The Izz and the Hazz Not

Speranza

First Google page for

"Aristotle being semantic Owen":

Aristotle: The Metaphysics. Semantics in Aristotle's strategy of ... -
Lambertus Marie de Rijk - 2002 - Philosophy
24
"The purport of the semantic diagram.
In the last few decades, the purport of the ... In his short study on 'Inherence', GEL Owen rejects the common view, ..."

Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle -
Christopher Shields - 2002 - Philosophy -

If there is a core sense of being upon which all non-core senses depend, then. ... But what will be the form of dependency Aristotle seeks? ...

"Owen's talk of "sense" here
commits him to a
SEMANTIC interpretation, as does his habitual ..."


On ideas: Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of forms
Gail Fine - 1995 - History -

He also cites Aristotelian passages that contrast being F haplos or akribos with ... or qualifications have anything to do with semantic incompleteness. ... But as Owen himself notes, for Aristotle, "to be" is always to be something or ...


Aristotle on false reasoning: language and the world in the ...

Scott Gregory Schreiber - 2003 - Mathematics -

"One attractive proposal is that homonymy is a semantic ambiguity, while amphiboly ... Owen and Hintikka have prudently avoided describing Aristotle's distinction ... Hintikka and Owen note these latter passages but dismiss them as being ..."


Individuals, essence, and identity: themes of analytic metaphysics -

Andrea Bottani, Massimiliano Carrara, Pierdaniele Giaretta - 2002 - Philosophy -

According to Owen,
Aristotle nowhere
distinguishes these
two _uses_ of the
verb. ... that
this semantic multiplicity
concerns the copulative use of being, ...

----

Aristotle Bibliographyfaculty.washington.edu/smcohen/.../433bibl.htm

1] 88-112. Wheeler, M. “Semantics in Aristotle's Organon. ...
Rohr, M.D. “Aristotle on the Transitivity of Being Said Of.” JHP 16 (1978) 379-385. Weidemann, H. .....
Owen, G.E.L. “Logic and Metaphysics in some Earlier Works of Aristotle.” [Düring ...

Aristotle's Categories (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-categories/Similares

7 Sep 2007 –

In the Pre-Predicamenta, Aristotle discusses a number of semantic relations ....

Instead, Owen argues, a being that is not said-of but present-in ...


Selected Bibliography on the Meanings of Being in Aristotlewww.ontology.co/.../being-qua-b...

An annotated bibliography on Aristotle's conception of Metaphysics as Being qua Being and his Ancient and Modern ... Owen on the development of Aristotle's metaphysics. ... In the first volume Aristotle's semantics is culled from the Organon . ...
[PDF]

Aristotle On The Separation Of Species-Formwww2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/.../fraser4.p...

structure of beings; it is a semantic inquiry that aims at the clarification of the ... Owen and During (Goteborg, 1960)]; see also "The Platonism of Aristotle", ...

----

Escaping the Snares of Ontology -- via Pragmatics

Speranza

Abstract of essay by J. Cooper, online -- in "Neoscholasticism", vol. 62

In a very influential article ("Aristotle on the snares of ontology", in "New essays on Plato and Aristotle", 1965), [Oxford philsosopher] G. E. L Owen has argued that there are at least three distinct "uses" [never 'meanings' or 'senses'] of existence present in Aristotle's texts.

Owen also claimed that Aristotle failed to recognize these.

-- trust Grice to come to rally to the defense of the underdog(ma).

"Against Owen, Cooper argues that there are alternative interpretations of Aristotle's texts on existence which are as equally plausible as those interpretations of these texts offered by Owen."

On top of that, Grice argued that, if you are unhappy with Aristotle on 'being' start using 'izz' -- especially as you should distinguish it from 'hazz' --.

"In particular it is argued that Owen fails to take as seriously as he should the existential status of universals and the role of real causality, especially formal causality in Aristotle's account of existence."

Cooper's interpretation leads him to conclude that "although Aristotle may be caught in snares, he is not caught in the snares of ontology laid by Owen."

-- on top of that, Grice said:

"Do not multiply SNARES beyond necessity".

I.e. do not multiply alleged senses or uses of 'being' beyond necessity.

And if you DO need to multiply, use different words: e.g. restrict essential existence to 'izz' -- 'izz or izz not -- that is the question'. And use 'hazz' for accidental (i.e. otiose) stuff.

Grice and Owen on the Snares of Ontology, Pragmatically Solved

Speranza

From wiki, below.


Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen ([born WHERE in Wales?] 18 May 1922 - 10 July 1982) was a Welsh philosopher, concerned with the history of Ancient Greek philosophy.

From 1973 until his death he was the fourth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

"An undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford,"

-- like Grice -- Grice was older, b. 1913.

"where after research at Durham he taught, he proceeded in 1966 to Harvard University, where his many distinguished students included Julia Annas, Gail Fine, Wilbur Knorr, Martha Nussbaum, Donald J. Zeyl, Terence Irwin and Nicholas P. White."

"He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1969." (Grice in 1966).

"He is known particularly for his ideas on the development of Aristotle."

"He has been classed with J. L. Ackrill and Gregory Vlastos as influential in creating interest in the field, in the Anglo-American context.[2]"

Actually, Ackrill was Grice's student (official tutee, and Ackrill does credit Grice (and Austin) in the Foreword to his relevant translations. Grice found that to translate Aristotle from Greek to English was BAD -- for Aristotle, and for English people. At Clifton, he had learned Greek so well that when he got his first in Lit. Hum. at Oxford he felt there was no need to render Aristotle in English. Hence his problems with izzing and hazzing -- which comes up when you want to _explain_ Aristotle's 'idiosyncratic' considerations in the lingo of the people -- ta legomena). (Or something).

References

Malcolm Schofield, Martha Craven Nussbaum (editors) (1982), Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen

Notes

1.^ Charlotte Witt, The Evolution of Developmental Interpretations, p. 74, in William Robert Wians (editor), Aristotle's Philosophical Development: Problems and Prospects (1996).

2.^ Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.4.01

[edit] External linksBiography
British Academy Fellowship entry
Academic offices
Preceded by
William Keith Chambers Guthrie Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy Cambridge University
1973 - 1982 Succeeded by
Myles Burnyeat
Preceded by
D.W.Hamlyn President of the Aristotelian Society
1978 - 1979 Succeeded by
A.R.White

Owen and Grice on Aristotle

Speranza

There is an online document by Prof. Cohen, at

http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/433/GriceCode.pdf

which I have excerpted. The issue is to add Owen to the bargain, as we think that Grice (who was lecturing with Strawson on Aristotelian categories) possibly found the connection with what Owen was calling the 'snares of ontology', or something.

"Grice and Code on IZZing and HAZZing" is the title of Cohen's essay.

"The distinction Paul Grice and Alan Code have come up with a useful terminology with which to express a key distinction that Aristotle introduces in the Categories and continues to use in later works."

"The distinction is between essential and accidental predication."

"According to Aristotle, "animal" is predicated essentially of "human", and both "animal" and "human" are predicated essentially of the individual human, Callias."

"Similarly, virtue is
predicated essentially of bravery, and both virtue and bravery are predicated essentially of
various individual virtues, such as one that inheres in Callias."

"On the other hand, we can predicate bravery not just of an instance of virtue that inheres in
Callias, but of Callias himself."

"(We can say not only that one of Callias’s virtues is bravery,
but that Callias—since he is brave—is an instance of bravery.) But predicating bravery of
Callias is what Aristotle would call accidental predication. So Callias is essentially a human
being and an animal, but accidentally brave."

"The Categories terminology"

"In the Categories, Aristotle uses the technical terms SAID OF and IN to express this
distinction. He would say: animal is SAID OF human, and both animal and human are SAID OF
Callias."

"In other words, the SAID OF relation holds between a universal and something that
falls beneath it in the same category. Similarly, virtue is SAID OF bravery, and both virtue
and bravery are SAID OF an instance of virtue that inheres in Callias."

"On the other hand,
neither virtue nor bravery is SAID OF Callias. Rather, bravery is IN Callias, and virtue is IN
Callias."

"In other words x is SAID OF y is the converse of y is essentially x (x is SAID OF y iff y is
essentially x), and x is IN y is the converse of y is accidentally x (x is IN y iff y is accidentally
x)."

"Notice that when we express the fact that bravery is IN Callias by means of a sentence in
ordinary English (or Greek, for that matter) we would say “Callias is brave” rather than
“Callias is bravery.” This is the phenomenon Aristotle calls paronymy (Cat. 1a12-15)."

"The
entities involved in this predication are a substance (Callias) and a quality (bravery); but...

Refs:

1 Grice, H. P. “Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1988) 175-200.
2 Code, A. “Aristotle: Essence and Accident.” in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories,
Ends, R. Grandy and R. Warner, eds. (Oxford: 1983) 411-439.

... instead of using the name of the quality (“bravery”) we use a paronym of it (“brave”) in our
linguistic predication.

"The point is that although the two predications “Callias is human” and
“Callias is brave” are superficially similar, the underlying ontological relations are different.
Human is SAID OF Callias but not IN Callias."

"Bravery is IN Callias but not SAID OF Callias."

"Aristotle also notes (Cat. 2a29-33) that sometimes the point about paronymy may be
obscured by the linguistic oddity that the name of the entity that is IN a subject and the
adjective that we use to characterize it are the same. Just as we characterize someone as
brave if the virtue bravery is IN him, so we characterize a body as white if the color white is
IN it."

"In English (“white”), as in Greek (“leukon”), the same word is both the name of a
quality and an adjective that characterizes something so qualified. This might create the
illusion that white is SAID OF a body (in the way that bravery is SAID OF a certain virtue or
human is SAID OF a certain animal). But white is not SAID OF a body, since “the definition of
white is never predicated of body” (Cat. 2a-34). This gives us necessary and sufficient
conditions (in terms of linguistic predication) for the (ontological) SAID OF relation."

"x is SAID OF y iff both the name of x and the definition of x are predicated of y."

******

The Grice-Code terminology

"Grice made up the verb “to IZZ” for Aristotle’s idea
of essential predication."

"So, Grice would
express the fact that y is predicated essentially of x by saying that x IZZes y."

"On the other hand [usually the left one -- Speranza] Grice uses the verb
“to HAZZ” for Aristotle’s idea of accidental predication, and would express the fact that y is
predicated accidentally of x by saying that x HAZZes y."

"(Note that ‘IZZ’ and ‘HAZZ’ are
regular verbs: “I IZZ, you IZZ, she IZZes, …, I HAZZ, you HAZZ, he HAZZes, …” etc.)."

"Code
doesn’t use the made-up words IZZ and HAZZ."

"He prefers the capitalized words “Be” and
“Have” as technical terms with the same meaning."

