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Cheryl Misak on Frank Ramsey's Life and Thought
00:17:17
The Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey died aged 26, but in a short brilliant life he made significant contributions to philosphy and economics. Here in the Bio Bites strand of Philosophy Bites David Edmonds discusses Ramsey's life and thought with...
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A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David.
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Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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Frank Ramsay was a remarkable Cambridge philosopher who died very young. He was only 26. In his short life, he produced a slew of brilliant ideas, many of which are still discussed in this interview in the Bio Bytes thread of Philosophy Bytes. Cheryl Mezak, author of Ramsey's biography, which she's subtitled A Sheer Excess of Powers, explores the relationship between his life and thought.
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Cheryl Mesak, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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C
My pleasure.
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We're talking today about Frank Ramsay. You've been on Philosophy Bites before, also talking about Frank Ramsay, but in particular today we're going to be talking about how his life affected his philosophy. Let's start by summarizing who he was when he lived, how important he was.
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C
Ramsay was, as Paul Samuelson, the economist once said, a genius by any test of genius. So he died at the age of 26 in 1930. He was a Cambridge philosopher, economist and mathematician who really did unbelievable things in this very short life. There's a branch of combinatoric mathematics named after him, Ramsey Theory. There are two sub branches of economics that he really founded. Optimal taxation theory and optimal savings theory. And in philosophy, we also have just a ton of things named after him. Ramsey sentences, Ramsey conditionalization. My favorite is Donald Davidson's coinage of the term Ramsey effect. The Ramsey effect is when you think you've just come up with some absolutely stunningly brilliant cool idea and it turns out that Frank Ramsey in 1927 already had it.
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A
So a genius by any definition. Tell me a bit about his upbringing, his parents.
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C
So he was a Cambridge product. His father was a jobbing mathematics don. When I say a jobbing mathematics don, I mean he wrote textbooks, never did anything of major significance. So Ramsay was much better a mathematician than his father. His mother was one of these firebrand progressive, feminist, socialist do gooders. So she would take her three children on Christmas day to the poor house and they would give presents to the poor children before they had their own Christmas. And Ramsay really grew up with the this mother with very strong values and he imbibed them. He adopted his mother's values, so he.
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A
Became a socialist, is that right? Because one doesn't really equate Ramsey economics with socialism.
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Yes. Ramsay is thought of as an economist as being a sort of paradigm case of a utilitarian analyzer. So he was very, very good at making utilitarian arguments. In fact, he's considered the founder of rational choice theory because he was the first, before De Finetti, before von Neumann and Morgenstern, to figure out how to measure partial belief, to come up with a subjective account of probability and show that we could be rational by keeping our probability measures, our belief credences, in line with the probability calculus. But Ramsey was very clear, even though he did this tremendously impressive technical thing, that no human being could keep their probabilities in line with the probability calculus. He was running around Cambridge in 1927 giving a talk called Mathematics and Economics in which he said, look, this is a highly idealized kind of rationality that no one can measure up to. And so he would have hated the fact that he's considered the founder of rational choice theory.
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A
Where does the socialism of his mother and concerns for justice then fit into his economics?
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C
So as an undergraduate comes into Cambridge very young, because he was always clever and always moved ahead, he comes in as a socialist and then he meets Morris Dob, who was an undergraduate at the time and a communist. And Dobb takes Ramsay to workers meetings. And Ramsey actually does a lot of good and very kind of administrative work for these workers associations, taking notes, making generalizations about what kind of worker was more inclined to union than others. And he really had his socialism cemented as an undergraduate. And when an undergraduate, he wrote a paper called Socialism and Inequality where he argued that economists should be socialists. And then later on, when he wrote his two very famous papers in economics, they look like straight up utilitarian models, but in fact, in one of them called A Mathematical Theory of Savings, he asks how much a society should save for the future. And that's not just how much money a society should save for future generations, but how much natural resources and the like they should save. And he was very clear that you couldn't just run a utilitarian calculus and for instance, discount future generations because some war disease might come and wipe them out, so you can't count their utility. He said, no, no, no, that would be unjust. So he brought justice considerations into his utility analyses and they were all kind of left wing welfare economics analyses.
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A
And is there a link at all between his socialism or perhaps more widely, putting human beings at the centre of his thinking with his philosophy as well as his economics?
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C
Yes, Ramsay was first and foremost in philosophy a pragmatist. So the pragmatist says that when we analyze our philosophical concepts like truth, probability, knowledge, belief, we mustn't go all metaphysical, but we must start with human beings and the role these concepts play in human inquiry, in human lives. So Ramsey's account of probability is a subjectivist accountability. It's about our degrees of belief and what they ought to be. His account of knowledge, he was the first reliableist in the theory of knowledge. He said, we know P when P is a reliable belief with which we meet the future, something that works perfectly for us.
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This stands in marked contrast to Wittgenstein's philosophy. And Wittgenstein was an enormous influence on Ramsay.
