Grice: "Ordinary Language Philosophy" -- "Common Sense"

by JLS
--- for the GC

WE ARE CONSIDERING WITH R. B. Jones, in "The City of Eternal Truth", this blogspot, and elsewhere, the Carnap-Grice interface.

Notably: Is Grice an effect of Carnap? We think he is: No ordinary language philosophy (with focus on natural language, like English) without formal language philosophy.

But: There is also this idea, not very marked in Carnap, that what the person (Grice, Carnap) should do is 'embody' "commons sense". "Ordinary language philosophy" (qua derivative of Moore's attacks) thus reacts, not so much against "formal language philosophy" (with a focus on natural language, rather than its variants as formal calculi), but against technicisms. In the case of Carnap, I am thinking of some of his commentary on 'philosophers' paradoxes', like "Nothing noths".

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Where Grice Stands:

i. The reaction against 'formal language' is more 'tacit' than explicit. Only when in "Vacuous Names" (1969, commissioned for festschrift for Quine) he proposes his System, Grice is never systematic as to the introduction of a language alla Carnap had done in his earliest work -- the 'semantic phase'.

ii. There is something to be said about a FOOTNOTE to Strawson 1952. This is the Introduction to Logical Theory, and all the Griceian manovoeuvre is there briefly stated. Strawson credits Grice. Grice is quoted as using the idea of a 'pragmatic' rule, to account for divergences of readings of the 'natural-language' particles versus their 'formal-language' counterparts. While Grice would later emphasise the truth-functional connectives, Strawson is citing Grice on the quantifier, the existential and the universal, and the idea that it's not STRONG enough (or 'semantically informative' enough -- to use Carnap-Bar-Hillel -- to say, e.g. -(Ex)Fx & Gx.

iii. Grice and Heidegger. Was Grice upset, as Carnap was, as to things like "Nothing noths"? Would he think that an appeal to ordinary-language would provide an antidote to such ridiculous things philosophers say? The first three essays in the SECOND PART of WoW address this -- and it's a strand alright in his work -- strand 3. This is a 'methodological' strand: it concerns, as with Carnap, systematising what the philosopher is about to do, or what we are to do with 'philosophers' statements'. So Grice is proposing to counterattack ANY philosophical thesis with some 'ordinary-language' counterpart. This is a CONSTANT strand in Grice. From his earliest publication, "Personal Identity", to his latest --. Grice is ALWAYS bringing in "what we would say". Like when he says, out of the blue, in "Meaning", against Carnap, "words are not signs". For Grice, if the thing does not ring a natural-English bell, it's enough of a no-no. He would grow qualificative about this, but the spirit remained.

iv. In later years, Grice were more and more weary of the technical language of 'scientists'. Eddington's second-table, for example: the quantum table. Do we need it? Is there a NEW metaphysics, or a new physics that the common man needs to be aware of, that will repel the structures and categories constrained by his use of language? He thinks not. In this sense, he was never as 'revisionary' or prescriptionist as Carnap was. The ordinary-language of 'common sense' ("English") HAS to be embody the truths. There is no argument one can make to the effect that the ordinary man is mistaken, and ready to be corrected by the scientists.

And there may be other points.