The Realistic Spirit

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to begin the task of characterising the realistic spirit. This is not a trivial undertaking; Ramsey uses the expression only once, in ‘General Propositions and Causality’ (GP&C), one of the last papers that he wrote. Nonetheless, we may find thoughts expressed in other late papers which will assist in the elucidation of the view. Note first that when a philosopher nowadays uses the word ‘realistic’, she can expect her audience to make a series of wholly predictable associations. The expression is nowadays connected with the general thesis of realism, an umbrella term under which any number of local theories shelter. When Ramsey uses the term ‘realistic’, he does so in explicit opposition to many (though not necessarily all) theses that might be labelled realist. That is how I shall use the word also.

Variable hypotheticals have formal analogies to other propositions which make us take them sometimes as facts about universals, sometimes as infinite conjunctions. The analogies are misleading, difficult though they are to escape, and emotionally satisfactory as they prove to different types of mind. But these forms of ‘realism’ must be rejected by the realistic spirit. (GP&C, p. 252)