Bootstrap

by J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Club.

JONES HAS BEEN MENTIONING metalogic often in this club, the Carnap corner, and the City of Eternal Truth, so I thought I'd drop the boostrap.

On p. 93 of his "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions of Paul Grice" by Paul Grice, now repr. in PGRICE, ed.Grandy/Warner, Clarendon, he is considering considering a 'fine distinction' concerning levels of conceptual priority (which I have discussed elsewhere in this club). He adds:

"It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine

distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed

in the business of pulling ourselves up by our

own bootstraps."

----- INTERLUDE: EXCURSUS:

"In this connection it will be

relevant for me to say that I once invented

(though I did not establish its validity) a

principle which I labelled as Boostrap."


----- A bit like Stephen Wright: "I'm writing a book. I have the page numbers done". Only that we love Grice -- and Wright. Note the success in having his reader engaged with him in Philosophy as a task which should be fun: name a principle whose validity you have not establish. Name it well -- forget about establishing its validity. This is a bit like Russell copying 35 pages of Principia Mathematica to Carnap, "I omit the proofs and lemmas, hoping that you can figure them out by your own lights", or words. Grice continues:


"The principle laid down that:

when one is introducing

the primitive concepts of a theory [Th] formulated

in an object-language [such as his System Q, or our system G_HP, or System C_R for a Carnapian],

one has freedom to use

any battery of concepts expressible in the

meta-language,"


--- and here comes the ceteris paribus, or Hart-type clause:

"subject to the condition that

counterparts of such concepts are

subsequently definable

or [to be less stringent]

otherwise

derivable
in the object-language."

The moral:

"So," -- the point of such manoevure being, that,

"the more economically

one introduces the primitive object-language concepts,

the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow".

But which is back to S. Wright: Leave for tomorrow what you don't feel like doing today", no?