Review

Reviewed Work(s): Philosophical Papers by F. P. Ramsey and D. H. Mellor: Foundations,

Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics by F. P. Ramsey and D. H.
Mellor: Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics by Frank Plumpton Ramsey
and Maria Carla Galavotti: The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey by Nils-Eric Sahlin
Review by: Mathieu Marion
Source: The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Sep., 1998, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 1177-
1180
Published by: Association for Symbolic Logic

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THE JOURNAL OF SYMBOLIC LOGIC

Volume 63, Number 3, Sept. 1998

REVIEWS

The JOURNAL reviews selected books and articles in the field of symbolic logic. The Reviews Section
is edited by Herbert Enderton, Matthew Foreman, Gerhard Jiger, Penelope Maddy, and Philip Scow-
croft. Authors and publishers are requested to send, for review, copies of books to The Journal of
Symbolic Logic' U C. L. A., Los Angeles, California 90095, U S. A.
In a review, a reference "XLIII 148," for example, refers either to the publication reviewed on page 148
of volume 43 of the JOURNAL, or to the review itself (which contains full bibliographical information for
the reviewed publication). "LV 347" refers to one of the reviews or one of the publications reviewed or
listed on page 347 of volume 55, with reliance on the context to show which one is meant. The reference
"LIII 318(3)" is to the third item on page 318 of volume 53, that is, to van Heijenoort's Frege and
vagueness, and "LX 684(8) refers to the eighth item on page 684 of volume 60, that is, to Tarski's Truth
and proof. References such as 1719 or 29512 are to entries so numbered in A bibliography of symbolic
logic (this JOURNAL, vol. 1, pp. 121-218).

F. P. RAMSEY. Universals. A reprint of 2954. Philosophicalpapers, by F. P. Ramsey, edited by

D. H. Mellor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge etc. 1990, pp. 8-30. (Also in Foundations, Essays
in philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics, by F. P. Ramsey, edited by D. H. Mellor, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, and Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978, pp. 17-39.)
F. P. RAMSEY. Note on the preceding paper. A reprint of 29513. Ibid., pp. 31-33.
F. P. RAMSEY. Facts and propositions. A reprint of 2959. Ibid., pp. 34-51. (Also in the same
place, pp. 40-57.)
F. P. RAMSEY. Truth and probability. A reprint of XXXII 137. Ibid., pp. 52-94. (Also in the
same place, pp. 58-100.)
F. P. RAMSEY. Theories. A reprint of 29514. Ibid., pp. 112-136. (Also in the same place, pp.
101-125.)
F P. RAMSEY. Universals of law and offact. Ibid., pp. 140-144. (Reprinted from the same place,
pp. 128-132.)
F. P. RAMSEY. General propositions and causality. A reprint of 29515. Ibid., pp. 145-163.
(Also in the same place, pp. 133-151.)
F. P. RAMSEY. The foundations of mathematics. A reprint of 2955. Ibid., pp. 164-224. (Also
in the same place, pp. 152-212.)
F. P. RAMSEY. Mathematical logic. Ibid., pp. 225-244. A reprint of 2958. (Also in the same
place, pp. 213-232.)
FRANK PLUMPTON RAMSEY. Notes on philosophy, probability and mathematics. Edited by Maria
Carla Galavotti. History of logic, no. 7. Bibliopolis, Naples 1991, 349 pp.
NILs-ERIC SAHLIN. The philosophy of F. P. Ramsey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
etc. 1990, xi + 256 pp.
When Frank Ramsey died in January 1930, aged 26, he had already published seminal papers in
philosophy, logic, foundations of mathematics, decision theory, probability theory, and foundations of
economics. His paper written in 1928, On a problem offormal logic (29512), contains proofs of a pair
of related results in combinatorial analysis that are at the origin of what has become known since as
"Ramsey theory." Ramsey proved these theorems while working out a solution for a special case of
the Entscheidungsproblem for first-order predicate calculus with equality. This is the problem that was
shown to be unsolvable in its general form by A. Church in 1936. Interest among logicians in Ramsey's
theorems was revived in 1978, when J. B. Paris and L. Harrington proved that an extension of the finite
version of Ramsey's theorem is true but unprovable in Peano arithmetic, thus providing a first truly
mathematical example of G6del's incompleteness (XLIX 981). The volume Philosophicalpapers (unless

