Semantics etc.

In a short review of the sequel to “The Graduate”, we find this in today’s Boston Globe:

Forty years have passed since Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson were last seen breathless on the back seat of a bus, staring at a future that suddenly seemed as dense and inscrutable as a new planet. The indelible scene, of course, is from the movie “The Graduate,” which consigned Charles Webb, on whose novel it was based, to the bizarre fate of being the unknown author of his most famous work.

“the unknown author of his most famous work” — Discuss.

If you’re one of us conditionals buffs, you know the famous footnote from Frank Ramsey’s article “General Propositions and Causality”:

If two people are arguing “If p will q?” and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and arguing on that basis about q; so that in a sense “If p, q” and “If p, not q” are contradictories. We can say that they are fixing their degrees of belief in q, given p. If p turns out false, these degrees of belief are rendered void. If either party believes not p for certain, the question ceases to mean anything to him except as a question about what follows from certain laws or hypothesis.

The first sentence of that footnote is now known as the Ramsey Test for the acceptability conditions of conditionals. The paper was written in 1929 and appeared posthumously (Ramsey died in 1930 at the age of 26) in 1931 in the collection The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays.

The Cambridge University DSpace archive contains a selection of Ramsey’s manuscripts and among them is the manuscript for “General Propositions and Causality”. The original of the Ramsey Test is on p.17 of the manuscript, which I reproduce here (click on the picture to download a full resolution pdf of the page):

How cool is that? For more on Ramsey, see D.H. Mellor’s biography article and the radio portrait that it was derived from, also in the Cambridge DSpace archive.

MIT Linguistics now has a weekly newsletter. Following the model of WHASC (What’s Happening at Santa Cruz) and WHISC (What’s Happening in South College), our newsletter is, of course, called Whamit!.