F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments [First Edition] 0826476007, 9780826476005, 9781847143143

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Citation preview

F. P. RAMSEY

CRITICAL REASSESSMENTS

Continuum Studies in British Philosophy: Duncan Richter, Wittgenstein at his Word Wilfrid E. Rumble, Doing Austin Justice Maria J. Frapolli (ed.), F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments William R. Eaton, Boyle on Fire Colin Tyler, Radical Philosophy Stephen Lalor, The Egregious Matthew Tindal James E. Crimmins, Jeremy Bentham's Final Years

F. P. RAMSEY

CRITICAL REASSESSMENTS

Edited by Maria J. Frapolli

continuum

L O N D O N • N E WY O R K

Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010 © Maria J. Frapolli and contributors 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:0-8264-7600-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data F. P. Ramsey: critical reassessments / edited by Maria J. Frapolli. p. cm.-(Continuum studies in British philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-8264-7600-7 1. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, 1903-1930.1. Frapolli, Maria Jose. II. Series. B1649. R254F67 2005 192-dc22 2004059841

Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

Contents

Acknowledgementss Contributors

vii viii

Prefacee

ix

Introduction Maria J. Frdpolli

1

1

Mind, Intentionality, and Language. The Impact of Russell's Pragmatism on Ramsey Juan Jose Acero

7

2

Ramsey and Wittgenstein: Mutual Influences Hans-Johann Glock

41

3

The Ramsey Sentence and Theoretical Content Jose A. Diez Calzada

70

4

The Contributions of Ramsey to Economics Jodo Ricardo Faria

104

5

Ramsey's Theory of Truth and the Origin of the Pro-sentential account Maria J. Frdpolli

113

6

Ramsey's Big Idea Colin Howson

139

1

Ramsey's Removal of Russell's 'Axiom of Reducibility' in the Light of Hilbert's Critique of Russell's Logicism Ulrich Majer

161

8

Ramsey and Pragmatism: The Influence of Peirce Christopher Hookway

182

vi 9

Contents Ramsey and the Prospects for Reliabilism Daniel Quesada

194

10

Ontology from Language? Ramsey on Universals Francisco Rodriguez-Consuegra

220

11

Ramsey and the Notion of Arbitrary Function Gabriel Sandu

237

Bibliography of Ramsey's Works

257

Index

260

Acknowledgements

It would not be possible to list everybody who has had a beneficial influence on the development and final stages of this book - there have been many who have helped, either directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, I would like to mention some of them: I warmly thank my colleagues Juan A. Nicolas and Juan J. Acero for their continuous support and friendship, and for having believed in this project from the beginning. I am also grateful to John R. Shook for his advice and help, and to the authors who have generously and enthusiastically contributed their works. The contact with them has been an unexpected pleasure added to the expected pleasure of working on Ramsey. I am also thankful to Philip de Bary, the Thoemmes editor for philosophy, who has handled the project with professional interest and affection, something that I highly appreciate. Neftali Villanueva and Francesc Gamos, PhD students of the Department of Philosophy, University of Granada, have been always ready to assist with their various technical and philosophical skills. To all of them I am deeply indebted, and I hope that the time and effort they have devoted to thinking about Ramsey for this volume has been at least as fruitful for them as it has been for me. Maria J. Frapolli

Contributors

Juan J. Acero: Departamento de Filosofia, Universidad de Granada, Spain Jose Antonio Diez Calzada: Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain Joao Ricardo Faria: University of Texas at Dallas, USA Maria J. Frapolli: Departamento de Filosofia, Universidad de Granada, Spain Hans-Johann Glock: University of Reading, UK Christopher Hookway: University of Sheffield, UK Colin Howson: London School of Economics, UK Ulrich Majer: Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Universitat Gottingen, Germany Daniel Quesada: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Francisco Rodriguez Consuegra: Universidad de Valencia, Spain Gabriel Sandu: University of Helsinki, Finland; Director of Research, CNRS, JHPST, Paris.

Preface

F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments is designed as a Festsschrift to mark the centenary of Frank Plumpton Ramsey's birth. Our way of honouring Ramsey has been to think with him and, wherever possible, to go beyond that, putting his ideas to work and seeing how far they can reach. In this regard, our main interest is not historical, although we have approached his work with textual and philosophical accuracy, and have tried not to put in Ramsey's mouth what is primarily in our minds. We share the opinion common among Ramsey's scholars that his work was ahead of his time. Many of Ramsey's ideas in philosophy and mathematics reappeared in mainstream twentieth-century thought, often independently of his writings, years and even decades after they were first discovered, created or entertained by the genius of Cambridge. Ramsey was too modern for his time, and his ideas were too revolutionary, difficult and deep to be understood by his contemporaries, even though he lived in a privileged city that was host to an extraordinary assembly of the greatest thinkers of the day. In this book, we have approached topics that we considered would be of interest to logicians, philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, philosophers of language, mathematicians, probability theorists and historians. We have touched on logic and foundations of mathematics (Howson, Majer and Sandu), philosophy of mind (Acero), philosophy of language and ontology (Frapolli and Rodriguez-Consuegra), pragmatism (Hookway), epistemology (Quesada), economics (Faria), philosophy of science (Diez) and the mutual influences between Ramsey and Wittgenstein (Glock). We are naturally well aware that the book does not exhaust the richness of Ramsey's thought, but if we contribute in some measure to spreading the ideas of this British philosopher and thereby bring them into contact with and fertilize contemporary thought, we will feel that the purpose of the book has been accomplished. The world of Ramsey scholarship is widening slowly but surely. Over the last decades we have been fortunate to see such excellent work as Sahling's (1990) pioneering monograph, Moore and Braithwaite's illuminating comments in the preface and introduction to (1978), Mellor's profound insights in his introductions to (1978) and (1990), and his edition of Prospects for Pragmatism (1990) and, more recently, Maria Carla Gavalotti's edition (1991),

x

Preface

and Dokic and Engel's monograph (2002). But Ramsey deserves much more attention, not only to do justice to the depth and brilliance of his work, but also so that we can learn from him the myriad lessons that he still has to teach. We only hope that the present volume will take a further step along the road of this exciting venture. Maria J. Frapolli

