--- by J. L. Speranza
------- for the Grice Club.
I AM FASCINATED THAT JONES HAS REGALED us, "Strand 5", THIS BLOG, with an account of Grice on salva veritate:
"The cases where the proposition itself
is involved are those in which
substitutivity of extensionally equivalent
propositions (i.e. ones with the same truth value)
salva veritate may fail, and we say that
the context in which the proposition
appears is opaque or intensional."
Or both!
In fact, Grice speaks of 'opaque' literally, in "The Strand" (by "The Strand" we mean, 'whatever Strand Grice reflects on this' -- it's a variable --. In this case, it's on p. 359:
"Might it not be that the
capacity to see through a glass darkly
presupposes ... a capacity, at least
occasionally, to achieve an
unhampered vision with the naked eye?"
--- I would agree, but I think 'naked' as apply to the eye is redundant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Is that "literal"? Perhaps.
ReplyDeleteBut surely not the kind of opacity I was talking about?
RBJ
Well...
ReplyDeleteHere we have, shall we say,
the transparent-opaque distinction.
This can be "literal". As Jones notes, it's never 'literal' with Grice. But we can think of a literal case where we have unhampered vision of something -- diaphanous, transparent.
Then we have the OTHER vision: the opaque.
How does this apply to 'truth' (veritas in Latin), and why?
----
The idea would be, indeed, as Jones notes, to add any "intensional" operator that turns the transparent into the opaque. I commented on his use of 'verbs' of propositional attitudes, pointing to the subtlety of verbs like 'regret' as analysed by Grice. Is it transparent or opaque?
"He regreted that the cat was hungry."
----
Here we DO need to take into account the utterer. For the most we can get at is the utterer's BELIEFS which are ALWAYS opaque (I argued for this in my "Mill and mentalism" for my tutor, E. A. Rabossi, along with H. Arlo-Costa, who replied). (I used Mill, "System of Logic" for that purpose).
If we take a simpler operator (Jones suggests 'eventually' as opaque) we distinguish between
i. p
and
ii. Op.
i.e.
"It rains"
and
"Eventually, it rains"
What makes 'eventually' opaque? Why is 'it rains' transparent?
As Jones notes, truth functors can be boring, but it would seem that " - " is transparent:
"It rains"
"It does not rain".
Both are 'transparent' in this sense. Yet each expresses a different belief.
With 'eventually', there is NO way, then, to get to the truth-value (or truth-condition) of the complex "Op" as a FUNCTION of the truth-value of its component "p" -- for why would we suggest that "O" itself has a truth-value?
The idea of a hampered and unhampered (or rather of an unhampered and a hampered) vision
may be taken somewhat more seriously into account.
Consider Greek. In Greek, 'phenomenalist' languge of the type that Carnap and Grice call 'phenomenalist' is NOT opaque. Because, in Greek, 'to appear' is TRANSPARENT.
"The flower appears red to me"
This, in Greek grammar, is 'transparent'. There is nothing more 'shiny' than a rose appearing red to you.
Yet -- that is not the case in English, or in German -- 'schein' means 'pseudo-' in Carnap, as when he speaks of pseudo-problems, 'scheinprobleme'.
So, what one may have as an intensional operator in English and German is not necessarily an intensional operator in Greek.
When I wrote my "The Sceptic and Language" for a seminar with E. de Olaso, I matriculated all of the examples by Sextus Empiricus, and would use phi and nu for the respective operators (for 'phainomenon' and 'noumenon', respectively).
Phi, p
--- would stand for, "It seems to me that p"
Nu, p
-- on the other hand, would stand for, "p", plainly.
I managed to quote from Bar-Hillel for whom "phenomenalist" language is NO language (He was a student of Carnap in Chicago). (Carnap would have disagreed).
The idea, in Bar-Hillel, that an opaque language which is SO dependent on its transparent predecessor (the physicalist language) should attain the very status of a 'language' is laughable, he thought.
It would be as if we were for good condemned to stick with 'intensional' operators. Surely if there are opaque contexts it's because there are transparent ones.
Of course this begs the question that the sceptic will NOT accept the physicalist language in the first place. So it's not like he deals with a phenomenalist language as opaque. It's the only one he has. If your only vision is unhampered you don't realise it is. Or something.