Grice and the King of Prussia

-- by JLS
-- for the Grice Club

In "Actions and Events," then -- a paper that you won't find quoted a lot, all in all, in the philosophical literature -- "which is sad," Geary commented, "it being a pre-humous publication" (I sometimes dislike his black humour) -- Grice notes when discussing

"things that exist"

"It is obvious that VERY MANY WIDELY
different answers have at one time or another
been put forward; some of them have been
WILDLY GENEROUS like Richard Robinson's
'You name it,' since anything you can [actually]
_mention_ will win its share of the prize; some
of them have been REMARKABLY NIGGARDLY, like
what Broad [an otherwise tolerable philosopher]
once [and just once] reported to be Hegel's
solitary selection, namely the Kingdom
of Prussia."

(p. 1-2).

----

It may do to compare this with Russell's example, as changed by Russell:

"The king of France is bald".

For some reason, discussed by Horn in "A Natural history of Negation," which spends some time with the implicatures of its negation, "It is NOT the case that the King of France is bald", Strawson (who was Grice's student, or 'pupil' as Grice preferred, as if he ran a boarding school) changed that to:

"The king of France is wise."

---- (Horn mentions Bosanquet and Hegel as having used similar 'royal' examples.

In Broad's gloss, a distinction is made between:

"the kingdom of Prussia"

which includes Hegel as a non-singleton,

and

"the king of Prussia", which ALSO is a, perhaps 'better' member of that set.

At this point, Grice has a quote on ontological 'snobbery' -- (in "Method") vis a vis the desire not to be seen except in the 'company of the best'. But I disgress.

In any case, Hegel's point did make a reference to the _derived_ ontological status of "Kingdom of Prussia" from "King of Prussia" (or the other way round). Etc. Later.