Introduction Maria J. Frdpolli

Ramsey was born on 22 February 1903 in Cambridge and died on 19 January 1930. During his short life he wrote some of the most profound pages on philosophy, economics, and mathematics of the twentieth century. He lived in an extraordinarily stimulating milieu, surrounded by figures such as Russell, Whitehead, Keynes, Moore, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, W. E.Johnson and Wittgenstein. From them and others Ramsey picked up the master threads with which he was to weave his thought, although the resulting fabric was entirely due to his own genius. During the first quarter of the twentieth century the philosophical world was not prepared for a talent like that of Ramsey. As has been pointed out by several authors, Braithwaite (1931), Mellor (1990, p.xvi) and Sahling (1990) among them, other factors contributed to the relative silence with which Ramsey's work was received. One factor was that he did not publish his complete production, another was his humility that kept him from showing himself as the genius he was, and a third was the disproportionate influence of Wittgenstein on the philosophical world during the first three quarters of the last century. Joao Faria (see his contribution below) points to the technical innovations in Ramsey's approach to economics as one reason for its delay in being drawn into the mainstream of the discipline. Mathematics was his professional calling and in fact he became a Fellow at King's College, where he taught this subject from 1926 until his death. Although his only production in this discipline was the nine pages of §1 of 'On a problem of formal logic' (1928), his mathematical expertise was of great value in his incursions into economics and philosophy of mathematics, as well as in probability theory and general philosophy. In mathematics, he proved two theorems, both of them known as 'Ramsey's theorem', which lay down the basis for partition calculus. Its development and related discussions are referred to as 'Ramsey's theory'. Ramsey intended to give a solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, which years later Alonzo Church proved unsolvable. In the way of doing it, he proved these theorems that, although not needed for the general decision problem, have been shown to be extremely useful and fruitful. In his monograph on Ramsey's philosophy, Sahling illustrates the definite version of Ramsey's theorem with the

2

F.P.Ramsey: Critical Reassessments

following example: 'In any collection of six people either three know each other or three of them do not know each other' (Sahling, 1990, p. 183). Ramsey's theorem follows from the Axiom of Choice, and in fact, Ramsey used the Axiom in his proof. L. Mirsky, in his section on mathematics in the Introduction to Foundations (1978), considers Ramsey's contribution to the subject as one of'the first magnitude to, and probably lasting significance for, mathematical research' (p. 10). In economics, he wrote two masterpieces, 'A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation' (1927) and'A Mathematical Theory of Saving' (1928), from which two branches of economic theory originated, the theory of optimal taxation and the theory of optimal saving, respectively. As has happened in the case of other contributions by Ramsey, the sheer novelty and depth of his insights meant that they made virtually no impression on the thought of his time. For Ramsey's view on economics, see Farias's chapter below. Nevertheless, although he was a mathematician 'by trade as well as by training', as Mellor says in the introduction to Ramsey's Philosophical Papers (1990, p. xiv), the core of his production and the topic that unified his apparently diverse writings is his account of belief. For this reason, Ramsey's philosophy of mind is crucial to understanding his thought. His philosophy of mind relies heavily on Russell's pragmatist ideas in The Analysis of Mind (1921). Ramsey is basically a functionalist as far as belief is concerned. Beliefs are dispositional properties that lead one to action. Ramsey answers a criticism by Russell, by saying that not all our beliefs have a real influence on our behaviour, and that it is not that we actually behave in a certain way, because we have such and such a belief, but that a belief is an idea that leads to action in appropriate circumstances. In this way, Ramsey improves the most naive behaviourist account using counterfactual considerations. For an analysis of Ramsey's philosophy of mind, see Acero below. His views on probability theory appeared in 'Truth and Probability' (1926), a paper rightly considered his most impressive piece of work. An analysis of (1926) and of Ramsey's theory of probability is found in Howson's chapter below. In (1926) Ramsey criticized Keynes's logical theory of probability proposed as a way of measuring the relative probability between two given propositions, and also the monolithical interpretation of probability as frequency. These criticisms do not have the same weight. While Ramsey clearly considers that the foundations of Keynes's position is erroneous, i.e. that we do not possess clear intuitions about the relative probability of every two propositions, his doubts about the frequency interpretation of probability are much weaker. Although some uses of probability support its interpretations as frequencies, Ramsey calls attention to another use, namely the use that interprets probability as a partial belief, thus understanding a theory of probability as a logic of partial belief. He shows in (1926) that a logic of partial

Introduction

3

belief understood in this way satisfies the mathematical restrictions for being a theory of probability. In this sense, the formal claim is justified. Its philosophical consequences are, nevertheless, much more far-reaching. Logic of partial belief such as Ramsey's has an application to the philosophical analysis of beliefs and offers a way of measuring them. The way in which Ramsey explains how to measure beliefs, using betting as an analogy, connects belief and action in a manner that exhibits his pragmatist perspective. His way of measuring beliefs is asking how far a subject is willing to go on the basis of this or that belief and offering an algorithm to determine their degree of belief. In this algorithm he takes into account not only beliefs (subjective probabilities) but also desires (subjective utilities) and respects the principle of mathematical expectation. The theory of probability, that is, the theory of partial belief, is, according to Ramsey, a branch of logic. This claim dovetails perfectly well with his logicist perspective on logic as well as with his pragmatist perspective on philosophy. In (1926) Ramsey defines logic as the science of rational thought (1990, p. 87) and under this umbrella he not only lists formal logic, the 'logic of consistency' as he calls it, but also the logic of truth. The logic of truth is a normative part of logic that tells us how we should think. It is a human logic that might occasionally be incompatible with formal logic. This human logic is supported by his pragmatism that, as we will see later, leads him to consider the world from a human perspective. This he reveals in 'Epilogue', an illuminating piece written in 1925 as a talk to be given at one of the Apostle meetings. And this human perspective supports his hospitable view on logic. As regards formal logic, Ramsey was an advanced disciple of Russell and Wittgenstein. Two of the few papers that he prepared for publication, 'The Foundations of Mathematics' (1925) and 'Facts and Propositions' (1927), explicitly show his logicist sympathies. In (1925) Ramsey offers his view on the foundations of mathematics, understanding this discipline as a part of logic. He focuses on Principia Mathematica, showing its drawbacks together with his proposals to solve them. Basically, Ramsey rejects Russell's characterization of mathematics as a set of unrestricted general propositions, and his ramified theory of types that requires the dubious Reducibility Axiom. Ramsey's alternative is to consider mathematical propositions as tautologies, following the path opened up by Wittgenstein, and to distinguish between semantical and logical paradoxes, making only the latter the concern of mathematics and leaving semantical paradoxes to epistemology. Once this move has been accepted, a single theory of types suffices to get round the relevant paradoxes. For Ramsey's view on the foundations of mathematics and the logicist programme, see Sandu's chapter below. Ramsey's position on logical constants developed from an orthodox Tractarian view into a pragmatist account. In (1927) there is a rapid treatment of quantifiers and logical

