Rallying to the Defence of an Under-Dogma

Grice on the analytic-synthetic dogma

Speranza

Jones writes:

"Here are some responses to JLS followed by some more from on
the same topic."

Jones starts by quoting from Grandy's pun -- the underdogma of analyticity (Grice would rally to the defense of).


>> --- Lovely. We cherish REG's pun there:
>>dog-dogma-underdogma.

and asks,

>Whose pun?
>I thought it was yours.

Nay. It was Grandy's, as Grice credits it in WoW, "Meaning Revisited".

----- "My mischievious friend", he calls him.


>>(Incidentally, perhaps Hume's terminology is, more than
>>from Aristotle, who Grice worshipped -- in the figure of
>>"Kantotle" -- from Locke direct, whom Jones has edited.
>>For Locke, analytic propositions are 'trifle'.

Jones:

"I think myself that Hume's account is in some ways more
suggestive of Plato, especially when we see his scepticism
about matters of fact."

That's an excellent point. Recall too that IDEA was Plato's main contribution to philosophy. Odd how 'idea' changed its meaning so much, pace Grice, from Plato to, say Hume.

Jones:

"Philosophy in those days was still breaking away from Plato
and Aristotle, and the departure perhaps began with
translations of Sextus Empiricus commissioned by Savonarola.
This gave ammunition for sceptical arguments (initially
against papal (over?)dogma) which unfortunately had to be
mitigated to make room for the new science."

Good point about the Papal overdogma.

------ And I'm NOT surprised Savonarola rallied to its attack. One obituary on Dummett mentioned how surpised he was that Italians were (on the whole) so anti-Papal. I should trace the quote since it was lovely. It takes a converted Roman Catholic, as Dummett was, to understand Grice's father non-conformism, almost!

----

Jones:

"The first major philosophical (rather than ecclesiastical)
mitigation (if we discount less famous figures such as
Gassendi and Mesennes) was from Descartes, who used
sceptical arguments to sweep all aside before erecting his
own dogmatic rationalistic philosophy."

Excellent point. Back to Dummett, I was reading his early philosophical years, and Descartes's Meditations figured large, due to a programme conceived by Austin, which ended up with Frege. Should trace the quote.

Jones:

"Locke may perhaps be seen as reacting against the
rationalistic side of Descartes, re-asserting the empiricist
elements of Aristotle.
But in doing so he did not come up with a credible account
of the fork, he leaned to far in the direction opposite to
Descartes, allowing to small a role to the a priori
(trivia)."

Very good point. I wonder where Locke drew his Aristotelianism from. I like to think that, Oxford man that he was, he was against the "Cambridge Platonists" (whoever they were: Cudworth).

---

(There's also Leibniz in the continent, but we may dismiss him, pace Dummett).

Jones:

"Hume takes matter to their logical conclusion, and has a
much sharper conception of the divide.
First of all, he broadens the realm of the a priori,
relative to Locke, while, like Locke, denying it to any
matter of fact.
Secondly, in the sphere of the a posteriori, the matters of
fact of which our knowledge depends upon sensory experience,
he goes into just exactly one can infer from this sensory
evidence, which turns out (if implicitly we are asking the
question: what is logically entailed by the evidence) to be
almost nothing."

Excellent points. I think he was enthusiastic about 'associative psychology', too: there _are_ empirical generalisations, as it were, that we can make regarding the processing of empirical ideas. In those days, I'm surprised that philosophy continued to exist, since everybody seems to have been talking, to my ears, mere empirical contingent psychology (and developmental psychology at its worst).

Jones:

"Locke does not look to me (though I am substantially
ignorant) as a man influenced by scepticism to break with
Aristotle, but as one impressed by Newton's science to
endorse empirical methods rather than Descartes rationalism."

True. I always found Locke's refutation of INNATISM (the innateness hypothesis) fascinating. And it would take a Chomsky (in his Cartesian linguistics) to try (and fail) to redress the situation.

Chomsky's anti-Lockean rationalism is still a different animal from Grice's rationalism, which is more along Kantian lines ("I am enough of a rationalist", he writes in "Logic and Conversation").

