Re: Grice on Aristotle, rednecks and metaphysics

Speranza

Jones writes: "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."

----- Recall that Grice has TWO papers on the PPQ: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (so far -- we never know if his further unpublications will in the future be published by PPQ: one is the EARLIER, 1986, "Actions and events" -- this was possibly submitted by Grice himself; the other is the 1988 "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being". This is the one that originates in the Victoria lecture. It is in the "Aristotle" PPQ essay that Grice even cares to quote from Code -- you see, by the time of the re-elaboration of the "Aristotle" paper from the Victoria essay, Code had published his thing in PGRICE and so Grice can acknowledge it -- in a footnote.

--- (While "Actions and events" (PPQ) deals mainly with Davidson, although he cares to explore Reichenbach, von Wright, and Kant, "Aristotle" (PPQ) is mainly about izzing, hazzing, and the development of Aristotle's metaphysics).

Jones goes on:

"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)."

I happen to have seen that volume, once published by the BBC books (now defunct publishing house). Some great photos! I loved the interviews to R. M. Hare, and so many others. My friend Donal McEvoy is a FAN of Magee.

---

Jones:

"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."

Indeed. In "Reply to Richards", Grice refers to Ayer as the once 'enfant terrible'. I do have Ayer's bio -- in two volumes. The first one, "Part of my life" is essentially lovely. He came from quite a different background from Austin or Grice -- but they all met in the Oxford of the 1930s. Recall that Grice, unlike Ayer, came from even a _different_ background. Being from the Midlands, he landed on Corpus Christi (Grice did). Ayer was meeting with Austin, Hampshire, and others (Hart, notably) back in All Souls, but Grice, having been born on the other side of the tracks, as he said, never met them personally _Before_ the ['Phoney', so mis-called] War. But the things were there. In particular, I have argued that Grice's "Negation and Privation" -- his very first -- is empiricist, and positivist at heart -- within the Oxonian tradition, that is. Grice is thus generationally a slightly later thing than Ayer (Ayer, b. 1911, like Austin; Grice b. 1913). But in any case, for were much YOUNGER ('youngER brightER things') than, say, Ryle b. 1900, or Mabbott, or Collingwood...

(I mention Ryle, because he was Ayer's TUTOR -- so we can claim ascendancy here. And it was because of RYLE's advice that Ayer ever made it to Vienna -- not to waltz precisely?)

---

Jones goes on:

"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")."

Indeed. Carnap is a more complex figure than Ayer. For one, it is dangerous to speak of things like "Vienna Circle" simpliciter. Ayer himself, once back in Oxford and London, started to read, more or less seriously, all the work of the empiricists: Locke, and Hume -- He came with a volume of problems in the philosophy of knowledge -- and the foundations thereof. He ended a phenomenalist, as it were. His connection with Oxford ceased to be strong. And it's only YEARS AFTER, when he became Wykeham, that the paths reunited. (Ayer will discuss Grice's theory in a symposium in the Aristotelian Society, in 1977, on "The causal theory of perception", for example). (In the interim, were Ayer's _London_ years). Plus, he became like the official historian of Russell and Moore, whom he claimed -- against, perhaps Grice -- at the root of much of analytic philosophy.

----

Jones:

"This sense of similarity is also to be found in Gellner, whose "Words and Things" criticised a group of disparate movements including both Logical Positivism and the ordinary language philosophy which followed it at Oxford."

Grice criticised, rightly, Gellner, in "Reply to Richards". Grice considers Gellner a sort of Bergmann without a sense of humour. (Bergmann had said, 'I won't waste my time with the English futilitarians'). The criticisms by Gellner I have expanded on elsewhere, notably due to the encouragement by T. P. Uschanov. ---. Gellner, a French philosopher, does not take 'analytic philosophy' too seriously. At that time, Urmson, and Austin, and Hare, and others -- including Strawson, but alas no Grice -- were making it to the "Continent" to popularise the 'movement' ("La philosophie analytique"). Oddly, the connection Gellner--Magee is somewhere there, since Gellner was influential in London (rather than Oxford -- London being a sort of arch-enemy to Oxford's conservatism and reactionariness) along with Magee's idol: Popper (who was never accepted in Oxford).

---

Jones:

"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."

It IS a lovely book, Ayer's -- by Gollancz, in a very user-friendly backcover edition. It is full of insight. I always loved his EMOTIVISM, since, I think a chain can be traced between, say, Ogden and Richards -- vide discussions with R. Dale, this blog --, via Ayer, to STEVENSON. This is the Stevenson of 1944, Ethics and language, that Grice will quote in his "Meaning" (1948). So, Grice in a way was generalising over this trend of emotivism. Ayer is crucial with regard to illocutions with forces other than 'indicative' -- his remarks on the 'statements' of ethics or aesthetics in his book (which only took two weeks to compile -- he was v. busy otherwise -- marrying his wife in London, and moving houses). Of course, he made history with his declaration of the Verifiability Principle, which had to undergo so many refinements along the way, too.

