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Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: On Certainty in the Light of Peirce and James 1st Edition Anna Boncompagni (Auth.)
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For my parents, Alex and Ruby Misak, for their 80th birthdays
Part I. Cambridge Massachusetts
Part II. Cambridge England
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Preface
The aim of this book is to map and explore some unfamiliar but important territory in the history of analytic philosophy. It concerns the relationship between two intellectual giants of Cambridge Massachusetts, Charles Peirce and William James, and two intellectual giants of Cambridge England, Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The timeline begins in the mid 1860s, when Peirce and James started to develop the philosophical position they called pragmatism, and ends with Wittgenstein’s last works in 1951. There will be special focus on the three decades between 1900 and 1930, when philosophers in Cambridge England became aware of and took account of the pragmatism being developed in Cambridge Massachusetts. These were the years in which Russell was repelled by some of the ideas of the pragmatists and attracted by others; Ramsey was heavily influenced by Peirce on belief and truth; and Wittgenstein was influenced by James on religious belief and influenced more generally and more signficantly by Peirce, through Ramsey.
The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that any domain of inquiry—science, ethics, mathematics, logic, aesthetics—is human inquiry, and that our philosophical accounts of truth and knowledge must start with that fact. Our vast store of belief has developed in a way that is contingent on all sorts of historical accidents—the evolution of the human brain and sensory apparatus, the way language-users have posed fundamental questions and answered them, the technology made possible by the earth’s raw materials and by our ingenuity, and so on. As James was fond of putting it, the trail of the human serpent is over everything (P: 37, VRE: 352). As some put it today, the best understanding of our concepts is agent-centred.
From this starting point about the human origins of and constraints upon knowledge, pragmatists have made different arguments and drawn different conclusions. Some argue that it makes little or no sense to speak of truth, falsity, or objectivity, but only what passes for true, false, or objective in one community or another. The most prominent proponent of this kind of pragmatism in recent years has been Richard Rorty. Others argue that the contingency of knowledge, and the allied fact that each of our beliefs is a fallible interpretation, does not entail that our beliefs are simply determined by—or answerable only to—what our community decides, or that truth and objectivity are spurious notions. The ideas of truth and objectivity are required if we are to have beliefs at all. I have argued for this kind of pragmatism, as has Huw Price.1
The pragmatist who wants to retain a place for truth and objectivity must walk a fine line. The truth-denying pragmatist thinks that the truth-affirming pragmatist will not be able to keep her balance. Indeed, the truth-denying pragmatist thinks that the
1 See e.g. Misak (2004 [1991], 2013) and Price (2003).
truth-affirming pragmatist is really walking a plank that will inevitably dump her under what the truth-affirming pragmatist thinks is the sea of post-modern arbitrariness. But that, in my view, would be an indictment of pragmatism. In the pages that follow, I will try to show that Peirce and Ramsey manage to keep their balance and have much to teach contemporary philosophy as we try to work through these difficult matters. Peirce and Ramsey, that is, offer us the best chance of understanding how it is that beliefs can both be the products of human inquiry and can nonetheless aim at truth.
This will come as a surprise to those who read Ramsey as a redundancy theorist about truth. It will also come as a surprise to those who read him as an expressivist who thinks there is a fact-stating discourse and a non-fact-stating discourse of open generalizations, causal laws, conditionals, value statements, etc., and that only the latter kinds of belief require a pragmatist treatment. My intention is to show that Ramsey’s equivalence thought (the idea that ‘p is true’ and p are equivalent), which so many have interpreted as a redundancy theory, was merely a step along the way to a thoroughgoing pragmatist account of truth. That is, Ramsey is best read as a pragmatist, and a pragmatist not just about open generalizations, causal statements, conditionals, and value statements. He is a pragmatist about all our beliefs. On his account, however, as on Peirce’s, that is not to deny that our beliefs aim at truth and objectivity.
