More on Izzing and Hazzing

Roger Bishop Jones

Without as yet actually using Grice's words (though I might well put them in soon), the subject matter of Grice's work on predication in Aristotle is one of the topics under discussion at the moment on the phil-logic@philo.at mailing list.

It may not be a favourite haunt of Grice club denizens (Grice doesn't often get a mention) but I thought it worth a mention.

In my own formal work partly inspired by the Grice/Code collaboration I combined formal models of essential and accidental predication (izzing and hazzing in Grice's terms) with the syllogistic logic.
In doing so, my preliminary conclusions were that once you bring in that distinction (which seems to originate rather in Aristotle's metaphysics than his organon), then the rules of the syllogism become more complex, the usual conception of validity not being reflected fully for all kinds of predication.

Grice's interest seems to have been at least partly in multiplicity of "being", the question whether that verb has more than one sense.
Izzing and Hazzing are different names to distinguish two ways in which "being" (and some other words like "having") are used, the neologism being useful because the distinction between essential and accidental predication (as this is conceived by Aristotle) is not in ordinary language consistently conveyed by distinct vocabulary.
Grice I believe was inclined to question that multiple senses really are involved, and the question arises by what criteria one can judge whether observed usage constitutes a single or multiple senses.

On this I remain at present, much less than adequately acquainted with Grice's position, but there is one possible criterion which now occurs to me as a result of material on phil-logic.
It seems that there may be differences in Aristotle's conception of the ontological commitments implicit in affirmative propositions according to whether they involve essential or accidental predication, and hence differences in truth conditions.
The idea is that an accidental universal affirmation does entail existence, whereas an essential one does not.
I am still not clear on whether this is the case, but if it were and the truth conditions do vary in such a manner, then it is hard to see how these two kinds of predication could avoid being distinguished as different senses.

Could one plausibly argue against the "multiplicity of being" if it were once established that there is a multiplicity of truth conditions?

RBJ