Grice and Verificationism

* * * * * * * * By J. L. Speranza



In his intriguing post, "Early Grice", THIS BLOG, Roger Bishop Jones challenges some of my statements regarding Grice's verificationist and post-verificationist phases. He concludes: "From what you say, he was a pre-verificationist, at most" (or words).

So, I'll recheck with Chapman. Let's recall that we are doing this because we are writing a joint history of philosophy that will take place in Oxford and Vienna. Vienna of Carnap ("The day I arrived in Vienna," Quine writes, "I naturally head to Carnap's. The housekeeper told me he had gone to Prague and that he actually did not leave a forwarding address." -- or words). The Oxford bits start when Ayer brings from Vienna the news that the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy was a _fraud_.

The word in the air was 'verification', 'verify'. Isaiah Berlin, a Russian by birth, but who had acquired all the required Oxonian mannerisms, was gathering at All Souls on Thursday Evening. "I would have possibly enjoyed the meetings, but Berlin was clear that I had been brought up on the wrong side of the track, and that there was nothing _he_ could do about it". Etc.

So echoes of verificationism got Grice's ears second hand.

Chapman writes after quoting Older Grice recalling 'never been impressed by 'the crudities and dogmatisms that seemed too pervasive'.

"Grice", Chapman notes, "may have been unimpressed by some of Ayer's [verificationism's] most sweeping claims, but they opened up to him analytic possibilities that affected his own style of philosophy."

One early "Negation", c. 1937, typescript,

is about "This is not red"
"I am not hearing a noise"

---- For (ii), Grice proposes:

"Grice's suggestion is that" -- this is Too-Early Grice, so beware --

"the incompatible fact offering a solution to
this problem is the fact that the utterer of (ii)
ENTERTAINS the POSITIVE (affirmative) proposition,
I am hearing a noise, without having an attitude
of CERTAINTY towards it."

---- More generally, he proposes:

"The A is not B"

"To state 'I do not know that A is B is to
state:" (Grice verbatim now):

"Every present mental process of mine
has some characteristic incompatible
with knowledge that A is B."

----

In my margins to this, I propose a doxastic weaker version, replacing the dogmatic Oxonian 'know' with 'believe'.

His view of 'compatibility' reminds the Sheffer stroke that he'll later use in accounts of "not". And the idea of the pregnant proposition "I'm not hearing a nose" as pregnant with "I am hearing a nose" was scholastic and medieaval.

Chapman notes:

"The main proposal of the paper thus DRAWS on VERIFICATIONIST assumptions".

Rather than, as I said, earlier, perhaps too enthused, post-verificationist, ones.

----

"Grice's proposed analysis CAN be subjected to a process of VERIFICATION, on the understanding that perception th[r]ough the senses ("It is green") and introspection ("every present mental process of mine...") are empirical phenomena."

Chapman goes on to show that Grice's analysis of "I" in terms of mnemonic total temporary states is also empiricist (draws directly on Locke) and verifcationist. This is 1941.

Chapman quotes from Perry (I met him and respect him a lot) as to why Grice went one step further than Russell. This may connect with the point about logical construction that R. B. Jones was making in his "Early Grice".

Grice is proposing a statement in terms of total temporary states to stand for a statement in terms of "I". Unlike Russell, who said that these analysis do not really 'preserve' meaning, they do for Grice.

"Persons are logical constructions out of experiences." "Whereas in Russell, the logical construction was a philosophical concept to an IMPROVED conception, this is not so for Grice. Grice intends to be making explicit, through analysis, the concept we already have"(Perry).

A third 'early' paper to consider here survives in manuscript form, entitled, "Disposition and intention", which has a verificationist ring to it. Recall Ayer and the verificationists trying to hold water with concepts like 'fragile' and the problem of counterfactual conditionals vide a vide observational and theoretical concepts. Grice's papers has two parts: one on 'disposition' as such, and the second, the application to a type of psychological disposition, which would be 'phenomenalist' in a way, or verificationist, in that it derives from introspection of, shall we say, empirical phenomena. (By this time Carnap was seriously considering physicalism as the language even for psychology, so he would have objected).

Grice is going to analyse, "I want a sandwich"

One person wrote in his manuscript,

"There is something with the way Grice goes to work"

Still...

Grice says that "I want a sandwich" is problematic, for analysis, in that "it seems to refer to experience that is essentially private and

UNVERIFIABLE."

"The dispositional analysis solves this: A wants a sandwich if he'd open the frige and get one: disposition to act."

"This he oppposes to 'special episode' account. They DESCRIBE private experience, private sensations. These sensations take the form of highly specific psychological entities, like 'sandwich-wanting-feeligs'."

"And he is dismissive", as Carnap would not, having read Watson, "of behaviourism, which would describe the utterance in terms "purely of observable responses." He is having Ryle in mind and his problem is with the first-person, "Surely I don't need to wait to observe myself heading for the fridge before I am in a position to know that I am hungry".

----

Grice poses a problem for the protocol-reporter. You see Harry wanting a sandwich. You ask for evidence. But when it's _you_ who wants it, Grice melodramatically puts it,

"I am NOT in the audience,
not even in the front row
of the stalls, I am on the stage."

Genial you'll agree.


--- Grice goes on to offer an analysis of 'intend' -- his basic attitude -- which, as Chapman summarises it, "relies on dispositional evidence without divorcing itself completely from the privileged status of introspective knowledge" (p. 69).

Later, he'll turn a 'functionalist' (Conception of Value, repr. full "Method in philosophical psychology").