Kant Be That Kantian! (Griceian reflections on a Grecian Theme)

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

WELL, PRETTY PRETENTIOUS LABEL FOR something very simple! I have been discussing, elsewhere, notably with Donal McEvoy about

"inform"

and

"misinform"

and Grice on:

"false information is no information" (WoW, Strand 6), and I think Grice is right and McEvoy thinks Grice is wrong.

For Kant, indeed,

"do not lie"

is a universal prohibition.

This has NOTHING to do with what we were discussing with McEvoy, but I thought of bringing to the club this idea by Grice, circulated in his Kant Lecture (No. 4) that nobody can take Kant seriously about the universal prohibition of lying!

-------

McEvoy has sort of granted that the FIRST "sense" or "use" of ´inform´ is such that

(i) "A informed that p"

entails that the utterer of (i) holds p true.

Indeed, Floridi, in the Stanford Encycl. entry for ´info´ says as much crediting me! (and Grice, of course!).

Now, the prohibition of lying for Kant is so deontological it hurts. No wonder Grice preferred to ´respect´ Kantotle or Ariskant, over either Aristotle or Kant proper.

--------- For Aristotle, it´s all a matter of a ´telos´: there are white lies, which are justified if the ulimate end is a good one. I don´t know what the Greek for ´white lie´ is but if they used it, Cicero should have translated it as "albus", which gives us albino.

--------- The shades of truthfulness, trustworthiness, the very truth, and so forth, are such complicated matters, that one is reminded of the recent film with Meryll Streep, "It´s complicated".