By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club
Thanks to Speranza for his exhaustive commentary on Neale's review of WOW.
I thought I might say a little about why I was curious about Grice's views on presupposition.
This is in the context of our "conversation between Carnap and Grice", which has been dormant for a while.
It seemed to me, though I don't believe this comes from Carnap, that Carnap's position on ontology as given in his "Empiricism Semantics and Ontology" is a bit like saying that ontological questions external to some language framework (which Carnap considers meaningless) might well be considered common presuppositions to any assertion in the language.
The question is then whether Grice would have any objection to that way of talking about a non-natural language.
My impression is however, that Grice's objection to presuppositions is exclusively related to his objecting to truth value gaps in natural languages.
In the case I had in mind, the presupposition does not result in truth value gaps.
Not at least in the language itself, though Carnap's view on these external questions, that they are meaningless, does result in no truth value for the external question.
Carnap himself I think would consider the question of truth value gaps in natural languages (and indeed most questions about natural languages) as
belonging to some science (linguistics?) because natural languages are contingent, rather than to philosophy.
However, he softened on the question of the limits of philosophy, and would problably not want to press that kind of objection to ordinary language philosophy later in his life.
I just had a look at the Strawson paper in the Carnap Schillp volume, which is about the relative merits of constructed and natural languages in analytic philosophy.
Strawson seems rather dismissive of the case for formality.
He misses however a central issue, which is the difference between his (Strawson's) conception of philosophical analysis and Carnap's.
He is assuming that in advocating formal languages for philosophy Carnap is advocating their use for the kind of philosophy which Strawson is doing, i.e. the analysis of ordinary language.
But Carnap doesn't consider that to be philosophy, and so its very unlikely that he intended to advocate formal languages specifically for that purpose.
Grice's neo-traditional line of argument sometimes sounds more like an exploration than a statement of conviction on Grice's part.
He wants to contradict those who argue that the logic of ordinary discourse must diverge from "classical" logic in various respects, but its not clear from my own reading of Grice that he is not playing "devil's advocate", perhaps having a less dogmatic view on this than appears.
In "vacuous names" which is part of that enterprise, Grice looks very exploratory and experimental. It has a flavour of "lets see how far we can take this" (can we have our cake and eat it?) and devotes very little energy to the question whether ordinary language really is like "system Q".
One trick he misses in this is the possibility of retaining a two-valued logic by "looseness". One obtains a loose semantics by using principles to constrain the interpretation of one or more constructs without making the constructs completely definite. This is one way of dealing with partial functions in classical first order set theory. Under this scheme a definite description denotes some value even if the description is not satisfied, but in that case we have no way of knowing which function it denotes. This works fine in a two valued logic and is the usual way of treating Hilbert's choice function (which corresponds to indefinite description).
Though this way of dealing with the problem is quite old, the possibility of "looseness" of this kind is not often alluded to by philosophers, but might possibly be the best way to interpret natural languages as two valued logics.
Roger Jones
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
This is beautiful, Jones! I hope you will explore the last paragraph a bit more! Alas, 'definite description' -- and its bibliography is not my forte! We may want to revise how Grice (and for that matter, Neale) deals with that. We may recall that in Neale's review of WoW (Ling and Phil) there is a bit of formalism there, using the 'iota' operator. I may transcribe the bit. I note that Neale quotes,I think, from his "Definite description" book. I wouldn't know about that, but it may seem that this was an early interest of Neale. I do recall that it was, for a while, an interest of Schiffer -- in an extensive essay in _Synthese_. I will try and comment to anything but the last paragraph. I mean: I love the last paragraph. The idea of a loose semantic is appealing. Grice had troubles with this. In WoW, when discussing:
ReplyDelete"That tie is red under this light, but orange under this other light". He notes that to use "is" is "loose" speech, since the correct is: "that tie SEEMS red, etc." He notes that loose speech is acceptable. He later (not in WoW) connects this with 'disimplicature'. If by implicature we mean more than what we say, by disimplicate we mean less than what we say. Disimplicature is an exploitation (if that's the word): you drop entailments. "Hamlet saw his father", "Macbeth saw Banquo". Strictly, we know that we should use 'see' when 'what is seen' exists. But we can drop that entailment. In WoW he specifically refers to this as 'loose'. Other authors have used this adjective, 'loose', but I rather bring it to the attention of Jones as he speaks of 'loose' semantics. I once corresponded with a few logicians who called themselves (or theirselves, as I prefer) 'fuzzy'. It may relate. Williams himself has written extensively on vagueness which may still apply. And of course Atlas has spoken of underdeterminacy (which I think Neale considers briefly in his review of WoW).
I will consider the other paragraphs separately.
ReplyDeleteBut you are right that 'presupposition' has a few different usages, and in "Metaphysics" (coauthored Grice/Strawson/Pears), Grice seems to consider what we see as Collingwood's use of "presupposition". We should explore this. It connects with the internal-external distinction as applied to Carnap. As I note, Strawson was NOT using the technical, 'presuppose' in "On referring"; he explicitly writes that "by uttering, "The king of France is not bald", the utterer IMPLIES that there is a king of France". Thomason, and a few others, have referred to this distinction: implicature seems like a pointed act -- you imply because it is your intention to imply -- but cfr. "A rainbow implies rain", in "Dict. of Philosophy." 'presuppose' should be used only in reference to Collingwoodian issues. On top of that, in Kneale, Development of Logic, there are loads of stuff on 'suppositio', which applies. The mediaeval logicians were enamoured with 'suppositio'. Why Strawson changed his mind, and replaced his apter 'imply' for 'presuppose' (a redundance, where 'suppose' does) is something to consider perhaps. It was easy enough for Grice to deal with this manoeuvre then: what Strawson thought was a 'presupposition' was just an 'implicature', about which he was talking BEFORE Strawson knew the first thing about philosophy (Recall that Strawson was Grice's student -- at St. John's -- when fresh from the Army, Strawson got the John Locke scholarship. Grice was Strawson's tutor, and it was perhaps sad that Strawson got a 'second' -- Most of this I read from that book of memoirs by that OTHER tutor at St. John's at the time: Mabbott, the Scots philosopher. The book is "Oxford memories", and Grice knew of it. "Dear good ol' Mabb," he would say, "I never thought he thought so highly of me!" (Mabbot describes Grice as 'excellent'). And so on...