The position I trace and recommend here is in step with my 2013 book The American Pragmatists. There I presented a history of pragmatism and argued that we ought to follow Peirce and C. I. Lewis in order to rehabilitate the more objective version, after its successive downward shifts in fortune driven by James, F. C. S. Schiller, and Rorty. In the present book, I fill in a missing piece of that story. I give an account of the kind of pragmatism that was gaining strength across the Atlantic, in Cambridge England. That pragmatism is Ramsey’s pragmatism, which then influenced Wittgenstein. Hence, my account of Ramsey’s relationship with Wittgenstein is in competition with those who think of him as the junior partner in Wittgenstein’s project and it is in competition with the very different narrative that that Wittgenstein’s ideas were diametrically opposed to Ramsey’s. I shall argue that while Wittgenstein was indeed a major influence on Ramsey, Ramsey was also a major influence on Wittgenstein.
I should say right away that there is much more to James than his sometimes careless expressions of pragmatism as the thesis that truth is what works for any particular person or community. But these expressions were what dimmed pragmatism’s prospects in the minds of many, and hence, as in The American Pragmatists, I need to get this James on the page. Otherwise we will fail to understand the trajectory of pragmatism. It might be true that James’s theories are often presented, for instance by Russell and Moore, in a wilfully weak way so as to provide an easy stalking horse. But however much one might admire the more careful James, we shall see that it was his less careful statements about pragmatism that made an impact across the Atlantic. It is good that we shall have in the present book more opportunity to look at James’s better-received work, especially in psychology and the theories of action and perception.
The debates that absorbed the two sets of Cambridge pragmatists have of course evolved, and there is a temptation to spread our contemporary terminology and preoccupations onto thinkers in the past. I shall try to resist it.2 To take just one example— the debate about primary and secondary languages that occupied a good deal of the attention of Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and the Vienna Circle—I will stick to the intellectual context they found themselves in, and will only gesture at the way these debates have continued to unfold. I shall also confine myself to the core issues of pragmatism, and so I will not, for instance, speak to the work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey on the foundations of mathematics; or Frege’s part in the intellectual background against which these three formed their positions; or the role of Mach, Brouwer, Hertz, and Boltzmann, who did not call themselves pragmatists, but who were sometimes thought to be such by Schlick, Wittgenstein, and others.3
One might well ask whether Oxford was not also influenced by the American pragmatists. The answer, I think, is ‘yes’. Austin, Dummett, McDowell, Ryle, Strawson, and Wiggins are examples of those who have wanted to link our philosophical concepts to human practice and action. The pragmatist influence there came mostly through Wittgenstein, if my account of the impact of pragmatism on Wittgenstein is at all compelling. The reader who is interested in this lineage might want to turn to the volume of essays arising from the 2014 British Academy Symposium: The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in the British Long 20th Century.
2 David Stern (2007) is superb on the dangers of reading the present into the past.
3 See Kevin Mulligan (forthcoming) for the beginnings of that last study.
Acknowledgements
Huw Price has been instrumental to this project in more ways than one. A research workshop he and Fraser McBride organized in 2012 on ‘Cambridge Pragmatism’ sparked my interest in the topic. In the autumn of 2014, he and I put together a British Academy Symposium titled ‘The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in the British Long 20th Century’, which provided further fuel, as did the reading group on pragmatism we organized in Cambridge during Lent Term 2015. Indeed, the book was finished while I was a very happy Visiting Fellow Commoner at his college, Trinity, home at various times to Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. All along the way, he has asked some of the most pressing questions.
The organizers of a conference in 2012 on ‘Truth and Democracy: Themes from Cheryl Misak’s Work’ at the University of St Andrews, Yann Allard-Tremblay and Noah Friedman-Biglin, helped keep the flame alive during some heavy but rewarding lifting as Provost of the University of Toronto. My graduate classes at NYU in 2013 and the University of Toronto in 2015 on the topic of this book provided much stimulus. So did audiences at Columbia University; the University of Birmingham; the École Normale Supérieure; the University of Hertfordshire; The Idea of Pragmatism Workshop at Sheffield University; the Institute of Education at UCL; the New York Pragmatist Forum; NYU; the Peirce Centennial Conference; Royal Holloway; Queen’s University, Kingston; Roma Tre University; the Royal Institute of Philosophy; the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy; University College Dublin; the University of Vienna; and three Cambridge groups: the Moral Sciences Club, the Philosophy of Science Society, and the Serious Metaphysics Society.