4

F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments

constants that closely follows the teachings of the Tractatus. Logical constants do not represent, he considers against Frege's view, and quantifiers are truth functions, i.e. reducible to series of conjunctions and disjunctions. Less than two years later, in 'General Propositions and Causality' (1929), Ramsey defends an account of quantifiers that coheres better with his general pragmatism. Quantified sentences do not express propositions, according to his new view. They express inferences we are prepared to do and not first order propositions. There is no longer a truth functional account of quantifiers but rather what we might dub as an inferential account close to the one later offered by Gilbert Ryle in (1949). As to epistemology, Ramsey only wrote one short paper called 'Knowledge' (1929), in which some authors, Sahling (1990) for instance, have found a reliabilist account, close to the one recently put forward in the philosophical arena by Alvin Goldman. In fact, at the beginning of this one-page work, he declares that he has always believed that a belief about which we are certain counts as knowledge when it is not only true but reached through a 'reliable process' (1990, 1929, p. 110) and he devotes the following paragraphs to analysing how we should understand the reliability of processes that produce knowledge. For Ramsey's view on epistemology and the fate of reliabilism, see Quesada's chapter below. Ramsey's ideas and influence have shown now and then in the brightest minds of the twentieth century. But above all, two topics outshine the rest. One of them is Ramsey's treatment of the theoretical terms of scientific theories as quantified variables and the other is his alleged proposal of a redundancy theory of truth. In 'Theories' (1929) Ramsey proved that, given a theory, it is always possible to offer an empirically equivalent one that does not contain theoretical terms. The procedure for obtaining the new theory is simply to substitute the theoretical terms in the former theory by existentially quantified variables. Ramsey's procedure had great influence on the positivist paradigm in philosophy of science. For an assessment and comments on Ramsey's philosophy of science, see Diez's chapter below. His view on truth appears in his unpublished paper 'The Nature of Truth' and very marginally in his published 'Facts and Propositions' (1927). In both, Ramsey puts forward an original view on the truth operator, considered as a means that natural languages possess to construe complex prepositional variables. This idea was recovered in the 1960s and is now known as the prosentential theory of truth. For Ramsey's account of truth, see Frapolli's chapter below. The general terrain in which Ramsey's thought resides ranges from positivism and scientific philosophy, on the one hand, to pragmatism, on the other. We might say that positivism is the form but pragmatism is the inspiration. From a philosophical point of view, two thinkers influenced Ramsey above the rest: Russell and Wittgenstein. Ramsey adopted Russell's views on logic

Introduction

5

and the foundation of mathematics but modified and improved them, following the path trodden by Wittgenstein most of the way. From Russell, he also took part of his philosophy of mind and his analysis of belief and the influence of William James. From Wittgenstein Ramsey took in his interpretation of logic, basically the idea that mathematics and logic are collections of tautologies, and in (1927) the analysis of logical constants as truth functions. His pragmatism, though, being at the heart of Ramsey's thinking, forced him to an alternative interpretation of the role played by quantifiers and by quantified sentences in the system of human beliefs. Part of his pragmatism, taken from William James through Russell, passed from him to Wittgenstein and was responsible for the revolutionary change in Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein himself acknowledges that Ramsey influenced him crucially in the evolution of his thought. Although Ramsey mentions Wittgenstein in most of his philosophical papers and considers himself a follower of the Austrian philosopher, Ramsey's influence on Wittgenstein was in fact far greater than Wittgenstein's impact on Ramsey. Having Russell and Wittgenstein as models, it is no wonder that the explicit ascription of Ramsey's thought was scientific philosophy. In 'Epilogue' (1925), where Ramsey analyses what science and religion have finally left to philosophy, he declares that the traditional philosophical questions have now become either technical, and so requiring specific training, or ridiculous. And he explicitly endorses the Tractarian view that philosophy is not a subject that is genuinely separate from science. He undertakes the explanation of what the realm of philosophy is in 'Philosophy' (1929), where he does not offer a very different view from that proposed in 'Epilogue'. In (1929) the task of philosophy is reduced to that of providing definitions or ways to construe definitions, although not only nominal definitions are allowed. In a certain sense one perceives here the idea that philosophy is a task of elucidation, but there is also an open-minded treatment of what a philosophical elucidation is, which is closer to pragmatism than to strict logical positivism. Ramsey's thought inhabits this tense terrain between positivism and pragmatism and, we might guess, he would have abandoned positivism altogether had he lived a little longer. In his introduction to Ramsey's Philosophical Papers (1990), Mellor reminds readers 'how much Ramsey repays close and repeated reading' (p. xii). This is very true. And the more one is aware of how philosophy, foundations of mathematics and probability theory have developed during the last hundred years, the more one is able to appreciate Ramsey's immense talent. Our hope now is to contribute to an ever-increasing acknowledgement of the scope and value of his thought and to honour him as a thinker in the best way, by taking his ideas as far as we possibly can, by thinking about, talking about and spreading them.

6

F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments References

Braithwaite, R. B. (ed.) (1931). The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dokic,J. and Engel, P. (2003). Frank Ramsey. Truth and Success. London and New York: Routledge. Gavalotti, M. C. (1991). The Philosophy ofF. P. Ramsey. Theoria. Special Issue ,LVII, 1. (ed.) (1980). Prospects for Pragmatism. Essays in the Memory ofF. P. Ramsey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mellor, D. H. (ed) (1978). Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (ed.) (1990). Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: CUP. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. New York: Harper Collins. Sahling, N.-E. (1990). The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey. Cambridge: CUP.

1 Mind, intentionality and language. The impact of Russell's pragmatism on Ramsey Juan Jose Acero

1. Richard Braithwaite once commented that the philosophical thought in Cambridge in 1919 and for the next few years was dominated by Russell, that his books and articles \vere eagerly awaited and even discussed and criticized in E. G. Moore and W. E.Johnson's university lectures (Hacker 1996, p. 68). Not only in the general orientation of his thought but in tackling specific problems Ramsey stood long on Russell's shoulders. The philosophy of mind is a realm in which Ramsey's debt to Russell is particularly worth underlining. What are beliefs, what distinguishes one kind of mental state from others, i.e. believing from disbelieving, what is the relation of belief to action, in virtue of what do beliefs have intentional or representational properties, are all questions which help give this debt a neat profile. Concerning these questions Ramsey benefited from a number of proposals that Russell made both in 1910 in his essay'On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood' (Russell 1996) and, a decade later, in his influential book The Analysis of Mind (Russell 1921). If this work hypothesis is seriously taken, that is, if it were true that Russell's answers to those questions carried a significant weight on Ramsey's thoughts, it would be mandatory to admit that there is more than a personal sign of recognition in Ramsey's comment, made at the end of his 'Facts and Propositions', that his pragmatism in logic 'is derived from Mr Russell' (Ramsey 1990, p. 51). To determine the scope of such a debt is what the present chapter deals with. A brief overview of its content will help making its contents more perspicuous. The first steps towards Ramsey's conception of intentionality are taken in §2, where two arguments that Russell adduced against Brentano and Meinong's view of mental states are introduced and explained. Ramsey's acceptance of both their premises and conclusions explain why his views about belief inherit Russell's radical empiricism and naturalism. From the first of those, the Argument from the Non-existence of Mental Acts [NEAM], the non-existence of a transcendental subject, i.e. that the psychological subject is a construct, follows. The second one, the Argument from the Particular Nature of Content [PNC], concludes that human psychology is continuous with non-human, animal psychology. §3 goes more deeply into Ramsey's