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Yes, although I would argue that Wittgenstein was an enormous influence on Ramsay and Ramsay was an enormous influence on Wittgenstein. So as an undergraduate, Ramsay is asked to translate this manuscript that has come out of war torn Europe. Wittgenstein is in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. And Russell and Keynes managed to get this manuscript out of Europe to Cambridge. And it's a very unusual manuscript. It's written as a series of propositions with sub propositions. It's unlike anything that has been seen before and it's very technical. And Moore says it's untranslatable. And then they figure out, well, actually maybe this young man, mathematically inclined, genius Frank Ramsay can translate it. And indeed Ramsay is very keen to do it and he understands the philosophy completely because he's been going to Moore's lectures and he's been going to visit Russell in London to talk about logic. And Ramsay takes Wittgenstein's manuscript in German to the university typing office and he reads off to Ms. Pate the Tractatus Logical Philosophicus in English. So he looks at the German sentence and he reads it off to Ms. Pate in English, she transcribes it, they go back and forth and Wittgenstein declares the translation to have more authority than the original. So Ramsay was completely taken by Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is, as you say, completely unlike Ramsay's later pragmatist philosophy. So Wittgenstein's argument was that the meaning and truth of a proposition, which is somehow some independently existing entity, very bizarre. But the meaning of a proposition, and the truth of proposition is that you take a complex proposition, you boil it down to its very simple constituents, and then each of those constituent elements shares a logical form with reality or a state of affairs. So it's completely non human kind of meaning and truth. And Ramsay translates A Tractatus and then immediately writes a critical notice of it, which still stands as one of its most important commentaries.
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A
Famously, at the end of the Tractatus there's a section about ethics and the meaning of life. How does Ramsay's human approach differ from Wittgenstein.
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C
Good. So Wittgenstein in the Tractatus had a big problem in that very few propositions are going to come out meaningful and true on this strict logical picture, theory of meaning and truth. Only very simple statements like the pen is to the left of the cup perhaps are going to share a logical form with the state of affairs. There were a lot of propositions, like universal generalizations, causal propositions, but also ethical propositions and propositions about the meaning of life that literally just don't fit into Wittgenstein's picture. And of propositions about the meaning of life, Wittgenstein said we must be silent. We can't say anything about the meaning of life. But somehow our thoughts about the meaning of life are more important than what we can say in this primary logical language. So in 1925, there was a very interesting series of papers given at the Apostles Society in Cambridge, the Secret Conversation Society. So first Russell came and talked about the meaning of life. And he talked about how puny human beings were in the great universe and was eloquent, as he always was, about how all of human aspiration and accomplishment and love is bound to just be wiped out in the debris of a dying universe, because the universe is going to cool and die. Now we think it's going to heat up and die, but at the time they were sure it was going to cool and die. And Ramsay then gave a talk about the meaning of life. And he said, unlike some of my friends, he didn't mention them, but he meant Russell and Wittgenstein. He took the human perspective, said the stars are all as small as threepenny bits as far as the human is concerned. What Ramsay was interested in was human beings and what was best for human beings. So Russell focused on the vastness of the universe and found it depressing when it came to the meaning of life. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, focused on this tight logical language and said, you couldn't say anything about the meaning of life. But nonetheless, he also was a massive depressive. And Ramsey said, unlike some of my friends, I find life quite wonderful and enjoyable because I take the human perspective.
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A
Well, tell me a bit about Ramsay's character then, because that seems to be connected with an attitude to other human beings, an enjoyment in life. Wittgenstein notoriously, was terrible with other people, lacked empathy. Russell was more gregarious. What about Ramsay?
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C
Ramsay? It was very easy to write this biography in a way, because Ramsay turned out to be the sunniest, most Lovely, lovable character. Probably in the history of philosophy, it's very hard to find anyone who would say a bad word about him. So he was warm, he was gregarious, and he was very concerned about what other people were feeling in any human situation. And this did have an influence on his, both philosophy and economics, I think. An economist, I believe it was Paul Samuelson, identified one move of Ramsay's in economics as being after the feasible first best. And this, I think, is Ramsay's approach to everything in philosophy and economics. He's not after the ideal. So Wittgenstein is after the ideal truth that actually no human being can have. No human being is going to get their propositions such that they share a logical form with reality. He was against idealization in economics. No human being is going to be a perfect maximizer of utility. What Ramsay was after was what human beings can realistically get to. And that's a line of his that I employ quite heavily in my work on Ramsey. He was after a realistic philosophy and a realistic economics, and I think that is because as a human being, he was after the best that we human beings can do.
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A
And you describe him as a pragmatist. Does he come up with pragmatism himself, or is he introduced to pragmatism by somebody else?
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C
Yes, he is introduced by pragmatism by someone else. When he was a schoolboy, a family friend, Charles K. Ogden, was kind of a man about town in Cambridge and a very serious publisher, published Wittgenstein's Tractatus, for instance. Ogden was Ramsay's mentor, took him under his wing. And Ogden was one of the very few people in Britain who was really interested in and attracted to pragmatism. And he was reading Peirce, not understanding him very well. Ogden wasn't a great thinker himself, he was a great publisher. And he put in the young Ramsey's hands a couple of papers of Peirce's. And then when the very first volume of Peirce's papers were published after his death. Peirce died in 1914. 1922, Harcourt Brace in America published a volume of Peirce's papers, and Ogden published them simultaneously in the uk. Hardly anyone has clocked that and. And Ramsay read them hot off the press when he was an undergraduate in 1922. And that's when he started to call himself a pragmatist.
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A
You've written the definitive biography, definitely, of Ramsay. You already knew about his philosophy, but did writing the biography give you new insights into how you understood his philosophy?
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It did. In that I knew he was a pragmatist because he said he was, and I had thought that pragmatism manifested itself with respect to his theory of belief and how what is important about a belief is that it meet the future well, so we're not interested in that kind of correspondence theory of truth that Wittgenstein was interested in, but we're interested in how our beliefs serve us well in the future. But then it turned out, when I dived into the rest of Ramsay's thought, and also into his personality, that this idea of the feasible first best really was the governing thought of all of his work, except obviously in combinatoric mathematics. It would have really been a stretch to try to apply that overarching thought to Ramsey theory in mathematics.
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A
Shawmisak, thank you very much indeed.
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C
Thank you.
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