To re-fashion a remark made about Wittgenstein, one should not threaten visiting philosophers with early drafts of books. I’m glad I broke that rule with four of my own house guests—Hugh Mellor in Toronto, Anna Boncompagni in New York, and David Bakhurst and Nils-Eric Sahlin in Cambridge. They each read the entire manuscript at different stages and improved it immeasurably, as did Arif Ahmed, Steven Methven, Griffin Klemick, and two anonymous readers for OUP. Cora Diamond, Peter GodfreySmith, Andrew Howat, Tom Hurka, Henry Jackman, Jeff Kasser, Ed Mares, Michael Potter, Ian Proops, Ian Rumfitt, Joachim Schulte, David Stern, Sergio Tenenbaum, Thomas Uebel, David Wiggins, and Jessica Wright were very kind to comment on individual chapters, much to the benefit of the evolving manuscript. That is an astonishing amount of high-end help, and yet errors will remain, for which I take sole responsibility. Thanks also must go to three dedicated and knowledgeable archivists: Patricia McGuire at King’s College, Jonathan Smith at Trinity’s Wren Library, and especially my old friend Jacky Cox at the Cambridge University Library.
Griffin Klemick and Jessica Wright, Ph.D students at the University of Toronto, were superb research assistants, as well as substantial commentators throughout the writing of the book, and Cherie Braden and Leo Lepiano, students in my 2015 graduate seminar, did some excellent last-minute commenting and correcting. Jeremy Langworthy was a supererogatory copy-editor, as he was with my last book. Peter Momtchiloff, my editor at OUP, also went above and beyond the call of duty.
Peter Lofts found the wonderful photo for the cover. It is of Great Gate, Trinity College, home at various times to Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. It was taken by the Cambridge studio of Ramsey and Muspratt, the former being Lettice Ramsey, Frank Ramsey’s widow. Finally, I’m happy to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for necessary material support for this project and my family, David, Alex, and Sophie, for even more important immaterial support.
I have written on certain of these topics before, and while some of the material in this book draws and expands on that earlier work, all changes should be taken as improvements—at least, that is how they are intended.
Reference and Spelling Policy
Given that this book crosses back and forth over the Atlantic, I will spell words as they were printed—‘behaviour’ and ‘behavior’, for instance, a word that even Russell uses in both spellings. In Canada, we also switch back and forth, but when using my own voice in this book, I consistently go the UK way. Normally, there would be a comma between ‘Cambridge, England’ and ‘Cambridge, Massachusetts’. These places are part of my subject matter and I will slow the tsunami of commas by not following normal usage in this regard.
References to the works of William James
References to James’s correspondence refer to The Correspondence of William James and take the form ‘CWJ n: m, year,’ where n is the volume number and m the page number. Abbreviations for others of James’s works are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism
MT The Meaning of Truth
P Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
PP The Principles of Psychology
PU A Pluralistic Universe
SPP Some Problems of Philosophy
TTP Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
VRE The Varieties of Religious Experience
WB The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Reference to the works of C. S. Peirce
References to Peirce’s unpublished material are to the Charles S. Peirce Papers, Hougton Library, Harvard University: MS: n, where n is the manuscript number. References to Peirce’s published material are as follows. If a passage occurs in the new Writings of Charles S. Peirce: Chronological Edition, I cite that source as ‘W n: m year’ where n is the volume, m the page number. If it is not in the Writings, but in the older Collected Papers, the citation is ‘CP n. m year’ where n is the volume number, m the paragraph number. If it appears in print only in New Elements of Mathematics, the citation is ‘NE n: m, year’, where n is the volume number and m the page number. If it occurs in
Peirce’s contributions to The Nation, I cite it as ‘N n: m, year,’ where n is the volume number and m is the page number in the Ketner and Cook edition of those contributions. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
References to the works of Frank Ramsey
References to Ramsey’s unpublished papers are to the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Papers, 1920–1930, ASP.1983.01, Archives of Scientific Philosophy, Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh, RP n-m-o, where m is the box number, n is the folder number and o is the page number.
