| Sumario: | Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, as a belief that is in some way successful. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more and less objective ways. Peirce thought that a belief{u2019}s success had to be connected to circumstances {u2018}not extraneous to the facts{u2019}, whereas James sometimes argued that a belief is true if it works well for an individual. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James{u2019}s view, and that pragmatism has never fully recovered. But the story is more complicated and interesting than that. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid 1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with his pragmatism, Ramsey would not have been in step with it.
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