Where To Construct

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Grice, "Conception of Value", p. 100 -- actually repr. from "Reply to Richards":

"Are we, if we lend
a sympathetic ear to
constructivism, to think of
the metaphysical world as
divided into a constructed and
a primitive, original,
UNCONSTRUCTED section?"

---

"common objects like tables and chairs", Grice goes on,
are "certainly" NOT unconstructed.

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But what about "stuffs" as he has it like "rocks" or "hydrogen, or bits thereof"?

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"It seems to me to be quite on the cards
that metaphysical theory, at least when it
is formally set out, might consist of a
package of what I will call ontological
schemes"

--- cfr. Carnap's linguistic frameworks (and Davidson's conceptual frameworks via Quine). -- Grice goes on:

"in which categories of entities
are constructively ordered, that all
or most of the same categories may appear
within two different schemes with
different ordering,"

Cfr. 'relativism' for Davidson, and tolerance for Carnap.

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And Grice on prior uses of 'conceptually prior' (the legal prior to the moral? What type of priority? What type of conceptual priority?).

Grice goes on:

"what is primitive in one scheme being
non-primitive in the other and that this
might occur whether the ordering relations
employed in the construction of the two
schemes were the same or different"

-- cfr. his argument against type-type identity psychophysical theses in "Method in philosophical psychology", repr. in the same volume.

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Grice goes on:

"We would then have no role for a
notion of absolute primitiveness. All we
would use would be the relative notion of
primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme."

--- It is good to see that he sees 'tables' as certainly NOT primitive, since he had referred to Eddington's table as being a bad table. But the good table of good English fares no better!

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Grice goes on:

"There might indeed be room for a
concept of authentic or maximal
reality, but the application of
this concept would be divorced from
any concept of primitiveness,
relative or absolute, and would
be governed by the availability of
an argument, no doubt transcendental"

---- [cfr. 'metaphysical']

"in character, showing that a given
category is mandatory, that a place
must be found for it in ANY admissible
ontological scheme."