8

F. P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments

debt to Russell by considering the latter's theory of belief's subjective dimension, i.e. what Russell referred to as the belief's content. A new argument, the Argument from Intentional Properties Pragmatism [IPP], is added to NEAM and PNC to picture a richer image of Russell and Ramsey's pragmatism in the philosophy of mind. IPP requires that the intentional properties of beliefs and other mental states derive from the causal curricula of the symbols that make up their contents. When NEAM, PNG and IPP are combined, a view of the mind arises that gives language a central role in the constitution of intentionality. The objective dimension of belief is dealt with in §§4, 6 and 7. §4 focuses on Ramsey's careful analysis of Russell's reasons for getting rid of propositions understood as objective complex entities and the difficulties this goal created for Russell. Those difficulties inevitably turn up when one, as Russell did in The Analysis of Mind, abides by the principle that the content of a mental state determines its objective component, the Principle of the Objective Component Determination [OCD]. Ramsey grasped the insight under Russell's view that as far as its objective dimension is concerned a belief is true if, and only if, its psychological subject is multiply related to a number of objects, properties and relationships. However, and unlike Russell, Ramsey realized that turning this insight into an articulated theory of belief's objective dimension required limiting OCD's scope. Before tackling this question, a new argument is put forward in §5 to complete picturing Ramsey's debt to Russell and to make the remaining work easier. It is the Argument from the Intrinsic Feature of Mental States [IFMS], according to which, besides its content, a mental state's subjective dimension also includes an intrinsic feature, a sensation or feeling perceived by introspection. Its truth-conditions constitute its objective dimension. As already said, Russell did not arrive at a general theory of the objective dimension. Ramsey, however, made a significant contribution to this end by combining Russell's pragmatism with Wittgenstein's theory of logical constants as non-denoting expressions. This was not a minor move, as explained in §6. It led to a severe restriction of the scope of OCD, thus opening a path that Russell had not thought of. Not only did it go against the core of Russell's views on mental content, but it brought about a deep modification of his pragmatism as well. §7 finally deals with how the views of Wittgenstein on what the truth-conditions of a proposition are were used by Ramsey to complete his theory of mental intentionality and how his pragmatism freed him from a number of difficulties Wittgenstein had to face. As a consequence of all this, it is reasonable to claim that Ramsey's debt does not mean a blind commitment to Russell's views. Whenever Ramsey sides with Russell, as openly happens in 'Facts and Propositions', this attitude is the consequence of carefully pondered arguments. Moreover, even during the stage in which his closeness to Russell was more evident disagreement between them is not exceptional. 'Truth and

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Probability' marked the beginning of a quick process in which Ramsey shifted away from ideas which he had previously embraced. The posthumously published book On Truth (Ramsey 1991) meant an even more radical departure from Russell's pragmatism. However, this matter lies outside the scope of the present chapter. Finally, Ramsey's views about a number of topics which clearly announce a resolute evolution towards an own-brand pragmatism are briefly summarized in §8. 2. What is, then, Russell's analysis of belief which Ramsey took on? (As synonyms of 'belief Ramsey also uses the terms 'judgement' and 'assertion'.) A number of reasons led Russell away from Brentano and - his disciple — Meinong's view of the mind. In his Psychologic vom empirischen Standpunkl (Brentano 1995), Brentano's main insight (quoted in extenso in Russell 1921, pp. 14ff.) had been that mental states are acts of a subject by means of which this subject becomes conscious of an object in a certain way. The object might be an unusual, sui generis, one. For these authors a mental state of a subject consists of three components: an act, a content and an object. The act is the characteristic mind modality under which the subject is conscious of its content. In (1): 1 Jones thinks that Caesar was murdered a mental state of Jones's is stated. Unlike that in (2), the act in (1) is the same, i.e. of the same kind, as in (3), namely the judgement (the thought or the belief) that Caesar was murdered: 2 3

Ernest denies that Caesar was murdered I think that Caesar was murdered

However, the acts stated in (1) and (3) are ascribed to different thinkers. On the other hand, (2) states a denial, not a judgement, whose content is the same as the judgements in (1) and (3). Thus, two mental states may be different, though they share the thinker and the kind of act carried out, if their contents are different. Echoing Meinong, Russell characterized content as that which 'exists when the thought exists, and is what distinguishes it, as an occurrence, from other thoughts' (Russell 1921, p. 16). This is why contents are catalogued as events happening in the thinker's mind. Neither Brentano nor Russell were careful enough in characterizing mental contents as events, because talking about events is systematically ambiguous. There is a sense in which Jones's thought in (1) as well as my thought in (3) are always distinct events, and there is another sense in which they are always the same. The threat of contradiction is dispelled out as soon as the token-type distinction is put an edge on this set of data. Acts in (1) and (3) are different tokens of the

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same type of event, i.e. thinking that Caesar was murdered. Seen to this light, (1) and (3), but not (2), describe two instances of the same type of mental property, even though these three sentences might be used to state three different single mental events. Finally, the third component of a mental state is what Brentano calls its object. Unlike the act's content, its object does not have to exist in the thinker's mind when the act is done. The object can be a fact of the past, as in the above examples, but it does not have to. It may not even be something mental, but a physical or abstract entity (for example, the identity relation) or an imagined situation or state of affairs (as when someone thinks that there is a golden mountain) or a contradiction (as when someone thinks that there are round squares). Be that as it may, every mental act has an object, is a form of being conscious of an object. (See Russell 1921, pp. 16f.) Against this view of thought Russell deployed a battery of arguments. His logic of belief is like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have diverse origins. Some of them are of his own invention and fall into place as soon as we keep track of the evolution of Russell's philosophy; some others mean a debt of his to James' pragmatism and radical empiricism; a few others result from his calculated acceptance of the behaviourist conception of the mind. He was convinced that Brentano and Meinong's view was unable to resist a detailed analytic examination and unable to account for 'a host of facts in psycho-analysis and animal psychology' (Russell 1921, p. 15). This reference to animal psychology anticipates Russell's claim that 'I believe that the behaviourists somewhat overstate their case, yet there is an important element of truth in their contention, since the things which we discover by introspection do not seem to differ in any fundamental way from the things which we discover by external observation' (Russell 1921, p. 29). In Russell's programme of offering an explanation of mental states alternative to Brentano's a noteworthy role therefore corresponded to the naturalistic forces that were of a piece with both William James's conception of the mind and behaviourism. The final image that all these pieces come to picture openly contradicts the one promoted by Brentano (and Meinong). The first of Russell's arguments against Brentano's view of the mind is as follows:

The Argument from the Non-existence of Mental Acts [NEAM] No mental state has an act as one of its constituents. For a mental state to exist it is sufficient that there be one content, and there is mental content if (and only if) there happens to be the corresponding mental event. This argument goes against Brentano in holding that there is no act in any mental state. 'The first criticism I have to make is that the act seems unnecessary and fictitious' (Russell 1921, p. 17). Russell's reason to say so unfolds in

