Ryle on Hypotheticals

Abstract

In ‘General Propositions and Causality’ (1929), F. P. Ramsey argued that for a large class of general propositions of the form ‘All Fs are Gs’, any such proposition amounts to a sort of rule: ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a G’ (p. 149). ¹ For Ramsey, to express a rule of this sort is the same as expressing or reporting a psychological ‘habit’. That wouldn’t rule out genuine disagreement between somebody who uttered the quoted rule and somebody who, for example, uttered the rule ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a non-G’, on account of its being possible for one to be proved right in what he believes (e.g. ‘This F is a G’) and the other wrong. Still, it would arguably be an improvement on Ramsey to infuse proper objectivity into the rule corresponding to ‘All Fs are Gs’ by re-phrasing it more impersonally, as ‘If one meets an F, one should regard it as a G’.