? 1998, Association for Symbolic Logic

0022-48 12/98/6303-0091/$03.40

1177

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 1178 REVIEWS

otherwise indicated, all references are to that volume) is the third attempt at editing Ramsey's major
papers under one cover. Alas, contrary to the previous editions, it does not contain the paper On a
problem offormal logic.
At his death, Ramsey left behind a number of short pieces and a longer manuscript, On truth
(LVIII 721). Some of his most important papers were rapidly reprinted, along with a selection of
unpublished papers, in 1931 under the title The foundations of mathematics and other logical essays
(edited by R. B. Braithwaite, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, and Harcourt Brace and
Company, New York; reprinted XV 157 and XXXV 312). When it came time in 1978 for a new edition,
Foundations, Essays in philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London,
and Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands), the new editor, Hugh Mellor, decided to cull out the first
part of the paper On a problem offormal logic and reproduce it under the title Ramsey's theorem and
to leave out a few of the more minor pieces from the 1931 volume to make room for Ramsey's two
key papers in economics (with proofs of fundamental results in the theories of optimal taxation and of
optimal savings) and for another short posthumous piece, Universals of law and offact. This fragment
is of logical interest since in it Ramsey articulates an ancestor of the theory adopted by D. Lewis in
Counterfactuals (XLIV 278). As a matter of fact, Ramsey is often enlisted as an early representative
of possible-world semantics for conditionals. But Ramsey explicitly abandoned his theory a year later
(p. 150). In that paper, General propositions and causality, he also enunciated what is known today in
the literature on conditionals as "Ramsey's test" (p. 155 n). An appropriate reading of this text shows,
however, that Ramsey's theory does not correspond to the theories associated with his name since then,
e.g. in R. Stalnaker's A theory of conditionals (XLVII 470), which is not to say that these have no intrinsic
interest.
Further to complicate editorial matters, this second volume being out of print, a third one, Philo-
sophical papers, also edited by Hugh Mellor, has now been published in which the economics papers
are left out, along with the section on Ramsey's theorem, in order to make place once more for the
philosophical pieces just left out, with the exception of Ramsey's 1923 review of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
logico-philosophicus (2951). This omission may seem unjustified, considering the omnipresence of the
early Wittgenstein's ideas in Ramsey's thought. Articles of interest to logicians in Philosophicalpapers are
of two categories: (a) those in which he laid out the foundations of the theory of subjective probability
along with utility and decision theory, and (b) those on the foundations of mathematics.
(a) In Truth andprobability (written in 1926) Ramsey presented, in an informal manner, what amounts
to a complete theory of subjective probability, showing how beliefs and desires can be measured by use of
a betting method. He thus provided a measure of "degrees of belief" that satisfy the laws of probability,
given some principles of rational behaviour. In Facts and propositions (1927), Ramsey built on these
achievements, propounding a pragmatist theory according to which "the meaning of a sentence is to be
defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible
causes and effects" (p. 51). More precisely: any set of actions for whose utility p is a necessary and
sufficient condition is called a belief that p and would be true if useful, i.e., if p. Ramsey is generally
known as the first to have propounded-in this paper-a generally disregarded alternative to Tarski's
correspondence theory of truth known as the redundancy theory, i.e., a theory according to which the
word 'true' can be eliminated from 'p is true' in favour of the assertion that p (p. 38-39). This is, once
more, an incorrect characterization of Ramsey, who was in fact pointing out that the problem he was
tackling "is not as to the nature of truth and falsehood, but as to the nature of judgment or assertion"
(p. 39).
(b) The papers on The foundations of mathematics (written in 1925) and Mathematical logic (written
in 1926) do not contain any new results. The latter merely contains a defense of Russell's logicism against
rival foundational schemes of formalism and intuitionism, which is typical of the Grundlagenstreit of the
1920's. The lengthy essay on Thefoundations of mathematics contains, however, a number of noteworthy
proposals, albeit mostly from a historical standpoint. It was Ramsey's attempt at recasting the system
of Whitehead and Russell's Principia mathematica, by repairing its three "great defects." The first one
has to do with Ramsey's thesis that mathematics is "essentially extensional" (p. 178). Ramsey meant
by this that "it deals not with predicates but with classes, not with relations in the ordinary sense but
with possible correlations, or 'relations in extension' as Mr Russell calls them" (p. 177). He believed
"infinite indefinable classes" (in modern parlance, arbitrary subsets of an infinite set) to be essential to
modern mathematics and he was aware of the limitations of Principia mathematics in that respect: "The
mistake is made not by having a primitive proposition asserting that all classes are definable, but by