Jones:

"Hume however, is taking seriously the influence of sceptical
thought, even though he too is under the spell of Newton,
and models his philosophy on the methods of empirical
science.
Hume's moderation of scepticism consists in cutting of the
scepticism at the line between relations between ideas
(which he considers to consist of certain truths) and
matters of fact (which is a very thin and uncertain soup).
His conclusions about matters of fact are very
controversial, but his drawing of the line which is his fork
(the first one) is much better than his predecessors, and the
importance he attaches to it is significant."

Point taken, and I think "Hume's fork" is a delightful phrase.

---

It's interesting that 'matter of fact', apparently a philosophical technical expression for Hume, has become a rather colloquial thing that one can hear from, shall we say, 'non-philosophers'. I'm sometimes puzzled by the uses of 'fact', 'matter of fact', and "as a matter of fact", and other colloquialisms that, when taken literally, seem anti-Aristotelian, and anti-Platonic even.

---- "Matter" must be Aristotelian, "hyle". "Fact" is more of a Latinate root, and it may be argued that the idea of 'fact' cannot be Greek or Aristotelian.


>> -- For what about a trifle proposition like
>> 2 + 2 = 4

"This is Speranza talking about Locke. But I had the impression that trifiling propositions for Locke
were even more trifling than that.
He seems to require that a proposition is trifling only if
the the subject appears explicitly as a part of the
definition of the predicate."

Indeed.

"Sugar is sugar", perhaps.

----- He worked with a Subject-Predicate logic, Aristotelian, and he seems to be thinking of things like,

"Man is rational".

How trifle is that?

And so on. Indeed, Kant's favourite example

7 + 5 = 12

is HIS example, not of a trifle thing, but of something 'synthetic a priori'. Dummett I think talked about this (as I read in one of his obituaries, about numbers. Should trace the quote).

Jones:

"By contrast with Hume, whose "relations between ideas" does
encompass the whole of mathematics (he says).
Did you get this example from Locke?"

----- Should recheck. But it would be good to trace at least Kant's example which we know was:

7 + 5 = 12.

as synthetic a priori.

----

Jones then refers to

.
>>an example that fascinated Grice:
> "Nothing can be green and red all over". -- Synthetic a
> priori.

and comments:


"Interesting...
Is that what Grice says it is?
I have a colour problem to dscuss later."

Yes. I may have provided the quote elsewhere in the annals of the Grice Club. He did so in UNPUBLICATIONS, though.

----- One unpublication reads:

Nothing can be red and green all over.

And this is a supposed candidate for a statement that is both synthetic and a priori.

The reference is:

Grice, H. P.
---- 'The Way of Words', Studies in: Notes, offprints and draft material.
The Grice Papers BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

-----

This relates to a recollection by Mrs. Grice. During the 1950s, Grice delighted in questioning his children Karen's and Timothy's playmates about "whether something can be red and green all over", and enjoyed their subsequent confusion or puzzlement, insisting that spots and stripes were not allowed.

----

Grice was amusing himself by testing the famous claim:

Nothing can be red and green all over.

out on some genuinely naive informats, as we may call them.

As we know, Grice waxes sceptical about the dogma in "Retrospective Epilogue": "the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny."

----

Jones then turns to Mill on the alleged non-analyticity of things like Kant's

7 + 5 = 12.

and writes:

"Though I have not read him, I have the impression that Mill
takes the a priori to be just as small as Locke, possibly
even smaller.
So he is a philosopher who, in the terms I stated above,
doesn't get it, or doesn't get it "right", by a substantial
margin."

The locus classicus is "System of Logic", which was like mandatory reading, for years, at Oxford, even Grice's Oxford. I was always surprised, in a good way, by the reverential status that this book by Mill had in Oxford. Mill had no Oxford, or indeed, academic, associations. But his "System" was the opus magnum that showed British philosophers how to proceed empiricistically from Locke towards more contemporary philosophy.

