Grice's compleat angler. Chapter One: the fishhook

We are considering

p ) q

-- where ) is the horseshoe

and

p -> q

where -> is the fishhook.

J notes:

"Given material implication (ie, same truth table for p -> q AND -p v q and -(p & -q), right?) ...is there such a thing as a conditional?"

Right. I dislike the term. Oddly Grice never titled his 7 William James lectures. However, when Lecture III did circulate, it was referred to, informally, as

"Indicative conditionals".

Grice kept that slogan as the title for what later became, then, chapter III of his Way of Words.

But he does note, possibly after Mackie, that subjunctive conditionals do not fit the ) horse-shoe account. So there.

J adds:

"A true conditional's just another name for inclusion of a sort (not to bless set theory across the board)--ie, and yes Aristotle's square of opposition, mostly, with the (x) as universal and ∃x as particular. ("but" is usually read as "and")"

----

Right. Grice loved the way Strawson did take the Square of Opposition so seriously. It's interesting that for Aristotle, 'opposition' is not really 'negation'. Else he would have called it "The Square of Negation".

---

J adds:

"But....IIRC we also need to add...and the shit exists (which is to say, in real world situations, the ∃x relates to confirming premises, that is it's worth caring about...Hubble searching for a bald King of France? Teapot? Jeezuss? or something)"

Yes.

Jones has dealt with this, even if he did not express it in your direct terms ('shit exists'). Oddly, Stephen Yablo would say, echoing Strawson, perhaps: "impliatures happpen".

Jones has dealt with this in his account of Grice on izzing and hazzing, which contains -- in pdf form -- an account of the forms which Strawson thought 'invalid' because, well, "There is S", is not 'presupposed', or stuff.

J adds:

"What do syntactical types mean by logical form/LF ? Something like ,looks somewhat logical, and has a form, and helps out CHomsky's programmme."

Yes. The person who helped the Chomskyan programme least was Chomsky. He should NEVER have used 'logical form'. He used "LF", which some interpret as logical form. But there are problems:

Neale, "LF and Logical Form"

The problems were early enough understood brilliantly by who I regard as the most brilliant of the Princeton philosophers ever: Gilbert Harman (I love the name, "Gilbert", and opine that more philosophers should be called "Gilbert" than Ryle or Harman).

Harman wrote:

"Deep Structure as Logical Form"

Chomsky has changed his mind so soon on this that it's difficult to keep track.

For Grice, a wff is possibly a logical form. But informal types use 'formal logic' differently. This irritated Grice so, that he would say that, given the accounts of logical form provided by some of the informalists, we may just as well play with a regressus ad infinitum, and ask:

the logical form
the logical form of the logical form
the logical form of the logical form of the logical form

and so on.

I mean, there must be a stop!

Grice was more interested in EQUIVALENCE of logical form. As when informal logicians say "by virtue of the logical form".

Note that in the first and second pages of "Logic and Conversation" Grice overuses 'formal':

"formal devices" are

(x) (Ex) & v ) i

"natural counterparts" we know: not, and, or, if, all, some (at least one), the.

----

THEN he proposes to give a caricature of Strawson as an 'informalist', and he succeeds. The strawman Strawson is attacking is the "Formalist".

I have, after Grice, changed idioms here and refer to the formalists as the 'modernists' and the informalists as the neo-traditionalists.

Etc.