James Glover: ''The positivist foundations of Frank Ramsey’s philosophy of science".
Chair: Franck Cudek
Abstract: Literature on Frank Ramsey has depicted him as a philosophically progressive anomaly with respect to (among other things) the philosophy of science, who managed to see past logical positivist philosophy of science in its heyday—but whose work was “kidnapped” and “distorted” by Carnap and others (Sahlin 1990, 127). Work in the 1990s thus alleged that Ramsey’s was an intuitionist or pragmatist treatment of scientific theory (e.g. Sahlin op. cit., Majer 1989/1991). More recently, Psillos (2006) and Misak (2016) have instead proposed Ramsey was a ‘low-key’ realist about theoretical entities. I argue that the realist interpretations are textually baseless. Then I argue that the intuitionist and pragmatist interpretations conflate Ramsey’s pragmatist view of scientific methodology and his ontology, and read too much into Ramsey’s references to Peirce. I show that with respect to ontology, Ramsey was at home with his positivist “kidnappers”; he relied upon a ‘local’ realism, which sometimes veered into phenomenalism.