridge Magazine 1/1: 3-5.
[xii] Ramsey, Frank, (1926). “Truth and Probability”. Published posthumously in Ramsey (1931).
[xiii] Ramsey, Frank, (1927). “Facts and Propositions”. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 7: 153-70.
[xiv] Putnam, Hilary, (1992). “The nature of mental states”. The philosophy of mind: Classical problems/contemporary issues, 51-58.
[xv] Millikan, Ruth Garrett, (1989). “Biosemantics”. The journal of philosophy, 86(6), 281-297.
[xvi] Horwich, Paul, (1998). Meaning. Oxford University Press.
[xvii]O’Leary-Hawthorne, John, & Price, Huw, (1996). “How to stand up for non-cognitivists”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74(2), 275-292.
[xviii] From some notes Ramsey made in his undergraduate times.
[xix] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, (1982 [1797]). “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge”. In The Science of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, 3-28.
[xx] Keynes, John Maynard, (1972 [1930]). “F.P. Ramsey”. The Economic Journal 42/172: 140-57, page 154.
[xxi] From his lectures mentioned in note ix.
[xxii] From his lectures mentioned in note ix.
[xxiii] Misak, Cheryl, (2013). The American Pragmatists. Oxford University Press.
[xxiv] Misak, Cheryl, (2018). Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press.
[xxv] Schumpeter, Joseph, (1933). “Review of Keynes’ Essays in Biography”. The Economic Journal 43/172: 652-7.