When There Was Nothing to Discuss

We offer a novel interpretation of Frank Ramsey’s talk, “On There Being No Discussable Subject,” delivered to the Cambridge Apostles Society in 1925. We suggest that Ramsey aimed to present a reductio ad absurdum argument. His argument was that if the prevailing philosophical outlook among the Apostles were true, then we would conclude that there is nothing to discuss in the Society. Ramsey believed that this conclusion is absurd. His point was to challenge the Apostles by telling them that their theoretical philosophical commitments fail to explain why, indeed, there is much to discuss in the Society in practice. Exploring Ramsey’s reductio argument motivates a new historical explanation for the pragmatist philosophy he developed in the second half of the 1920s. It also facilitates a new reading of his pragmatism and its significance. More specifically, we argue that Ramsey developed his pragmatism partly due to his concern that the prevailing philosophical outlook within Cambridge-based intellectual circles, such as the Apostles Society, seemed to fail to account for the epistemic value of their members’ non-expert conversations with each other. His pragmatism left us hints about how to make sense of the epistemology of disagreements in our daily social lives.