Deviant Implicatures

In his commentary to this blog post, J writes:

"Quine's Phil. Of logic I have and read a chapter per annum or so. Doesn't WVOQ allude to Peirce's prag. verificationist criteria, a few times? (not quite the same as the positivist sort): what difference does the truth or falsity of some proposition/statement mean in terms of experience, ie measurable criteria, or something like that."

---- Yes. I was surprised, as per wiki's entry "Deviant logic", that indeed Haack borrows directly from Quine. Deviant is not a TERM *I* would use. We tend to associate it here with alternative sexualities. Just teasing!

-- But yes, that would be the Quine of "Word and object".

--- Note incidentally, that Quine provides an answer to Grice's and Strawson's "In defense of a dogma" in that manifesto, "Word and object". Recall too that Grice contributed to a lovely volume against Quine, "Words and ObjectIONS".

J goes on:

"And while not too pleasing to logicians or mathematicians, most ordinary research/science works in that manner--. In that sense Toulmin was a bit of a pragmatist too, eschewing pure formality in favor of applicability and evidentialism of a sort."

Yes, the tradition in Quine must come via Skinner ("Verbal behaviour") and perhaps the Chicago school of semiotics (Peirce, Morris, etc.). Very American.

J writes:

"Some of modern logic--such as quantification --may have had applications. But much was merely cold routine. Most humans, hearing some egghead say the King of France is bald would, say that's gibberish."

Oddly, in Latin, that would come out as

"Rex Franciae", rather than "THE" King of France. This possibly would mean that (ix), iota operator, as in the logical-form of Latin-language sentences, would seem otiose.

The problem is with the king of France _not_ being bald, which is true. The king of France is bald -- that's not gibberish, to Grice. It is false. But yes, blame Strawson on the gibberish. In fact, he is relying on Russell, as we well know. Oddly, Strawson writes,

"The king of France is not wise".

'bald' is Grice's and Russell's choice; Strawson's is 'bald'.

J goes on:

"Russell wants to insist it's not just gibberish but..false, because there is no such King. OK. But compared to trench warfare or the Great Depression or Hiroshima, logical analysis seems rather trivial, if not slightly...macabre, IMHE--as with the mysterious Charlie Dodgson hisself. The positivist Weltanschauung WAS Carrollian in a sense."

Yes. Recall that Russell attacked the Hegelians, too. When he closes the thing,

----

"Hegelians, who like a synthesis, may conclude that the King of France wears a wig".

Similarly Horn has noted a glitch in Strawson's way of finishing HIS discussion of "King of France": "The logic of ordinary language is neither Russellian nor Aristotelian; ordinary language hasn't got a logic".

Horn notes that

"The logic of ordinary language is not Russellian"

is a bit like

"The king of France is bald"

if you are going to back THAT claim on 'ordinary language having no logic'. Etc.

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J goes on:

"Hegelian tradition while not without problems--had a rather greater scope--not just oxbridge or Harvard philosophers, but World History, the State, nations, peoples, languages."

Yes. Good you mention that. When Elinor Ochs went to Malagasy she found that speakers there were NOT Gricean:

"My sisters is in the garden or in the music-room"

was NOT understood, as "I don't know where she is"

Ochs note, "These people are very reluctant to give information, especially about their sisters; Grice is refuted here."

The last chapter of my PhD dissertation I entitled, "The cunning of conversational reasoning", since I thought that, naive as Och's argumentation is -- it required a better answer than that provided by Gazdar and others. So, I thought a way to combine Grice's "universalism" (Kantian in nature) with neo-Hegelian evidence to the effect that Grice's scheme is Not universal would be in order. Or not.

J goes on:

"Even Peirce respected Hegel, in some sense. Don't forget the peeps, JLS."

No. M. Hollis has written extensively on "cunning of reason" which is a lovely concept. I learned about Hollis et al via my PhD thesis supervisor, who would have us read, "Rationality and relativism". In that area, you get a lot of literature from anthropology, etc. British anthropologists, the idea of 'magic', why 'rationality' may be a European concept, and so on. All very odd.

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Etc.