"So SAID OF and IZZ are converses: x is SAID OF y iff y IZZes x."

"Likewise, IN and HAZZ are
converses: x is IN y iff y HAZZes x."

"Here is the way Aristotle’s claims, above, would be expressed in the language of IZZing and
HAZZing:

Aristotle’s claim In IZZ- HAZZ terminology

Human is SAID OF Callias.

Callias IZZes [a] human [being].

Animal is SAID OF Callias.

Callias IZZes [an] animal.

Animal is SAID OF human.

Human IZZes animal.

Virtue is SAID OF bravery.

Bravery IZZes virtue.

Bravery is IN Callias.

Callias HAZZes bravery.

Virtue is IN Callias.

Callias HAZZes virtue.

Notice that nothing ever IZZes what it HAZZes or HAZZes what it IZZes.

Callias IZZes human,
but he does not HAZZ human.

Callias HAZZes bravery, but he does not IZZ bravery.

Note too
that IZZing is NOT identity."

Human IZZes animal, but human ¹ animal.

Identity might be
defined, however, as reciprocal IZZing:

x = y iff x IZZes y & y IZZes x

Some further ramifications

"Notice that the logical properties of IZZing and HAZZing are different."

"IZZing is transitive."

"If x IZZes y and y IZZes z, then x IZZes z."

If Callias is human and a human is an animal, then
Callias is an animal.

If something belongs to a species, it belongs to every genus under
which that species falls.)

"But HAZZing is not transitive."

"Callias HAZZes bravery, but he does
not HAZZ all of bravery’s accidental attributes—e.g., the attribute of having been
exemplified at the battle of Thermopylae."

"Likewise, IZZing is reflexive."

"For every x, x IZZes
x) but HAZZing is not—Callias does not HAZZ Callias, nor does bravery HAZZ bravery.

3

"(If these claims, or any of the following, seem dubious to you, try to think them through and
figure out why they are true.)"

"The reason why Callias IZZes animal is that he IZZes human, and human IZZes animal."

"So we
may generalize and say that when x IZZes y, it follows that x IZZes something that IZZes y."

"In
other words, if x IZZes y, then $z (x IZZes z & z IZZes y)."

"Likewise, the reason why Callias HAZZes virtue is that he HAZZes bravery, and bravery IZZes
virtue."

"Again, we may generalize and say that when x HAZZes y, it follows that x HAZZes
something that IZZes y."

"In other words, if x HAZZes y, then $z (x HAZZes z & z IZZes y)."

"Notice an important upshot of this: every predication, even accidental predication, implicitly
involves some kind of essential predication (i.e., classification)."

"In “Callias IZZes human” it
is there explicitly."

"But in “Callias HAZZes bravery” it is there implicitly: Callias HAZZes
something that IZZes bravery."

"That is, Callias is (accidentally) brave because something that
happens to inhere in him is (essentially) an instance of bravery."

"To put the point another
way."

"When we predicate human of Callias, we are classifying him by means of an essential
predicate of his. And when we predicate bravery of Callias, we are classifying one of his
qualities by means of an essential predicate of that quality.

--- note: 3 The idea that “bravery HAZZes bravery” is often attributed to Plato (and called the “literal self-predication” of
Platonic Forms)."

And so on.

Owen and Grice on Aristotle

Speranza

But I would like to think that since Grice quotes from this book by Owen, he (Grice) was having the 'historical' discussion of Aristotle as was current in Oxford. (Or something).

----- This in the broader PUBLIC context. We know that in the "private" (or semi-private, actually 'public', too, lectures that Grice _and Strawson_ gave at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, Aristotle AND CATEGORIES figured large. So it's only natural that Grice, at a later stage, found the motivation to revise his notes on the alleged semantic multiplicity of 'being', as it connects with the 'first' category of the susbstance, and that of qualitas (qualia), and idioms like 'essence', 'tode ti', and such. (Or something).

Cheers.

Re: Grice on Aristotle

Speranza

In "Grice on Aristotle", R. B. Jones writes

"On returning to Code I see now that
I was confused about which
paper of Grice he was
referring to. I had supposed, incorrectly
it now seems to me, that
Code referred (in footnote 2) to a
paper by Grice called

"Semantic Multiplicity and
Copulative Being", (at a conference...)

but I now suspect that
that paper was actually by Code."

Yes. That seems to be right.

Jones goes on:

"In a later footnote (4) Code (in PGRICE) refers to a paper by Grice presented at the same conference entitled "Aristotle on Being and Good" (specifically he refers to a section of that paper entitled "Semantic Multiplicity and Copulative being").
I wonder if this paper rings any different bells for Speranza?
I see that he does mention that this is an unpublished paper in the archive."

Mmm. So, it seems

"Semantic Multiplicity and Copulative Being"

is by Grice. -- Rather than by Code.

Citation:

Grice, H. P. "Semantic Multiplicity and Copulative Being" -- being Section (II) of "Aristotle on Being and Good", The Grice Papers.

---

So the right citation would be:

Grice, H. P. "Aristotle on Being and Good"

--- This should be distinguished from:

Speranza, "Aristotle on Being Good". (Unpublication, Unfiled).

----

So, the citation is:

Grice, H. P., "Aristotle on being and good" -- The Grice Papers.

And, as Jones notes, within that essay, there is a section, entitled:

"Semantic multiplicity and copulative being".

----

And so on.

Note that, intersetingly, this comes just after Quinion informs us that 'pragmatic' is the word most looked up during 2011.

And we have Grice, typically reactionarily, speaking of

SEMANTIC multiplcity.

----

Grice revised that section, "Semantic multiplicity and copulative being" (Section (II) of "Aristotle on being and good" -- into

"Aristotle on the multiplicity of being" -- Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

----

Note that 'good' quite does not compare to 'being', so one can see the EXTENT of Grice's talent in dealing with _being_ and _good_ (not on being good, alas) in Aristotle, in the same conference (coffee break).

Within the 'being', there's the 'copulative being'. Because we are interested in Quine's idea that copulation is otiose (it possibly is).

S is P

becomes, in Quineanese:

(Ex)Fx & Gx.

Yet, Aristotle, and Kant, and Kantotle (or Ariskant, aka Grice) likes to play with the idea of "COPULATIVE" being.

----

To that, we add,

"Semantic multiplcity".

In the language (or lingo) of 'izz' and 'hazz', the point is that

ESSENTIAL attributes are part of the "Izz".

Accidental attributes are part of the "Hazz".

It's like Grice is suggesting that Aristotle was confused in failing to realise that, in the deep structure of Greek, there are TWO verbs at play:

"einai" proper -- i.e. to 'be' (It's amazing how, in English, we have like 30 roots for that:

is
am
are
been
were
was

and keep counting... -- I hold that FOR EACH ROOT there is a semantic multiplicity, alleged, involved --.

And there is

'ekhein', i.e. to have.

"To have" is NOT cognate with Latin 'habere', or Greek 'ekhein' -- but Grice possibly knew what he was talking about when he said that 'hazz' is BASIC -- and possibly a counterpart to copulative being.

----

The PPQ essay is not clear what is responding to. The Canada conference WAS VERY HISTORIC -- archaeological almost -- and Code was since then "An Aristotelian Scholar" (broadly understood).

(whereas Grice remained Kantotelian at heart).

----

And so on.

Cheers.

Grice on Aristotle

On returning to Code I see now that I was confused about which paper of Grice he was referring to.   I had supposed, incorrectly it now seems to me, that Code referred (in footnote 2) to a paper by Grice called "Semantic Multiplicity and Copulative Being", (at a conference...) but I now suspect that that paper was actually by Code.  In a later footnote (4) Code (in PGRICE) refers to a paper by Grice presented at the same conference entitled "Aristotle on Being and Good" (specifically he refers to a section of that paper entitled "Semantic Multiplicity and Copulative being").

I wonder if this paper rings any different bells for Speranza?
I see that he does mention that this is an unpublished paper in the archive.

Roger Jones

The misuses of pragmatic

Speranza

Quinion:

WORDS OF THE YEAR This week, it was the turn of publisher Merriam-
Webster to pick one. It chose "pragmatic". A curious choice, you
might think, since it doesn't directly apply to any event of 2011.
The publisher selected it because it was the word most often looked
up in its online dictionary during the year. There were two peaks,
one in the weeks before the US Congress voted in August to increase
the nation's debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to
craft deficit-cutting measures this autumn. John Morse, the firm's
president, suggested it sparked dictionary users' interest because
it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality
over frivolity. Most people who recorded a reason for looking it up
said that they wanted to confirm that it was meant positively.
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 767 Saturday 17 December 2011
Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
ISSN 1470-1448


"WORDS OF THE YEAR."

"This week, it was the turn of publisher Merriam-
Webster to pick one."

"It chose "pragmatic". A curious choice, you
might think, since it doesn't directly apply to any event of 2011."

I _might_ think. But knowing Grice and his dismissal of the 'direct', I rather go _IN_direct.

"The publisher selected it because it was the word most often looked
up in its online dictionary during the year."

And who uses a paper dictionary anymore? Grice disliked computers. They didn't recognise for him, not just 'pirot', but 'sticky wicket'.

"There were two peaks,
one in the weeks before the US Congress voted in August to increase
the nation's debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to
craft deficit-cutting measures this autumn."

----- A third peak was NOT when Speranza checked the use of 'pragmatic inference' as an early use by Grice in the Retrospective Epilogue.

"John Morse, the firm's
president, suggested it sparked dictionary users' interest because
it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality
over frivolity."

--- rather than the Morrisian trilogy: syntactics, semantics, pragmatics -- on which Grice trades.

"Most people who recorded a reason for looking it up
said that they wanted to confirm that it was meant positively."

The implicature is that they didn't. I.e. they didn't confirm that.

Grice used 'pragmatic' when he HAD to. He makes a not-to-fine distinction between 'logical' inference, and 'pragmatic' inference, which most radical pragmaticists disagree with. The entry in the OED for 'pragmatic' is so confusing I love it.

----

Other than that Grice used 'semantic' (on occasion).

When he does use 'pragmatic inference' versus 'logical inference' (in Retrospective Epilogue) the rationale is so Griceian (as I prefer to spell the surname-derived adjective) that it hurts, delightfully!

----

Check 'pragmatic' with the annals of the club. Or not!


