A Study Of Ramsey’s Truth Theory

This thesis aims to give an adequate account on F.P.Ramsey’s truth theory,the content of which is divided into two parts.The first part introduces the background of Ramsey’s view on truth and his actual treatment on analyzing this notion.The second part focuses on clarifying the relationship between Ramsey’s theory and another two truth theories,the Redundancy Theory and the Prosententialism Theory.In the first part,the author contends that Ramsey supports a mild view toward Logical Psychologism.This view has significant impact on his opinion of truth and leads to his reductive treatment on truth.Ramsey’s position on Logical Psychologism is that Logic is a sub-discipline of Psychology with its specialty as the normative subject that studies inference and argument and therefore that all content of Logic is reducible to Psychology.This position also influences his view on truth in the sense that it leads him to argue that truth can also be defined in terms of Psychology.Thus,Ramsey puts forward a schema of reducing the notion of truth in terms of Psychology.Holding the Psychologism contention Ramsey deals with the problem of truth in the following procedures:firstly,truth is defined as that "a belief that p is true,if and only if p",in which the belief p has affirmative character and propositional reference;secondly,since belief is dispositional,namely,it reveals as judgement made by people under certain circumstances,the analysis of belief is reduced to the analysis of judgement and the analysis of truth therefore resorts to the notion of judgement;finally,analyze judgement by virtue of the critique to traditional substance theory and develop a correspondence theory of truth.In the second part,two truth theories,the Redundancy Theory and Prosententialism Theory,who assert to inherit from Ramsey’s theory but are not compatible with each other,are introduced in this paper and their relationship with Ramsey’s is identified.The Redundancy theory of Truth argues that the problem of truth is merely a problem of language,namely,how to explain the meaning of truth predicate.According to this theory,truth predicate has no meaning in the sentence predicated by it and therefore is redundant and can be eliminated in all contexts.This theory has claimed to follow from Ramsey’s truth theory.The Prosententialism Theory of Truth also claims to follow from Ramsey’s theory,but unlike the Redundancy Theory,it holds that truth predicate is not redundant and therefore cannot be eliminated in language.The truth predicate,according to them,is an indispensable part of one important type of prosentence and to eliminate it away from language will decrease the expressive power of language.In this paper,the author holds that the Redundancy Theory makes a misinterpretation on Ramsey’s point and therefore cannot be regarded as a consequence of Ramsey’s truth theory.The Prosententialism Theory is indeed the correct implication of Ramsey’s view in the Logical-Semantic level.Based on the two parts of analysis,it is concluded that Ramsey’s truth theory is a correspondence theory,and a Prosententialsm in terms of Logical-Semantics,but it cannot be a redundancy theory.