Ramsey sentence

Ramsey sentences are formal logical reconstructions of theoretical propositions attempting to draw a line between science and metaphysics. A Ramsey sentence aims at rendering propositions containing non-observable theoretical terms clear by substituting observable terms. They were introduced by the logical empiricist philosopher Rudolf Carnap.

For Carnap, questions such as: “Are electrons real?” and: “Can you prove electrons are real?” were not legitimate questions implying great philosophical/metaphysical import. They were meaningless "pseudo-questions without cognitive content,” asked from outside a language framework of science. Inside this framework, entities such as electrons or sound waves, and relations such as mass and force not only exist and have meaning, but are "useful" to the scientists who work with them. To accommodate such internal questions in a way that would justify their theoretical content empirically – and to do so while maintaining a distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions – Carnap set out to develop a systematized way to consolidate theory and empirical observation in a meaningful language formula.

Carnap began by differentiating observable things from non-observable things. Immediately, a problem arises: neither the German nor the English language naturally distinguish predicate terms on the basis of an observational categorization. As Carnap admitted, "The line separating observable from non-observable is highly arbitrary." For example, the predicate "hot" can be perceived by touching a hand to a lighted coal. But "hot" might take place at such a microlevel (e.g., the theoretical "heat" generated by the production of proteins in a eukaryotic cell) that it is virtually non-observable (at present). Physicist-philosopher Moritz Schlick characterized the difference linguistically, as the difference between the German verbs "kennen" (knowing as being acquainted with a thing – perception) and "erkennen" (knowing as understanding a thing – even if non-observable). This linguistic distinction may explain Carnap’s decision to divide the vocabulary into two artificial categories: a vocabulary of non-observable ("theoretical") terms (hereafter "V_T"): i.e., terms we know of but are not acquainted with (erkennen), and a vocabulary of observable terms ("V_O"), those terms we are acquainted with (kennen) and will accept arbitrarily. Accordingly, the terms thus distinguished were incorporated into comparable sentence structures: T-terms into Theoretical sentences (T-sentences); O-terms into Observational sentences (O-sentences).

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