Where Plato And Grice Agree: Ep. vii 343a

Or, the Lunary
-------- by JLS
------------ for the GC

---- GRICE LOVED TO PLAY GRECIAN, and it shouldn't surprise us that he refers to the supralunary in WoW:MR: the hyperselenios of the Grecians. And it's precisely in the very Platonic sense of his Epistle vii:342a -- when Grice discusses 'cyclos'. What do we mean 'circle'? Can a 'circle' exist? What is the _meaning_ of 'circle'. Would we call the rough thing we draw on, say, sand, 'a circle', or just so by approximation. Isn't 'meaning' a bit like the optimal limit where this or that rough 'circle' are only scare-quotedly so-mis-called?

Plato writes:

There is something called a circle, whose name is just the very word I just now utterered. The name 'circle'. There is the OBJECT which is drawn and erased and destroyed. This is a physical scheme or shape. We have the circles as they are drawn. This is hardly a circle, since in many places "it touches THE STRAIGHT [line] while the real circle, we maintain, contains in itself neither more nor less of the opposite nature

Estin ton onton hekasto, di'hon ten epistemen anagke paragignesthai, tria, tetraton d'autepempton d'auto tithenai dei ho de gnoston te kai alethos estin on en men onoma deuteron de logos, to de triton eidolon, tetraton de episteme. Peri en oun labe boulomenosmathen to nun legomenon kai panton houto peri noesson. Kuklos estin ti legomenon hoi tout' auto estin onoma ho nun ephthegmetha. Logos d'autou to deuteron, ex onomaton kai rhematon sugkeimenos. To gar ek toi eskaton epi to
meson ison apekhon pante, logos an eie ekeinou hoper stroggulon kai peripheres onoma kai KUKLOS. Triton de to zographoumenon te kai exaleighomenon kai torveuomenon kai apollumenons. On autos HO KUKLOS, on peri pant'estin tauta, ouden paskhei, touton hos heteron on. Tetarton de episteme kai nous alethes te doxa peri
taut'estin, hos de hen touto au pan teheton, ouk en phonais, oud'en somaton
skhemasin al'en psukhais enon, oi delon heteron te ohn autou tou KUKLOU tes phuseos ton te emposthen lekhtenton trion. Touton de eggutata men suggeneia kai homoioteti tou pemptou nous peplesiaken, talla de pleon apekhei. KUKLOS HEKASTOS ton en tais praxesi graphomenon e kai torveuthenton meston tou
exantiou estin toi pempto -- tou gar eutheos ephaptetai pante -- autos de,
phamen, HO KUKLOS oute ti smikroteron oute meizon tes enantias ekhei en hauto
puseos. Onoma te auton phamen ouden oudeni bebaion eina, koluein d'outen ta nun stroggula kaloumena euthea keklesthat ta te euthea de stroggula, kai ouden eetoon bebaios exein tois metathemenois kai evantios kalousin.

Grice:

"It might be for one reason or another that there cannot be in the sublunary world any things that are, strictly speaking, circular. Nevertheless, that does NOT prevent us from applying the word 'circular' in the sublunary world, because we apply it in virtue of approach to, or approximation to, the ideal limit which is itself not realised. All we need is a WAY of, so to speak, measuring up actual particulars against the unrealizable quality of the perfect particular. Indeed, maybe something like this is what Plato went in for" (WoW:301).

Indeed. Code, who is one of Grice's literary executors, has decoded this. For Code, Grice was an Ariskantian -- i.e. he believed in the tode ti. (This has been formalised by R. B. Jones in his "Izzing and Hazzing" study of Aristotle's metaphysics in rbjones.com). As Jones and Code and Grice noted: there seems to be an easy way to formulate the big discrepancy thing between Aristotle and Plato on just this: never mind Socrates. For Plato, indeed, went in for the supralunary. While Grice, being more of an Aristotelian spirit, would refer to 'rough' circles, alla Kramer (if I recall the vocabulary alright) 'construction' routines.

I recall actually my very first paper in philosophy -- for a seminar on the reading of philosophical texts -- Eutyphro of Plato, in Greek -- (seminar by G. Ranea) was on this:

a m A

where "m" means 'means', and 'a' is the particular, and "A" the 'idealised particular' that an idea stood for in Plato. For Aristotle,

this rough circle MEANS the Circle.

would be an ill-formed expression (or something). It's not like we are deeming the rough 'circle' a circle because it resembles, roughly, the Perfect Circle. For such would involve having a third circle, etc. Aristotle, to wax dramatical, would mention the third man, which later became the title of a novel by Graham Greene and Grice's favourite film _Ever_, as he presided the Oxford Film Society, at Oxford, of course.