On Solipsism

“If a proposition is a picture of the world, disconnected from any reference to the self whose picture it is, then we are totally vulnerable to skepticism or solipsism. How are we to bridge the gap between ourselves and that world? How can we even make claims about that world? Wittgenstein’s primary world ‘contains no thought’. If we want to understand the world, we must not neglect the ‘subjective side’... We need the irreducible secondary world, full of hypotheses, laws and claims about the existence of objects, if we are to think about the world at all.”

Carole Misak, “What is Truth? On Ramsey, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle,” - aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle. Insightful short essay in Aeon’s history of ideas section on Ramsey’s pragmatism. Once recovered it provides new avenues of progress in philosophy. The other title listed on the cover image sums it up nicely: “Philosophy must be useful. For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative.”