---

WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 767 Saturday 17 December 2011
Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
ISSN 1470-1448

Quinion and Grice on "pragmatic"

Speranza

Quinion writes in "World Wide Words" (Dec. 17 2011):

WORDS OF THE YEAR This week, it was the turn of publisher Merriam-
Webster to pick one. It chose "pragmatic". A curious choice, you
might think, since it doesn't directly apply to any event of 2011.
The publisher selected it because it was the word most often looked
up in its online dictionary during the year. There were two peaks,
one in the weeks before the US Congress voted in August to increase
the nation's debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to
craft deficit-cutting measures this autumn. John Morse, the firm's
president, suggested it sparked dictionary users' interest because
it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality
over frivolity. Most people who recorded a reason for looking it up
said that they wanted to confirm that it was meant positively.
---- WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 767 Saturday 17 December 2011
Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
ISSN 1470-1448

For the use of 'pragmatic' by Grice, vide this club.
Cheers.

"Pragmatic"

Speranza

From M. Quinion's World Wide Words:

---

WORDS OF THE YEAR This week, it was the turn of publisher Merriam-
Webster to pick one. It chose "pragmatic". A curious choice, you
might think, since it doesn't directly apply to any event of 2011.
The publisher selected it because it was the word most often looked
up in its online dictionary during the year. There were two peaks,
one in the weeks before the US Congress voted in August to increase
the nation's debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to
craft deficit-cutting measures this autumn. John Morse, the firm's
president, suggested it sparked dictionary users' interest because
it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality
over frivolity. Most people who recorded a reason for looking it up
said that they wanted to confirm that it was meant positively.

---

WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 767 Saturday 17 December 2011
Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
ISSN 1470-1448

Re: Grice on Aristotle, rednecks and metaphysics

Speranza

Jones writes: "I hope as Speranza suggests, that Grice's paper on the multiplicity of being does originate in the one referred to by Code in PGRICE and so I am now looking at it. This is the place where his reference to "rednecks of Vienna" appears, in an otherwise wholly unpolemic context."

----- Recall that Grice has TWO papers on the PPQ: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (so far -- we never know if his further unpublications will in the future be published by PPQ: one is the EARLIER, 1986, "Actions and events" -- this was possibly submitted by Grice himself; the other is the 1988 "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being". This is the one that originates in the Victoria lecture. It is in the "Aristotle" PPQ essay that Grice even cares to quote from Code -- you see, by the time of the re-elaboration of the "Aristotle" paper from the Victoria essay, Code had published his thing in PGRICE and so Grice can acknowledge it -- in a footnote.

--- (While "Actions and events" (PPQ) deals mainly with Davidson, although he cares to explore Reichenbach, von Wright, and Kant, "Aristotle" (PPQ) is mainly about izzing, hazzing, and the development of Aristotle's metaphysics).

Jones goes on:

"I am at present reading an autobiographical volume by Bryan Magee, an Oxonian best known as a populariser of philosophy in the broadcast media, notably through a series of interviews with (then) contemporary philosophers (probably many now dead)."

I happen to have seen that volume, once published by the BBC books (now defunct publishing house). Some great photos! I loved the interviews to R. M. Hare, and so many others. My friend Donal McEvoy is a FAN of Magee.

---

Jones:

"The relevance of this is that it reminds me of something which I have perhaps not paid enough attention to in the history of mid-century Oxford philosophy, which is that the brief ascendency in Oxford of Logical Positivism was of that special brand of logical positivism encapsulated in Ayer's "Language Truth and Logic", which is a world apart from the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap."

Indeed. In "Reply to Richards", Grice refers to Ayer as the once 'enfant terrible'. I do have Ayer's bio -- in two volumes. The first one, "Part of my life" is essentially lovely. He came from quite a different background from Austin or Grice -- but they all met in the Oxford of the 1930s. Recall that Grice, unlike Ayer, came from even a _different_ background. Being from the Midlands, he landed on Corpus Christi (Grice did). Ayer was meeting with Austin, Hampshire, and others (Hart, notably) back in All Souls, but Grice, having been born on the other side of the tracks, as he said, never met them personally _Before_ the ['Phoney', so mis-called] War. But the things were there. In particular, I have argued that Grice's "Negation and Privation" -- his very first -- is empiricist, and positivist at heart -- within the Oxonian tradition, that is. Grice is thus generationally a slightly later thing than Ayer (Ayer, b. 1911, like Austin; Grice b. 1913). But in any case, for were much YOUNGER ('youngER brightER things') than, say, Ryle b. 1900, or Mabbott, or Collingwood...

(I mention Ryle, because he was Ayer's TUTOR -- so we can claim ascendancy here. And it was because of RYLE's advice that Ayer ever made it to Vienna -- not to waltz precisely?)

---

Jones goes on:

"A mark of the distinction between the two (perspectives on logical positivism) is found in Magee's representation of Logical Positivism and the subsequent Linguistic Philosophy as being rather similar, rather than (as I have represented Carnap's philosophy) as in important respects diametrically opposed (see the diagrams which I put into our "Conversation between Carnap and Grice")."

Indeed. Carnap is a more complex figure than Ayer. For one, it is dangerous to speak of things like "Vienna Circle" simpliciter. Ayer himself, once back in Oxford and London, started to read, more or less seriously, all the work of the empiricists: Locke, and Hume -- He came with a volume of problems in the philosophy of knowledge -- and the foundations thereof. He ended a phenomenalist, as it were. His connection with Oxford ceased to be strong. And it's only YEARS AFTER, when he became Wykeham, that the paths reunited. (Ayer will discuss Grice's theory in a symposium in the Aristotelian Society, in 1977, on "The causal theory of perception", for example). (In the interim, were Ayer's _London_ years). Plus, he became like the official historian of Russell and Moore, whom he claimed -- against, perhaps Grice -- at the root of much of analytic philosophy.

----

Jones:

"This sense of similarity is also to be found in Gellner, whose "Words and Things" criticised a group of disparate movements including both Logical Positivism and the ordinary language philosophy which followed it at Oxford."

Grice criticised, rightly, Gellner, in "Reply to Richards". Grice considers Gellner a sort of Bergmann without a sense of humour. (Bergmann had said, 'I won't waste my time with the English futilitarians'). The criticisms by Gellner I have expanded on elsewhere, notably due to the encouragement by T. P. Uschanov. ---. Gellner, a French philosopher, does not take 'analytic philosophy' too seriously. At that time, Urmson, and Austin, and Hare, and others -- including Strawson, but alas no Grice -- were making it to the "Continent" to popularise the 'movement' ("La philosophie analytique"). Oddly, the connection Gellner--Magee is somewhere there, since Gellner was influential in London (rather than Oxford -- London being a sort of arch-enemy to Oxford's conservatism and reactionariness) along with Magee's idol: Popper (who was never accepted in Oxford).

---

Jones:

"Ayer's Logical Positivism was the first distinctive contemporary philosophy which I became acquainted with, and I have ever since been some kind of positivist. I had only very limited exposure to Carnap as an undergraduate (though the one paper I know I then read probably was his most important and original: "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology"), and it was not until I had spent decades in computing and was once again returning to Philosophy that I became better acquainted with the main tenor and central themes of Carnap's philosophy, and with Russell's idea of "scientific philosophy" which had inspired it."

It IS a lovely book, Ayer's -- by Gollancz, in a very user-friendly backcover edition. It is full of insight. I always loved his EMOTIVISM, since, I think a chain can be traced between, say, Ogden and Richards -- vide discussions with R. Dale, this blog --, via Ayer, to STEVENSON. This is the Stevenson of 1944, Ethics and language, that Grice will quote in his "Meaning" (1948). So, Grice in a way was generalising over this trend of emotivism. Ayer is crucial with regard to illocutions with forces other than 'indicative' -- his remarks on the 'statements' of ethics or aesthetics in his book (which only took two weeks to compile -- he was v. busy otherwise -- marrying his wife in London, and moving houses). Of course, he made history with his declaration of the Verifiability Principle, which had to undergo so many refinements along the way, too.

----

Jones:

"If one were to pick any feature to distinguish the two variants of logical positivism which I am here speaking of, it is the attitude towards natural languages. Russell and Carnap were advocates of the new logic, believed that Philosophy could be made rigorous using these new methods, which made use of language for philosophy more precise than ordinary language."

Indeed. Ayer is never so negative. This may have to do with his background in classics -- and his early days with Austin and Hart and Hampshire in the "All Souls" Tuesday evening group.

You see, what Grice calls "The Play Group" (led by Austin) was indeed the offspring of this earlier group he had conceived back at All Souls (I. Berlin's college) in Oxford. They would discuss things like 'reduction' of material-object statements to 'sense-data' statements, and so on. They would conduct those conversations in _English_. It is only with the developments of Quine, a decades later, after Russell/Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, that Oxonians started to take the idea of a _calculus_ seriously. Also perhaps via Wittgenstein, who played with symbolism in Tractatus, drawing some commentary by Urmson, say ("Philosophical analysis: its development between the two worlds"). In the case of Grice, the input came from Strawson.

You see, Grice tutored Strawon in _logic_ (Grice was a don at St. John's, Oxford, where Strawson had this scholarship, the John Locke scholarship). Strawson ended up with a 'second', but in his first book, "Intro to logical theory", he managed to credit Grice ('from whom I never ceased to learn about logic') -- and it's all about:

"She married and had a child"
"She had a child and married"

-- and so on. Strawson has sections for _EACH_ operator. Only when it comes to (x) and (Ex) does he care to quote from Grice (This is Strawson 1952). It is here that Strawson states Grice's thesis that 'natural language' and 'formal language' can be claimed to be IDENTICAL if the main divergence one can trace is otherwise explainable via pragmatic constraints of informativeness, and so on. Why is it that it SOUNDS as if the two sentences above _depict_, to use Witters's words, a different state of affairs. Well, because one usually narrates things as they happened. In this case it is not informativeness; it is orderliness.

But Grice was never too interested in these things. His concern was a more British (or empiricist) one when it comes to the _weaker_ (he found) language of phenomenology. Why is it weaker to say,

"It looks to me as though the pillar box _is_ red". (cfr. "It looks to me as though the pillar book might LOOK red".

---- In WoW, Retrospective Epilogue (strand 6) he then puts things in context, and clarifies things. He notes that his interest in implicature (or 'pragmatic' vs. 'logic inference') had originated in questions in the philosophy of sense-data (he was aligning with G. A. Paul -- is there a problem about sense data -- against "later Wittgensteinians" who would say that "it SEEMS red, and it IS red" is not a 'form of life' and a 'language game' to match).

Jones:

"This is the central thrust of Carnap's philosophical programme, in which he saw himself as laying the philosophical ground for a transformation, both in philosophy and science, similar to that achieved for mathematics by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. There is little trace of this in Ayer's "Logical Positivism", which is the beginning of a more genteel oxonian kind of philosophising, in which certain of the doctrines of logical positivism, most notably the verification principle, were the subject of debate and refinement without much contribution from modern logical methods."

