Thanks JL, for you comments on my latitudinal thing.
However, on reflection I concluded that the lower parts of the diagram, the Wittgensteinian bits, when interpreted as I suggested, were just too far out of line with reality, so I rehashed the diagram.The problem is that if you interpret the extremes as formal and natural as I suggested, then my positioning of Wittgenstein at the extremes is quite wrong.
Though Wittgenstein might have given encouragement (perhaps unwittingly) to both extremes, he was throughout too enigmatic to actually occupy one.
The diagram is particularly out in placing the Tractatus on the left extreme, for which we would have to follow Russell's misconception of the Tractatus as speaking of an idealised language.
Hence the rehash showing Wittgenstein enigmatically connected with the extremes.
Our joint project, "the conversation", is undertaken on the three blogs, and is written up as it goes in the PDF. The project is concerned with the upper part of the diagram, the prototypes, their evolution, and the supposed concensus which results. The two historical parts on left and right to be discussed at Carnap Corner and The Grice Club respectively, the speculative projections and the ultimate synthesis (dotted arrows) to be discussed at The City of Eternal Truth blog, and the whole to be sewn together in the PDF and ultimately made available as a short paperpack.
So goes our fantasy.
RBJ
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Nah, no fantasy, or phantasy, as I prefer. It is ALREADY made available as a neat short paperpack. Surely someone can print it, bind it, and call it ´a neat short paperback´. Plus, availABLE has a ring of possibility to it that should not be descarded. Cfr. "to no avail".
ReplyDelete---- Yes, I like your Diagram. You are right about adding the prototypes. These are the "ideal types" alla Max Weber. "Typus idealis", he wrote. What a good thing they are. And as you note, they already embody TWO alternate conceptions of the City of Eternal Truth.
You are right that possibly Wittenstein, unwittingly or not, would not do this or that. The idea that the Tractatus, or Logische-Philosophische Abhandhlung, if you must, is an ideal language will clash with anyone who´s actually seen the manuscripts. I never saw anything LESS ideal!
----
So, this Club is for the promotion of the development of Grice out of Austin. I like that. And how he softens the Austinian position. I like that.
The name for the prototype will thus be, I suppose, Ordinary-Languge Philosophy (the full Austinian code) as presented in all we have about Austin: his three books -- all posthumous, as that should please Grice: Sense and Sensibilia, Philosophical Papers (with essays ranging form the late 1930s to 1960) and his "Words and deeds" lectures at Oxford, published by Urmson as "How to do things with words". The fact that there are so many connection of these people -- Austin, Urmson, and Warnock, who edited Sense and Sensibilia for publication -- and Grice makes the task less arduous.
Plus, an examination of the theories Austin criticised most (Strawson on truth, for example) will also appeal the Griceian.
The discussion of Austin in the "Prolegomena" for which Jones has written extensively on his pages, is very helpful. Grice is notably concerned with "A plea for excuses" -- "no aberration without modification". In my recent overview of Grice on Davidson (in "Actions and Events", by Grice, PPQ, vol. 67) one sees the trend. Grice does think that linguistic botany has to weed off the ground. And Austin, in Grice´s view, just plainly ignored (most of the time) the crucial distintion, in Austin´s view, between implication and implicature. I.e. between something like entailment, which is semantic, and part of what we mean by the expression, and the implicature, which is pragmatic, not logical, and part of what we mean by UTTERING the expression.
Hence, there is a lot of ambiguity in that "no modification without aberration" slogan. Travis will go on to say -- in his "Annals of Analysis" -- review of Grice, WoW -- that Grice just "killed" Ordinary Language Philosophy. So we may have to consider that bit, too, however hyperbolic. Etc.