The Grice Club

Welcome

The Grice Club

The club for all those whose members have no (other) club.

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Diagram of The Approach to The City

Posted by RBJ for the Grice Club.

Here is the "picture" which JLS referred to:
I will follow up with some narrative on The City of Eternal Truth blog.

RBJ
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Luigi SperanzaMay 2, 2010 at 11:43 PM

    It is an excellent diagramme.

    Note the chronological development. As Jones notes, it all started (sadly, as I have to say, since I'm such an Oxonian at heart) at the other place, with G. E. Moore and B. A. Russell. A good source for this for me has been Ayer's book, "Moore and Russell: the analytical heritage" (Macmillan).

    This is then followed by whom Russell referred to as "the Austrian engineer": Ludwig "Witters" as J. L. Austin would call him ("Some like Witters, but Moore's still MY man"). As Jones notes, there are at least TWO Witters: the early and the later (never late). The middle Witters we can skip.

    --- As Jones then notes, the connection is between the early Witters (of the Tractatus, that is) and both Carnap and Ayer. Ayer having sent to Vienna by his once tutor in Oxford: Gilbert Ryle.

    ---- The diagram is precise in the timeline. At the SAME time, there's the influence of the later Wittgenstein on Austin and Grice.

    For the record, suffice that Grice does quote directly from "Philosophical Investigations" in WoW:i. The Prolegomena that he waited so long to publish. Because it IS a provocative piece. It was via an Oxonian connection. G. E. M. Anscombe, after all, had translated the Philosophical Investigations and published them back in Oxford where she was teaching (although never allowed in the Saturday mornings -- perhaps she had other things to do, though).

    Then we have indeed the later Carnap, and the still later Grice. Carnap died in Sept. 1970 -- in Santa Monica. -- Grice will survive him for some 18 years, but then he was younger.

    "The city of eternal truth" is the name Grice uses for the destination of his pilgrimage. Jones and I are discussing the monsters (or betes noires, or daemons) he meets on the way, and how some of them one tends to identify with some major trends in 20th-century philosophy.

    Again, thanks to R. B. Jones for designing the diagramme and sharing it with both the Eternal Truth blog and this one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roger Bishop JonesMay 3, 2010 at 11:47 AM

    Thank you, JL, for that nice account of the longitudinal aspects of the diagram.

    Here's a rather rambling story about the lattitudinal aspects.

    The lattitudes may be thought of a little like the very imperfect left/right characterisations of political parties, but in this case of philosophical systems or postures.

    On the left we have radical positivism (often said to be an \emph{anti-philosophical} philosophy) and the Tractatus (close enough to be blamed, perhaps unfairly, for logical positivism), on the right Wittgenstein's radical rejection of his Tractatus characterised not only by a broader conception of language and a complete rejection of much of what is found on the left, but also by a radical anti-philosophical stance which spawns a new kind of philosophy, ordinary language philosophy.

    The starkest contrast may be seen in attitude towards the use of formal logical systems.
    On the extreme left we have the evagelists for whom science, mathematics and philosophy should all be formalised.
    On the right we have those for whom "ordinary language" suffices, and who can conceive of no benefit from the adoption of formal notations.

    The two extremes are conceived as dogmatic overstatements of ideas not entirely without merit.
    The center ground is moderate in being stripped of such false idols (replacing them with the true faith of The City of Eternal Truth).

    The lines of development of the philosophies of Carnap and Grice proceed from the radical to the moderate.
    More importantly (for who is to say what is moderate), they proceed by the excision of dogmas of various kinds.
    Thus we find in the later Carnap a very narrow characterisation of deprecated metaphysics, and a liberal pragmatic attitude towards ontological and conceptual gambits which might otherwise have been taken as metaphysical nonsense.

    Grice can also be seen as a moderating influence.
    He draws from both sides of the great divide, combining selective interest in, and use of, formal logics with a predominantly informal interest in ordinary language and its dynamics.
    His theories of implicature moderate some of the dogmatic excess, his introduction of ``speakers meaning'' moderates the terminological dogmatism of interpreting philosophy in terms other than those intended, his defence of a dogma and his work on meaning support a distinction and a preoccupation perhaps even more vital to our left than our right wing against an attack which is rooted in dogmatic scepticism about meaning.

    Our picture shows both Carnap and Grice as becoming more moderate as they matured, and extrapolates that process to a communion in The City of Eternal Truth.
    We aim to show how this process can be accomplished by a shedding of dogma on both sides, positive and negative dogmas, doctrinal, methodological and terminological dogmas.
    In particular, we read Grice's campaign against the demons as an extirpation of dogma, which unwittingly appears as negative dogmas when the B\^ete's are shown to be capable of moderation themselves (as we find them in the pluralistic Carnap), as minimalisations are seen to be potentially enabling rather than restraining, and as we admit the possibility of a genial pragmatic pluralistic peicemeal adoption of minimalisms.

    RBJ

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)