Abbreviations for Ramsey’s published and collected papers are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
CN Critical Notice of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
DS ‘On There Being No Discussable Subject’
FM ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’
FP ‘Facts and Propositions’
GC ‘General Propositions and Causality’
K ‘Knowledge’
ML ‘Mathematical Logic’
MM ‘Review of Ogden and Richards’ Meaning of Meaning’
NP ‘The Nature of Propositions’
NPPM Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics
OT On Truth
P ‘Philosophy’
RB ‘Reasonable Degree of Belief’
T h ‘Theories’
TP ‘Truth and Probability’
U ‘Universals’
References to the works of Bertrand Russell
References to Russell’s unpublished material are to the McMaster University Archives, BR n, where n is the record number.
References to The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell take the form ‘CP n: m, year’, where n is the volume number, m the page number. Abbreviations for others of Russell’s works are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
A Autobiography
AM The Analysis of Mind
F ‘Foreword to An Introduction to Peirce’s Philosophy Interpreted as a System’
FMW ‘The Free Man’s Worship’
IMP Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
IPM 2 ‘Introduction to the Second Edition of Principia Mathematica’
JCT ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’
KEW Our Knowledge of the External World
MPD My Philosophical Development
P ‘Pragmatism’
PoM The Principles of Mathematics
PLA The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
RSP ‘The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics’
WIB ‘What I Believe’
Reference to the works of Victoria Welby
References to the works of Welby are in the form WA: n, where n is the manuscript number in the Welby Fonds, York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections.
References to the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein
References to Wittgenstein’s unpublished papers are in the form MS: n, where n is the manuscript number. Abbreviations for Wittgenstein’s published material are as follows. Full details of these works can be found in the bibliography.
References to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are in the form T: n.m where n is paragraph number and m is subparagraph number.
BB The Blue and Brown Books
BT The Big Typescript
CV Culture and Value
LAPR Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religion
LC1
LC2
N
Cambridge Lectures 1930–2
Cambridge Lectures 1932–5
Notebooks 1914–16
OC On Certainty
PG Philosophical Grammar
PI Philosophical Investigations
PPF Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment
PR Philosophical Remarks
RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
RPP I/II Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2
WVC Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann
Z Zettel
Permissions
I have endeavoured to trace holders of copyright and request permission to quote when required. I thank the following: Stephen Burch for permission to quote from the unpublished Ramsey letters and diaries; the University of Pittsburgh for permission to quote from the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Papers; the Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge for permission to quote from the unpublished writings of J. M. Keynes; the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, for permission to quote from the Wittgenstein writings; McMaster University Library, William Ready Archives, for permission to quote from the Bertrand Russell letters; the Officers and Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club for permission to quote from its minutes; Thamar MacIver for permission to quote from the unpublished diary of Arthur MacIver; York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, for permission with respect to the Lady Victoria Welby fonds; and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for permission to quote from the materials in its collections for which it holds copyright.
Introduction
Pragmatism came into being in 1867 in Cambridge Massachusetts, in a discussion group that included philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and lawyers. In 1906 C. S. Peirce, one of the primary contributors, reminisced about its birth:
It was in the earliest seventies that a knot of us young men in . . . Cambridge, calling ourselves, half-ironically, half-defiantly, ‘The Metaphysical Club,’—for agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics—used to meet, sometimes in my study, sometimes in that of William James.
[CP 5. 12]
In the year Peirce made this remark, James gave his Lowell lectures. They were published in 1907 as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, which Paul Carus said appeared ‘cometlike on our intellectual horizon’ (2000 [1911]: 44). James’s fame was not restricted to America. He delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901 and the Hibbert Lectures in Oxford in 1908. Pragmatism was the talk of the town not just in Cambridge Massachusetts, but also in Cambridge England.