----

Jones:

"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."

Indeed. Ayer is never so negative. This may have to do with his background in classics -- and his early days with Austin and Hart and Hampshire in the "All Souls" Tuesday evening group.

You see, what Grice calls "The Play Group" (led by Austin) was indeed the offspring of this earlier group he had conceived back at All Souls (I. Berlin's college) in Oxford. They would discuss things like 'reduction' of material-object statements to 'sense-data' statements, and so on. They would conduct those conversations in _English_. It is only with the developments of Quine, a decades later, after Russell/Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, that Oxonians started to take the idea of a _calculus_ seriously. Also perhaps via Wittgenstein, who played with symbolism in Tractatus, drawing some commentary by Urmson, say ("Philosophical analysis: its development between the two worlds"). In the case of Grice, the input came from Strawson.

You see, Grice tutored Strawon in _logic_ (Grice was a don at St. John's, Oxford, where Strawson had this scholarship, the John Locke scholarship). Strawson ended up with a 'second', but in his first book, "Intro to logical theory", he managed to credit Grice ('from whom I never ceased to learn about logic') -- and it's all about:

"She married and had a child"
"She had a child and married"

-- and so on. Strawson has sections for _EACH_ operator. Only when it comes to (x) and (Ex) does he care to quote from Grice (This is Strawson 1952). It is here that Strawson states Grice's thesis that 'natural language' and 'formal language' can be claimed to be IDENTICAL if the main divergence one can trace is otherwise explainable via pragmatic constraints of informativeness, and so on. Why is it that it SOUNDS as if the two sentences above _depict_, to use Witters's words, a different state of affairs. Well, because one usually narrates things as they happened. In this case it is not informativeness; it is orderliness.

But Grice was never too interested in these things. His concern was a more British (or empiricist) one when it comes to the _weaker_ (he found) language of phenomenology. Why is it weaker to say,

"It looks to me as though the pillar box _is_ red". (cfr. "It looks to me as though the pillar book might LOOK red".

---- In WoW, Retrospective Epilogue (strand 6) he then puts things in context, and clarifies things. He notes that his interest in implicature (or 'pragmatic' vs. 'logic inference') had originated in questions in the philosophy of sense-data (he was aligning with G. A. Paul -- is there a problem about sense data -- against "later Wittgensteinians" who would say that "it SEEMS red, and it IS red" is not a 'form of life' and a 'language game' to match).

Jones:

"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."

Indeed. On top of that, Ayer started to be better known for his other books on the foundations of knowledge (that Austin studied thoroughly in his lectures, "Sense and sensibilia"). He was also collecting his other essays from his London days, and he was studying the early philosophies not just of Russell -- his phenomenalism -- but Moore. His links with the general guidelines of Vienna (or "Unified science") were a thing of the past, or something he was not focusing his attention on.

---

(A good thing here is that Penguin book, "Central questions of philosophy", Ayer's Guifford -- where he goes back, slightly, to whatever was that he had found central back in the day --. Incidentally, the conversation with Magee in Men of ideas is also good. It is the 'reminiscent' Ayer, as it were, with thoughts on Wiesmann, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and a few others).

Jones:

"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)."

Good, I should elaborate on each of the points:

"My interest in hazz and izz is not the question about whether "is" has a multiplicity of meanings, but" on

(a) "the role they play in distinguishing accident and essence",

----- Why does this connect with 'multivocality'? I think the key is Aristotle's and Grice's (or Kantotle's, rather) view on categories. Why is it that "Socrates is mortal" one likes to pronounce "Socrates izzes mortal", whereas, "Socrates is white' comes out in Grice's dialect as "Socrates hazz white". Then comes Kripke, who will say that Socrates's whiteness is perhaps _essential_ to the thisness that Socrates was. This connects with (b):

(b) "the relationship between these and necessity and contingency,"

------ If one just sticks with Socrates, a first substance, as it were. One considers the categories that he also represents. Recall that for Kant, the first category of substance is a no-no. It all starts with quality, quantity, modus, and relatio. Quality is the key. Some qualities of Socrates are accidental ('he didn't wear glasses', 'he was a slow runner'). Some are not ("he thought himself a genius"?). Kripke (whom Jones will not agree with) will start to use

<>p
[]p

i.e. the diamond and the square of modal logic (which he was familiar with from work by Lewis, and Dummett?). In this case, we surely need PREDICATE logic, not propositional. <>p won't do. We need to consider variablas and predicates (the linguistic correlate of a 'quality'. And we play with symbols, and consider whether we want to subscribe to various alleged paradoxes of necessity.

