Brain of a Gricean

---- by J. L. Speranza
-------- for the Grice Club

---- WE ARE DISCUSSING WITH L. J. KRAMER IN A NUMBER of posts, the so-called identity-thesis regarding mind or brain. Well, Kramer uses 'brain' -- I will search his previous posts, but this from commentary to recent "The Compleat Griceian". I'm not bringing this for criticism, but to elucidate further, if we can, this area which has not received much debate in Grice Studies: the Smart-type of identity-thesis. Are the mind and the brain connected, and how. How important is the _brain_ rather than mere talk of 'physical' realisation. Kramer is, like me, an adherent of the logical vs. physical device. E.g. my uncle is a physical device. But he is also a logical device --. Being my uncle involves both devices, etc. In his recent commentary Kramer writes:

this is really the principle of my "brain" computer program, which randomly searches its database for answers to questions.

The use of 'scare quotes' -- (Kramer may protest that not all quotes are 'scare' ones) -- may indicate that this is a simile, and not brain-brain.

"Finding subs in the ocean is like finding answers in your brain."

I was protesting that if I were to _observe_ or spy as I may prefer, my brain, I would possibly find a bit of grey matter (so-called mirror neurons, etc. (*) and not because they are reflected on mirrors, etc), but hardly 'an answer'. It seems 'answer' belongs to the logical, rather than the phsyical device (which includes the brain). So the idea would be I suppose to let the physical realisation be held 'multiple': i.e. one STATE of the brain (qua physical device) will be 'identical' -- Smart's thesis goes -- with a logical device that is one particular answer to one particular question.

Alas, Grice was so sceptical about advances in neuroscience that I have absorbed some of the scepticism from him.

Oddly, Plato believed that the mind was indeed deposited in the brain. On the other hand, Aristotle, thought it was deposited, somehow, in the heart. This is ODD, but true. I.e. it would seem that progress always 'progresses' and there you have a person (Plato) being more right than his successor (Aristotle) who was right in everything else.

In fact, when I read this thing about Aristotle, and seeing that Grice is constantly referring to Aristotle in particular in his "Method in philosophical psychology" (repr. Grice 1991, Conception of Value) one wonders, I mean, I do.

Part of the problem here is verbal. I wouldn't know what term the Greeks used for 'brain' -- cephallos possibly? cerebrum sounds Latin. Should find out. On the other hand, as a student of philosophy I was literally bombarded (well, ...) by all the otiose nomenclature the Graeco-Romans had about 'anima'. I.e. the ghost in the machine (which was the brain, or the heart -- cfr. Aristotle enthymeme, epithumia, etc. the latter translated as conscuspiscentia).

There's the

animus -- the psyche of the Greek.
But then there's the 'anima'.
This gives zoon or bion, or animal.
Engish 'life'.
Then there's the soul which translates psyche and anima, rather than animus.
Then there's the mind -- and it may be for this restriction that Grice prefers to speak of philosophical psychology, rather than philosophy of mind -- this move is so anarchic that endears me to Grice on yet another front.

So there's the mind -- but which in Greek is the nous, and in the Latin the mens.
Then there's the intellectus, which is also the nous in Greek. So perhaps the nous is not the mind. There's activus intellectus (nous poietikos) and passivus intellectus (nous pathetikos). Indeed the latter coming first -- first we sense things (subdoxastic), _then_ we grasp them cognitively or conatively. Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu, as the scholastics would say.

Then there's the spiritus, which was possibly a Biblical invention, trying to get back to the 'breath' idea of the psyche -- as when we say that whisky is a spiritual drink, etc.

-----

I once attended a course in neurolinguistics and know a bit about dislexia and Broca, and so this should interest Griceans. But the problem is experimenting. I once photocopied the WHOLE WORKS, almost of neurologist Jackson, and also one called, appropriately, Head -- these people had studied 'mismanoeuvres' in conversation after, say, a hit in the head. Jackson's transcripts were pretty boring, but I suppose interesting in some respect or other. Schyzophrenic talk is yet different, because Jackson studied patients with cranial traumas. Dislexia may be yet a different thing: Broca was important, but perhaps overestimated. It may seem that some speech pathologies do not necessarily involve brain damage of any sort? --- On the other hand, or rather, on the other hemisphere, I would NOT think that Grice Studies should be concerned ONLY with 'speech' -- that's LINGUISTICS. But a Gricean has a broader interest in communication as such, which can be visual, analog, emotional, musical, etc. -- so none of the narrow localisms for us.

Call this the Broca Implicatura.

Are we a higher ape? Anyway, they are sufficiently related to us, so I'm labelling this post after them. After all Grice did write:

"Read 'Selfish Gene', chimp lit."

-- by which he meant 'chimpanzee literature'. Apparently they cannot really 'converse', and Nim Chimsky's utterances, while lovely were hardly compositional or implicature-loaded:

banana want want no banana no no want desire yes banana

(11 items utterance was the longest ever produced) --. Bonobos, on the other hand, seem more Gricean in other respects (as N. V. Smith and T. Wharton have pointed out, vis a vis, at least the latter author, H. P. Grice), etc.