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two steps. On the one hand, an act demands an agent or subject, i.e. the thinker; on the other hand, the agent is undetectable. Our common forms of expression lead us astray to wrongly infer that there has to be a mental substance from the very fact that (l)-(3) have each a grammatical subject. This confusion feeds Brentano's tripartite analysis of mental states into a mental subject, a mental content and an object. However, Russell joined James in rejecting that behind any mental state there has to be an acting subject. Both of them emphatically held that existence can only be accorded to what can be observed, and then added that the acting subject is nowhere found. The conclusion follows that Jones, I and the thinker in general are useful fictions, logical constructions: Meinong's act is the ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul. [...]! think that the person is not an ingredient in the single thought: he is rather constituted by relations of the thoughts to each other and to the body. [...] All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the grammatical forms 'I think', 'you think', and 'Mr. Jones thinks' are misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single thought. It would be better to say 'it thinks in me', like 'it rains here'; or better still, 'there is a thought in me'. This is simply on the ground that what Meinong calls the act in thinking is not empirically discoverable, or logically deducible from what we can observe. (Russell 1921, p. 18) The criticism is, then, that, once the analysis is carried to its ultimate components, no agent remains. It does not follow from this that we have no right to say for example that Jones thinks that Caesar was murdered. Of course we have it. It just means that the Jones, I and any thinking subject are logical constructions, posits useful to make sense of the fleeting experience. This way out from the clash between radical empiricism and an uncritical reading of our mother-language grammar forces Russell to tell what the materials are from which logical constructions are assembled, that is, which those mental events are that give both thoughts and subjects their identity. The answer to this question constitutes Russell's second argument against Brentano.

The Argument from the Particular Nature of Content [PNC] There is no break in continuity between explaining human behaviour and explaining other animal species' behaviour. Therefore, a mental state's content has a particular nature, not a universal one, i.e. it consists of images, words or compounds of them, not of a counterpart of human understanding's conceptual abilities, but a product of perception and imagination.

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Concerning the nature of mental content, Russell's choice consistently fits his naturalistic approach to intentionality. According to this naturalism, understanding human psychology and behaviour must be, in so far as possible, continuous with what animal psychology postulates to make sense of animal behaviour. Thus, if it lacks any justification to attribute a non-human a psychic state with an universal content, it also lacks justification to attribute a human a psychic state endowed with the same kind of content. Russell illustrates this point through the case of a horse that, on smelling a bear, behaves as if it knew the universal property being-a-bear. This sort of explanation must be discarded. It is simply incredible, Russell thinks, that horses possess the ability to get acquainted with universals. It follows, in virtue of the continuity between animal and human psychology, that when a human being either thinks or says to herself'I smell a bear', the thought's content, what is in her mind, cannot be universal or have universal constituents. Images and words, which constitute the content of our thoughts when either they come into the mind or are said to ourselves, are not universal. Mental content consists of tokens of words and images, as well as combinations of words and images, and being in a mental state is a tokening of them. Therefore, PNC translates into the theory of content Russell's attraction towards naturalism. The two arguments so far taken into account, NEAM and PNG, set forth neat differences between the analyses of intentionality put forward by Brentano, on the one side, and by Russell, on the other side. Ramsey was with the latter unambiguously: he accepted both their premises and their conclusions. He definitely took on these arguments and stood close to the terminology with which Russell had articulated them. In 'Facts and Propositions' he followed Russell in distinguishing with these very words the subjective dimension or dimensions of mental states from their objective dimension. While Russell chose the terms 'content' and 'objective' for those two dimensions, Ramsey did not use them. However, beyond words, they shared the fundamental issue. The content of a mental state of a thinker on a certain occasion consists of'[the] words or images in my mind' (Ramsey 1990, p. 334) on that occasion. When only words fix it, instead of'content', Russell used the word 'proposition' (Russell 1921, pp. 240f.). (As for this, Ramsey followed Wittgenstein and chose 'proposition' instead of Russell's 'objective'. See below, §7.) It has been remarked that this analysis of belief's subjective dimension is moulded to fit into PNG's demands, and sanctions the continuity between non-human and human psychology, between image-content and word-content. Because of it, that words play such an outstanding role in shaping human mentality should come as no surprise. Behind PNG lies Russell's conviction that '[t]he more familiar we are with words, the more our ((thinking)} goes on in words instead of images' (Russell 1921, p. 206). The more characteristically human mental content is the richer the deployment of linguistic resources.

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Ramsey's naturalism makes it plausible to think that he shared such a conviction. However, the only argument he gave to conclude that the content of human thoughts are made up with words comes up in another context, namely that of providing an account of the fact that human thoughts characteristically enter into logical relationships. In other words, that unlike non-human beliefs, i.e. a chicken's belief that a certain sort of caterpillar is poisonous, human beliefs, 'which are expressed in words, or possibly images or other symbols consciously asserted or denied, ... are the most proper subject for logical criticism' (Ramsey 1990, p. 40). A belief is subjected to logical criticism when, and only when, it has logical properties and keeps logical relationships to further beliefs. Now, Ramsey argues, in order for a belief to be subjected to logical analysis, it has to be articulated, i.e. it has to be compound. (Wittgenstein would say that a belief has to be a fact. Cf. Wittgenstein 1922/1961, §2.141.) Beliefs have content,-and mental contents are made up of elements of some sort. Language provides the answer to the question, what sort of things enter into their constitution. The logical properties of human beliefs are consequences of the linguistic or symbolic nature of their constituents. Lacking language abilities, non-human animal beliefs lack the complexity that would make it possible for them to have logical properties. Thus, Ramsey arrives at a point where PNC, a crucial argument against Brentano and Meinong's view of mind, smoothly follows. All this makes it natural to conclude that James' assault on an immaterial substance, the human soul, which is the subject of conscious acts, and Russell's naturalism, which demands the continuity of human thinking to animal psychology, constitute two fundamental commitments of Ramsey's philosophy of mind. 3. In addition to having a mental or subjective dimension, beliefs and in general mental states have an objective dimension as well. It is in virtue of playing intentional or representational roles that beliefs possess what Brentano and Meinong called the object and Russell the objective reference (Russell 1921, pp. 232f.) — prepositional reference when mental contents consist of words exclusively. By having objective reference beliefs relate to a more or less inclusive part of the world, and by being connected to the world, beliefs have truthconditions and mental states in general have satisfaction-conditions. This is not a contingent feature of mental states, but an essential one. Jones's belief stated in (1) has in its content the words 'Caesar', 'was', and 'murdered'. When combined in the proper way, these words represent that Caesar was murdered, the fact or existent state of affairs that constitutes the belief's objective factor. The logical details of such a dimension will be taken up below (in §§6 and 7). What has to be considered at once is how both the mental and objective factors relate to each other. As for this, Russell held that mental content somewhat determines objective reference. Put in a different way, that a belief or judgement's objective reference 'is, in general, in some way derivative

