Grice's "Fourfold list" of Formality Requirements

--- Grice thinks that Quine dismisses an 'inept' theorist. On p. 363 of "Valediction" he refers to formality as being 'in a better shape' "to his mind" than is dictivness as the 'best-candidate' status to attack Quine in his attack of a dogma.

--- without reverting to 'scepticism'. Quine confuses an 'inept theorist' with one who has done 'his best' in dealing with intractable tracts -- and he does not mean Witters's easy way out of his tract: 'thereof we cannot speak we should, tautologically, pass on in silence."

---

Grice has this fourfold list which he feels should fill pp. 364 of his "Valediction"

FIRST ITEM in the list:

---

"First and foremost ... is the
demand for a theoretically
adequate specification of CONDITIONS",
by which he means, of course,
'alethic' conditions: to which truth-values
(1 and 0, never more no less) apply.

---

This specification, Grice has it,

will

"Autorise the assignment of
'alethic' conditions to
suitably selected expressions"

---- the 'not' (among the monadic), and the 'and', the 'or' and the 'if' among the dyadic.

We are "thereby" 'endowing such expressions'

as

"p and q", "p or q", "if p, q"

---

"with a conventional signification."

----

"It is plain that such provision is
needed if signification is to get

OFF the ground" -- ['floor', I add, if you excuse me the Americanism -- or not].

"Meanings," Grice has it, "are
NOT natural growths. They need
to be CONFERRED or instituted."

Of course he is speaking loosely. Deutero-Esperanto is the language he invents while lying in his tub, to re-narrate a new High-Way Code.

"This makes me the authority."

----

"The mere fact that they are NEEDED"

-- he says as if with a credit to Carnap and his A-postulates --

"is insufficient to show that they
are AVAILABLE."

---- He is thinking Quine versus Carnap.

For,

"we might be left with [the hatefully Quinean]
sceptic's position of seeing clearly
what is needed, and yet being at the same time
TOTALLY unable to attain it."

--- Grice was saddened by the Tragey of Quine. An 'analytic' philosopher who disbelieves in 'analyticity' and who keeps quoting to no avail Grice's and Strawson's "In defense of a dogma" (in Quine's "Word and object" for example) as wanting to do something constructive about it (Quine's laughable version of 'stimulus meaning') and failing!

Grice goes on:

"We should not, of course, CONFUSE
the suggestion that there IS, strictly
speaking,"

-- versus 'loosely put' --

"no such thing as the exercise of
RATIONALITY with the suggestion taht
there is NO RATIONALLY ACCEPTABLE
theoretical account of what the exercise of
rationality consists in."

---- But Quine did turn into an 'irrationalist' -- and Harvard kept paying his salary!

Grice goes on:

"But though distinct these suggestions
may NOT be independent; for it IS
conceivably true that the EXERCISE
of rationality can exist only if there is a
theoretically ADEQUATE acocount, accessible
to human"

--- as opposed to 'rat' or 'divine'?

"reason, of what is that constitutes"

HUMAN

"rationality; in which case, an acceptance
of teh second suggestion will ENTAIL
an aceptance of the first suggestions"

-- if you are keeping track.