Grice on Aristotle, rednecks and metaphysics

I hope as Speranza suggests, that Grice's paper on the multiplicity of being does originate in the one referred to by Code in PGRICE and so I am now looking at it.

This is the place where his reference to "rednecks of Vienna" appears, in an otherwise wholly unpolemic context.

I am at present reading an autobiographical volume by Bryan Magee, an Oxonian best known as a populariser of philosophy in the broadcast media, notably through a series of interviews with (then) contemporary philosophers (probably many now dead).  The relevance of this is that it reminds me of something which I have perhaps not paid enough attention to in the history of mid-century Oxford philosophy, which is that the brief ascendency in Oxford of Logical Positivism was of that special brand of logical positivism encapsulated in Ayer's "Language Truth and Logic", which is a world apart from the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap.

A mark of the distinction between the two (perspectives on logical positivism) is found in Magee's representation of Logical Positivism and the subsequent Linguistic Philosophy as being rather similar, rather than (as I have represented Carnap's philosophy) as in important respects diametrically opposed (see the diagrams which I put into our "Conversation between Carnap and Grice").
This sense of similarity is also to be found in Gellner, whose "Words and Things" criticised a group of disparite movements including both Logical Positivism and the ordinary language philosophy which followed it at Oxford.

Ayer's Logical Positivism was the first distinctive contemporary philosophy which I became acquainted with, and I have ever since been some kind of positivist.  I had only very limited exposure to Carnap as an undergraduate (though the one paper I know I then read probably was his most important and original: "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology"), and it was not until I had spent decades in computing and was once again returning to
Philosophy that I became better acquainted with the main tenor and central themes of Carnap's philosophy, and with Russell's idea of "scientific philosophy" which had inspired it.

If one were to pick any feature to distinguish the two variants of logical positivism which I am here speaking of, it is the attitude towards natural languages.  Russell and Carnap were advocates of the new logic, believed that Philosophy could be made rigorous using these new methods, which made use of language for philosophy more precise than ordinary language.
This is the central thrust of Carnap's philosophical programme, in which he saw himself as laying the philosophical ground for a transformation, both in philosophy and science, similar to that achieved for mathematics by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica.

There is little trace of this in Ayer's "Logical Positivism", which is the beginning of a more genteel oxonian kind of philosophising, in which certain of the doctrines of logical positivism, most notably the verification principle, were the subject of debate and refinement without much contribution from modern logical methods.

Anyway, here I am, still a positivist and much in sympathy with the Viennese "rednecks", but perhaps just as interested in Aristotelian exegesis as was Grice, though perhaps not for the same reasons.  My interest in hazz and izz is not the question about whether "is" has a multiplicity of meanings, but the role they play in distinguishing accident and essence, the relationship between these and necessity and contingency, and the extent to which Plato and Aristotle can be seen to connect these issues with anything like semantics (and hence the analytic synthetic distinction).

Back to the metaphysics, it is of interest, especially to a positivist, whether the difference between Plato and Aristotle in relation to Universals, primarily the question of immanence of universals, are substantive or might be argued to be merely verbal.  They disagree about how to talk about universals, but can one simply translate between the two in a way which causes apparent disagreement to dissolve into terminology (bearing in mind here that for Carnap ontology is in a sense instrumental rather than absolute, so he will accept universals in an ontology if they serve pragmatically the purposes of science).

Grice and Code together are helping me to approach these issues, which are primarily motivated by a positivistic inclination which I don't imagine either would have shared.

Roger Jones