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any difference?” Ramsey seems to have
believed that it would, and the matter
depressed him, on and off, for two years.
In Vienna, he was treated by The-
odor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils.
Initially, Ramsey found the sessions
unpleasant and he was sometimes bored
by so much talk about himself. He lent
Reik a copy of the “Tractatus,” and was
annoyed when Reik declared that its
author must have some sort of com-
pulsion neurosis. But after six months
he told his parents that he found Reik
“jolly clever,” and that being analyzed
was likely to improve his work. Even
the foundations of mathematics could
be illuminated by psychoanalysis, Ram-
sey thought: guarding against one’s
emotional biases would make it easier
to get a clearer view of the truth. Ram-
sey returned to Cambridge in Octo-
ber, 1924, and evidently considered him-
self cured. Meanwhile, Reik told a
friend of Ramsey’s that there had never
been much wrong with him.
Ramsey, taking up a fellowship at
Keynes’s college, King’s, began lectur-
ing on mathematics. Tall and increas-
ingly round, he had a lumbering grace,
and acquitted himself well at lawn ten-
nis; a friend, writing in her diary, de-
scribed a broad face that “always seems
ready to break into a wide smile.” He
fell in love with Lettice Baker, a spir-
ited woman five years his senior, who
had excelled in science and philoso-
phy as a Cambridge undergraduate
and was working at the university’s
psychology laboratories. They were
married in 1925, just after an odd epi-
sode during a summer party at Keynes’s
country place.
Several Bloomsbury figures were
there, including Virginia Woolf and
Keynes’s new wife, a Russian ballerina,
Lydia Lopokova. Unfortunately, Witt-
genstein was, too. Lydia made the mis-
take of remarking, “What a beautiful
tree,” presumably too casually, where-
upon Wittgenstein glared and de-
manded, “What do you mean?” and
she burst into tears. Wittgenstein also
became annoyed with Ramsey, who
took issue when Wittgenstein declared
Freud “morally deficient.” Although
Ramsey didn’t bear grudges, the two
men had no contact for four years, ex-
cept for a distinctly cool exchange of
letters in 1927 about the logic of “=.”
In love and full of ideas, Ramsey
said in early 1925, “I find, just now at
least, the world a pleasant and excit-
ing place.” This was in a talk he gave
to the Apostles, a select and venerable
Cambridge discussion club. Ramsey’s
main topic that evening was whether
there was anything left for such clubs
to talk about. The rise of science and
the fading of religion meant that the
old questions were becoming “either
technical or ridiculous,” or so Ramsey
argued. He half seriously suggested
that conversation, except among ex-
perts, was now just a matter of saying
how one felt and comparing notes with
others. But he ended with a twist. Some
might find the world an unpleasant
place, yet he had reason on his side—
not because any facts supported him
but because a sunny attitude did one
more good. “It is pleasanter to be
thrilled than to be depressed, and not
merely pleasanter but better for all
one’s activities.”
There was a broader philosophical
picture behind his humor. He was at-
tracted by the idea that beliefs of all
sorts were best understood in terms of
their consequences. He called this
“pragmatism,” following the Ameri-
can philosopher C. S. Peirce, who died
in 1914. Ramsey took the essence of
pragmatism to be that “the meaning
of a sentence is to be defined by ref-
erence to the actions to which assert-
ing it would lead, or, more vaguely still,
by its possible causes and effects. Of
this I feel certain.” Part of “the essence
of any belief,” he later wrote, is that
“we deduce from it, and act on it in a
certain way.”
In 1926, Ramsey composed a long
paper about truth and probability
which looked at the effects of what he
called “partial beliefs”—that is, of peo-
ple’s judgments of probability. This
may have been his most influential
work. It ingeniously used the bets one
would make in hypothetical situations
to measure how firmly one believes a
proposition and how much one wants
something, and thus laid the founda-
tions of what are now known as de-
cision theory and the subjective the-
ory of probability.
Ramsey hoped to turn his essay
about truth and probability into a
book, which he worked on in the latetwenties, but during this time he also
produced two articles for The Eco-
nomic Journal, which was edited by
Keynes. One was the article on sav-
ings—Ramsey mentioned to Keynes
that it was “much easier to concen-
trate on than philosophy”—and the
other was about tax, and ultimately
no less consequential. Its key proposal
is that, given certain conditions, the
rates of sales taxes should be set in
such a way that the production of each
taxed commodity falls by the same
proportion. The tax article, like the
savings one, eventually became the
basis of a subfield of economics con-
cerned with “optimal taxation,” and
changed the way economists thought
about public finance.W
hen Wittgenstein returned to
Cambridge, early in 1929, Ram-
sey was eager to resume their philo-
sophical talks, and it seems that Witt-
genstein was as well. He moved in
with Ramsey and Lettice until he
found his own place, and the two men
had intensive discussions throughout
Ramsey’s last year. In a letter from
this time, Keynes wrote to his wife
that Wittgenstein had come to din-
ner and was “more ‘normal’ in every
way than I have ever known him. One
woman at last has succeeded in sooth-
ing the fierceness of the savage brute:
Lettice Ramsey.”
Misak thinks that Frank Ramsey
had a transformative effect on Witt-
genstein at this time, too. She argues
that it was Ramsey’s talks with him in
1929 that turned the Wittgenstein of
the “Tractatus” into the Wittgenstein
of the “Philosophical Investigations,”
a summation of his mature work that
was published, posthumously, in 1953.
In the thirties, Wittgenstein moved
away from the formal logical system
of his “Tractatus” and toward mean-
dering explorations of the purposes to
which language is put—the meaning
of a word is, as he argued in his later
work, often just its use. He was, in Mi-
sak’s account, adopting the sort of prag-
matism that Ramsey had taken up. In
the preface to his “Investigations,”
Wittgenstein certainly credited Ram-
sey for helping him to realize “grave
mistakes” in the “Tractatus.” But he
claimed to be even more indebted to