The Izz and the Hazz

Speranza

In "Grice and Code on Aristotle", R. B. Jones writes:

"Speranza and I have been discussing metaphysics at "The City of Eternal Truth".
There has been a little hiatus since I got distracted but metaphysics is for one reason or another still in my thoughts, and PGRICE having become less visible on Google books I felt the need to get some better access to Code's paper in that volume. I went to the British Library and scanned it, so I at last have the whole thing. At the same time I sought the paper by Grice which arose from the Grice/Code collaboration, but made a mistake and ended up scanning a different Grice paper on Aristotle (on the multiplicity of being, which I am still glad to have).
The one Code refers to is "The relation between form matter and composite in Aristotle's metaphysics". But its not clear exactly where it is to be found so I have not succeeded in locating it. I searched the BL catalogue and the internet and the Grice club but came up with nothing. Surely its in Speranza's head!"

Mmm.

From what I recall.

Code was writing what he wrote in 1982, let's say. Perhaps 1984. The PGRICE volume came out in 1986, but surely the stuff was writing before then. So, the quotation is indeed here:

Code 1986

-- which now Jones has scanned. Then there is the Grice Aristotle essay in PPQ. (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly). The quotation should be:

Grice 1988.

---- As I recall, this was edited posthumously by B. F. Loar, for the 1988 issue (one of the 1988 issues -- the later one) of the PPQ. "In memory of Grice". So, again, it's not like Grice wrote the thing in 1988.

---- Now for the OTHER SOURCES.

Code does provide some background to the thing. It was a symposium (or contribution therein) by Grice back in the day (in the 1970s) in, of all places, Canada. (I love the misimplicatures of "of all places" -- set-theoretically, it is redundant).

-----

Most likely, that piece is the title as per Grice's contribution in the Canada symposium ("Somewhere in Canada").

----

The whole point, as we know, is to challenge Quine. For Quine, 'is' does not make sense. "Pegasus is a flying horse" comes out in Quinese, as "x pegasises".

For Aristotle, Saint Thomas (of Aquino -- I prefer to credit the place in Italy, rather than invent a locative, Aquinas), and Kant, "is" is a bit of a copulative mystery. But surely the trio would disagree with Grice's panorama.

Grice wants to use "I" as a two-place predicate

I(x, y).

He reads that as

"x izzes y".

On the other hand, there's the, again, controversial, two-place predicate, "H", for hazz.

So, if the lion has a mane, we get

H(lion, mane).

This sounds otiose. In the end, it is captured, as Jones notes (in perhaps other language), by Porphyry's tree. The idea that we have classes, and that some members of some classes are essentially members of some other classes.

It's best to see this as it applies to Socrates, which is what Grice does in the Aristotle paper (as I think).

Socrates is white (accidental).
Socrates is wise (apocryphal).
Socrates is mortal (tautological).

This should provide with some complex formula

H(x, y) --> I(y, z), and so on.

Jones has formulated all this in his lovely pdf document.

------ The point for Code was that Code was an Aristotelian. So, unlike Grice's games, Code thinks that Grice is helping to INTERPRET Aristotle. In Philosophy, philosophers usually don't speak with each other. So Code was successful, in ways, to bring Grice's language-philosophical formalism to discussions of say, the book Z of Metaphysics.

Aristotle invented a sort of Greek. I once tried to prove that his features were dialectal, since he was not a native of Athens. By the same token, someone said, you can claim that what Heidegger writes (and the way he destroys standard German) is dialectal too.

Grice's hazzing and izzing are dialectal features. Most likely they were not picked up by his son (or his daughter).

------ And so on.

Later,

Speranza