During this period, both Cambridges were in the most illustrious periods in their great philosophical histories. In the English Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Frank Ramsey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were setting the tone of philosophy for decades to come. In the Massachusetts Cambridge, America’s homegrown philosophy, pragmatism, was being developed by William James, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The standard story has it that Russell, Moore, and, to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein, savaged pragmatism, leaving it never to fully recover.1 The standard story also has Ramsey and especially Wittgenstein putting forward novel positions, drawing upon few influences outside their tight local circle. On this account, true genius flowered on the banks of the Cam, untouched by non-native species. Von Wright makes the assertion for the later Wittgenstein:
The young Wittgenstein had learned from Frege and Russell. His problems were in part theirs. The later Wittgenstein, in my view, has no ancestors in the history of thought. His work signals a radical departure from previously existing paths of philosophy.
[1982: 27]2
1 Indeed, I have been one of those who have told part of the standard story. See Misak (2008).
2 See also Hacker (1996: 100).
Suppes makes the assertion for Ramsey: he was ‘much too caught up in the writings of those at or close to Cambridge’ to have been familiar with much of the literature produced elsewhere (2006: 37).3
I shall argue that both parts of the standard story are mistaken. Far from nearly killing off American pragmatism, Ramsey and Wittgenstein were strongly influenced by it, and even Russell took important cues from it. I hope that by the end of this book, the reader will find these surprising claims uncontentious.4 Perhaps more contentious will be my argument that Ramsey should be viewed not only as a vital part of the pragmatist tradition, but as a proponent of the most compelling version of it, and that Ramsey’s pragmatist objections to Wittgenstein’s early position were largely responsible for Wittgenstein’s turn away from the Tractatus and toward ordinary language.
The standard story does acknowledge that Ramsey was interested in Peirce—after all, he prefaced one of his most famous papers, ‘Truth and Probability’, with a quote from Peirce, and declared the final section ‘almost entirely based on the writings of C. S. Peirce’ (TP: 90). But it has not been altogether clear whether the intellectual connection was deep or superficial. Ramsey muddied the waters by claiming: ‘My pragmatism is derived from Mr. Russell’ (FP: 51). His friend and colleague Richard Braithwaite repeats the claim in his obituary of Ramsey: ‘Recently (in company with Bertrand Russell) he had been descending the slippery path to a sort of pragmatism’ (Braithwaite 1930: 216). This will seem astounding to scholars of American pragmatism, as Russell produced the most damaging critiques of pragmatism. Indeed, we shall see that Russell vociferously objected to the pragmatist account of truth and that Ramsey, in turn, objected to Russell’s logical atomist theory of truth (as any pragmatist would). So how could Russell be taken by Ramsey to be his source for pragmatism?
The key to unlocking this mystery lies in the fact that by 1926 Russell had in fact adopted some pragmatist claims about the link between belief and behaviour. He could not, however, enrol fully in the pragmatist project, since he took this to require endorsement of the pragmatist theory of truth that James was inclined to articulate. Russell understood that pragmatist theory of truth as the claim that truth is what ‘works’, and he found the idea an abomination. Nevertheless, Russell’s new account of belief was pragmatist in spirit, and it provided a pragmatist steer for Ramsey. But as Braithwaite indicated, Ramsey was on the path also to a pragmatist account of truth, a path Braithwaite thought would result in a slide to relativism. Russell was not the inspiration for that.
It is Peirce who was responsible for Ramsey’s taking the step from the linkage of belief to behaviour to the linkage of truth to the success of behaviour. Ramsey had
3 Suppes, though, makes the claim only for Ramsey on the theory of measurement.
4 Not everyone will be surprised. Sahlin (1997), Tiercelin (2004), Hookway (2005), and Boncompagni (forthcoming a, forthcoming b) also argue for the influence of Peircean pragmatism on Ramsey and the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatism on Wittgenstein.
discovered Peirce in 1924 and was drawing upon Peirce’s non-Jamesian, more objective pragmatist account of belief and truth. That is, he was making his way down that slippery path to a stable pragmatist patch of ground. I shall show that Ramsey had forged a deep connection with some key ideas of Peirce’s: that a belief is a disposition to behave; that we evaluate beliefs in terms of whether they serve us well; and that an understanding of truth as correspondence is not in competition with a pragmatist conception of truth, but is in harmony with it.
