Large comment on Genesis and Revelations

Speranza wrote:

.

> 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'.

We would be working with "Polar Coordinates" if we ventured so far as to attach a number to the degree (of lat or long).

> We could expand slightly on ONE minimalism for each point

> in the diagramme.

You are fond of one-one relationships.

I think we should find the important ones, however many.

Important for the story, and that really means (since we are looking for communion) the ones which get in the way.

But I persist in suggesting that the dominant evil's are the dogmas. If we define dogma in the right way, then dogmas are always wrong so we can excise them all, but minimalisms are not always bad, we have to be selective in our disposal of minimalisms, otherwise we lose useful things like set theory, possibly even the whole of science, since science looks for simplest theories and is therefore in that sense inherently minimalistic.

If we say dogma is "belief beyond reason" meaning a belief held against the evidence, or with greater strength than the evidence warrants, or perhaps a (seriously) unwarranted belief, then we have a very general kind of thing which both Carnap and Grice would be prepared to do without, and which encompasses all the minimalisms insofar as they are dogmatic (and we can discuss which on either side are or are not), and by the progressive elimination of dogma we can hope to progress toward a common conception of The City.

> 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.

I think that the principle dogma of the left concerns the scope of philosophy, as concerned exclusively with matters potentially in the scope of formal logic.

In the early Carnap this looks like a dogmatic minimalism, in the later Carnap we get a withdrawal from prescribing the boundaries of philosophy, but we still have a prejudicial attitude towards all that falls outside the analytic/synthetic classification as not just lacking empirical content but even lacking a truth value.

My guess is that Carnap just doesn't see a middle ground here, and that he would soften if it were pointed out to him.

> 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.

My inclination, having shown a picture which begins with R.M and passes through Witt., is to back off any exegesis at this stage.

Here Ayer and Austin fulfill a role, because they provide clearer pictures of a City-like ideal which we can use as our starting points for the moderating evolution in the thought of Carnap and Grice, en-route to our "City of Eternal Truth".

We could then begin with an account of the nature of the conception of the ideal in Ayer's "Language Truth and Logic" and in Austin (S&S, DTWW, A plea for excuses). Consider where the crucial dogmas are (minimal or not) which could not be swallowed by the other side. Then see how may of these were in fact moderated by Carnap and Grice.

This gives us a couple of hopefully converging lines of development, which we could extrapolate to a common point in the City.

> 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?

Though the principle of tolerance is in LSL and seems to have roots in his student days. As you can see in the extract from the Bio in our conversation draft, it is remarkable how many of the key views which characterise Carnap's mature philosophy have precursors in his pre-Vienna youth.

> 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.

This is OK, intolerance of intolerance, we just need him to look closer at the "minimalisations" as they appear in Carnap and accept that they are mostly not intolerant dogmas in his hands.

Thinking dogma instead of intolerance, if we use the definition I gave above, "belief beyond reason" (which, incidentally, encompasses religious dogmas nicely).

then it seems reasonable to dispose of them, at least in analytic philosophy if not in religion. But this in itself is not an inconsistency, for surely abstaining from a dogma thus defined can't be unreasonable, and therefore won't be dogmatic (so long as the thing abstained from IS a dogma).

Epistemic retreat woud fit into my "City" if not be the whole thing, but I don't know whether we could plausibly get Carnap and Grice there.

RBJ