By Roger Bishop Jones, for The Grice Club
Thanks JL for your copious responses to my suspicions about these words which it seems are unfounded.
My conclusion is that Platonic is an adjective attributing something to Plato and Platonistic to the followers of Plato.
Minimalism is a technical term probably used differently by different authors, but not necessarily (and probably not often) meaning minimism.
In the wake of this is a small re-interpretation of the issue between Grice and Carnap on the Betes Noires.
I had previously thought to reconcile the two by allowing that Carnap is some kind of minimalist but suggesting that Grice. in his heart, is only opposed to something I called `dogmatic minimalism' of which I absolved Carnap.
Now that I see minimalism as a technical term, potentially distinct from minimisms, I could talk about the difference by having it that Grice in talking about minimalisms means (as his writings suggest) that a minimalist is not only one who strives (at times) to manage with little, but who aims to deprive others of their more commodious preferences.
Of this latter I will hold Carnap to be either innocent, or a minor offender (in his maturity), and admit that he still seeks utility in various minimisations for pragmatic gain.
RBJ
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Good. It was good of Grice to FIND 'Minimalism'. He is so into the betes noires, the twelve of them, that it would have been boring of him to have to fight with each separately. In his typical vein, he rather generalised what those twelve -isms had in common, and found it: they were all offsprings of "Minimalism". I'm happy Carnap finds a place for "Minimalism". Surely philosophy is often about -isms. It's Grice in his role of 'pilgrim in progress' and in search of the city of eternal truth only, that he finds those -isms (and Minimalism at large) unfriendly. But I agree with Jones's description of the minimalist creed as one "who aims to deprive others of their more commodious preferences" --. But surely that's not just out of some evil nature in the minimalist, but to his serious belief or conviction that what the alleged commodious preferences are yielding can be yielded by a more parsimonious methodology. In any case, Grice's and Carnap's concerns about this show how a sound reflection on methodology was so central to their enterprises.
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