It is a reasonable question to ask how the standard story has seemed so plausible all these years. The answer lies in two sets of facts. The first concerns Peirce and James. Not only was Peirce’s writing technical and difficult, but as his brother rued, he was ‘erratic in his judgment & temperament’ (CWJ 8: 17, 1895). In the introduction to Peirce’s first volume of collected essays, Chance, Love and Logic, editor Morris Raphael Cohen characterized him as one of those ‘restless pioneer souls with the fatal gift of genuine originality’ (1923: viii). In a similar vein, Carus wrote to Victoria Welby in 1898, igniting what would become a long and fruitful correspondence between Welby and Peirce:
Charles S. Peirce is a man of unusual ability, and one of the greatest logicians in the world The sole drawback with him is that he is unmanageable in his private relations, and has thus been frustrated in his career; instead of holding a chair at the university, which would have been the place for him he is sitting on a little farm in Pennsylvania, dissatisfied with all the world, and sometimes even in straightened circumstances [York University, Clara Thomas Archives 1970-003/6].
The upshot was that Peirce was almost entirely locked out of academia. He published very little, and his name was frequently misspelled—even on proofs of his own essays and in the American Philosophical Association’s minutes recording his death. He was virtually unknown at home and abroad—except to Ramsey and a small handful of others. (That small handful includes C. I. Lewis, whose work was also known to Ramsey.)
One of my aims is to uncover the way in which Ramsey found out about Peirce, a route that lies almost hidden from sight. As a preview, Ramsey discovered Peirce through C. K. Ogden, who had known Ramsey from the time he was a schoolboy. Ogden knew about Peirce through one of those relatively few people who had read his work—the independent scholar Lady Victoria Welby. Ogden was so keen on this unknown American pragmatist that he published Chance, Love and Logic simultaneously with the Harcourt Brace edition in 1923 and put it in Ramsey’s hands.
James was the opposite of Peirce—charming, personable, and an accessible writer. But he ignited the philosophical rage of the hard-headed realists Russell and Moore by seeming to suggest in his ‘The Will to Believe’ and ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ that if the hypothesis of God’s existence makes one’s life more bearable, then that is a kind of evidence that God exists. James argued that a live hypothesis for an individual thinker is one that he acts upon. That is the dispositional account of belief shared
by all pragmatists. He goes on to maintain that if the effects of believing in the hypothesis of God’s existence are good for the individual, then she should believe. James made Russell and Moore only more cross by contending more generally in Pragmatism that:
Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true instrumentally
(P: 34)
‘Satisfactorily’, he says, ‘means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic’ (P: 35).
George Santayana, a fellow pragmatist traveller, says that the thesis of ‘The Will to Believe’ is ‘a thought typical of James at his worst—a worst in which there is always a good side’ (2009 [1920]: 60). We shall see that the good side of James is very good indeed. Unfortunately, in Cambridge England the focus was on the worst side of James, partly due to his own sharp way of putting his point and partly due to his disciple in Oxford—the extreme and undiplomatic F. C. S. Schiller, whose ‘Humanism’ or ‘Personalism’ had it that truth and reality are ‘wholly plastic’. Wittgenstein read Schiller’s ‘The Value of Formal Logic’ (1932) and pronounced it philosophical nonsense.5 And here is Russell, in a 1912 letter to Ottoline Morrell, venting about Schiller:
I am in a state of fury because Schiller has sent me a book on Formal Logic which he has had the impertinence to write. He neither knows nor respects the subject, and of course writes offensive rot. I am already thinking of all the jokes I will make about the book if I have to review it.
[CP 6: 292, 1912]
In the 1919 printing of Pragmatism that is still on the shelves of Ramsey’s King’s College Cambridge library, James’s preface advises the reader that ‘the best statements’ of pragmatism to use as an introduction are Schiller’s (1919 [1907]: viii). The preface mentions Dewey as well, but not Peirce. It is entirely understandable why Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey would have worried that James’s more Schillerian statements were the essence of pragmatism.
