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| 10993 | Ramsey's Test: believe the consequent if you believe the antecedent |
| Full Idea: Ramsey's Test for conditionals is that a conditional should be believed if a belief in its antecedent would commit one to believing its consequent. | |||
| From: report of Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928]) by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.3 | |||
| A reaction: A rather pragmatic approach to conditionals |
| 14279 | Asking 'If p, will q?' when p is uncertain, then first add p hypothetically to your knowledge |
| Full Idea: If two people are arguing 'If p, will q?' and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge, and arguing on that basis about q; ...they are fixing their degrees of belief in q given p. | |||
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], B 155 n) | |||
| A reaction: This has become famous as the 'Ramsey Test'. Bennett emphasises that he is not saying that you should actually believe p - you are just trying it for size. The presupposition approach to conditionals seems attractive. Edgington likes 'degrees'. |
| 6894 | Mental terms can be replaced in a sentence by a variable and an existential quantifier |
| Full Idea: Ramsey Sentences are his technique for eliminating theoretical terms in science (and can be applied to mental terms, or to social rights); a term in a sentence is replaced by a variable and an existential quantifier. | |||
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928]), quoted by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.469 | |||
| A reaction: The technique is used by functionalists and results in a sort of eliminativism. The intrinsic nature of mental states is eliminated, because everything worth saying can be expressed in terms of functional/causal role. Sounds wrong to me. |
| 9418 | All knowledge needs systematizing, and the axioms would be the laws of nature |
| Full Idea: Even if we knew everything, we should still want to systematize our knowledge as a deductive system, and the general axioms in that system would be the fundamental laws of nature. | |||
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], §A) | |||
| A reaction: This is the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view. Cf. Idea 9420. |
| 9420 | Causal laws result from the simplest axioms of a complete deductive system |
| Full Idea: Causal laws are consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system. | |||
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], §B) | |||
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 9418. |