Indeed. On top of that, Ayer started to be better known for his other books on the foundations of knowledge (that Austin studied thoroughly in his lectures, "Sense and sensibilia"). He was also collecting his other essays from his London days, and he was studying the early philosophies not just of Russell -- his phenomenalism -- but Moore. His links with the general guidelines of Vienna (or "Unified science") were a thing of the past, or something he was not focusing his attention on.

---

(A good thing here is that Penguin book, "Central questions of philosophy", Ayer's Guifford -- where he goes back, slightly, to whatever was that he had found central back in the day --. Incidentally, the conversation with Magee in Men of ideas is also good. It is the 'reminiscent' Ayer, as it were, with thoughts on Wiesmann, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and a few others).

Jones:

"Anyway, here I am, still a positivist and much in sympathy with the Viennese "rednecks", but perhaps just as interested in Aristotelian exegesis as was Grice, though perhaps not for the same reasons. My interest in hazz and izz is not the question about whether "is" has a multiplicity of meanings, but the role they play in distinguishing accident and essence, the relationship between these and necessity and contingency, and the extent to which Plato and Aristotle can be seen to connect these issues with anything like semantics (and hence the analytic synthetic distinction)."

Good, I should elaborate on each of the points:

"My interest in hazz and izz is not the question about whether "is" has a multiplicity of meanings, but" on

(a) "the role they play in distinguishing accident and essence",

----- Why does this connect with 'multivocality'? I think the key is Aristotle's and Grice's (or Kantotle's, rather) view on categories. Why is it that "Socrates is mortal" one likes to pronounce "Socrates izzes mortal", whereas, "Socrates is white' comes out in Grice's dialect as "Socrates hazz white". Then comes Kripke, who will say that Socrates's whiteness is perhaps _essential_ to the thisness that Socrates was. This connects with (b):

(b) "the relationship between these and necessity and contingency,"

------ If one just sticks with Socrates, a first substance, as it were. One considers the categories that he also represents. Recall that for Kant, the first category of substance is a no-no. It all starts with quality, quantity, modus, and relatio. Quality is the key. Some qualities of Socrates are accidental ('he didn't wear glasses', 'he was a slow runner'). Some are not ("he thought himself a genius"?). Kripke (whom Jones will not agree with) will start to use

<>p
[]p

i.e. the diamond and the square of modal logic (which he was familiar with from work by Lewis, and Dummett?). In this case, we surely need PREDICATE logic, not propositional. <>p won't do. We need to consider variablas and predicates (the linguistic correlate of a 'quality'. And we play with symbols, and consider whether we want to subscribe to various alleged paradoxes of necessity.

In the case of Grice, his interest was somewhat more historical, in that he saw as rallying to the defense of the under-dog, the underDOGma, of the analytic/synthetic distinction. But he possibly did feel that 'synthetic a priori' was something to consider. He would inquire the playmates of his two children (Karen and Tim) with things like whether a shirt could be 'red and green' all over ('no stripes allowed') and so on. As we saw in "Retrospective epilogue" -- after discussing the strands -- he concludes that the analytic-synthetic (rather than necessary-contingent) distinction is at the ROOT of ALL metaphysical and philosophical thinking. Even if, alla Carnap, he has grown a 'pragmatist' and allowed for 'degrees of relevance' of this or that notion ("analytic"-for-this-purpose, etc.).

Jones:

(c) "and the extent to which Plato and Aristotle can be seen to connect these issues with anything like semantics (and hence the analytic synthetic distinction)." --- The connection with Plato is an interesting one, as developed by Code. Since surely Grice's Kantotle cannot just be born out of thin air. It was Plato that provided the input for Aristotle. The distinction may be seen in terms of 'order' as when logicians speak of first-ORDER predicate calculus. Plato seems to be talking, almost always, in terms of higher orders. Hence, the qualities, which in Aristotle are just accidental/essential correlates to this or that predicate, become things we can talk about -- subjects of propositions. "The whiteness of Socrates", 'the wisdom of Socrates'. Code, as Jones is well aware, since he has used the formalisations, and improved on it, in the pdf document, goes on to suggest that it's best to see Aristotelianim (qua metaphysics) as a later development from Platonism, now understood in terms of a few axioms in the theory of izzing and hazzing.

---

Jones goes on:

"Back to the metaphysics, it is of interest, especially to a positivist, whether the difference between Plato and Aristotle in relation to Universals, primarily the question of immanence of universals, are substantive or might be argued to be merely verbal. They disagree about how to talk about universals, but can one simply translate between the two in a way which causes apparent disagreement to dissolve into terminology (bearing in mind here that for Carnap ontology is in a sense instrumental rather than absolute, so he will accept universals in an ontology if they serve pragmatically the purposes of science)."

Good points. My first unpublication ever, typically, was on Plato. Since in most philosophical schools, one STARTS a Platonist, and ends an Aristotelian. There are LOADS to discuss about Plato, his theory of forms. Crombie, and so many interpreters, come to mind. My tutor in this area was for example obsessed with Plato's _early_ theory of forms (we spent a whole term discussing paragraphs from the Eutyphro, in Greek, which is about 'arete' or virtue). So, even within Plato, there is a continuum or historical aspect. There IS a verbal issue, which was the focus of my unpublication. At the time, I was obsessed with Plato's Cratylus, which helped! ---- Grice and Austin, along with Urmson, were somewhat keen students of not just Aristotle's but Plato's philosophy. Urmson has a good essays and books on Plato and _ideas_. How to understand the transcendence of universalia, then, in a 'material' (metaphysical) mode, and then in a 'formal' (linguistic) mode? --- The fact that Plato's style becomes somewhat pompous (that dialogical form, and the attitude that Socrates always wants to strike) does not help. But interpretations of Plato's doctrines may come handy. Of course, most philosophers will even agree that Plato's style exceeds that of Aristotle.

Aristotle's work on metaphysics, being in the form of a treatise, rather than a dialogue, is in comparison rather blunt, and uninspiring. (Except to Grice, Jones, and Speranza). His examples are somewhat out of the blue. Recall that his dialogues are all lost. All we keep are his boring notes on 'ta meta ta physika', which we never know who they were intended for. The opinion is that they were lectures he wrote for OTHER lectures at the "Academy". I.e. the methodology of philosophy was, then, as it is today, in Oxford, via dialogical tutorials. So the notes on metaphysics are rather a collection of 'rudiments' of what to sustain, in terms of opinion, about where _universals_ fit.

And of course, a good thing is that Plato is ALWAYS on Aristotle's mind ("Plato may be my friend, but Truth is a better one"). So, Aristotle ('third man') is never allowing us to _forget_ the deep metaphysical waters (where Plato drowned?) that Aristotle was so ready to get away from. Or something like that.

---

Jones:

"Grice and Code together are helping me to approach these issues, which are primarily motivated by a positivistic inclination which I don't imagine either would have shared."

Good. I think Grice's love for systematicity came from his festschrift to Quine. -- Recall his System Q. So, in the "Metaphysics" (Aristotle on the multiplicity, PPQ, 1986) essay, he again attempts to provide a _formal_ calculus for the ideas at large. He had first attempted this in "Vacuous Names" (although he was familiar with the axiomatic treatment to logic via Strawson's Introduction-- indeed, it was Grice who taught Strawson all that). In "How pirots carulise elatically -- some simpler ways" (unpublication) he also explored formal axiomatics. The rudiments of language. So it is natural to see the logic of izzing and hazzing as Grice's attempt (now in metaphysics) to trace what Aristotle and Plato (if not Kant, or Hegel) were talking about. The outcome is an elegant system that allows for some considerations as to inmanence of universalia, definitions of 'thisness' (tode ti) and so on. ----.

For Grice, these systems have at least three levels: there's the grammatical--and syntactic level, that he needs to axiomatise. Then there's the semantic component. (This is relevant when it comes to Aristotle -- since Jones has dealt with his syllogistics, and things like 'truth-value gaps' which occur in some interpretations of Aristotle -- e.g. Strawson's -- are best seen as _semantic_ rather than syntactic. Finally, there is the 'pragmatic' (or contextualist) component, that Grice elaborates on at the later segments of the "Aristotle" PPQ paper. How to allow that some implicatures of 'Harry is healthy' are to be disimplicated ("He cannot be healthy or cease to be: food ONLY is healthy -- not people"). And so on.

It is like if Grice is saying that the formality belongs to the syntax-cum-semantics. It's in the pragmatic realm that 'natural' language becomes naturalised, as it were. Or something like that.

Grice on Aristotle, rednecks and metaphysics

I hope as Speranza suggests, that Grice's paper on the multiplicity of being does originate in the one referred to by Code in PGRICE and so I am now looking at it.

This is the place where his reference to "rednecks of Vienna" appears, in an otherwise wholly unpolemic context.

I am at present reading an autobiographical volume by Bryan Magee, an Oxonian best known as a populariser of philosophy in the broadcast media, notably through a series of interviews with (then) contemporary philosophers (probably many now dead).  The relevance of this is that it reminds me of something which I have perhaps not paid enough attention to in the history of mid-century Oxford philosophy, which is that the brief ascendency in Oxford of Logical Positivism was of that special brand of logical positivism encapsulated in Ayer's "Language Truth and Logic", which is a world apart from the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap.

A mark of the distinction between the two (perspectives on logical positivism) is found in Magee's representation of Logical Positivism and the subsequent Linguistic Philosophy as being rather similar, rather than (as I have represented Carnap's philosophy) as in important respects diametrically opposed (see the diagrams which I put into our "Conversation between Carnap and Grice").
This sense of similarity is also to be found in Gellner, whose "Words and Things" criticised a group of disparite movements including both Logical Positivism and the ordinary language philosophy which followed it at Oxford.

Ayer's Logical Positivism was the first distinctive contemporary philosophy which I became acquainted with, and I have ever since been some kind of positivist.  I had only very limited exposure to Carnap as an undergraduate (though the one paper I know I then read probably was his most important and original: "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology"), and it was not until I had spent decades in computing and was once again returning to
Philosophy that I became better acquainted with the main tenor and central themes of Carnap's philosophy, and with Russell's idea of "scientific philosophy" which had inspired it.

If one were to pick any feature to distinguish the two variants of logical positivism which I am here speaking of, it is the attitude towards natural languages.  Russell and Carnap were advocates of the new logic, believed that Philosophy could be made rigorous using these new methods, which made use of language for philosophy more precise than ordinary language.
This is the central thrust of Carnap's philosophical programme, in which he saw himself as laying the philosophical ground for a transformation, both in philosophy and science, similar to that achieved for mathematics by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica.

