Frank Ramsey Quotes on Knowledge
Frank Ramsey (1903–1930) produced, in the seven years between his Cambridge degree and his early death, one of the most influential bodies of work in twentieth-century philosophy of language, decision theory, and philosophy of probability. Truth and Probability (1926) gave the founding statement of subjective Bayesian probability theory through the Dutch book argument; the Ramsey test for conditionals (the theory of belief revision under hypothesis) supplied the framework for contemporary conditional logic; the redundancy theory of truth (truth as superfluous predicate added to a sentence one is asserting) opened deflationary truth theory; and the Ramsey sentence technique for theoretical terms shaped post-Carnapian philosophy of science. The work was largely recovered after his death through the editorial efforts of his colleagues.
Quotes
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Beliefs are guides to action; their truth is their reliability.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“What we cannot say at all, we cannot say either; nor can we whistle it.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Truth is the satisfaction of the conditions of an assertion.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“We must always be brought back to the experiments and the data.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Philosophy is the clarification of thought, not the discovery of new facts.”
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“The first problem I propose to tackle is this: how much of its income should a nation save? To answer this a simple rule is obtained valid under conditions of surprising generality; the rule, which will be further elucidated later, runs as follows. The rate of saving multiplied by the marginal utility of money should always be equal to the amount by which the total net rate of enjoyment of utility falls short of the maximum possible rate of enjoyment.”
A Mathematical Theory of Saving", The Economic Journal , Vol. 38, No. 152 (Dec., 1928) -
“The first problem I propose to tackle is this: how much of its income should a nation save? To answer this a simple rule is obtained valid under conditions of surprising generality; the rule, which will be further elucidated later, runs as follows. The rate of saving multiplied by the marginal utility of money should always be equal to the amount by which the total net rate of enjoyment of utility”
A Mathematical Theory of Saving", The Economic Journal , Vol. 38, No. 152 (Dec., 1928) -
“Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition that we have to check, and an inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense!”
Philosophy" (1929) as quoted by Nils-Eric Sahlin, The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey (1990) -
“Philosophy" (1929) as quoted by Nils-Eric Sahlin, The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey (1990)”
Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition that we have to check, and an inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense! -
“Tautologies and contradictions are not real propositions, but degenerate cases. ...Clearly, by negating a contradiction we get a tautology, and by negating a tautology a contradiction. ...A genuine proposition asserts something about reality, and it is true if reality is as it is asserted to be. But a tautology is a symbol constructed so as to say nothing whatever about reality, but to express total ignorance by agreeing with every possibility.”
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