Strawson and Grice on 'analytic'

--- By J. L. Speranza

In this post, which I will try to elaborate on at a later stage, I would like to get a few quotes by Strawson on 'analytic', and see what Grice could have said about them.

Grice was onto the teaching of logic, as it were, in a very Oxford context, and I tend to think he was especially interested in this book by Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, which had come out in 1952, i.e. before Quine visited Oxford.

While Grice and Strawson would have been familiar with Quine's textbooks, they were still basically relying on Whitehead/Russell, Principia Mathematica, it would seem.

There were _other_ philosophers than Strawson who Grice would be interested in: Urmson was studying the development of logic in England for his book Philosophical Analysis that came out in 1956, and which discusses examples like

"She got off her knickers and went to bed"
"She went to bed and got off her knickers"

-- vis a vis the logical atomism of the Tractatus: they 'depict' the same picture of reality. Warnock, who had written on 'Metaphysics in Logic' was going to supply a history of logic in his English Philosophy since 1900. Plus, there was the local history of logic at Oxford: the work of John Cook Wilson, for example, pretty influential in Grice (his Statement and Inference -- posthumous heavy book on so many things).

So, 'analytic' was out in the air, and neither Strawson or Grice needed Quine's little refutation of what he found was a problem in non-Oxonian authors! So one may need to revise what Strawson may have said about 'analytic' or even 'logical' truth in his Intro, and see if we can elaborate a continuity of argumentation incorporating now Grice in their joint attack to Quine.

From
www.archive.org/stream/introductiontolo010626mbp/introductiontolo010626mbp_d
jvu.txt

The first occurrence of 'analytic' is on p. 21. where Strawson takes "analytic" as short for "logically necessary".

The next is on p. 36, where he speak so of 'analytic' as a statement that "makes special connexions with things in the world":

my three-year-old son is not an adult.

The next is on p. 38, where he says that 'if' combines most often with the metalogic 'analytic'. It's the meaning postulate:

"A three-year-old child is not an adult" (understood conditionally)

On p. 39 he uses that in connection with the horse shoe

He is a younger son ⊃ he is a brother.

(where the above is analytic).

On p. 40 he considers:

He is a bachelor --> NOT (he is married)

(analytic). But he feels he has to consider more important 'necessary truths'. "Otherwise my book on logic will be longer than any dictionary".

On p. 41 he says he'll restrict to second-order analytic truths.

On p. 46, considering logic of relations consider this below as analytic

xRy
yRz
-------
Ergo xRz

----

On p.58, he considers that the logician works best deriving one analytic formula from another analytic formula rather than at the metalogical level of deriving one rule from another.

On p. 60, he considers

"If x is not a male, x is not a father"
as "analytic"

On p. 71 he provides the truth table to prove what formulae are analytic:


She got off her knickers and got into bed.
___________________________________________

Therefore: she got into bed and got off her knickers

p & q
-------
q & p

It is analytic (a tautology, a theorem) that

if (p & q), (q & p)


In symbols

(p & q) --> (q & p)
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0

Tautology
Analytic


Not a lot -- here we may want to consider Strawson's earlier thoughts on 'necessary', too. That is


N E C E S S A R Y

P R O P O S I T I O N S

and

E N T A I L E M E N T - S T A T E M E N T S


which he wrote for _Mind_, 1948, four years before his book. When he was JUST learning from Grice (Grice was Strawson's tutor at St. John's where Strawson was John Locke Scholar).

In this early paper, Strawson quotes Koerner quoting CARNAP:

He is talking of

"deducibility"

and what we mean by that and that there seems to be a consensus:

with "except, perhaps, Carnap"

For which Strawson referst to Korner, pp. 151-152,

------ So in any case, these are serious issues that Strawson and Grice were peacefully studying in Oxford, using Aristotle, "Analytics" and Whitehead/Russell, discussing the occasional ref. to Carnap, and then possibly feeling bombarded when the textbook author Quine (whom they would have considered for things like "Mathematical Logic") thinks he can have the cheek to say that Carnap was being an empiricist and that as Such empiricism was silly because it rested on one big mistake, called "analytic".

Quine's agenda is obvious: he wanted to present "the New American" philosophy, etc. What his critics have noted, though, is that as far as the analytic/synthetic distinction go, the claim was pretty English and empiricist already and traceable back at least to Good Ol' Mill's System of Logic which was A REQUIREMENT of the Lit. Hum (Philosophy) programme that Grice had passed with flying colours. Etc.