Grice reads Wiggins, "Sameness and Substance"

--- and makes some funny apt comments on 'salva veritate' and implicature.

------ by JLS
--------- for the GC

--- WHEN GRICE WAS INTO HIS "METAPHYSICAL moods" -- he gave a Metaphysics seminar at Berkely on Friday afternoons -- he could be witty. He would use the paperback of Wiggins, "Sameness and Substance" and destroyed it to bits -- which the students had to pick from the floor -- literally.

He said,

"Harold Wilson is a great man"

"The British Prime minister is a great man"

--- "Suppose one dies, but the other survives", Grice suggests. "Suppose we are observing Harold Wilson as a baby, crawling on the floor with diapers -- would you still say he is 'a great man'?"

Many implicatures, in fact, depend 'on the time of the utterance'. But Wiggins wanted to sound grandiose and Aristotelian.

"Truth should be saved", Wiggins said.

"Salva veritate", replied Grice.

Mates, who was in the room, added:

Eadem sunt quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate.

There was "a moment of appalled silence", Grice recalls.

An online source translates the above as: "Le cose delle quali l'una può essere sostituita dall'altra mantenendone intatta la verità, sono le stesse." Mmm. Let's compare original by Cicero:

i. Eadem sunt quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate.

First, it's true the NEUTER is used "unum" and "alterum" -- the one and the other, or as Truffaut would prefer, 'l'une et l'autre' only in singular.

i. Eadem sunt quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate.

Here Cicero is not speaking of 'implicata', as Grice suggests, but eggs. One egg can be substituted by another egg. When? Well, when truth is saved.

"Eadem sunt quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate."

So the subject of the sentence is the latter part:

"Quorum unum potest substitui alteri, salva veritate".

and the predicate is brief enough:

"eadem sunt"

"Eadem sunt" being of course 'same-self'. As when we say:

A: "Beer anyone?"
B: "Yes"
C: "Idem"

---- cfr. Milanese, "Ditto"

"Ditto" is metalinguistic; "Idem" is objectlinguistic. It's loose talk, too. For surely it's not the SAME beer (or pint) that C is asking for. A similar TYPE of a beer -- or something. It's not like an egg.

So I propose to put the predicate where it should be, at the end of the phrase (Sometimes Cicero confuses us by his willingness to have his prose flow):

Quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate sunt eadem.

I.e. this is quantification. Quorum is a verbal thing, "out of which".

"Out of which, one CAN BE SUBSTITUTED", i.e. it's not like the egg substitutes, but CAN be substituted (not by the hen, we expect).

"Quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate sunt eadem"

So it's a hypothetical:

One egg can be substituted BY ANOTHER egg.

Here the Latin uses the genitive, which is rather low cant if you ask me, "I subsitute an egg off an egg." Let that be in that pigLatin and stick with the anglo:

"Quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate eadem sunt"

"Whatever one (thing) can be substitude by another (thing), with truth preserved, is the same thing (as this other thing that I've been mentioning above)." Clumsy.

---- He is saying: Sacco is condemned to die. We substitute Sacco by Vanzetti. We hang Vanzetti. Surely if we have begged the question that one can be executed without loss of anything that matters (In those days, "Truth" is what matters most -- for what matter MORE than Truth?) then one can just us well hang Vanzetti.

The argument was not convincing back then, alas -- and alack. -- for Cicero. Because in fact, NOTHING can be substituted for anything else. The implicature of Cicero's claim is that this DEFINES 'identity':

"the British prime minster"

"Harold Wilson"

-- back in 1967.

If we can substitute one singular term for the other -- assuming we KNOW the denotatum is the same -- we are just merely beggin the question that these are alternative names. So it's one and another "name" for the SAME thing. But without their causal link to a common denotatum (and why bother with two labels for the same thing?) that's a fallacy.

One DOES bother for two sobriquets, because Harold Wilson -- who cares? It's true that he RAN for Prime Minister, and he should be praised for that (I'd rather have studied philosophy under Grice), in his own little ways. But once he 'became' Prime Minister, I propose that "Harold Wilson" ceased to exist. If people stuck with the "name" Harold Wilson... their problem. One problem here is that one may want to say that who is a great man is HAROLD WILSON, not an 'office' ("the British Prime Minister"). It's the same as saying, "he is tall", 'or short, for that matter'. People ARE LOOSE SPEAKERS, and they exchange devices (what Kramer calls logical versus physical) like that. But we are philosophers and we should know better.

"It's different with eggs", remarks Cicero -- "they all look the same". But they don't. Caesar, for example, would often joke with Cicero on this: "I have learned the name of each of my soldiers in the army". "You should have spent more time studying philosophy. Soldiers are interchangeable salva veritate'.

The adage stuck, and when the English attacked the Falklands, it was full of gurkhas, which at the time, _were_ interchangeable (and they hardly belong to the Western Graeco-Roman civilisation part of the world, anyways -- Prince Edward calls them 'mercenaries'). Etc.