From Genesis to Revelations

This below is meant as comment to R. B. Jones's comment in the "Diagramme" thread. The system disallowed me to post it there.

--

What a virtuous account of Lat.!

Grice was Royal Navy, and I tend to think that his idea that there is a

Long./Lat.

coordinate for everything is THAT, rather the Cartesian idea of the 'Cartesian coordinates'.

It's wonderful to have that account in such 'minimal' terms of the latitudinal unity, as it involves, as you note, concepts.

"Dogma" seems indeed the right concept to focus, and the extra emphasis on Minimalism as the dogma par excellence also fares very well with Grice, and, we trust, Carnap.

I like your metaphorising with the communion, the false idols, the truth faith, and the approach to the City. Eschatology at its best, or as Grice would say, "from Genesis to Revelations"!

----

You are exactly right about the FL vs. NL debate (formal language vs. natural language) and the idea of the left and the right -- indeed it is political doctrinaire we are speaking here.

We could expand slightly on ONE minimalism for each point in the diagramme.

What was minimalist about Moore and Russell. Or Russell and Moore. If one skims through Grice, WoW, one finds a more profusive use of Moore, as seen via N. Malcolm (indeed, of course, a follower of the later Wittgenstein). The 'minimalism' of this G. E. Moore was indeed the rejection of "philosopher's paradoxes" as Grice calls him. The 'minimalism' of Russell we can think of as his Logicism.

The minimalisms of both Wittgensteins: the early and the later, seem easy enough to locate. The minimalism of the Tractatus seems obvious: no account of 'value', for example. The pictures ('pictorial' meanings) are GIVEN to us, rather than being postulated by us. The 'minimalism' of "Philosophical Investigations" seems to spring from this dogmatic attitude that the "form of life" that the "language game" that 'formal language' yields is incomplete. To say that amounts to thinking that the propounder of a formal language is INTENDING it to 'cope' with every phenomena on earth, which is hardly the point.

When we come to the minimalisms of the early Carnap and the early Grice, the lists are long and juicy. E.g. Positivism versus anti-Positivism, for example. The fact of having J. L. Austin as companion to the early Grice makes things very easy to digest and conceptualise. It is FASCINATING that the later Grice spends most of his time reminiscing the 'good old days' with Austin. The detachment that the passing of time had allowed offers a unique view of what he even KNEW the dogmas were. For example, he is always happy to add that he never 'quite' subscribed to the full Austinian code. But just because he sees what the code is so EASILY 'implicates' that he sees that as some sort of 'regret'. And of course, who is to say if he subscribed or not? For Gustav Bergmann he subscribed alright! They were all "English Futilitarians"!

So, it is with the Later Carnap and the Later Grice that we for the first time reach this anti-dogmatic inspiration (of the Holy Ghost, as it were). In Carnap it started quite early in his career. In fact, while most people citing Carnap seemed to have preferred his 'constructivist' side -- perhaps because they were constructivist themselves -- Carnap was clear from an early stage (within his 'late' phase, though), that pluralism was the way out of a dogma. For what can be less dogmatic than tolerance -- in religion, in politics, and in philosophy?

As for the anti-dogmatic Grice, as Jones has noted elsewhere, the issue is trickier, and it may well be that the City of Eternal Truth belongs more to Carnap than to Grice. Grice grew an intolerance for intolerance. So it is quite a subtle piece of work to find his anti-dogmatic defense of the dogma. It is enough at this point to want to introduce R. E. Grandy's rather frivolous (but charming) talk of the UNDER-dogmas at this stage (which Grice jocularly refers to in WoW:"Meaning Revisited".

A dogma is a philosophical thing. It was perhaps Sextus Empiricus who first discoursed on them from a sound philosphical or metaphilosophical perspective. His Loeb-Library edition of his Sketches is a pleasure to read. For Sextus, the dogmatic attains meaning by his contrast with the 'sceptic' -- his distinction between a full sceptic (Phyrric) and a probability-based Carneadean attitude is a thing to consider. And then there's the idea of the 'retreat': there is, to echo Jones, not just 'epistemic' retreat, but axiological retreat. A 'retreat' is the adoption of a safer position to avoid a dogmatic challenge, or challenge qua dogmatic. The philosopher, on recognising a dogma in his own system, retreats to a position where he attains this 'ataraxia' which may well be what he grasps in full (if ataraxia is a thing one can grasp) only when passing the pearly gates of that City of Eternal Truth!