There is little trace of this in Ayer's "Logical Positivism", which is the beginning of a more genteel oxonian kind of philosophising, in which certain of the doctrines of logical positivism, most notably the verification principle, were the subject of debate and refinement without much contribution from modern logical methods.

Anyway, here I am, still a positivist and much in sympathy with the Viennese "rednecks", but perhaps just as interested in Aristotelian exegesis as was Grice, though perhaps not for the same reasons.  My interest in hazz and izz is not the question about whether "is" has a multiplicity of meanings, but the role they play in distinguishing accident and essence, the relationship between these and necessity and contingency, and the extent to which Plato and Aristotle can be seen to connect these issues with anything like semantics (and hence the analytic synthetic distinction).

Back to the metaphysics, it is of interest, especially to a positivist, whether the difference between Plato and Aristotle in relation to Universals, primarily the question of immanence of universals, are substantive or might be argued to be merely verbal.  They disagree about how to talk about universals, but can one simply translate between the two in a way which causes apparent disagreement to dissolve into terminology (bearing in mind here that for Carnap ontology is in a sense instrumental rather than absolute, so he will accept universals in an ontology if they serve pragmatically the purposes of science).

Grice and Code together are helping me to approach these issues, which are primarily motivated by a positivistic inclination which I don't imagine either would have shared.

Roger Jones

Modified Occam's Razor

or "Implicature" saves, but there is no such thing as a free lunch (they say).

Grice and Aristotle on the multiplicity of being and multivocality of 'being' -- and so on

Speranza

In "Grice and Code", R. B. Jones writes:

"The reference in Code in PGRICE to Grice says: "The relation between Form, Matter and Composite in Aristotle's Metaphysics Z" which was apparently a paper at a conference held by the University of Victoria in January 1979, sponsored by the Canada Council. But were the proceedings published, or did the paper appear anywhere else?"

I wouldn't think. But surely it should be cited thus:

Grice, H. P. "The relation between form [eidos],
matter [hyle], and composite [hylemorphism] in Aristotle's Metaphysics Z" -- unpublication, 1979. The Grice Papers. UC/Berkeley, Bancroft.

The mimeo that B. F. Loar published as "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being" (PPQ 1986) is possibly Grice's rewrite out of Grice 1979. Recall that Grice's were the days without word processor, or even typewriter.

Jones goes on: "My own interest at present is in Plato and Aristotle as providing an early approximation to the analytic/synthetic distinction, (as the essential/accidental distinction, or the necessary/contingent) and in the relationship between metaphysics, semantics and epistemology in this area, most of which must have been of interest to Grice also. I did make a start in my "PDF" which started from the Code formulae and later went into the syllogism, and I did come out of that knowing a lot more about Aristotle than I did when I went in. But I didn't come close to understanding fully any of the parties involved even in this limited domain (Plato, Aristotle, Grice and Code), and now that I feel once again the need to trace the history of Hume's fork I can probably do best by revisiting the Code paper. But it looks like the corresponding Grice paper will prove elusive, perhaps it was never in print. I do now have the one on multiplicity of being, which looks to me a nicer piece (and more relevant as it happens) than Grice's Eschatology paper in WOW, which I have not been able to get on with very well."

YES -- the "Aristotle multiplicity" essay is a jewel. And I'm glad B. F. Loar decided to edit it for publication as a memorial to Grice in PPQ 1986.

I love the way Grice discusses the work of fellow Oxonian G. E. L. Owen ("Snares of Ontology", for that is what they are) -- and others.

Of course, the 'izz' and the 'hazz' is JUST PART or a part of the whole thing, and -- if we are tracing the history of this, we know (from Code, then, in PGRICE) that Grice had all these ideas clear by 1979, when he first introduced the izzing and the hazzing at Victoria University, in Jan. 1979.

The "Aristotle" PPQ paper goes on to provide a lot of clues for what is now referred to as 'contextualism'. I especially enjoyed the latter bits where he discusses various types of 'ambiguity'.

For recall that Grice's attempt, in the "Aristotle" paper, is that there is possibly NO MULTIPLICITY of being in Aristotle!

Grice wants to say that we have 'izz' and we have 'hazz'.

But NOT that 'is' is ambiguous. (So Clinton was thinking 'implicature' when he said, "it depends on what the utterer means by _is_").

Grice's other examples include:

"He is a French teacher".

This may mean, "He teaches French". "He is French". We would NOT like to say that "French" is ambiguous. In many other unpublications Grice shows how he was obsessed with that.

"Roberts is between Smith and Williams."

Grice wants to say that 'between' is not ambiguous. The relevant unpublication by Grice reads:

"Need to distinguish all thse from cases
where SPEAKER might mean so-and-so or
such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of
the sentence".

Grice notes:

"

"Jones is between Williams and Brown"

EITHER spatial order or order of merit, but DOUBTFUL this renders it an ambiguous sentence."

These are unpublications dealing with Strawson's and Grice's joint work on Aristotle's categories. Notes in Grice's hand record that

"healthy"

can be applied to, or predicated of:

'person', 'place', 'occupation', or, 'institution' -- while

"medical"

can be applied to 'lecture', 'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription'
and 'advice'.

Linguistic botany, Austinian code, at its best.

----- (Grice Papers, Bancroft).

Grice notes that the neutral term (lingustic)

'employment' -- of utterance x --

can cover the important different terms

'use'
'sense'
and
'meaning' -- cfr. Frege, Sinn, Bedeutung.

--- and that here is it is perhaps
most appropriate to say that the predicate has
the particular range of 'uses'.

Thus, for Grice, the notions of 'sense', 'meaning', and 'use' nned to be distinguished not just from each each other, but ... between discussios of sentences and of speakers. And so on, hence his remark on the univocality of 'between', say ("Do not multiply _senses_ beyond necessity").

"Multiplicity" is perhaps too grand a word here, when dealing with Kantotle, or Grice's Aristotle. "Multivocality" would perhaps be better. (Grice goes on to prefer AEQUI-vocality, where this is a good thing, since 'aequi-' means, 'same').

Of course, Grice's biggest lesson came when he applied this "modified Occam's razor" to _must_. Surely there is NO distinction between a physical must ('what comes up must go down') and an ethical must ("you must not lie"). It's not like 'must' is ambiguous. (The "AEQUI"-vocality thesis, or the unity of practical and theoretical reason, no less).

So, if in Grice 1979 (Grice on Aristotle's Book Z) was trying to elucidate an exegetical problem -- as it indeed touches with Platonism -- Grice's interest was wider.

Code makes a good point that Aristotle's theory changed along the way. As W. Jaeger noted, the early Aristotle is Platonistic enough, so this becomes a problem when speaking of "Aristototelianism". What stage in Aristotle's development are we signalling? And so on.

Jones has done some excellent work towards the formalisation and elucidation of this in his pdf. Cheers.

Grice and Code

The reference in Code in PGRICE to Grice says:


"The relation between Form, Matter and Composite in Aristotle's Metaphysics Z"

which was apparently a paper at a conference held by the University of Victoria in January 1979, sponsored by the Canada Council.
But were the proceedings published, or did the paper appear anywhere else?

My own interest at present is in Plato and Aristotle as providing an early approximation to the analytic/synthetic distinction, (as the essential/accidental distinction, or the necessary/contingent) and in the relationship between metaphysics, semantics and epistemology in this area, most of which must have been of interest to Grice also.

I did make a start in my "PDF" which started from the Code formulae and later went into the syllogism, and I did come out of that knowing a lot more about Aristotle than I did when I went in.  But I didn't come close to understanding fully any of the parties involved even in this limited domain (Plato, Aristotle, Grice and Code), and now that I feel once again the need to trace the history of Hume's fork I can probably do best by revisiting the Code paper.  But it looks like the corresponding Grice paper will prove elusive, perhaps it was never in print.

I do now have the one on multiplicity of being, which looks to me a nicer piece (and more relevant as it happens) than Grice's Eschatology paper in WOW, which I have not been able to get on with very well.

Roger Jones

The Izz and the Hazz

Speranza

In "Grice and Code on Aristotle", R. B. Jones writes:

"Speranza and I have been discussing metaphysics at "The City of Eternal Truth".
There has been a little hiatus since I got distracted but metaphysics is for one reason or another still in my thoughts, and PGRICE having become less visible on Google books I felt the need to get some better access to Code's paper in that volume. I went to the British Library and scanned it, so I at last have the whole thing. At the same time I sought the paper by Grice which arose from the Grice/Code collaboration, but made a mistake and ended up scanning a different Grice paper on Aristotle (on the multiplicity of being, which I am still glad to have).
The one Code refers to is "The relation between form matter and composite in Aristotle's metaphysics". But its not clear exactly where it is to be found so I have not succeeded in locating it. I searched the BL catalogue and the internet and the Grice club but came up with nothing. Surely its in Speranza's head!"

Mmm.

From what I recall.

Code was writing what he wrote in 1982, let's say. Perhaps 1984. The PGRICE volume came out in 1986, but surely the stuff was writing before then. So, the quotation is indeed here:

Code 1986

-- which now Jones has scanned. Then there is the Grice Aristotle essay in PPQ. (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly). The quotation should be:

Grice 1988.

---- As I recall, this was edited posthumously by B. F. Loar, for the 1988 issue (one of the 1988 issues -- the later one) of the PPQ. "In memory of Grice". So, again, it's not like Grice wrote the thing in 1988.

---- Now for the OTHER SOURCES.

Code does provide some background to the thing. It was a symposium (or contribution therein) by Grice back in the day (in the 1970s) in, of all places, Canada. (I love the misimplicatures of "of all places" -- set-theoretically, it is redundant).

-----

Most likely, that piece is the title as per Grice's contribution in the Canada symposium ("Somewhere in Canada").

----

The whole point, as we know, is to challenge Quine. For Quine, 'is' does not make sense. "Pegasus is a flying horse" comes out in Quinese, as "x pegasises".

For Aristotle, Saint Thomas (of Aquino -- I prefer to credit the place in Italy, rather than invent a locative, Aquinas), and Kant, "is" is a bit of a copulative mystery. But surely the trio would disagree with Grice's panorama.

Grice wants to use "I" as a two-place predicate

I(x, y).

He reads that as

"x izzes y".

On the other hand, there's the, again, controversial, two-place predicate, "H", for hazz.

So, if the lion has a mane, we get

H(lion, mane).

This sounds otiose. In the end, it is captured, as Jones notes (in perhaps other language), by Porphyry's tree. The idea that we have classes, and that some members of some classes are essentially members of some other classes.

It's best to see this as it applies to Socrates, which is what Grice does in the Aristotle paper (as I think).

Socrates is white (accidental).
Socrates is wise (apocryphal).
Socrates is mortal (tautological).