In the case of Grice, his interest was somewhat more historical, in that he saw as rallying to the defense of the under-dog, the underDOGma, of the analytic/synthetic distinction. But he possibly did feel that 'synthetic a priori' was something to consider. He would inquire the playmates of his two children (Karen and Tim) with things like whether a shirt could be 'red and green' all over ('no stripes allowed') and so on. As we saw in "Retrospective epilogue" -- after discussing the strands -- he concludes that the analytic-synthetic (rather than necessary-contingent) distinction is at the ROOT of ALL metaphysical and philosophical thinking. Even if, alla Carnap, he has grown a 'pragmatist' and allowed for 'degrees of relevance' of this or that notion ("analytic"-for-this-purpose, etc.).

Jones:

(c) "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)." --- The connection with Plato is an interesting one, as developed by Code. Since surely Grice's Kantotle cannot just be born out of thin air. It was Plato that provided the input for Aristotle. The distinction may be seen in terms of 'order' as when logicians speak of first-ORDER predicate calculus. Plato seems to be talking, almost always, in terms of higher orders. Hence, the qualities, which in Aristotle are just accidental/essential correlates to this or that predicate, become things we can talk about -- subjects of propositions. "The whiteness of Socrates", 'the wisdom of Socrates'. Code, as Jones is well aware, since he has used the formalisations, and improved on it, in the pdf document, goes on to suggest that it's best to see Aristotelianim (qua metaphysics) as a later development from Platonism, now understood in terms of a few axioms in the theory of izzing and hazzing.

---

Jones goes on:

"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)."

Good points. My first unpublication ever, typically, was on Plato. Since in most philosophical schools, one STARTS a Platonist, and ends an Aristotelian. There are LOADS to discuss about Plato, his theory of forms. Crombie, and so many interpreters, come to mind. My tutor in this area was for example obsessed with Plato's _early_ theory of forms (we spent a whole term discussing paragraphs from the Eutyphro, in Greek, which is about 'arete' or virtue). So, even within Plato, there is a continuum or historical aspect. There IS a verbal issue, which was the focus of my unpublication. At the time, I was obsessed with Plato's Cratylus, which helped! ---- Grice and Austin, along with Urmson, were somewhat keen students of not just Aristotle's but Plato's philosophy. Urmson has a good essays and books on Plato and _ideas_. How to understand the transcendence of universalia, then, in a 'material' (metaphysical) mode, and then in a 'formal' (linguistic) mode? --- The fact that Plato's style becomes somewhat pompous (that dialogical form, and the attitude that Socrates always wants to strike) does not help. But interpretations of Plato's doctrines may come handy. Of course, most philosophers will even agree that Plato's style exceeds that of Aristotle.

Aristotle's work on metaphysics, being in the form of a treatise, rather than a dialogue, is in comparison rather blunt, and uninspiring. (Except to Grice, Jones, and Speranza). His examples are somewhat out of the blue. Recall that his dialogues are all lost. All we keep are his boring notes on 'ta meta ta physika', which we never know who they were intended for. The opinion is that they were lectures he wrote for OTHER lectures at the "Academy". I.e. the methodology of philosophy was, then, as it is today, in Oxford, via dialogical tutorials. So the notes on metaphysics are rather a collection of 'rudiments' of what to sustain, in terms of opinion, about where _universals_ fit.

And of course, a good thing is that Plato is ALWAYS on Aristotle's mind ("Plato may be my friend, but Truth is a better one"). So, Aristotle ('third man') is never allowing us to _forget_ the deep metaphysical waters (where Plato drowned?) that Aristotle was so ready to get away from. Or something like that.

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Jones:

"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."

Good. I think Grice's love for systematicity came from his festschrift to Quine. -- Recall his System Q. So, in the "Metaphysics" (Aristotle on the multiplicity, PPQ, 1986) essay, he again attempts to provide a _formal_ calculus for the ideas at large. He had first attempted this in "Vacuous Names" (although he was familiar with the axiomatic treatment to logic via Strawson's Introduction-- indeed, it was Grice who taught Strawson all that). In "How pirots carulise elatically -- some simpler ways" (unpublication) he also explored formal axiomatics. The rudiments of language. So it is natural to see the logic of izzing and hazzing as Grice's attempt (now in metaphysics) to trace what Aristotle and Plato (if not Kant, or Hegel) were talking about. The outcome is an elegant system that allows for some considerations as to inmanence of universalia, definitions of 'thisness' (tode ti) and so on. ----.

For Grice, these systems have at least three levels: there's the grammatical--and syntactic level, that he needs to axiomatise. Then there's the semantic component. (This is relevant when it comes to Aristotle -- since Jones has dealt with his syllogistics, and things like 'truth-value gaps' which occur in some interpretations of Aristotle -- e.g. Strawson's -- are best seen as _semantic_ rather than syntactic. Finally, there is the 'pragmatic' (or contextualist) component, that Grice elaborates on at the later segments of the "Aristotle" PPQ paper. How to allow that some implicatures of 'Harry is healthy' are to be disimplicated ("He cannot be healthy or cease to be: food ONLY is healthy -- not people"). And so on.

It is like if Grice is saying that the formality belongs to the syntax-cum-semantics. It's in the pragmatic realm that 'natural' language becomes naturalised, as it were. Or something like that.