James died in 1910 and Peirce in 1914. At that point, pragmatism was viewed with a great deal of suspicion, both in America and across the Atlantic, and was identified with James’s less careful accounts. Russell’s harsh verdict, although unfair, was not uncommon: ‘The skepticism embodied in pragmatism is that which says “Since all
5 Britton (1967 [1955]: 58). O. K. Bouwsma (1986: 28–9) reports that Wittgenstein was also scathing about Dewey:
[LW:] Dewey—was Dewey still living?
[OB:] Yes.
[LW:] Ought not to be.
beliefs are absurd, we may as well believe what is most convenient” ’ (JCT: 280). We shall see that Ramsey distanced himself from James’s account of truth and tried to find his way to a better pragmatist position. At the time he made the remark about getting his pragmatism from Russell, Ramsey was much happier nailing his colours to Russell’s reputable mast, and Peirce’s unknown one, rather than the less reputable Jamesian one.
The second set of facts that has allowed the standard story to thrive concerns Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Ramsey’s work was unfinished, under tragic circumstances. He died just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday in 1930. In that brief life, he managed to figure out how to measure partial belief and hence lay the groundwork for decision theory and Bayesian statistics; found one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics; and make huge contributions to logic, the foundations of mathematics, semantics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and truth theory. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of a substantial book titled On Truth. When Braithwaite collected and edited Ramsey’s papers for posthumous publication as The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays, he declined to include anything from that manuscript. The material is still largely overlooked, or at best underemphasized. It was edited and published only in 1991 by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer. Had Ramsey’s life not been cut so short, had he finished the book before his death, or even had the unfinished manuscript been published in a timely fashion, the direction and reputation of pragmatism would have been radically altered. Lytton Strachey wrote to a friend after Ramsey’s death that the deprivation to the world of learning was as if Newton had died at the age of 26 (Holroyd 2011: 655). I submit that one thing that would have transpired had Ramsey lived to Newton’s age is that his pragmatist account of belief and truth would have been well known and would have provided us with an excellent version of pragmatism to compete with Dewey’s and complement Lewis’s.
Wittgenstein, for his part, was not keen on making transparent the impact of pragmatism on his thought. It has been noticed by many that his later work seems pragmatist, with his interest in philosophy as method rather than as a body of truths; his focus on the primacy of practice and meaning as use; his positive regard for those propositions which we do not doubt; and his concern to describe the complex detail of human language and life.6 But Wittgenstein seemed uninterested in the history of philosophy and was remarkable for not talking much about the work of others. Ramsey reports that Wittgenstein ‘doesn’t like reading, being too lazy ever to try to understand a book, but only occasionally using one as a text for his own reflections’.7 James was one of the few philosophers he would admit to having read. A. C. Jackson reported that for a time James’s Principles of Psychology was the only book on Wittgenstein’s shelf, and that in the 1940s he ‘very frequently referred to James in his
6 See e.g. Brandom (1994, ch. 1), Putnam (1995, ch. 2), and Goodman (2002).
7 Paul (2012: 212); see also Monk (1996: 251) and Ryle (1970:11).
lectures, even making on one occasion—to everybody’s astonishment—a precise reference to a page-number!’8
But while we shall see that James’s thoughts on religion influenced Wittgenstein, his thoughts on truth often appear in Wittgenstein’s writing as an exemplar of error. I shall argue that it was Ramsey who was the strong pragmatist influence on Wittgenstein’s epistemology, to use a term that Wittgenstein himself would not have liked. Careful excavation of the pathways of influence are required here. Although Ramsey was one of the very few people with whom Wittgenstein cared to discuss philosophy (both in his years of isolation as a schoolteacher after the First World War and when he returned to Cambridge in January 1929 in what turned out to be the last year of Ramsey’s life), they had an intense, on-again, off-again relationship, and disagreed about how to approach philosophy. I shall argue that this disagreement resulted in two different kinds of pragmatism, and that the Ramseyan kind is better.