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from' the meanings of words or images of the mental content (Russell 1921, p. 235). Therefore, it is metaphysically impossible for a belief's content to be made up of constituents c\, ,.., cm whereas its reference objective does not depend at all upon any ofci,...,cm. (The reason why the condition is stated this way will be apparent in §6.) An explanation of the mechanism which yields objective references out of the intentional properties of words or images is, together with NEAM and PNC, a mandatory step that has to be taken to put forward an alternative to Brentano and Meinong's view of mind. Such an explanation not only hangs on accounting for the meaning of words and images, but it also requires that this task should be carried out in the spirit of Russell's continuity between non-human and human mentalities. The key to all this lies in an aspect of Russell's philosophy in which his influence on Ramsey reaches the highest point: his commitment to pragmatism, namely to the principle that 'the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects' (Ramsey 1990, p. 51). The stuff that makes this declaration of principles comprehensible is contained in Chapter 3 ('Words and Meanings') of Analysis of Mind, whose target is to account for the meaningfulness of words, images and their combinations. Russell's analysis of that relationship walks a good way within behaviourist courses, though a significant part of it explores new territories. His determination to understand human psychology in accordance with principles deemed to be valid for non-human psychology now confronts what at first sight would seem to the most formidable obstacle in the way of such a project, namely to account for human thought. Supposedly, the theory of meaning that Russell sets out there allows him to accomplish at least part of such a goal with the help of two premises: first, that, as far as psychology is concerned, thoughts, i.e. beliefs, and judgements (in general, mental states), are images or words (or combinations of both of them); and second, that thinking involves associating images and words with their meanings. From this point of view, there is no separate mental reality that underlies language. On the contrary, the way language affects thought, giving rise to it, is very important in this approach. 'Almost all higher intellectual activity is a matter of words, to the nearly total exclusion of everything else.' It is easily understood that the most complex kinds of beliefs and judgements 'tend to consist only of words' (Russell 1921, p. 238). The thought that planets revolve around the sun may have associated images of spherical bodies turning around a star, but the only images that may occur in its content'are, as a rule, images of words' (Russell 1921, p. 238). This example is not without a moral. It illustrates the general phenomenon that we humans think in and through words. Following a classical distinction of Sellars - and denying some hasty comment on the significance of Russell's views (cf. Carruthers 1996, p. 2) - language is not only a means of communication,

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but above all the medium of thought. Language is the primary form of thought and so mental intentionality is not primitive intentionality, but intentionality (Sellarsl969). The device that makes language, though not only language, a crucial medium for thought is that of conditioned response. Something, an image or a word, becomes a symbol b of something else x when b acquires the function (or the power) of replacing x, and this happens when b takes the place of x in the system of causes and effects in which x is engaged. For this to be the case a link between x and b has to arise that confers b x's causal history, i.e. both its causal antecedents and powers. In non-linguistic forms of thought, i.e. in image-thinking, x brings about an image i which, in virtue of its similarity to x, turns i into a symbol of x thereby gaining the role of meaning or representing x. Image i replaces its meaning or prototype because of its similarity to it. This means that the causal sensitivity and power of the image i becomes similar to those of x. 'If we find, in a given case, that our vague image, say, of a nondescript dog, has those associative effects which all dogs have, but not those belonging to any special dog or kind of dog, we may say that our image means "dog" in general. If it has all the associations appropriate to spaniels but no others, we shall say it means "spaniel" ' (Russell 1921, p. 209). When a symbol s is not an image but a word w the explanation of how w becomes meaningful is more involved, and depends upon a general law — Russell calls it the general law of telescoped processes — according to which if A causes B and B causes C, it will happen in time that A causes C without the intermediate operation of B. ('A', 'B' and 'C' are variables that range over events.) The learning process of a word w by its user S consists in the setting-up of a general causal law connecting the tokening of w, maybe because S says w to himself or herself, and on perceiving x. The sort of cases that Russell was mostly concerned with marks out what he called the private use of language, and it is exclusively this sort of use that truly gives thought the chance to reach its highest level. This happens thanks to a kidnapping-and-doubling effect, as it were: an image i of x, which is an effect of 5"s having perceived x in the past, is replaced by a word w and given the causal curriculum of x (or something close to it). For this to be possible, a causal link between tokenings of images and tokenings of words must have taken root. Once this has happened, w gains the capacity to replace i in the economy of mental causal transitions. This is why the more familiar we are with our language the higher the extent to which our thought goes in it. Well, that to which Ramsey alludes and in which his pragmatism finds inspiration is nothing but a consequence of the explanation of thought's intentionality just put forward. The explanation belongs to Russell's alternative to Brentano concerning the intentional properties of mental states. Therefore, to NEAM and PNC the following argument has to be added.

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The Argument from Intentional Properties Pragmatism [IPP] Thoughts are made up of symbols, i.e. words and images, whose meaning consists of their causal links. The intentional properties — the meaning - of thoughts (beliefs and mental states in general) are what they are by virtue of their causal antecedents and powers. Brentano and Meinong had it that the distinctive feature of a mental state is its making reference to a suigeneris object. It could be thought that, as a consequence of abiding by NEAM and PNG, which give images and words the truly key role in casting light on intentionality, Brentano's view has been definitely got over. This is not true. In the doctrine that holds that the meaning of a symbol is an idea in the mind of its user Brentano and Meinong have still a chance to give a new boost to their view of intentionality. Ideas in the mind would connect words (and images) to the objects or situations they represent and in so doing would provide the thinker with the sort of object whose peculiarity gives the mental its own character. IPP stands in the way of such a variant of Brentano's theory. The meaning, the intentional properties of images and words, constitutively depend on their causal history, i.e. their causal antecedents and their causal efficiency. In a word, their meaning is their use: 'The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when we hear it used' (Russell 1921, p. 198). Therefore, whoever understands a word is in the habit of using it properly. This means that, as a speaker of the word, she understands it because she acts in the right way and, as a hearer, she has got the ability of [being] affected by it in the way intended' (Russell 1921, p. 198). It is plain that this explanation makes no room for an idea's making itself present to a subject's consciousness. If while crossing a street with an absent-minded friend I say: 'Look out, there is a motor coming!', and she glances round and jumps aside, her behaviour is accounted for by imputing to her the capability of understanding my words. This explanation does not accord ideas any role to play in human understanding. To understand is to have got the right habits: '[tjhere need be no {(ideas)}, but only a stiffening of the muscles, followed quickly by action' (Russell 1921, p. 199). IPP makes it unnecessary to posit any idea or mental entity, of which a definition can be framed and communicated. The very idea of a lexicographical definition tempts us to take the wrong way of assuming that meaning is not the result of polishing the countless irregularities of its use. Far from being true, this idea is refuted by the fact that 'there is always a greater or lesser degree of vagueness' (Russell 1921, pp. 197f). That is why Russell compares the meaning of a word with a target, which can be reached with a gradually .diminishing degree of precision from its bull's eye. Rather than failing to score if the target is missed, a speaker is not deprived of the skill to use a word appropriately for not being able to define its meaning.