This should provide with some complex formula

H(x, y) --> I(y, z), and so on.

Jones has formulated all this in his lovely pdf document.

------ The point for Code was that Code was an Aristotelian. So, unlike Grice's games, Code thinks that Grice is helping to INTERPRET Aristotle. In Philosophy, philosophers usually don't speak with each other. So Code was successful, in ways, to bring Grice's language-philosophical formalism to discussions of say, the book Z of Metaphysics.

Aristotle invented a sort of Greek. I once tried to prove that his features were dialectal, since he was not a native of Athens. By the same token, someone said, you can claim that what Heidegger writes (and the way he destroys standard German) is dialectal too.

Grice's hazzing and izzing are dialectal features. Most likely they were not picked up by his son (or his daughter).

------ And so on.

Later,

Speranza

Grice and Code on Aristotle

Roger Bishop Jones, for The Grice Club

Speranza and I have been discussing metaphysics at "The City of Eternal Truth".
There has been a little hiatus since I got distracted but metaphysics is for one reason or another still in my thoughts, and PGRICE having become less visible on Google books I felt the need to get some better access to Code's paper in that volume.

I went to the British Library and scanned it, so I at last have the whole thing.
At the same time I sought the paper by Grice which arose from the Grice/Code collaboration, but made a mistake and ended up scanning a different Grice paper on Aristotle (on the multiplicity of being, which I am still glad to have).
The one Code refers to is "The relation between form matter and composite in Aristotle's metaphysics".  But its not clear exactly where it is to be found so I have not succeeded in locating it.

I searched the BL catalogue and the internet and the Grice club but came up with nothing.

Surely its in Speranza's head!

Roger Jones

Grice: Eschatology

Speranza

--- We are considering that strand in the work of Grice: 'presupposition', as pointed by Jones re: some work by Neale.

---- Some excerpts below on Collingwood on 'the science of absolute PRESUPPOSITIONS', as per wiki.

Jones has commented on that at the CITY OF ETERNAL TRUTH (this blogger).

It may, I hope, connect with Grice's serious idea of 'eschatology'. In "WoW", he cared to reprint, out of the blue, as it were, since it does not connect with much else, his 1987 (so this is not really a _reprint_) essay on "Philosophical eschatology". Recall that Section II of WoW he cared to title, "Explorations in Semantics and Metaphysics", so it fits.

For Grice, Metaphysics has two realms:

--- metaphysics proper, or ontology, rather.

--- eschatology.

It seems that ontology deals with categories as given -- the 'synthetic a priori', as it were?

But there should be room for a discipline that he calls "philosophical" eschatology (as opposed to theological eschatology, of course). The idea is that the "philosopher" (rather than the scientist, say, so here he may disagree with Collingwood in this being a _science_ (of absolute presuppositions) has the ability to CHALLENGE a given set of 'allegedly' absolute presuppositions.

The philosopher considers the categories that define an ontology, but he can also explore what Grice calls transcategorial barriers and epithets.

This is interesting in that Grice goes on to apply this to a trick of a word,

"right".

As in

"That's right"
"That's alright".

He takes up neo-Thrasymachus's position: 'right' is POLITICAL right. Grice opposes this view (which he identifies with Nagel's, a former student of his) with neo-Socrates (Rawls) for which the 'right' is the MORAL right.

The outcome of any dialogue between the positivist and the moralist then may well be defined in terms of eschatological remarks. It takes a change of the 'absolute' presuppositions to challenge that there is, say, a priority of the moral right over the political right. And so on.

--- And so on!

---



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Pierce/An_Essay_on_Metaphysics_(R._G._Collingwood)

Chapter IV of Collingwood's "Essay in metaphysics" is entitled, "On Presupposing".

There are statements, questions, and suppositions.

That which is stated is something that can be true or false.

Following a convention that he does not like, Collingwood will call this a proposition, and stating it is propounding it.

It is not clear that Collingwood makes an important distinction between a statement and a proposition.

Neither does he say explicitly that they are the same thing.

Every statement is the answer to a question.

This question is always logically prior to the statement.

In scientific thinking, the question is also temporally prior, although it persists while it is being answered.

For example, an everyday observation like

"That is a clothes-line"

is preceded logically, but perhaps not in time, by a question like

"What is that line for?"

Every question has a presupposition, which is logically prior to the question.

The question "What is that line for?" has the presupposition that the line is for something.

When a question has an unmade presupposition, it is said that the question does not arise.

For example, the question

"When did you stop beating your spouse?"

usually does not arise.

[I discussed this elsewhere. Grice refers to the wife in WoW:Presupp. and Conv. Impl, and most notably in that section that Neale was complaining Grice did not reprint in WoW, in "Causal theory of perception". Grice uses,

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

along with "My wife is in the kitchen or the bathroom", and "He has beautiful handwriting" and "She was poor but she was honest" as the FOUR examples. This one is of 'presupposition'. I discussed this elsewhere, "Tu non cessas comedere ferrum", You do not cease to eat iron, an old sophisma.

That a supposition causes a question to arise is the logical efficacy of the supposition.

The supposition need not be a proposition in order to have logical efficacy.

For example, in commerce, the supposition that people are dishonest causes receipts to be requested.

But a request for a receipt is not an accusation that somebody is in fact dishonest.

Assumptions are suppositions made by choice.

Not all suppositions are assumptions.

It can be rude to accuse people of making wrong assumptions when they are only making suppositions.

Presuppositions that are themselves answers to questions are relative presuppositions.

There are also absolute presuppositions, which are not answers to any questions.

--- These should interst us as we walk towards the city of eternal truth. Or not!

They are not propositions.

They are neither true or false.

For example, the pathologist works with the absolute presupposition that every disease has a cause.

This is not something that can be discovered or verified, like the existence of microbes.

It is taken for granted.

The metaphysician's job is not to propound this or that absolute presupposition, because it cannot be done.

The metaphysician's job is to propound the proposition that this or that supposition is an absolute presupposition.

The next Chapter, V, Collingwood entitles, "[Metaphysics as] The Science of Absolute Presuppositions".

Thinking comes in grades.

In low-grade, unscientific thinking, we do not recognize that every thought answers a question, much less that every question has a presupposition.

Low-grade thinking cannot give rise to metaphysics.

It does give rise to the "realist" theory whereby knowledge is "intuition" or "apprehension" of what confronts us.

The harm of Realism comes from thinking that it is re-doing, only better, what people like Descartes and Kant have done.

As higher animals can use energy in bursts to overcome obstacles, so humans can use high-grade, scientific thinking to transform their world.

High-grade thinking depends on:

1. Increased mental effort, with which comes the asking of questions.

2. Skill in directing this effort:

Questions that may be grammatically one, although they are logically many, must be
disentangled and resolved into their components; arranged so that a question whose answer is presupposed by another question precedes that question.

This work of disentangling and arranging is analysis.

It is the work of detecting presuppositions.

Detecting absolute presuppositions is metaphysical analysis.

But all analysis raises the question of whether a given presupposition is relative or absolute.

Thus metaphysics is born together with science. (Surely Collingwood was well read in Carnap -- and Grice was _hearing_ all this).

As invented by Aristotle, metaphysics (after the nonsense of ontology is removed) is the science of absolute presuppositions.

This will be shown by the examples in Part III. Meanwhile, we are working what this formulation of metaphysics means.

Telling whether a presupposition is relative or absolute:

--- can be difficult, since acknowledging the existence of absolute presuppositions is out of fashion in modern Europe;

--- cannot be done by introspection, since this only focusses on what we are already aware of, and in low-grade thinking, we are not even aware of the questions that our propositions answer;

requires analysis.

This analysis can be done with a willing subject trained in some scientific work, but unused to metaphysics.

He will be "ticklish" about his absolute presuppositions, but not the relative.

He will accept an invitation to try to justify the latter, but not the former. However, the subject will lose value as he gains experience.

It is better to experiment on oneself.

Ordinary science identifies relative presuppositions for future study.

Metaphysics, absolute presuppositions.

Absolute presuppositions can cause "numinous terror" (in the terminology of Rudolf Otto).

In the past, people had "magical" ways to deal with this terror.

Now we have abolished magic, so we frown on metaphysics, denying the existence of absolute presuppositions.

This is neurosis. Successful eradication of metaphysics will eradicate science and civilisation.

Pseudo-metaphysics asks whether a given absolute presupposition is true, and why.

Answers to such questions are nonsense.

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" Grice and Collingwood on absolute presuppositions

Speranza

Grice, WoW: 279, ref. to: "the inquiry whether you have left off beating your wife".

Neale was referring to this when he was objecting ("bad judgement"?, "error in judgement"?) on the part of Grice to EXclude the four examples in "Causal theory". These were:

Have you stopped beating your wife?
My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bathroom [garden].
She was poor, but she was honest (and her parents were the same, till she met a city feller and she lost her honest name, cfr. variant version: victim of a squire's whim, first he loved her, then he left her, and she lost her honest naym."
He has beautiful handwring.

Grice:

"This [Third] Section is here omitted,
since the material which it presents
is substantially [but not accidentally,
Neale argues] the same as that discussed
in ['Logic and Conversation']. Under the
general heading of "Implication"[loaded], I
introduced

FOUR

examples, one exemplifying what is
commonly [oh, so commonly] called
the notion of 'presupposition'

----- "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

--- the other THREE being instances
of what I later [in 1965, "Logic and
Conversation", Oxford lectures, now in
the Grice collection] called 'implicature'.
In one case of conventional implicature

----- "She was poor, but, boy, wasn't she honest."

---

"... and in the other two of nonconventional implicature"

to wit:

"He has beautiful handwriting" -- particularised.

"My wife? Either in the garden or the kitchen, I expect" -- generalised.

-----

"With regard to the four selected
examples I raised FOUR
different questions, on the answers
to which depended some IMPORTANT

[oh, so importantly important!]

distinctions [he said smugly] between
the examples. These questions were

--- whether the truth of what is implied
is a necessary condition of the original statement [or query, as in "Have you stopped...?"]'s possessing a truth-value.

---- whether the implication possessed one
or both of the features of detachability
and cancellability.

---- whether the presence of the implication
is ["or is not", Grice redundantly adds] a
matter of the meaning of some particular
word or phrase.

"I also raised the question of the connection, in some cases, of the implciation and general principles governing the use of language, in particular ["the the 'wife in the garden or kitchen' example] with what I later called the first maxim of Quality." This should read, "Quantity", since it's all about a conversational move being OVER-Strong, or under-weak, as it were. "On the basis of this material I suggested the possibility of the existence of a class of nonconventional imlpications which I later called conversational implicatures."

I.e. "Have you stopped beating your wife?" left far behind! _Pace_ Strawson!

Cheers.

