Epilogue: Ramsey’s Ubiquitous Pragmatism

Ramsey’s late piece ‘General Propositions and Causality’ (GPC) begins with a discussion of the logical status of unrestricted generalizations—claims of the form ‘(x)F(x)’. Ramsey argues against his own earlier view that a sentence of this form should be treated as an infinite conjunction. However, as he puts it, ‘if it isn’t a conjunction, it isn’t a proposition at all’. He goes on to put causal judgements in the same non-propositional box, noting that what he has offered is a ‘psychological analysis’ of causal judgement, not a metaphysics of causation—the later, he thinks, turns out to be the wrong mode of inquiry in this case. In modern terms, what Ramsey has sketched is a pragmatist or expressivist view of causation. This chapter relates Ramsey to later manifestations of the same pragmatist move, in Cambridge and elsewhere, and discusses the question whether Ramsey himself does or should think that this pragmatism is a ‘global’ view, applicable to all our judgements.

Hume

One of Hume's prime methodological principles is this: where philosophical confusion reigns, cognitive psychology may help to bring resolution. This article tries to approach the question of his theory of causation through two questions of Humean cognitive psychology. First, what is his theory of causal inference, particularly as it concerns necessity? Second, what is his theory of causal judgement, particularly as it concerns the deployment of concepts? The answers to these questions, it is argued, reveal that Hume has a reasonably sophisticated ‘causal sense’ theory of causal psychology that allows him to concede something to each of the following: projectivism, reductionism, and realism. He can do this without falling into a simple version of any of these epistemological/semantic/metaphysical packages.

Short Article: Extinction in human learning and memory

In two experiments, participants were given extinction training in a human causal learning task. In both experiments, three critical experimental cues were paired with different outcomes in a first phase of training and were then extinguished in a second phase. Three control cues were given the same treatment in the first phase of training, but were not then presented in the second phase. Participants’ ability to correctly identify the outcome with which each cue had been paired in the first phase was lower for extinguished than for control cues. Causal attributions to the extinguished cues were also lower than those to the control cues, a difference that correlated with outcome memory. These data are consistent with the idea that extinction in causal judgement is due, at least in part, to a failure to remember the cue–outcome relationship encoded in the first phase of training.

Forward blocking in human learning sometimes reflects the failure to encode a cue–outcome relationship

In two “allergist” causal judgement experiments, participants were trained with a blocking design (A + |AB+). The procedure allowed different food cues to be paired with different fictitious allergic reactions. On test, participants were asked to rate the causal efficacy of the target cues and to recall the particular allergic reaction (outcome) that had followed each cue during training. Forward blocking was observed on the causal judgement measure and on the outcome recall measure in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. A backward blocking contingency was also trained in Experiment 2 (AB + |A+). Backward blocking was not observed either on the causal judgement or on the outcome recall measure. The evidence from the recall measure suggests that forward blocking in this task results from a failure to encode the B–outcome relationship during training. Associative and nonassociative mechanisms of forward blocking are discussed.