Conclusion

The aim of this work was, first, to understand and give a precise characterisation of Ramsey’s famous footnote. In order to do so, an exploration of Ramsey’s texts was needed to check if something more on Ramsey’s ideas on conditionals could be found. This work shows that Ramsey had more developed ideas on conditionals than it appears from the footnote. In turn, the footnote itself requires to be re-read, in light of these ideas. Contrary to what is generally believed today, Ramsey holds that in many circumstances, the meaning of a conditional sentence is material, namely it is given by the truth conditions of the material conditional corresponding to the conditional sentence. However, this is not always the case, and often a conditional expresses something more. Ramsey points out that the classical tool is not apt to always grasp the information a speaker conveys in asserting a conditional. The analysis Ramsey offers, then, is not purely semantic, he does not want to develop alternative truth conditions, but he is interested in the epistemology of conditionals.