Was Flew An Anarchist?

---- Yes, as was Humpty Dumpty.

Great quote I quote in my "Humpty Dumpty" paper I presented to the Lewis Carroll Society of Luton, Beds., and which got published in the "Jabberwocky":

Flew writes in "Philosophy and Language", which he published in the Scots-based, Philosophical Quarterly for 1956 and later had the cheek to reprint as the 'Introduction', 'Philosophy and Language', in his own edited "Essays in conceptual analysis", published for Macmillan, London, in 1956, pp. 1-20 -- The reference is to p. 7 of the reprint --:

---- "The sounds we use as words are all,
---- intrinsically and prior to the emergence
---- of any linguistic conventions about them,
---- almost equally suitably to do any linguistic
---- job whatever. Whereas a knife, say, could
---- not be used, or even misused, as a
---- tent, "glory" might [but then
---- might have not. JLS] have been given
---- the use we have in fact given to "a nice
---- knockdown argument"".

I argue that if that were the case, when we stand up to sing:

"Send her victorious, happy and glorious"

what we WOULD mean be:

"send her a nice knock-down argumentative"

which is absurd. While Flew plays with Humpty Dumpty as an anarchist, what HE (Flew) should have done, is stayed closer to Grice and learn more from him. Instead, he went to Keele, if you can believe that.