Thus, the standard story has been allowed to remain largely unchallenged all these decades not only because while Peirce was alive he had very little influence and was unable to provide a counterweight to James’s shaping of the public face of pragmatism. We also need to bring into the causal account the facts that Ramsey’s life was cut short, leaving pivotal portions of his later work unfinished and unread, and that Wittgenstein was wary of acknowledging Ramsey, given that he felt there were fundamental differences in perspective between them. The aim of this book is to fill these gaps in the telling of the history of analytic philosophy. The reader who is familiar with or not interested in the details of the philosophical background might understandably want to go directly to the parts of the book that fill those gaps: Chapter 3, where I show how knowledge of Peirce arrived in Cambridge England through Welby and Ogden; the parts of Chapter 4 that show how Wittgenstein’s Tractatus set the stage for Ramsey’s pragmatist rebellion (§§4.6 and 4.7); the sections of Chapter 5 where I show how Russell not only knew a fair bit about Peirce, but was attracted to pragmatism’s dispositional account of belief (§§5.1 and 5.3); Chapter 6, where Ramsey’s important pragmatist theory is articulated; and Chapter 7, where we see some surprising and novel evidence that Wittgenstein was significantly influenced by Ramsey’s pragmatism. I shall also fill a gap in the telling of the history of naturalism, of which pragmatism is a variety. Each of the four great naturalists I will examine in detail—Peirce, James, Ramsey, and the post-1929 Wittgenstein—struggles with one of the most pressing questions for philosophy. How can we make sense of normative notions such as truth, rightness, necessity, consistency, following a rule, rationality, and progress, given that we are beings in the natural world who cannot step outside our beliefs and practices to determine whether those beliefs and practices line up with objective facts? Each of these four great naturalists, in his own way, answers the challenge by linking the normative with successful behaviour.
8 See Passmore (1966: 434). See also the references to James in the notes of Wittgenstein’s 1946–7 Lectures on Philosophical Psychology
It will be clear that I think of ‘naturalism’ broadly, not in the narrow sense in which science is the source of all knowledge. Those who have been in the grip of the narrow characterization have spent much time on what are, in my view, fruitless debates, exemplified by the old Popperian and positivist arguments about how we might demarcate science from non-science. My aim is not to avoid the hard questions. Naturalists have to say something about how to characterize genuine belief, assertion, or inquiry. But I try not to start off by begging all the questions about what counts as knowledge, a candidate for truth, or a suitably objective domain of inquiry. I try to start with an epistemology that does not exclude, from the outset, beliefs about unobservable entities, ethics, and so on from being candidates for truth and knowledge.
By the end of the book, I will have offered an answer to a question that occupies many a contemporary pragmatist. Does pragmatism hold across the board, as a general account of belief and truth, or does it hold for only some kinds of beliefs? We shall see that the question of whether there is a bifurcation between discourses that are straightforwardly descriptive and those that should receive a pragmatist treatment is one that occupied both Wittgenstein and Ramsey.9 It is still a live question today, with local pragmatists or expressivists arguing that only certain domains of discourse are to be construed pragmatically. I shall throw my lot in with global pragmatists, who argue that pragmatist notions of belief and truth hold across the board. Peirce was a straightforward global pragmatist. I shall interpret Ramsey, especially in On Truth, as opting for the global position and influencing Wittgenstein to do so as well. I shall suggest, however, that the particular version of the global position Wittgenstein settled on would not have pleased Ramsey. Some Ramsey scholars will prefer the ‘early’ Ramsey, who may have thought that only some discourses or statement-types are to be construed pragmatically. The persistence of this debate— and especially the way that Ramsey, like so many pragmatists, found himself moving between the two positions—indicates that it too is one of the profound questions for philosophy. I do not expect to win over all those with opposing inclinations. But I will suggest that the ‘later’ Ramsey felt the pull of the global position, and in examining both his reasons and those of the classical pragmatists, I suggest that we, too, should feel their weight.
Along the way, I hope also to shed light on other contemporary substantive questions for pragmatists, without going into those contemporary debates in too much detail. For instance, it is sometimes said that pragmatists place too much emphasis on language and not enough emphasis on the relationship between thought and action.10 An underlying theme in the pages that follow is that it is an important insight of pragmatism that the two matters cannot be neatly pulled apart.
9 The language of ‘bifurcation’ is due to Kraut (1990).
10 See e.g. Godfrey-Smith (2014).
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