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" Grice on presuppositions

Speranza

Of course, this is about Lacan. See what happens when you start to using Husserlian jargon without disimpicating it.

The Impossibility of Philosophy without Presuppositions; Sublation

In the introduction to the first chapter of his Greater Logic ,[63] Hegel discusses his goal of creating

"a philosophy without presuppositions".

The locus classicus then is Hegel.

To put it simply, Hegel concludes that it is impossible to begin a logical analysis without intentionally, if tentatively, adopting presuppositions.

One needs an initial working hypothesis or abduction.

We have just explained that Hegel criticized other philosophers for basing their theories on unexamined presuppositions.

Does this mean that Hegel himself is open to the same criticism despite his denials?

Hegel would argue

"No."

The problem with most philosophers is not that they start from presuppositions, which is inevitable.

It is that they never return to critique their initial presuppositions.

Presuppositions should only be accepted tentatively as working hypotheses to be developed and tested.

Hegel argued that his totalizing philosophy and dialectic logic of Aufhebung (frequently translated into the dreadful English word "sublation") always turns back on itself.

This enables one not only to develop the logical consequences of a hypothesis but also to return to and analyze the starting point—to test the hypothesis.

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.

"For how can I start stopping beating my wife," asked the unmarried bachelor.

Sublation, then, is the concept we need to understand Grice's disimplicature.

It is a process by which internal contradictions of earlier concepts are resolved, but not in the sense of suppressing difference.

The German word aufheben means paradoxically to preserve as well as negate.

("No, I'm not married" -- "The Bachelor's Diary").

"To sublate" [i.e., "aufheben"] has a twofold meaning in [German]: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to.

Even "to preserve" includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it.

A bachelor can hardly start stopping beating his wife.

Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved.

It has only lost its immediacy but it is not by that account annihilated.[66]

Heidegger noted this when he remarked,

"But then, Noth noths." Carnap laughed at this.

In trying to understand the dialectic, many Americans are hampered by having been taught a crude caricature of sublation as a simplistic trinity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

That is, a thesis is presented, an internal contradiction or antithesis in the original thesis is identified, and the two are resolved in a harmonizing synthesis, which destroys all previous contradictions.

This serves as a new thesis, starting the logical process over.

This formula is designed more as a means to discredit Karl Marx (who expropriated Hegel's method) than to understand philosophy.

Indeed, this is how I was introduced to it in kindergarten. ("This is not your pencil.")

The problem with this description is that it suggests that sublation destroys all difference and deviation by converting them into an oppressive compromise.

Rather, as the German term implies, sublation preserves, as well as negates, the prior concept. Sublation is not merely tertiary—it is quadratic.

Thesis and antithesis exist in contradiction.

Through sublation these contradictions are simultaneously resolved into synthesis so that at one moment thesis and antithesis are revealed as identical.

Yet there always remains an unmediated moment, a hard kernel of unsublated contradiction, a phantom fourth, the trace or differance of deconstruction, that resists mediation.

That is, in sublation (or disimplicature, if you mustn't) we have not only the thesis and antithesis and the moment of identity of synthesis, but also simultaneously the moment of difference which resists sublation.

In sublation the difference identified in the earlier stage is always preserved because it is always a necessary moment in the development of the later.

To gussy it up with more fashionable terminology, the earlier concept is at one moment always already the subsequent concept, but simultaneously the very existence of the latter concept requires that the earlier concept is not yet the later concept.

Now, if we change the 'rules', as Quine has it, and allow that a bachelor can 'get a wife', he surely can later start stopping beating her. Or not.

Sublation (i.e., synthesis) can never destroy the differentiation between self and other (thesis and antithesis) precisely because sublation is the recognition that at one moment self and other are truly the same while at another moment they are truly different.

Moreover, the moment of identity is itself different from the self-identity of self and other.

In other words, in the differentiation of self and other, identity is a possibility.

It is through sublation that the possibility of identity is actualized. But at the same time, self and other must remain differentiated in order for actualization to remain possible.

Hence Hegel's famous slogan,

"the identity of identity and non-identity."

-- now in the coat of arms of the Hegel family, in Hanover.

This is a necessary result of the circularity of the dialectic.

Although worded in terms of the proactive resolution of what initially appeared to be contradictions into an implicit and inevitable whole, sublation is simultaneously the retroactive breakdown of what initially appeared as a harmonious whole into unresolved inherent contradiction.

And so on.

Presuppositionless pragmatics -- (Was: presuppositional apologetics)

Speranza

Oddly, wiki has this entry, presupposition,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupposition_(philosophy)

that is totally unhelpful (They keep asking, "was this helpful to you?" -- such a presupposition-loaded query).

It reads:

"In epistemology, presuppositions relate to a belief system, or Weltanschauung, and are required for it to make sense."

Weltanschauung is a good one, and I will analyse it:

welt--- world
an----- German for 'in', or 'on', I'm never sure.
shau -- English: 'show' as in "Broadway show"
ung --- English -ing.

worldinshowing, as it were.

"A variety of Christian apologetics, called presuppositional apologetics, argues that the existence or non-existence of God is the basic presupposition of all human thought, and that all men arrive at a worldview which is ultimately determined by the theology they presuppose."

Or fail to presuppose. Indeed Grice grew tired of Strawson's Sticking with the King of France existing or failing to exist (before we can deem him bald or not). Perhaps the existence of (a bald?) God is more powerful?

"Evidence and arguments are only marshalled after the fact in an attempt to justify the theological assumptions already made. According to this view, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of God unless one presupposes that God exists"

Ditto for the king of France.

Dummett, typically, argued that to demonstrate that

the QUEEN of England (he means Elizabeth I) was bald is just as otiose. He notes that there is a way to verify that (or not). He calls himself an intuitionist.

--- Recall that Russell ended the polemic by noting that a "Hegelian, who likes a synthesis" will possibly conclude that the king wears a wig.

----

This all escaped Strawson, who has "the king of France is _wise_" rather -- NOW THAT is presuppositionless!

"; modern science is incapable of discovering the supernatural because it relies on methodological naturalism and thereby fashions a Procrustean bed which rejects any observation which would disprove the naturalistic assumption. The best the apologist can do is to argue that the resulting worldview is somehow inconsistent with itself and therefore irrational (for example, via the Argument from morality or via the Transcendental argument for the existence of God)."

And so on!

"You're the cream in my coffee!"-- Grice on disimplicature

Speranza

I am using this example, because in unpublished (but never unwritten) notes, Grice has this marginal comment,

"You're the cream in my coffee!"

-- the 'disimplicature' being TOTAL!

--- I may have written something about this elsewhere in the Grice Club. Now for some running commentary on Jones, as I focus then on this notion of

"disimplicature"

(which may be behind much talk on presupposition, presupposition cancellation, loose, undeterminacy, and so on...)

Jones writes:

"I thought I might say a little about why I was curious about Grice's views on presupposition. This is in the context of our "conversation between Carnap and Grice", which has been dormant for a while. It seemed to me, though I don't believe this comes from Carnap, that Carnap's position on ontology as given in his "Empiricism Semantics and Ontology" is a bit like saying that ontological questions external to some language framework (which Carnap considers meaningless) might well be considered common presuppositions to any assertion in the language."

I would think, but we would need to trace this, that this is Collingwood's idea of 'presupposition'. Collingwood is particularly interest in that, like Grice and Strawson, he is "Oxford" (or Oxonian). It MAY relate, since Collingwood was a bit of a continental, with Husserl:

"Philosophy without presuppositions."

I never understood that term! But you are right, also that it connects with Grice's appeal to English -- an English philosopher works with the categories of the English language, and so on.

"Presupposition to any assertion" is a good one. Horn once wrote on this, on what he called 'assertive inertia," I think. I pointed out to him that, for Grice, this extends BEYOND assertion: questions ("Who killed Cock Robin?") and orders ("Do it!") also _presuppose_. While there is this idea that

presupposing

conflicts with _stating_ or asserting (what Grice, as Neale notes, calls central speech acts), as opposed to 'implying', it also applies to central speech acts which are NOT assertion. There is a recent book by Palgrave Publishers on "Assertion" which might consider at this pont.

Jones continues:

"The question is then whether Grice would have any objection to that way of talking about a non-natural language. My impression is however, that Grice's objection to presuppositions is exclusively related to his objecting to truth value gaps in natural languages."

Indeed. For we can see that System G, as we call it, or System G_HP, strictly: a highly powerful version of System G, is about:

syntax
semantics
pragmatics

Most of the alleged divergences between 'and' and '&', say, can be dealt with syntactically. In SOME cases, we need an appeal to the 'semantic' truth-tables. The whole enterprise starts to loose sense if we allow that in truth-value assignment we are allowed NOT to assign a truth-value.

By distinguishing syntax-semantics here I am being a traditionalist. By syntax, Grice and I refer to Gentzen-type of 'natural' deduction, introduction and elimination of symbols. Consider the introduction of 'and', or the elimination of 'and', and so on.

The 'semantics' for "and" is a different animal. Here we see that "p & q" receives the same truth-table that "q & p" does. The commutability of "and" then is 'semantic' rather than 'syntactic'. In the case of 'negation', perhaps it's both. And so on. For each operator, we need to consider this. In the case of the definite description, we need to focus on the introduction/elimination (syntax) of the iota operator, and the truth-table for the iota operator. Grice considers this in terms of what he calls the

Russellian expansion

in WoW. I.e.

"The king of France is not bald"

thus gets expanded in THREE conjuncts. A & B & C. In none of them he considers the 'iota operator', but we have to trace the 'iota' operator to its very definition. E.g. its reliance on Leibniz's Law of the equivalence of indiscernibles, and so on. For 'iota' is a DERIVED symbol. But it DOES depend on the symbol for "=", identity. There is a closure clause for defining iota-x, such that there is no other "y" such that... "=" itself is a derived sign. So we need to consider all the primitive syntax behind "the". Then, we identify the minimal syntactic rules, and THEN we deal with the semantics.

The pragmatics for System G would allow for things like:

"Jones's butler was clumsy."

He meant, "Jones's gardener," since U wrongly thought that the man with protruding ears was Jones's butler (he was dressed as one, and Jones indeed had him dress as a butler for that special party). Grice wants to say that 'clumsy' attaches truthfully to that individual that the utterer describes as "Jones' butler". The utterance in itself is _false_. And so on. In any case, there is a pragmatic explanation for any divergence as regards the truth values of things like descriptions. Neale does not consider this, but I would think the expansion,

"whoever he is"

works very well. In some cases, when we use a description, such as "the president of Ruritania", "whoever he is", "must have it easy". In other cases, it is totally uncalled for. You can NOT add, "whoever he is". "The president of the USA, whoever he is, is meeting the president of Italy, whoever he is." This sounds as _too loose_. Grice sometimes, as Neale notes, introduces some devices that LOOK like formal, but they ain't. In some cases, the typography fails. Grice uses square-brackets, the WoW reprint does not. The joke is lost. In other cases, Grice uses SMALL CAPITALS: "JONES'S BUTLER", as oposed to "Jones's butler". In one case, it is IDENTIFICATORY; in the other it is not -- Grice unimaginatively, but he would rather be seen dead than using Donnellan's vocabulary -- says 'non-identificatory' (Donnellan: attributive/referential).

