New Prospects for Pragmatism: Ramsey's Constructivism

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.