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 REVIEWS 1179

giving a definition of class which applies only to definable classes, so that all mathematical propositions
about some or all classes are misinterpreted" (p. 186 f.). The most unpalatable consequence of this
narrow definition of predicative functions was that it rendered necessary the introduction of an axiom
of reducibility. To avoid it and use a simple theory of types (thus getting rid of ramification), Ramsey
redefined and enlarged predicative functions as any finite or infinite truth-function of either (atomic)
functions of individuals or propositions (p. 202). This definition was "essentially dependent on the notion
of a truth-function of an infinite number of arguments" (p. 202) that Ramsey took from Wittgenstein's
Tractatus.
Ramsey was relying on an extreme form of Platonism about mathematics. He argued that Russell
gave too much importance to the vicious circle principle; he could not see that impredicativity was
problematic since there is, for example, nothing problematic in referring to a man as "the tallest in a
group," even though that man would then be identified by means of a totality of which he is himself a
member (p. 204). Ramsey claimed further that there is nothing wrong in adopting the same attitude
for an infinite class. The fact that some properties can only be described impredicatively is thus seen
as caused by our inability to write propositions of infinite length, an inability that he deemed to be
logically a mere accident (p. 204). Although Ramsey's attitude to impredicativity is generally agreed
with, his use of infinite truth-functions failed to convince. For example, Kurt G6del condemned them as
"fictions," needlessly complicated objects (as opposed to classes) that made little sense since they could
be understood only by an infinite being (Russell's mathematical logic, XI 75).
The second defect was a failure to overcome the difficulties raised by the contradictions of the theory
of classes. It is while discussing this point that Ramsey introduced a now usual distinction between
paradoxes such as Russell's or Burali-Forti's that "involve only logical or mathematical terms" and those
such as the liar's, Richard's, or Grelling's paradox, that "cannot be stated in logical terms alone" (p.
183). Ramsey then argued that the simple theory of types was sufficient to avoid the occurrence of
the first group of paradoxes, while those of the second group are irrelevant. Russell's mistake was thus
to have unnecessarily introduced ramification in the theory of types to deal with this second group of
paradoxes. The third defect was related to identity. Ramsey was influenced once more by Wittgenstein
who claimed that the identity sign "is not an essential constituent of logical notation," but Ramsey
assumed that eliminating it "puts us in a hopeless position as regards classes, because, having eliminated
altogether, we can no longer use x = y as a propositional function in defining finite classes" (p.
212). Moreover, the elimination of identity had, following Wittgenstein, the effect of ruling out certain
expressions as nonsensical, in particular the axiom of infinity, which was vital to any renovated Principia
mathematics. Ramsey thought that he needed to and could circumvent these problems by supplementing
the predicative functions with "functions in extension": "Such a function of one individual results from
any one-many relation in extension between propositions and individuals; that is to say, a correlation,
practicable or impracticable, which to every individual associates a unique proposition, the individual
being the argument to the function, the proposition its value" (p. 215). This idea was never followed up.
Instead, Ramsey got into a heated argument (in 1927) with Wittgenstein. (His two drafts of a letter to
Wittgenstein, published in an appendix to Notes on philosophy, probability and mathematics, bear witness
to this incident.)
It seems that in the last year of his life Ramsey converted to intuitionism, abandoning his infinite truth-
functions. This conversion is evident in posthumous pieces from that year such as Principles offinitist
mathematics and The formal structure of intuitionist mathematics (notes 53 and 54 in Notes on philosophy,
probability and mathematics) where Ramsey clearly adopts the intuitionist point of view of Hermann
Weyl, who described existential propositions as Urteilsabstrakte or judgement-abstracts and universal
propositions as Anweisungen auf Urteile or instructions forjudging. This intuitionist stance underlies also
the paper on General propositions and causality where Ramsey defined "variable hypothetical" as "not
judgments but rules for judging" (p. 149) and construed causal laws in terms of these hypotheticalls:
"when we assert a causal law we are asserting not a fact, not an infinite conjunction, nor a connection
of universals, but a variable hypothetical which is not strictly a proposition at all, but a formula from
which we derive propositions" (p. 159).
This textual evidence led recently to a better understanding of Ramsey's views in Theories, which
contradicts the orthodox reading propounded originally by Carnap, according to which Ramsey intended
to eliminate theoretical terms in favour of a pure observation language by a logical "trick" known as
"Ramsey sentences." (See U. Majer, Ramsey's conception of theories: an intuitionistic approach, History
of philosophy quarterly, vol. 6 (1989), pp. 233-258.) The abandonment of this major tenet of his

