Note on the JSTOR document: This was published together with a paper by G. E. Moore under a single title (they were originally delivered in the same conference session), and JSTOR treats the two papers as single document; however, I’m assigning only Ramsey’s paper.
Ramsey begins by referring to the essay by Russell we discussed on Friday. He is writing nearly 20 years after Russell, but the connection is closer than that might suggest. As Ramsey notes at the end of the paper, he is trying here to give an interpretation and development of ideas Wittgenstein presented in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), and that book—especially the strand of it that Ramsey addresses—was a response to Russell’s 1910 theory of judgment.
• Ramsey begins (pp. 153-157) with his own version of Russell’s arguments against an account of belief or judgment as a relation to a single object.
• Then follows the part of the paper that is most important for us (pp. 157-159). In it, Ramsey advances a position regarding truth that is often labeled “deflationism.” According to that sort of view, truth is not a substantive property of beliefs or judgments; instead the term ‘true’ is seen as a kind of verbal convenience. It then follows that what appear to be theories of truth are really best thought of as theories of something else (in the case of the theories that Ramsey considers, as theories of judgment).
• The remainder of the paper (pp. 159-170) is Ramsey’s reworking of some of Wittgenstein’s ideas as a multiple-relation account of judgment that differs from Russell’s 1910 account in important ways. Notice that, if Ramsey’s deflationism is set aside, this theory, like Russell’s 1910 account, can be seen also as a correspondence theory of truth.