Frank Ramsey

Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) may have been the only person who could argue with Wittgenstein as an equal. He was eighteen and an undergraduate at Cambridge when he did most of the work on the English translation of the Tractatus, published in 1922 under C. K. Ogden's name. He died at twenty-six, leaving landmark work in logic, probability and economics.

What Ramsey took from Wittgenstein

In September 1923 Ramsey travelled to Puchberg am Schneeberg, where Wittgenstein was a village schoolteacher, and spent about two weeks going through the book with him line by line. He came back convinced that the Tractatus could repair Russell's logic. In "The Foundations of Mathematics" (1925) he used Wittgenstein's idea that logical truths are tautologies to simplify the theory of types in Principia Mathematica.

But he was never a disciple. His 1923 review in Mind already put a finger on a weak spot. The Tractatus says elementary propositions are independent of each other, yet "this spot is red" and "this spot is blue" cannot both be true. Wittgenstein's 1929 paper Some Remarks on Logical Form is his first admission that this does not work. Ramsey also mocked the mystical ending of the book, and the doctrine of saying and showing:

But what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.

Frank Ramsey, "General Propositions and Causality" (1929)

What Wittgenstein took from Ramsey

When Wittgenstein came back to Cambridge in January 1929, Ramsey, fourteen years younger, was formally his doctoral supervisor. They talked almost daily until Ramsey's death in January 1930. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says that Ramsey's criticism helped him recognise the grave mistakes of his first book. Ramsey's pragmatism, his interest in what beliefs do in action, may have nudged Wittgenstein towards meaning as use. How much is disputed: the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Ramsey speaks of a confluence of ideas rather than a one-way influence.

Where they disagreed

Ramsey wanted to fix philosophy with better theory, and he built some of it himself: subjective probability, decision theory, Ramsey sentences. Wittgenstein grew suspicious of that ambition. In a remark from 1931, collected in Culture and Value, he called Ramsey a "bourgeois" thinker, someone who wanted to put the affairs of a particular community in order without asking about the foundations of that order. It was not quite an insult, and not quite a compliment. You can read the translation Ramsey worked on at Project Gutenberg.