Grice's Shopping List

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

NOT HAPPY WITH PHILOSOPHY AS IT STOOD, Grice had to create new sub-disciplines. His father was a nonconformist, but his mother was High-Church (as she should. Who wants a nonconformist mother?). Thus Grice was NOT such an atheist (as his student at St. John's, Flew, came to be). Grice knew of theological eschatology (the study of heaven -- and hell). He proposes 'philosophical eschatology' to deal with something similar -- but different.

In his essay 19 of WoW defines eschatology as that branch of metaphysics which is

"suprcategorial" in character, i.e. it would bring
together categorially different subject-items beneath
a single characterisations, and specify principles for
this sort of assimilation [beyond category-barriers]

Grice deals with this as he proposes to analyse, a la very Oxford, the notion
of the word "right" as used by Plato in _The Republic_, as applied to what
is good for the soul, and what is good for the state.

Grice is though into something general, especially in the opening section, and thinks that eschatology may provide (as it occurred the idea to him "some time ago")

affinitites between categorially different realities,
protecting the principles associated with particular
categories from suspicions of [ad-hocness].

In this way, Grice introduces "analogical reasoning" --

a/b = c/d

-- which is the only way the philosopher has to deal with cases where "a" and "c"
are items which belong to different categories.

This supracategorial talk Grice contrasts with the _sub_categorial
talk which he finds the traditional talk works such as Kant's and the idea
of causation -- i.e. in traditional constructivist metaphysics (God, I'm
using _grand_ words. I miss the implicatures!).

Anyway, Grice provides a shopping list, as it were, for the
eschatologist which contains five items:

The eschatologist should:


I. provide a generalised theoretical account which would unite
specialised metaphysical principles which are separated from one another by
category-barriers.

II. provide a theoretically adquate characterisation of the relation
"be akin to..." (i.e. affinity), which, unlike the relation "...is similar
to..." seems to have a higher degree of "insensitivity to the presence of a
cateogory-barrier".

III. elucidate metaphorical thought, and simile.

IV. characterise the aporia or impasses in which he is likely to find
himself.

V. And this connects with Quine's dictum (in _Philosophy of Logics_) re
"changing the subject", as it states that the eschatologist should provide

a thoroughgoing analysis of the boundary
between legitimate and illegtimate imputations
of the sin of "having changed the subject".

It seems little has been written about eschatology, but consider one recent
discussion of metaphor at

http://www.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin12/p12t1.htm

The attempt is mainly, as I see it, to connect Grice's theory of metaphor
in 'Logic and Conversation' -- also in Studies in the Way of Words, Essay
II ("you're the cream in my coffee" is true iff you're the cream in my
coffee, but metaphorically iff you're my pride and joy) and the work of
cognitive psychologist M Turner as found eg. in

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html

The discussing centres around "coputative metaphors" of the form "BE (x,
y)", specifically,

"The utterer's meaning is a dinosaur"

and it is claimed that _four_ different conceptual or categorial fields are
involved. Before I turn the subject to Pataphysical Science (as introduced
by Mccartney in Maxwell's Silver Hammer), let's analyse what this approach
amounts to. From the first site

(http://www.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin12/p12t1.htm), we
read,

"The model posits the existence of two "input" spaces, 1. Space One, and 2.
Space 2 -- which correspond to Max Black's in Models and Metaphors, "focus"
and "frame"), plus, 3. a "generic" space which comprises the abstract
"skeletal" structure shared by spaces and 4. a "blend" space, where the two
representations from the two input spaces combine, originating a new
conceptualisation.

"In constructing a "blended mental space" when faced with a
metaphorical utterance, the addressee recruits information from different
sources in a "completions" that goes beyond the input spaces involved in
the analogical projection.

"This process, which accounts for much of our counterfactual thinking
into impossible/possible worlds means that by trying to make
"truth-conditional" sense of a specific utterance, the addressee must
derive an inference that can not be predicted from any of the individual
information sources considered in isolation.

"The addressee identifies the utterer's intended assumption by
formulating an interpretative hypothesis which the addressee intends to get
validated. This depends mainly on non-demonstrative non-monotonic
inferential calculus.

"By identifying the relations that are causally relevant and which
allow the mapping of two disparate concepts, the addresse finds a solution
for the "meaning problem" created by the metaphor, in a hyperbolic
manifestation of conversational reasoning strategies.

"Both analogical reasoning and the interpretative hypothesis through
which the addressee reconstitutes the intended assumption can comprised all
inferential processes that expand knowledge in the face of uncertainty.
Metaphoric projection takes place from focus to frame. This irreversibility
of metaphor is the main ground for its heuristic and cognitive potential,
since we tend to model less known concepts upon a well described domain of
our experience, bringing about a conceptual innovation from available
information.

"The addressee selects and retrieves a set of stored general
assumptions about the world which will feed the inferential calculation.
Contextual effects result from the combination of contextual assumptions
with the new information, and the metaphoric projection constitutes the
application of the system of associated commonplaces from focus to frame.
The retrieval of contextual assumptions, as the identification of the
relevant commonplaces of the source, is the essential inferential procedure
through which the system takes advantage of its stored information, whose
relevance relies on its potential multiplicative effect."

I must leave the discussion of the relevance of eschatology to general
pataphysical science for our next meeting (he said with a grin).