Accidentally/Inadvertently

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club

I have NOT checked with Austin, but at

http://spruce.flint.umich.edu/~simoncu/380/austin.htm

I read of:

"Small distinctions, and big too [445.2]"

"Inadvertence" should be distinguished from ... "accident."

---- which seems slightly otiose in that I was NOT going to _not_ distinguish them. But the issue may have a connection with grander discussions of, say, Aristotle, on 'accident'.

This site below is confusing enough, so I like it:

http://www.nd.edu/~bbranson/aristotle-gettier.html

[B]y “accidentally” Aristotle is not giving a circular account. This is the technical phrase kata sumbebekos, which Aristotle is using in contrast to the phrase kath hauto. (Aristotle gives the example that “the house-building faculty is a cause of a house kath hauto” – by itself, per se – whereas “the pale or the musical is a cause kata sumbebekos” – per accidens, by coincidence, or “concurrence”). The idea is that some X which instantiates paleness or musicality may be the cause of a house, but only in virtue of the fact that X also instantiates “house-builder-hood.” What Aristotle is getting at in his second condition, then, is that for something to happen “by luck,” it must involve final causation that is affected in a certain way by the above kind of concurrence or coincidence, which Aristotle calls being “accidentally numerically one” or “one in number, but not in logos.”

---- So the next step, elsewhere, perhaps, would be: how does this relate to Grice on 'free'?

And whether Austin's distinction, as may permeate in our distinguishing the use of the adverb 'accidentally' from 'inadvertently', follows from the Aristotelian paraphernalia. Or not, of course!