Prospects for an Objective Pragmatism: Frank Ramsey on Truth, Meaning, and Justification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IIt is by now a familiar view that, at bottom, there are two rival factions within the pragmatist camp."One kind," Cheryl Misak maintains, "tries to retain a place for objectivity and for our aspiration to get things right"; "the other," she adds delicately, if suggestively, "is not nearly so committed to that" (2013, 246; cf.3).Misak gives her allegiance to the former faction, interspersing defenses of it and attacks on its rival throughout her telling of the history of pragmatism (see Misak 2013).Indeed, from pragmatism's inception, those who committed themselves to an objective pragmatism, as I shall call it, have been much more invested in distinguishing the two factions than those accused of a subjective pragmatism. 1 For instance, while William James dedicated his 1897 collection The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy "to my old friend Charles Sanders Peirce" (1979/1897, 3) and presented the pragmatism of his 1906 Lowell lectures as founded on "the principle of Peirce" (1978/1907, 29), Peirce was vitally concerned to distinguish the "logical gospel" he had called "pragmatism" from the "doctrine of philosophy" into which James transformed it.For, he reports, "prominent parts" of this Jamesian doctrine "I regarded, and still regard, as opposed to sound logic," and even as "characterized by an angry hatred of strict logic, and . . .some disposition to rate any exact * My thanks are due to Cheryl Misak for helpful comments, as well as to the Balzan Foundation-University of Toronto Styles of Reasoning project, inaugurated by Ian Hacking, for its support. 1 Rorty is an exception.He sharply separates Peirce's embrace of Kantianism from James' and Dewey's rejection of it, insisting that Peirce's "contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James" (1982, 161).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".