Frank Ramsey Quotes on Truth
Frank Ramsey’s posthumously collected papers, especially “Facts and Propositions” (1927) and “Truth and Probability” (1926), gave early twentieth-century analytic philosophy its founding statement of the redundancy or deflationary theory of truth. The central thesis is that the truth predicate adds no genuine substantive property to the propositions to which it is applied — to assert that a proposition is true is simply to assert the proposition itself, with whatever content the proposition independently has — and the corresponding philosophical work that traditional correspondence and coherence theories had attempted is therefore better located elsewhere in the analysis of language and belief. The framework, developed across Ramsey’s brief Cambridge career before his death at twenty-six, shaped the subsequent deflationary tradition through Strawson, Quine, Horwich, and the contemporary minimalist accounts of truth.
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 formalists neglected the content altogether and made mathematics meaningless, the logicians neglected the form and made mathematics consist of any true generalizations; only by taking account of both sides and regarding it as composed of tautologous generalizations can we obtain an adequate theory.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Wikiquote