"[M]y teacher Frank Ramsey... showed that if a scientific system was so completely precise that you could replace every word in it, such as "electrons," by the totality of all observations on the electron, then you could never discover anything new. ...Ramsey's theorem is really equivalent to all the Tarski-Turing theorems in essence because it says that if you push the symbolism even in a word like "mass" so that you say, as operationalists do... mass is everything you do when you weigh the mass, you are never going to discover that mass and energy are interchangeable. You have closed the system to new discoveries."
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Philosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandEconomists from EnglandPeople from Cambridge
Original Language: English
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Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey
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Frank P. Ramsey
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a precocious British philosopher, mathematician and economist who died at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and was instrumental in translating Wittgenstein's into English, as well as persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the , the intellectual secret society, from 1921.
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