Modified Occam's Razor

or "Implicature" saves, but there is no such thing as a free lunch (they say).

Grice and Aristotle on the multiplicity of being and multivocality of 'being' -- and so on

Speranza

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

"The reference in Code in PGRICE to Grice says: "The relation between Form, Matter and Composite in Aristotle's Metaphysics Z" which was apparently a paper at a conference held by the University of Victoria in January 1979, sponsored by the Canada Council. But were the proceedings published, or did the paper appear anywhere else?"

I wouldn't think. But surely it should be cited thus:

Grice, H. P. "The relation between form [eidos],
matter [hyle], and composite [hylemorphism] in Aristotle's Metaphysics Z" -- unpublication, 1979. The Grice Papers. UC/Berkeley, Bancroft.

The mimeo that B. F. Loar published as "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being" (PPQ 1986) is possibly Grice's rewrite out of Grice 1979. Recall that Grice's were the days without word processor, or even typewriter.

Jones goes on: "My own interest at present is in Plato and Aristotle as providing an early approximation to the analytic/synthetic distinction, (as the essential/accidental distinction, or the necessary/contingent) and in the relationship between metaphysics, semantics and epistemology in this area, most of which must have been of interest to Grice also. I did make a start in my "PDF" which started from the Code formulae and later went into the syllogism, and I did come out of that knowing a lot more about Aristotle than I did when I went in. But I didn't come close to understanding fully any of the parties involved even in this limited domain (Plato, Aristotle, Grice and Code), and now that I feel once again the need to trace the history of Hume's fork I can probably do best by revisiting the Code paper. But it looks like the corresponding Grice paper will prove elusive, perhaps it was never in print. I do now have the one on multiplicity of being, which looks to me a nicer piece (and more relevant as it happens) than Grice's Eschatology paper in WOW, which I have not been able to get on with very well."

YES -- the "Aristotle multiplicity" essay is a jewel. And I'm glad B. F. Loar decided to edit it for publication as a memorial to Grice in PPQ 1986.

I love the way Grice discusses the work of fellow Oxonian G. E. L. Owen ("Snares of Ontology", for that is what they are) -- and others.

Of course, the 'izz' and the 'hazz' is JUST PART or a part of the whole thing, and -- if we are tracing the history of this, we know (from Code, then, in PGRICE) that Grice had all these ideas clear by 1979, when he first introduced the izzing and the hazzing at Victoria University, in Jan. 1979.

The "Aristotle" PPQ paper goes on to provide a lot of clues for what is now referred to as 'contextualism'. I especially enjoyed the latter bits where he discusses various types of 'ambiguity'.

For recall that Grice's attempt, in the "Aristotle" paper, is that there is possibly NO MULTIPLICITY of being in Aristotle!

Grice wants to say that we have 'izz' and we have 'hazz'.

But NOT that 'is' is ambiguous. (So Clinton was thinking 'implicature' when he said, "it depends on what the utterer means by _is_").

Grice's other examples include:

"He is a French teacher".

This may mean, "He teaches French". "He is French". We would NOT like to say that "French" is ambiguous. In many other unpublications Grice shows how he was obsessed with that.

"Roberts is between Smith and Williams."

Grice wants to say that 'between' is not ambiguous. The relevant unpublication by Grice reads:

"Need to distinguish all thse from cases
where SPEAKER might mean so-and-so or
such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of
the sentence".

Grice notes:

"

"Jones is between Williams and Brown"

EITHER spatial order or order of merit, but DOUBTFUL this renders it an ambiguous sentence."

These are unpublications dealing with Strawson's and Grice's joint work on Aristotle's categories. Notes in Grice's hand record that

"healthy"

can be applied to, or predicated of:

'person', 'place', 'occupation', or, 'institution' -- while

"medical"

can be applied to 'lecture', 'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription'
and 'advice'.

Linguistic botany, Austinian code, at its best.

----- (Grice Papers, Bancroft).

Grice notes that the neutral term (lingustic)

'employment' -- of utterance x --

can cover the important different terms

'use'
'sense'
and
'meaning' -- cfr. Frege, Sinn, Bedeutung.

--- and that here is it is perhaps
most appropriate to say that the predicate has
the particular range of 'uses'.

Thus, for Grice, the notions of 'sense', 'meaning', and 'use' nned to be distinguished not just from each each other, but ... between discussios of sentences and of speakers. And so on, hence his remark on the univocality of 'between', say ("Do not multiply _senses_ beyond necessity").

"Multiplicity" is perhaps too grand a word here, when dealing with Kantotle, or Grice's Aristotle. "Multivocality" would perhaps be better. (Grice goes on to prefer AEQUI-vocality, where this is a good thing, since 'aequi-' means, 'same').

Of course, Grice's biggest lesson came when he applied this "modified Occam's razor" to _must_. Surely there is NO distinction between a physical must ('what comes up must go down') and an ethical must ("you must not lie"). It's not like 'must' is ambiguous. (The "AEQUI"-vocality thesis, or the unity of practical and theoretical reason, no less).

So, if in Grice 1979 (Grice on Aristotle's Book Z) was trying to elucidate an exegetical problem -- as it indeed touches with Platonism -- Grice's interest was wider.

Code makes a good point that Aristotle's theory changed along the way. As W. Jaeger noted, the early Aristotle is Platonistic enough, so this becomes a problem when speaking of "Aristototelianism". What stage in Aristotle's development are we signalling? And so on.

Jones has done some excellent work towards the formalisation and elucidation of this in his pdf. Cheers.