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This way of accounting for the intentional properties of mental states, and a fortiori of the faculty of understanding, answers behaviourism's naturalistic demands. A word or an expression has been understood if the right habits have been learned, i.e. if it is used in the right situations and it brings about the right reactions as the context requires. Now, having got the correct habits, adds Russell, 'may be taken to belong to the nerves and brain5 (Russell 1921, p. 199). It follows that the laws which govern understanding, and particularly language understanding, can be reduced to causal laws of nervous system physiology. Let us put this last point aside for a moment to highlight the word 'habit' as the key term in the previous explanation of language understanding - it is the identity stamp of the behaviourist's view of mind as well. Learning language, says Russell, is like learning to play cricket, 'a matter of habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others' (Russell 1921, p. 197). Given that thought is an essentially linguistic, symbol-involving activity, it follows from what has just been said that thinking too is essentially a matter of acquiring certain habits. Ramsey shared this point of view when he declared that the human mind works 'according to general rules or habits' (Ramsey 1990, p. 90). The package of arguments so far taken into account, NEAM, PNC and IPP, is implicit in Ramsey's recognition that his pragmatism derived from Russell's. Were it true that he accepted those three arguments, and it has been argued that he did, the nature of his debt to Russell would have a neat outline. (On the other hand, were such a hypothesis to be abandoned, we would be in the dark about what the point of Ramsey's pragmatism is.) On the interpretation here sketched, Ramsey's pragmatism finds inspiration in Russell's and the latter's commitment to behaviourist naturalism. (See below §6.) However, in order to get a more faithful picture of the whole situation, it has to be added that this commitment was not plain. His naturalism led Russell to maintain, firstly, that the content of a mental state consists of words or images and, secondly, that the intentional properties of mental contents are constituted by causal relations. In this very sense, meaning is use. Nevertheless, in the detailed analysis Russell worked out in Analysis of Mind., he goes beyond the limits of behaviourism in two crucial aspects. Russell distinguished three uses of words: the demonstrative, the narrative and the imaginative use. Only the first of these, the use words acquire when we learn to utter them in the right situations, to react properly after having heard them and to associate them with individuals, so that the causal efficiency these have is transferred to their corresponding symbols, can be accounted for within behaviorist strictures (see Russell 1921, pp. 199f.). The sphere of thought, as pointed out by Watson in his classic Behaviorism., 'is the field of language habits - habits which when exercised implicitly behind the closed doors of the lips we call thinking' (Watson 1970, p. 215). Russell shares with Watson a concept of thought as a faculty of

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inner speech's being incipiently pronounced. However, Russell widens this concept by including in it the faculty of imagining inner speech's being pronounced. This difference, though a significant one, is minor when what matters is the nature of understanding and the relation between words and meanings, i.e. the demonstrative use of language. The narrative and imaginative uses, on the other hand, do not square with the more restrictive, i.e. the Watsonian, view of thinking. This is due to the very special role images play in both uses of language. In the narrative one, words are designed to capture the images going through the user's mind — whether the speaker is being conscious of them or he or she is able to recall them — and recreate them in the hearer's mind. In the imaginative use of language a previous connection of words with images is exploited to create new images. That the bounds of behaviourism are infringed is proved by the fact that causal links are set up not between words and actions but between words and images. As a consequence of adding this parameter, an image of thought emerges as a system of two-way causal relationships, linking words to images and backwards, that mediates between the world that human beings inhabit and their action on it. In such an intermediate system the pragmatist principle, according to which '[t]o understand the function that words perform in what is called ({thinking}), we must understand both the causes and the effects of their occurrence' (Russell 1921, p. 203) is still valid. The relation of non-linguistic stimuli to the thinker's actions is much more indirect. 4. While mental content is in the thinker's mind, its objective component is not. By virtue of having got an objective the world makes a difference for any mental state, thus making possible for beliefs to be true or false, for desires to be satisfied or unsatisfied, and so on. Concerning beliefs, Russell said that their being true or false 'does not depend upon anything intrinsic to the belief, but upon the nature of its relation to its objective' (Russell 1921, p. 232). What is the nature of the objective component which, together with the way the world is, determines beliefs' truth values? In Analysis of Mind Russell showed a less resolute attitude than in many other previous publications to answer that question. In fact, he never goes so far as to explain what the objective is. However, it is worth taking a short time over a remark he makes about it, because it helps understanding the way Ramsey dealt with this problem. The remark has to do with the relation between the subjective and the objective dimensions of belief, i.e. between the words or images that make up my believing that Caesar was murdered and the murder of Caesar — something outside the mind, a worldly entity of some sort. Because those two factors are somewhat related to each other, beliefs are true or false. Now, the idea is that all that is needed for beliefs to have a truth-value is for them to have the right sort of content. Once a number of words or images maintain the appropriate relations, the objective

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has been fixed, and now it is up to the world, so to say, to assign a truth-value. It is thus that Russell accepts the following principle.

The Principle of the Objective Component Determination [OCD] The content of a mental state determines its objective component. Since the content of a mental state is constituted by either words or images, OGD sets forth that either words or images fix its objective. Beliefs stated in (1) —(3) are true since they have the fact that Caesar was murdered as their objectives. However, since the objective component of (4)

Caesar died in bed

is an objective falsehood, i.e. that Caesar died in bed, the belief that Caesar died in bed and the judgement expressed by uttering (4) must be false. Russell was perfectly aware of this. Moreover, he did not either overlook that Brentano's view of intentionality lies in the background of OCD. Thus, in 'On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood' he had written: If every judgement, whether true or false, consists in a certain relation, called {(judging)} or {(believing)}, to a single object, which is what we judge or believe, then the distinction of true and false as applied to judgements is derivative from the distinction of true and false as applied to the objects of judgements. Assuming that there are such objects, let us, following Meinong, give them the name {{Objectives}}. Then every judgement has an Objective, and true judgements have true Objectives, while false judgements have false Objectives. (Russell 1992, p. 118) Russell noticed, therefore, that Brentano and Meinong's view of the objective dimension is exposed to two decisive objections: that in a complete inventory of the world objective falsehoods, i.e. 'not depending upon the existence ofjudgements' (Russell 1992, p. 119), should be included side by side with objective truths; and that by postulating objective falsehoods one runs the risk of blurring the difference between truth and falsehood if'we abandon the view that, in some way, the truth or falsehood of a judgement depends upon the presence or absence of a {{corresponding}} entity of some sort' (Russell 1992, p. 119). As for Ramsey, he was acquainted with these criticisms. Thus, when discussing the doctrine that beliefs have an objective component that determines their truth or falsehood, he writes: This was at one time the view of Mr Russell, and in his essay 'On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood' he explains the reasons which led him to abandon

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it. These were, in brief, the incredibility of the existence of such objects as {{that Caesar died in his bed)}, which could be described as objective falsehoods, and the mysterious nature of the difference, on this theory, between truth and falsehood. He therefore concluded, in my opinion rightly, that a judgement has no single object, but is a multiple relation of the mind or mental factors to many objects, those, namely, which we should ordinarily call constituents of the proposition judged. (Ramsey 1990, p. 34) In these lines Ramsey alludes to the following. The belief ascribed in (1) would, in accordance with Brentano and Meinong's analysis, express a relation, either the act of judging or the mental state of believing, between Jones and the fact that Caesar was murdered. That is, (IBM)

Believing (Jones, {Caesar, Having-been-murdered))

Russell, who disagreed with that analysis, recommended something close to the following: (!R)

Believing (Jones, Caesar, Having-been-murdered).

