R. Paul informs me that there is this new book on Chess. Grice loved chess, and would often play it with Myro -- on the phone!
Why did Grice like Chess? Why not? But Grice went further.
He took chess as the 'paradigm' of reason. He refers to famous chess-players in his "Aspects of Reason".
My friend L. M. Tapper, who chesses, cannot agree less!
Cheers, and Checkmate!
JLS
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'He refers to famous chess-players in his "Aspects of Reason".'
ReplyDeleteHe uses the name of one of the greatest chess masters, Botvinnik, as a pseudonym for one of the greatest logicians, Georg Kreisel, in the following anecdote about a proof:
"about twenty years ago a distinguished logician, whose identity I will conceal under the name ‘Botvinnik’, published a proof, or the sketch of a proof, of an (alleged) theorem; his ‘proof’ was six pages long. Two Harvard graduate students (one now himself a distinguished logician) set themselves to expand Botvinnik's proof. They found the conclusion of it to be indeed a theorem; but their expansion was eighty-four pages in length." (Grice, 2001, p. 11)
Lovely. Indeed, R. B. Jones, who is now allowed to contribute and post (and _has_ in thread of Harborne, being a lifelong native of Stoke) thinks that formal proof is all there is to philosophical life. And I, on Thursdays, agree! (His views archived online in S. R. Bayne's _history of analytic philosophy_ website. Thread: Proving).
ReplyDeleteWe were discussing the alleged 'factivity' of 'proved'.
I would like to think, and I know that N. Elwyn is all about this in his thesis -- when a major book with ... Blackwell? Hateful question that. What is wrong with a PhD dissertation remaining so -- that Grice's point is that
OPTIMALLY
it is not the case that
Kreisel "proved" anything.
For it was his students "as done it", as it were.
Seriously, though, I am for ever confused, since when I taught logic -- for a term or two -- if I had to FAIL students who skipped steps in proofs.
A student of mine, one of my best, Adrian Elder, would comment, "But doc, surely we are not as STUPID as to require that silly little step in the proof which merely amounts to one of the textbook's idiotic rules of inference".
Ah well.
Elder is into computer programming, which shows. Only someone in computer programming know how dangerous it _is_ to skip a step. And yet he didn't seem to care, Elder didn't.