By Roger Bishop Jones, for The Grice Club
Grice talks of minimalisms.
I don't know whether he coined the term (the blogger spell checker knows the word), but it has lead me to talk, in our Carnap/Grice conversation, of ``minimalisation'', and my emacs spell checker, not knowing this word, has suggested (inter alia) minimisation (neither of which is good for blogger, though the latter only because like a good american blogger would like a z instead of the s).
I don't much care for the adoption of lengthy neologisms where we already have a perfectly good word to hand, but I'm not at all sure that the adoption of minimalisms is adequately described as minimisation. Minimisation, for example, in ontology, sounds rather like Occam's razor, having no more than necessary, whereas minimalisation sounds rather more like nominalism (having very little whether or not that is sufficient or convenient).
Is there anything to be said about how Grice would advise me on this topic?
RBJ
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Good points. Will do some search on this. Yes, there's something odd sounding about Grice's Minimalism. As I recall, he sees the twelve betes noires as -isms, rightly, and there's something to be said about -isms in general. I have been told for example (by Donal McEvoy) that Popper has been criticised for his ism-ism, or something.
ReplyDeleteSo, out of the 12 forms of -isms, which we have listed elsewhere, Grice decides to offer an argument that will embrace what, if I recall alright, calls his 'twelve-fold antipathy' -- hence "Miminalism".
As I recall, the expresses this argument in terms of 'philosophical explanation'. The twelve -isms that he has selected share a feature regarding philosophical explanation. It is here where Grice introduces the metaphor (rather brusque, if you ask me) of the Philosophical Trades Commission. Minimalism then would be against liberal freemarket commerce. It would 'protect' (as per Protectionism) and regulate, over-regulate. E.g. Nominalism is Minimalism in that it disallows explanations in terms of abstract entities. But Grice has Kneale pointing out that abstract entities may be needed to justify 'secondary induction', and so on.
Minimisation is not bad either.
Kasher, plus, to confuse things further, has focused on maxi-min, and so there's this idea that 'minimalisation' has to with the constraints on 'informativeness' of messages --
do not say more (max) nor less (min) than is required.
I further think that Levinson has written on 'minimalisation', too, with still a different 'sense' in mind -- but should check this.
Levinson uses "Minimization and conversational inference", so for just that reason we should perhaps stick with "minimalism" instead. I'm not sure what Levinson means. I think it refers to the minimum number of conversational rules or strategies -- or maxims. Odd that a maxim, being so brief, should be called 'maxim', too. But I've been there.
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