And so on...

Jones continues:

"In the case I had in mind, the presupposition does not result in truth value gaps.
Not at least in the language itself, though Carnap's view on these external questions, that they are meaningless, does result in no truth value for the external question."

Good. We would need to discuss this in

Husserl: title of his book: philosophy without presuppositions. What are the presuppositions of philosophy? Suppose materialism versus empiricism. The existence of sense-data, or the mind. Is that a 'presupposition'? What is Husserl aiming at? He thinks that Phenomenology discusses things, philosophically, and does not need any presupposition as to what's there.

Then there's Collingwood. He is considering things like the idea of history, etc. And he notes that there are 'presuppositions'. Grice et al, in "Metaphysics" in Pears, The nature of metaphysics, discusses this particular use of 'presupposition' as it was influential in Oxford pre-analytic philosophy of metaphysics. Collingwood was the prof. of metaphysics, at the time Grice was writing that.

And then there's Carnap, and Strawson misusing a word with recognised pedigree, as 'presupposition' was, to simple things like,

"By uttering 'the king of France is not bald,' the utterer IMPLIES that there is a king of France, which happens to have hair." And so on.

Typically Grice would not stand such loose use!

Jones continues:

"Carnap himself I think would consider the question of truth value gaps in natural languages (and indeed most questions about natural languages) as
belonging to some science (linguistics?) because natural languages are contingent, rather than to philosophy."

Grice would of course aim at deeper, more committed view! Why leave it to linguistics, or some empirical science, what philosophers DO with language or lingo? He wants to say that truth-assignment (central meaning, in Strand 5) is so basic, that without it, there's no room for the analytic-synthetic distinction. It all depends on the alethic view on things. This is NOT something that can be refuted, say, by a Chinese speaker who says, "Hey, in my dialect, "The moon is made of cheese" displays a truth-value gap."

--- And so on!

Jones continues:

"However, he softened on the question of the limits of philosophy, and would problably not want to press that kind of objection to ordinary language philosophy later in his life."

To think that the Carnap papers somewhere deposited in a uni deploy such varied views! Grice, too, later in his life, changed his views. And to think that what he left in the Grice papers could fill VOLUMES!

Jones:

"I just had a look at the Strawson paper in the Carnap Schillp volume, which is about the relative merits of constructed and natural languages in analytic philosophy. Strawson seems rather dismissive of the case for formality. He misses however a central issue, which is the difference between his (Strawson's) conception of philosophical analysis and Carnap's. He is assuming that in advocating formal languages for philosophy Carnap is advocating their use for the kind of philosophy which Strawson is doing, i.e. the analysis of ordinary language. But Carnap doesn't consider that to be philosophy,"

Lovely. Grice, at least, KNEW that! He relished (if that's the word) in that anecdote. When Gustav Bergmann (whoever he was) was invited to attend a Saturday morning with Austin, Bergmann allegedly replied:

"I rather do things other than spending a Saturday morning with a group of English futilitarians."

---- Grice was being reactionary, and by sticking to the implicatures of idioms he KNEW he was not doing philosophy (or Philosophy) but he loved not doing it!

----

Jones:

"and so its very unlikely that he intended to advocate formal languages specifically for that purpose. Grice's neo-traditional line of argument sometimes sounds more like an exploration than a statement of conviction on Grice's part.
He wants to contradict those who argue that the logic of ordinary discourse must diverge from "classical" logic in various respects, but it's not clear from my own reading of Grice that he is not playing "devil's advocate", perhaps having a less dogmatic view on this than appears."

Too true. I LOVE your reading of him!

"In "Vacuous names" which is part of that enterprise, Grice looks very exploratory and experimental. It has a flavour of "lets see how far we can take this" (can we have our cake and eat it?) and devotes very little energy to the question whether ordinary language really is like "system Q"."

Too true. He is especially exploratory in that he starts the thing by noting that Quine disallows "names" in his system. So, seeing that there are no NAMES, who (i.e. Quine) cares if some of them (i.e. names) are vacuous? It is very sad that Quine, in his "Reply to Grice", notes that he rather not even GO there. He finds all the subscript notation totally otiose, when there is a re-write to hand. He notes, too, that for "Fa" there's Ax & Fx -- i.e. a name like "Marmaduke Bloggs" (a) becomes the predicate, "being-Marmaduke Bloggs", and so on. He should at least pay some attention to the later segment on descriptions as such. But Quine was very confused about propositional attitudes. He thought that 'believing that the sun is red' is an unanalysed predicate (notably in "Words and objects"). The logical form of

"Peter thinks Paul is good"

is Fa -- where 'a' is Peter, and "F" is "-- thinks that Paul is good"; to be further analysed by denying status to "a" and replacing it for the further predicate 'being Peter"

"There is something that holds the property of being-Peter and such that it also holds the property of thinking that Paul is good".

We know that Quine never understood philosophy as Carnap did. We know that Quine made BAD use of some ideas he just took from Carnap, and we KNOW that Quine used Carnap to bring in his own programme against anaytic philosophy, by proposing a scepticism towards what makes the venture of analytic philosophy worth being pursued, but that's another topic!

Jones continues:

"One trick [Grice] misses in this is the possibility of retaining a two-valued logic by "looseness"."

I love that. I point that using 'disimplicature' helps as well.

"U implicates" -- Grice spends some time elucidating. Let us revise what he says about "disimplicate", in the Grice Club, using the search engine, "disimplicature", some other time?

----

Grice's examples:

Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elinore.

Hamlet's father is dead.

In a context where utterer assumes his addressee assumes that the utterer assumes that Hamlet's father is dead, the utterer "is not committed to the usual entailment", as we may say, that Hamlet's father was on the ramparts.

Bill intends to climb Everest next week.

When context (looseness?) makes it obvious tahat there are forces that prevent us from fulfilling an intention, as we may say, one may utter

"Bill intends to climb Everest next week."

WITHOUT committing to the usual entailment. The utterer DISIMPLICATES that Bill is SURE, for example, or KNOWS, that he will climb Everest, "just because everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved," as we might say.

Implicature is a matter of meaning more than we say -- to entailed meaning, as it were.

With disimplicature, Grice is allowing that the MEANING conveyed by an utterer (who utters 'x') in a context may in fact be LESS than is entailed (as we might say) by 'x'. The entailment, to use Grice's word, is "dropped" in context.

Grice notes that 'disimplicature' is "total", as in "You are the cream in my coffee"" (Grice Papers). The remark appears in parentheses. In a context which makes the WHOLE of 'what is said', as it were, untenable, it can be replaced with an implicated (metaphorical) meaning ("You're my pride and joy"). The mechanism of disimplicature does not diverge from that of imlpicature. Disimplicature is explained in terms of the assumption that the conversationalist is abiding by the conversational 'maxims' (and principle), particularly those enforcing 'qualitas' (truthfulness) -- submaxim 1 in particular. If one of all the entailments of 'what is said' are PLAINLY *false*, they can be assumed NOT to arise on that particular occasion of use. S. Yablo noted, with scepticism: Implicatures happen. But then they often don't. Disimplicatures happen, then.

And so on.

Jones goes on:

"One obtains a loose semantics by using principles to constrain the interpretation of one or more constructs without making the constructs completely definite."

This, charming, looks like a semantic (or systemic) regimentation for what may be eventually, a process of a pragmatic nature (as disimplicature is). But it is welcomed in allowing to observe what type of looseness is involved, and so on.

"This is one way of dealing with partial functions in classical first order set theory. Under this scheme a definite description denotes some value even if the description is not satisfied, but in that case we have no way of knowing which function it denotes."

Very good. It may relate to 'dossier'. Neale does not mention this, but Evans does in his "Ways of Reference". Evans takes up the notion of a 'dossier' that Grice introduces in "Vacuous Names". When conversationalist A meets conversationalist B they have to work on the overlap of a dossier. An example from Urmson, "Intentions and Intentions", Aristotelian Society, may apply:

"I saw Mary's husband today."

----- It turns out that he saw the postman. "Why didn't you say, "the postman", rather than "Mary's husband"? -- I.e. A and B, as they converse, have dossiers:

Philip: Mary's husband, the postman.

--- When we hold a conversation, we apply the definite description that we think fits best "in the context of utterance", as it were. This may relate to what Strawson, before Grice, for once, called,

Principle of the Presumption of Ignorance
Principle of the Presumption of Knowledge
Principle of Relevance ("Identifying reference and truth-values").

Without a bit of each, conversation could not even start. If we all share the same knowledge, what's the point of INFORMING, say? And so on. These pragmatic dimensions may implinge on the semantic looseness that Jones is referring to. Or not!

Jones:

"This works fine in a two valued logic and is the usual way of treating Hilbert's choice function (which corresponds to indefinite description)."

Lovely. Grice was OBSESSED with 'indefinite descriptions'. Apparenly, he never saw farther than:

"He is meeting A WOMAN this evening." Implicature: not his wife.

----

"I found a tortoise in a house." (Not my tortoise in my house).

"She broke a finger" -- the nurse. Not hers?

And so on. This is in WoW: III. He is discussing the logical form of indefinite descriptions, and is like precisely refuting a view like Cohen's:

Cohen would like to say that 'a' (as in "an x") has DIFFERENT _senses_ according to context. Grice sticks to just the logical form of the canonical system, with glosses for any further implicature (or disimplicature) that may arise in context.

I never use "a" or "an" in indefinite descriptions. To me, "a" means "one" ("He is meeting ONE woman this evening."). I use 'some' -- I follow Warnock there, "Metaphysics in Logic" -- "Some kings of France are not bald," say.

--- Note that in the paraphrasis for "(Ex)" in WoW:II Grice gives "some (at least one)". The use of 'one' to replace (Ex) seems colloquial.

Jones concludes his interesting post:

"Though this way of dealing with the problem is quite old, the possibility of "looseness" of this kind is not often alluded to by philosophers, but might possibly be the best way to interpret natural languages as two valued logics."

Indeed. Keyword then: LOOSENESS. Cfr. VAGUENESS, FUZZY, DISIMPLICATURE, and keep counting!

Cheers.