Jones writes:

"This is an illustration that a positivist is not simply an
extreme empiricist.
Hume and Carnap (not sure about the positivists in-between)
had a more generous conception of the a priori than
empiricists like Lock and Mill, and positivists such as
Hume, possibly Carnap take a less generous view of what we
can know a posteriori."


--- Perhaps part of the problem here is this reverential status that "know" acquired. Grice discusses this in "Meaning revisited" in WoW, where he thinks that 'know' may be an IDEAL concept, like 'circle'. But he wants to say, earlier in WoW, that things like

"The student knew the answer".

are reasonable things to say (WoW:iii -- analysis of 'know' in terms of 'justified belief', caused.).

Jones:

"(a positivistic science is expected not to go beyond the
experimental data, except to the very limited extent of
deductive inference, but an empiricist is more likely to
accept wide ranging "inductive" inferences)."

Indeed. Grice was too obsessed with deductivism, but it was refreshing, I think, when Strawson dismissed this and cared to introduce a whole chapter in his "Introduction to logical theory" to the justification of INDUCTION.

(Grice had been aware of and concerned with matters of empiricism in his EARLIEST publications and unpublications, late 1930s, such as his "Negation and privation", and stuff on intentions. He was at that stage a strict empiricist in that, as it transpires in his also early "Personal identity", it is temporary states of the mnemonic type that constitutes one's notion of the 'self', as it were. "I am hearing a sound." is his example for analysis).

Interestingly, he never socialised, back in the 1930s, with the Tuesday group of Austin, Ayer, Hart, Hampshire, and BERLIN, which was discussing more or less the same things, already in the pages of "Mind" (vide Berlin, "Concepts and categories" --).

Discussing 'rationalism', Jones quotes Grice's
>
> "enough of a rationalist"
> to want to say that ... people are rational.

and comments:

"I'm not sure that I would regard that as rationalist in the
usual philosophical sense of the term."

Indeed. Strictly, he is into the justification or grounding of things like:

"Do not lie" ("Say the truth").

Do we accept those things on an empirical basis? Because our parents have taught us so? He rejects this. He finds that 'too dull an empiricist answer'. And he proposes to think that things like

"Say the truth"

are REASONABLE or RATIONAL things to say. In "Reply to Richards", opening paragraphs or so, he has further things to say about "Rationalism" as HIS credo.

('irreverential, reactionary, rationalism').

Re: Hume as historian:

Jones:

"Apparently both the British Library and the Cambridge
University Library still list Hume as a "Historian" as which
he was best known in his day."

------ Good to learn. I once collected sobriquets for Grice. The Bartlett dictionary has him as a "British logician". The OED used to have him as a "linguist" and so on... He was of course a don!

---

Re: what the OED has sexistically as "woman's reason"

Jones writes:

"I don't understand the source of this problem.
Who is it that has cast doubt on whether trivial
demonstrations are indeed demonstrations?"

Apparently, though Grice does not credit this, there is in the OED the entry, 'woman's reason': "I like it because I like it."

Grice considers, in the first chapter to "Aspects of reason" whether we want to say that

p
----
therefore p

should count as a piece of reasoning. He thinks it does, but we should 'disimplicate', as it were, since there is this odious implicature attached to 'reason' that wants us to say that nobody reasons from p to p.

----- Similarly with misreason. Things like this had Grice think that 'reason' is a value-oriented word. "He misreasoned from p)q to q)p" thus NOT fall under 'reason'.

Back to


"Nothing can be green and red all over"

Jones asks:

"What does he say about why he thinks this synthetic?"

As I say, this is in a draft to WoW. So he must have reconsidered thoughts, since there is no collocation, "synthetic a priori" in the final draft of WoW. But surely the thing was in his mind, when he considers a 'doable' defense of the analytic-synthetic underdogma.

----

The source of that claim, about nothing can be red and green all over, should be traced. Perhaps Aquinas?

----- Cfr.

"What is black and white and red all over?" (phonetic transcript). The newspaper.