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 1180 REVIEWS

earlier papers on the foundations of mathematics-infinite truth-functions-is not accidental but is

deeply linked with Ramsey's pragmatist views on probability and decision theory, since he saw variable
hypotheticals as forming "the system with which the speaker meets the future" (p. 149): a variable
hypothetical is a map by which we steer and "if we professedly extend it to infinity, it is no longer a map"
(p. 146).
The volume edited by Maria Carla Galavotti, Notes on philosophy, probability and mathematics,
contains a further set of unpublished papers and notes, in fact it contains a transcription of almost all
of the publishable manuscript material that is part of the Frank P. Ramsey Collection at the University
of Pittsburgh (in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Hillman Library),
eighty-four notes and two drafts of a letter to Wittgenstein. With the exception of a few pieces, some
already mentioned, they will remain of interest only to scholars. Mention should be made, however,
of the notes on probability (notes 68 to 77). They show further advances from Truth and probability,
for example in note 76 on The rule of succession, induction, and unknown probabilities, which gives hints
on higher-order probabilities, or in note 77 on Weight or the value of knowledge, which provides what
amounts to a proof of a result later rediscovered by Good and Savage. (See N.-E. Sahlin's introduction
to this note in The British journalfor the philosophy of science, vol. 41 (1990), pp. 1-4.)
Nils-Eric Sahlin's study, The philosophy of F. P. Ramsey, is the only one of its kind. Sahlin has worked
out a unified and exhaustive interpretation of Ramsey's philosophy-its various parts form indeed a
coherent whole-and it will become the standard for Ramsey scholarship. Sahlin was evidently asked
to render accessible to a larger public Ramsey's various contributions. For example, the chapter on
Ramsey's theorem is a pedagogical attempt at conveying the gist of the result to someone with little
mathematical knowledge. Specialists may be dissatisfied with this or that part of the volume but to
criticize the book on such grounds would be unfair since addressing specialists was evidently not its
purpose. This book should on the contrary be of the highest interest to any specialist curious enough to
wish to learn about adjacent fields (e.g. to learn how an intuitionist stance in mathematical logic links
with a pragmatist stance on truth and belief) and to see how far a philosopher can go in the direction
of a unifying philosophy without sacrificing the rigorous standards of the scientific inquiry. Reading
Sahlin's book one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that Ramsey's work is unjustly underrated and that
it is one of the true high-water marks of twentieth-century philosophy. MATHIEU MARION

The philosophy of mathematics, edited by W D. Hart, Oxford readings in philosophy, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Oxford, New York, etc., 1996, vi + 316 pp.-therein:
W D. HART. Introduction. Pp. 1-13.
PAUL BENACERRAF. Mathematical truth. A reprint of LII 552. Pp. 14-30.
W V QUINE. Two dogmas of empiricism. A reprint of XVII 281. Pp. 31-51.
W D. HART. Access and inference. Pp. 52-62. (Reprinted with revisions from The Aristotelian
Society supplementary volume LWII, London 1979, pp. 153-165.)
MICHAEL DUMMETT. The philosophical basis of intuitionistic logic. A reprint of XLVII 689. Pp.
63-94.
CHARLES PARSONS. Mathematical intuition. Pp. 95-113. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, n.s. vol. 80 (1979-80), pp. 145-168.)
PENELOPE MADDY. Perception and mathematical intuition. Pp. 114-141. (Reprinted from The
philosophical review, vol. 89 (1980), pp. 163-196.)
W W TAIT. Truth and proof: the Platonism of mathematics. Pp. 142-167. (Reprinted with
revisions from Synthese, vol. 69 (1986), pp. 341-370.)
HILARY PUTNAM. Mathematics without foundations. A reprint of XXXVII 402. Pp. 168-184.
GEORGE BoOLOS. The consistency of Frege's Foundations of arithmetic. Pp. 185-202. (Reprinted
from On being and saying, Essays for Richard Cartwright, edited by Judith Jarvis Thomson, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987, pp. 3-20.)
DANIEL ISAACSON. Arithmetical truth and hidden higher-order concepts. Pp. 203-224. (Reprinted
with revisions from Logic Colloquium '85, Proceedings of the colloquium held in Orsay, France July 1985,
edited by the Paris Logic Group, Studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics, vol. 122, North-
Holland, Amsterdam, New York, etc., 1987, pp. 147-169.)
STEWART SHAPIRO. Conservativeness and incompleteness. Pp. 225-234. (Reprinted from The
journal ofphilosophy, vol. 80 (1983), pp. 521-53 1.)

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