Grice and the vacuum cleaner

From

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/RichfestPartee.ppt.pdf

Partee quoting from Kaplan:

----- “Linguists are like vacuum cleaners!"

Note the "!"! It is a simile. Cfr.

Linguists are vacuum cleaners, like!

----

"Philosophers are rather like
black holes."

I never saw one!

---


"Philosophers react to every

theory by constructing

arguments against it."


----- Indeed, we are forgetting this aspect of Grice. My favourite has to be McKay writing for "Mind" on Grice being totally AD-HOC. McKay just couldn't BEAR the way Grice would listen to -- in this order, I analysed each:

URMSON
STRAWSON
STAMPE
SCHIFFER
SEARLE

and so on

---

to get to a 'richer' definition of "... means ...".

Or consider ANY THEORY ever posited by Grice. It is ALL-ways in response to a problem he was having:

-- briefly, we need to consider this in depth elsewhere, I hope:

"Negation" 1938 -- his reading of Plato, and Ayer, on Negation and how disturbing the view was. For Grice 'negation' is privation.

"Personal identity". 1941. A reaction to Broad and other Cambridge-based simplistic views. Quotes by ridiculous philosophers talking of the self-as-a-substance. Gallie, etc.

---

"Meaning" 1948. Reaction against Peirce's crypto-technical stuff. Reaction against Stevenson oh-so-simplistic 'causal' claims, drawing from Ogden, etc.

---

"Causal theory of perception" -- this was Grice's DEEPEST problem. His reaction against later Wittgensteinians (Anscombe) saying silly things like:

---------- "That horse cannot look like a horse; it is a horse."

--- Grice reacts against a poor reason to reject sense-datum (alla G. A. Paul, whom he quotes in "Retrospective Epilogue") on account of a silly 'doubt-or-denial' conversational implicature:

"It looks to me as if x is phi" -- by which I will not of course pretend to have suggested willingly that I want you to believe that I conceived, at all, the possibility that x may not be phi.

----

"Logic and conversation". Prolegomena is ALL about philosophers committing mistakes. I counted them! The most important mistaker being:

Grice -- "Causal theory" that Grice quotes
Strawson, Intro Log. Theory
Austin, here and there Philosophical Papers
Ryle, Concept of Mind
Hare, "the meaning of 'x is good' is "I comment x'"
Hart, in conversation, on 'carefully'
Benjamin
Wittgenstein, "This looks like a flower"
and so on.

---- We see then the implicatum-theory of ch. ii as a reply to correct that manoeuvre.

"Some remarks about the senses" -- perhaps this is more like 'creative'.

Exegetical work by Grice on Descartes, Moore, N. Malcolm, as it relates to the status of 'ordinary language'

LOTS of papers against the critics of "ordinary language philosophy".

"Method in philosophical psychology": a reply to behaviourism. A critique of eliminationism, etc.

"Conception of value", Carus lectures. First lecture dedicated to criticise Mackie, Foot, and a few others. There IS absolute value.

"Aspects of reason". Kant lectures. Aimed at criticising those who defend an is-ought divide. Reason pervades both theory and practice.

"Davidson on actions and events" PPQ -- great criticism of Davidson's very simplistic ontological views.

"Davidson on weakness of the will" -- in Vermazen. Attack of Davidson's terribly simplsitic account of what akrasia is all about.

and so on.

---- Perhaps the summary for this is in the last quote by Chapman in her book on Grice, and the ending of "Reply to Richards":

"If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead" -- bread-and-butter of the philosopher.

Kaplan goes on:


"Linguists", on the other hand, and where I would count:

WILSON, Deirdre
Chomsky, Noam

and a few others! (Some of my linguist friends ARE philosophers -- even if closet ones!)

"... react to every theory by sucking it in"

--- this should NOT _just_ mean sucking Grice in, as it were. But I think THAT was the context which originated Kaplan's semi-demonstrative cri-de-coeur.

"and using it to explain some of their millions
of examples.”

------

Explain away. I would think that linguists would NEVER have applied Grice's theory unless they saw it as 'liberating', i.e. as providing pragmatic (relatively easy) explanations of recondite semantic facts.

But -- in what way is this different from what Grice was doing with Hart, Strawson, himself, Wittgenstein, etc? Wasn't the concept of 'implicature' introduced to explain away some of the examples?

I would then propose:

(i)

--- the examples by Grice are 'suspect examples' -- and are NOT that many. And they are NOT of the form:

??? I see who the hell wrote the book.

---

But rather of the form:

"Philosopher P said that p; this is ridiculous, no. Why?"

----

---
The second feature to point out is

(ii)

What Philosopher P, even if misguidely, was trying to do, by saying that p, was to solve a philosophical puzzle or problem. Something of philosophical import and not about the grammaticality or lack thereof of a given utterance. E.g. Wittgensteinians applying criteria of privileged access to reject sense-data as 'communicable'. Or Strawson claiming that ordinary language is RICHER than formal logic thinks it is (His case for a richer reading of 'if' than the 'horseshoe'). Or Austin on the abuses of 'intentionally' in explanations of behaviour. Or: an important one vis-a-vis recent discussion by Blackburn and his quasi-expressivism: Stevenson's and Hare's account of 'emotive meaning' -- the nondescriptive content of 'evaluative words', etc.

---

Partee, a linguist, comments:

"Actually, aside from the fact that what vacuum cleaners normally take in is
dirt, we rather liked the analogy."

Good point. Plus, what does a _black hole_ do?

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