Frank Plumpton Ramsey

Truth and Probability

Contains two other essays as well: Further Considerations & Last Papers: Probability and Partial Belief.

Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics

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The Nature of Truth

What is truth? What character is it that we can ascribe to an opinion or a statement when we call it true? This is the first question we have to ask, and before trying to answer it, it may be as well to reflect for a moment on what it means. Above all we must distinguish clearly our question, what is truth, from the quite different question, what is true? If we asked what was true, the sort of answer we should hope for would either be as complete an enumeration as possible of all true opinions [the truth about everything], i.e., an encyclopaedia, or else a test or criterion of truth, a method by which we could know a truth from a falsehood. But what we are asking for is neither of these things, but something much more modest; we do not hope to learn an infallible means of telling true statements from false ones, but simply to know what it is that this word “true” means. 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.

Knowledge and Opinion

We saw above that judgment in the wide sense in which we use the term was held by some not to be a real genus, but to comprehend two essentially different processes, knowledge and opinion; and our next step must be to examine the meaning and validity of this distinction.

The Nature of Propositions

Mr. Russell in The Analysis of Mind divides propositions into two main kinds, word propositions and image propositions. I want it to be clear that I do not use propositions in this sense; what Mr. Russell calls word propositions I shall call sentences, reserving proposition for those things, if any, which sentences stand for. This paper is divided into four parts; first I shall examine the view that the phrases which express propositions are incomplete symbols, which is put forward in those words in the Introduction to Principia Mathematica, and is clearly also held by Dr. McTaggart in The Nature of Existence, although he expressed it differently. I shall give reasons for rejecting this view and in the second part of the paper put forward the alternative in which I believe. Then I shall discuss the relations between propositions and facts, and lastly truth.

Truth and Coherence

Let us take the Coherence Theory first; this holds that the truth of a belief that A is B depends not on whether A is in fact B but on how far the belief that it is forms part of a coherent system. It is a theory which is very easy to reduce to absurdity and after Mr Russell’s amusing essay on “The Monistic Theory of Truth”1 it is difficult to see how anyone can still cling to it; but the defect of all refutations by reductio ad ahsurdum is that they do not reveal where the line of thought which leads to the absurdity first goes astray. According to Mr Russell the first mistake of the advocates of the Coherence Theory lies in their assuming an abstract metaphysical axiom called the Axiom of Internal Relations, but some of their arguments seem to me not to depend on any such axiom but to arise from confusions of a simpler sort such as ensnare not only the abstruse metaphysician but also the common man.

Judgment and Time [or? Time and the Mind]

In this chapter I propose to interrupt the main course of our argument in order to develop some very general considerations about events in time. These have a bearing on our present problem because a judgment is an occurrence or an event in time, and anything that can be said about events in general will apply to judgments in particular, and may help us to elucidate the logical category to which they belong. We shall, in fact, find that the word event is used in two different senses, and that there is no agreement as to which of these senses is applicable to judgments.

The Prolem of Judgment

In the last chapter we indicated, as well as we could, the range which we took our term judgment’ to cover, and defended it against those who make an essential difference between knowledge and opinion. We have now to go back to the “Question II” which we left over from Chapter I and try to answer it in the case of judgments. This question was, it will be remembered, “What is propositional reference?”, that is to say, what do we mean when we speak of a judgment that A is B, or say that so-and-so judges that A is B.

Paper to the Society — Autumn 1922

I am going to discuss one of the most important philosophical questions, which is of general interest and not, I think, difficult to understand. What, however, is so difficult that I have abandoned the attempt, is to explain the reasons which are to me decisive in favour of the view which I shall put forward, namely that it is the only one compatible with the rest of Mr. Wittgenstein’s system.

The “Long” and “Short” of it or a Failure of Logic

All exact reasoning, especially mathematical reasoning, rests on the supposition that a precise statement is either true or false, and cannot be both true and false. Consequently mathematicians have in recent years been forced to give a lot of attention to certain cases in which simple and apparently flawless reasonings can be used to establish contradictory conclusions; for the situation which arises is as uncomfortable to the mathematician as it would be if he could prove that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third side, and also prove that they were together less than it.