ABSTRACT

The prominent representatives of pragmatism of the left identified by Nicholas Rescher are William James and Richard Rorty. Pragmatists must go deeper, normatively speaking: they must hold that a statement's truth conditions, as well as the conditions under which someone is justified in believing it. Misak has recently suggested that Ramsey argues for a persuasive version of objective pragmatism. Rescher has worked extensively on Ramsey, acquiring and administering the Ramsey Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as editing Ramsey's unfinished manuscript On Truth for publication. This chapter proposes Ramsey's views of meaning and justification, exploring how he manifests the deep normative concerns and realist sympathies characteristic of objective pragmatism. Ramsey attempts to give a theory of probability, which he takes to be "a branch of logic, the logic of partial belief and inconclusive argument". The chapter presents Ramsey's deflationism about truth and shows how it leads him to search for a pragmatist theory of meaning.