In (1R) the act of believing relates Jones to Caesar and to the property of having been murdered. Because the entities involved are the familiar particulars and universal, no sui generis object is brought up. In this respect, (!BM) differs very much from (!R). (IBM) analyses Jones's belief into a thinker and {Caesar, Having-been-murdered}, an objective fact or state of affairs. As such, (IBM) does not generate any inconvenience at all. The problem comes as a in deciding whether to take (IBM) as a model for further cases. (5) is a case in point: (5)

Jones believes that Caesar died in bed

awill resort to a complex entity {Caesar,aesar, If we stand by (IBM)Janalysis the Having-died-in-bed}, that would be included among the things put on record in the world inventory. In other words, the analysis, in welcoming objective falsehoods, would be exposed to Russell's objections Ramsey was familiar with. Moreover, he realized that what lies at the bottom of the problem is Russell's allegiance to OCD. Is there any way of putting aside these objections without having to give up OCD? In his Analysis of Mind Russell tried to stick to OCD while retaining the idea that true beliefs have a fact as their objective component - a trace of the Brentanian suggestion that mental acts have sui generis entities as their objectives. Russell now brought two novelties to bear. On the one hand, he

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split up what Brentano and Meinong called the mental act into the act proper and a pointing direction. A true belief points towards a fact proper whereas a false belief points away from the fact (Russell 1921, p. 272). The second novelty lies in how the act's pointing direction and the mental content fit into each other. The objective component of a true belief, i.e. its prepositional content, is both determined by the meaning of its content, i.e. the proposition that constitutes its content, and its pointing towards a fact. The objective component of a false belief is determined by the meaning of the prepositional content and by its pointing away from the right fact. Thus, the difference between (1) and (5) is respectively captured in (IEM+R) and (SEM+R): (1 EM+R)

Believing-true(Jones, 'Caesar was murdered')

(SEM+R)

Believing-false( Jones, 'Caesar died in bed')

Before the analysis is finished, it has to be added that the truth of (IEM+R) implies, and is implied by, the truth of (!EM) while the truth of (SEM+R) does not imply the truth of (SEM): (SEM)

Believing (Jones, (Caesar, Having-died-in-bed})

Since no objective falsehood is now part of analysis, (SEM) is not an allowed possibility. Russell added to all this the remark that his analysis has the 'practical inconvenience' of not permitting to tell what the right analysis of a mental state is until it is known whether it is true or false, if it is a belief, satisfied or unsatisfied, if it is a desire, and so on. Ramsey rejected this way of complying with OCD. His assault on Russell's manoeuvre is interesting in itself. Russell begins by accepting Russell's hypothesis that unlike beliefs and judgements, which point either to a fact or away from a fact, depending on whether they are true or false, perception is a kind of mental state that only points towards its objective component, i.e. the situation or state of affairs perceived. In other words, perceptive states, states of the form Jones sees that/? should only be understood as (SEM+R)

Seeing-true (Jones, >')

or, what amounts to the same, as (6EM+R)

Seeing (Jones, {/>))

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P.P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments

The infallibility of perception would thus seems to open the way to capturing the meaning of (6) and, even more important, to motivating the need for two kinds of pointing directions. As against this, Ramsey suggests considering a case in which someone judges that Jones sees that a knife is to the left of a book, (7): (7)

Jones sees that the knife is to the left of the book.

In fact, Jones does not see that the knife is to the right of the book, so the one who judges what Jones sees makes a mistake. The false judgement states the following: (^EM+R)

Seeing-true (Jones, 'the knife, To-the-left-of, the book')

that is, Seeing( Jones, (the knife, To-the-left-of, the book}) As a matter of principle, (7EM+R.) cannot be the right analysis of any perceptive state on the conditions laid down by Russell, because the objective falsehood (the knife, To-the-left-of, the book) is required by the analysis. The infallibility of perception really demands that (7) be analysed as (7 EM+R ): C^EM+R)

Seeing-false( Jones, 'the knife, To-the-left-of, the book')

On the one hand, whether Jones's perceptive belief is true or not, the meaning of (7) does not change. On the other hand, (7EM+R) and (7 EM+R ) express obviously different perceptive beliefs, that is, (7 EM+R ) is not a paraphrase of (7). Therefore, we are pushed to choose a way out of this dilemma. The first option is Russell's, i.e. to reject that (7) means only one thing, so that what (7) expresses depends upon whether the knife is to the left or to the right of the book. The second option is Ramsey's, that is, the meaning of (7) 'cannot therefore be that there is a dual relation between the person and something (a fact) of which "that the knife is to the left of the book" is the name, because there is no such thing' (Ramsey 1990, p. 35f.). Russell's attempt in The Analysis of Mind to square Brentano and Meinong's view of mental states with OGD is finally unsuccessful. This is not the only attempt to stick to the idea that the objective component of a mental state has to be some sort of entity in the world. Though it concerns a rather narrow range of cases, another possibility is enhanced by construing (9) (9)

Jones is aware that Caesar died

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as setting up a relation between Jones and an entity that could be described by means of the description 'the death of Caesar': (9')

Being-aware-of( Jones, the death of Caesar).

However, Ramsey has got an argument to block the way to this analysis. Let us suppose that The death of Caesar = the murder of Caesar i.e. that the event that was Caesar's death is just the event that was his murder. From the truth of (9) and (10) the truth of (11) follows: Jones is aware that Caesar was murdered (11')

Being-aware-of( Jones, the murder of Caesar)

Now Ramsey argues that (9) (and (9')) can be true without ( l l ) ' s (and (11')) being true as well, because anyone might be aware of Caesar's death while ignoring that he was murdered. Therefore, this construal of (9) is wrong. The question is, then, how to safeguard the idea that the death of Caesar was an event without moving back towards an unacceptable theory of intentionality. To put it briefly, Ramsey's solution lies in pointing out — thus opening a route Davidson has explored much later (in Davidson 1980, pp. 105ff.) - that a mental state like the one expressed in (9) and (11) quantifies over events. The connection between the event which was the death of Caesar and the fact that Caesar died is, in my opinion, this: 'That Caesar died' is really an existential proposition, asserting the existence of an event of a certain sort [...] The event which is of this sort is called the death of Caesar. (Ramsey 1990, p. 37) These words strongly suggest that, unlike (9') and (11'),.the right analysis should be close to the following ones: (QD)

3