Abstract
The fiftieth anniversary of Ramsey’s death in 1980 saw the publication of a well-received collection of essays Prospects for Pragmatism, edited by Hugh Mellor. As Mellor claimed in his introduction, the book aimed to investigate the multifarious influence Ramsey’s pragmatism had on subsequent philosophical debates. Thirty years later, there is no doubt that the impact of Ramsey’s thought has been steadily growing ever since, prompting new developments not only in philosophy of science and epistemology, but also in computer science, mathematics, and economics. The implications of Ramsey’s pragmatism have yet to be fully explored particularly in connection with his philosophy of probability and his probabilistic epistemology. The aim of this article is to draw attention to aspects of Ramsey’s pragmatism that have been somewhat overlooked by the literature. Special emphasis will be placed on Ramsey’s constructivism. This theory, shared by the geophysicist and probabilist Harold Jeffreys, anticipated by several decades a widespread tendency of contemporary debate on the foundations of scientific knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
See Price’s chapter in this volume.
- 2.
- 3.
De Finetti wanted this claim printed in capital letters in the Preface of the English edition of his Theory of Probability (see de Finetti 1970/1975).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Johnson was the first to devise the probabilistic property of exchangeability; see Galavotti (2005) for more on this.
- 7.
See Ramsey (1991, pp. 279–281).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
For more on Ramsey’s notion of chance see Galavotti (1995).
- 12.
See also Sahlin (1991).
- 13.
See Dokic and Engel (2001).
- 14.
- 15.
This conjecture is discussed in Galavotti (2003).
- 16.
Notably, in recent years constructivism has also attracted increasing attention among authors working on the foundations of mathematics and statistics. Recent contributions to constructivism in those areas have been put forward by the logician Carlo Cellucci – see his (2011, 2013) – and the statistician Christian Hennig – see his (2010). A discussion of their contribution is contained in Galavotti (2014).
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Galavotti, M.C. (2014). New Prospects for Pragmatism: Ramsey’s Constructivism. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_45
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