The Type of Implicature that Enfant Terrible Freddie Ayer Most Feared

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

CHAPMAN HAS WRITTEN 4 books, and will write more. She is interested in 'verificationism', etc. -- the Vienna Circle, etc.

To 'verify' is the opposite of 'to falsify'.

Roger Bishop Jones also shares an interest with Chapman on this. In Jones's case, it's due to his serious interest in the history of the Philosophy in that City of Waltzes: Vienna.

"To verify" and 'to falsify'.

Carnap was NOT in Vienna when Quine went to Vienna to see Carnap. (This is an autological paradox of topological displacement. He was in Prague).

Ayer, who was proving 'heavy' in Oxford, was sent by Ryle to Vienna too. Ayer and Quine met, and they tried, with the little German they knew ("They speak with an Austrian thick accent in Austria"), to make sense of 'verification' and 'confirmation'.

Consider Grice:

---- He was NEVER a 'verificationist', but he played with it. As Chapman notes, as she considers a 'typescript' with the Harborne address: Grice's "main proposal draws on VERIFICATIONIST assumptions."

The problem with Grice at this point was however 'status'. He was a "Scholarship Boy" from the Midlands at what is Oxford's BEST college by FAR: "Corpus Christi". Grice KNEW that, as he later put it, he came or was bred in 'the wrong side of the tracks' to socialise with the richer (stinking, filthy rich) Hart, Berlin, and Ayer -- at All Souls, where it was "Verification" with a big "V".

-----

This was in 1937. Some years later, in 1987, Grice can counterattack. He writes of

'p'.

Why would someone say,

"It seems to me as though that pillar box seems, seemingly, red, to me."

The strength of that 'statement' is so null that Bar-Hillel doubted it was a 'statement' at all (it does not concern 'objects' but 'images', shall we say: phenomenalist, not physicalist language -- it's not about things that 'threaten' us, but how things appear to us -- it's a Bradleian vacuity.

Grice analyses it. He is careful in his phrasing and speaks of

"a conscientious reluctance
to see one's statement fALSIFIED
or UNCONFIRMED."

----- (WoW: 367): one of the four items that make up for 'dictiveness'.

I.e.

"a distaste for having
one's already issued
statements discredited."

---

Anyone familiar with the sport of professional dons in Oxford as from G. A. Paul's early irreverent, "Is there a problem about sense data?" (Aristotelian Society, 1938) knows what Grice is thinking of.

Hence the guardedness:

"It seems to me that the red pillar box is red."

Anything stronger is bound to be discredited -- refuted, falsified, disconfirmed -- by --- Popper!