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KRAMER WRITES in "How palaeo Griceian can you be?", this blog: "[H]ow can [Speranza] say [Butler] [is] a well-known lesbian if [Speranza] [does NOT] allow folks to say that they [do] know she [is] a lesbian?"
This seems to Kramer to incur in some unwanted cancellation: "[Butler is a] well-known lesbian, but I do not know that she is a lesbian."
"Does that make Butler a [R]ussellian [L]esbian?"
It would, but I don't think she wears a wig. Recall that for Russell, there are three positions:
Russellians -- like indeed Grice:
----"The king of France is bald" FALSE
----"The king of France is not bald" TRUE.
Other: -- like Strawson
---- "The king of France is bald" -- FALSE.
---- "The king of France is not bald" INDETERMINATE.
(Grice had caveats with Strawson here: "He fails to distinguish why he would feel adamant to say that the King of France is not bald if he doesn't exist, but why he would NOT feel adamant to say that the King of France is bald under the same circumstances, that is, in circumstances where "King of France" is a vacuous name -- Grice, "Vacuous Names"") (Strawson read "Vacuous Names" and changed his mind: "I owe to my teacher H. P. Grice the observation that indeed, if the King of France does not exist, it is stupid to say that he is bald, and not, as I first thought, true.").
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But Russell has a third party in the picture. "The Hegelians", he write.
"The Hegelians, who like a synthesis, will perhaps not be happy with our dichotomy of the scenarios where the 'king of France' is held to be a singular term, of definite description, strictly, where the attribute 'bald' applies unambiguously."
"What if he wears a wig?"
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Just to stick my two cents in, I think
ReplyDeleteThe king of France is bald
is not true. I don't believe its falsity can be determined, as there is no king of France. All I know (if I know there is no king of France) is that no statment about the king of France (other than one asserting or assuming that there is none) can be true.
So the question is in what language "false" is being applied. I think that I've got the state of affairs right in Natural English. But I've only been studying Logiclandian for a short while, so I'm not sure how things play out there.
Yes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure either. Because I never spoke Natural English. But you will concede that both Grice and Strawson spoke Natural English. Grice was Strawson's senior -- Grice b. 1913, Strawson, b. 1919. Both dead now:
But Grice says that Strawson's English is not as natural as his (I expanded on this in my "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul" which was rejected -- by the Bank of England -- on the basis that I was calling Grice a criminal).
Grice writes:
"As far as I could see, in the original version of Strawson's true-gap theory, he did not [as he SHOULD HAVE] recognised any particular asymmetry, as regards the presupposition that there is a king of France, between the two sentences, 'The king of France is bald' and 'The king of France is not bald'. But it DOES SEEM (to me, that is) to be plausible to suppose that there IS such an asymmetry."
When you are with someone who cannot recognise an asymmetry -- what I call a blatant asymmetry like that...
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Recall that Grice had a deep sensitivity of the usage of English. Unlike Strawson. They belonged to the same group (what Grice called the "play group" -- I was recently advertising that club in CHORA -- a philosophy list owned by S. Clark -- and someone objected, "while the playgroup plays we are heading for global warming").
But Grice had had a better education. Grice knew Latin and Greek, and had gone to Clifton. Strawson's Latin (if he had any) left a lot to be desired (not by Grice, who was very relunctant as to display his desires overtly).
So I suppose that "The King of France is NOT bald" -- we are only concerned with the negation, which GETS expressed, follows the Gricean pattern.
The implicatures of "The king of France is bald" uttererd when there is no King of France are secondary, in that one really has to be an idiot to say that. But Grice's point is that one can VERY WELL (and not very bad, as Strawson suggests, or very unwell, I don't know) say "The king of France is not bald, because there is no King of France" ("One could just as well say, "Because France is a Republic," but that would trade on my assumption that this person I'm talking to knows the meaning of 'republic' and you never know these days", etc.).
Etc.