----

I think Quinton considered this in the essay in Strawson's "Philosophical logic" paper. The topic seems to have been one that engaged the Play Group, since we have Warnock, and Pears, and Thomson (also in the Strawson collection) considering the alleged analyticity (or transcendence?) of

"Every event must have a cause" (or better, "Every event has a cause").

---

Kant has a fast reply for all that, and Grice knew his Abbott (his Kant), so at least I would think that Grice considered Kant's arguments for the syntheticity of those judgements -- working within the Aristotelian subject-predicate logic that Strawson also favoured --, and thought highly of them.

Jones:

"As far as the demonstration is concerned, Carnap would have
something very close to this as a meaning postulate
(perhaps, "red is not green"), and so it would in effect not
be a demonstration in Aristotle's terms."

Indeed, and Quine would refer to that, having Grice/Strawson reacting against Quine's too easy dismissal of the 'vicious circle'.

Jones:

"Aristotle's usage is reflected in Hume when he talks of
relations between ideas as "intuitively of demonstratively
certain" since for something to be demonstrative it has be
shown by derivation (syllogistic) from premises which are
themselves intuitively certain (necessary, essential truths)
but those premises are not counted as demonstrative by
Aristotle.
By contrast in moden logic the axioms are counted as
theorems, and have a one-line proof which is just the axiom."

Excellent distinctions.

Jones quotes my:

> This is indeed a special concern of his metaphysics,
> because even for an ordinary-language philosopher like
> him, it is not easy to grasp where such 'demonstrations'
> or premises derive their validity. He was interested,
> informally, in the ontogenesis, as it were, of such
> claims. When do children start to think that "nothing
> can be green or red all over" states an a priori
> analytic truth, as it doesn't?
.
and writes:

"Or indeed, how could they?"

----- This relates to this anecdote from Mrs. Grice then, of Grice testing his children's playmates with

"Nothing can be green or red all over".

--- and finding children as 'puzzled', and being 'naive informants'. In Leicester, Sampson quotes similar reports from less naive informants:

Spring follows Winter.

For example.

And other 'statements'. The boundary analytic/synthetic is not as blunt.

------ When Kant started to be misunderstood by Continentals, it was Piaget's turn, and he would start to rethink Kant's 'transcendental' apperceptions in terms of mere contingent psychology.

------ And so on.

Jones quotes my:

>>And if it expresses an
>>a-posteriori synthetic truth, what does it mean to say
>>that it IS 'a posteriori'.

And comments:

"That's tricky, but I have an example to come."

Good.

"Returning now to the matter of the Grice defence of
analyticity, I have, in the course of thinking about the
history of the analytic/synthetic dichtomy give
consideration to how far back deductive reasoning goes.
Note first the semantic characterisation of deductive reason.
Reasoning is deductive if its conclusions are entailed by
its premises, and A entails B iff "A implies B" is analytic.
So there would be a way here of arguing that someone grasps
the notion of analyticity even if he doesn't have the word."

Good point. There's also the language/metalanguage issue that we may throw in for good measure. For someone may not use 'analytic' in L1 but in L2 (or something).

Jones:

"If he can tell sound from unsound inferences, then he
understands analyticity in all but the word.
It is generally thought that the Greeks were the first to do
deduction, but what this really means is that the first
mathematical texts in which mathematical results (e.g.
algebraic equations) are accompanied by proofs are
from 6th century BC Ionian philosophers."

Good. I must have, somehere in the swimming-pool library, those two volumes in Loeb that I share, edited by Thomas, "Greek mathematical thought". FASCINATING! Their terminology, mathematical and metamathematical, is exquisite!

---

Jones:

"However, it is easy to argue that the ability to grasp
certain elementary inferences is an essential part of
understanding a language.
e.g. one does not understand the English language if he does
not know that "azure" is a shade of "blue" and if one cannot
therefore infer from "the wall tiles are azure" to the
cruder "the wall tiles are blue"."

Too true. I found colour words VERY puzzling. They say it's a sex-thing. E.g. "mauve" males regard as "red" and so on. Sapir-Whorf of course based their case on this. Also Welsh "glas" which is either green or blue (or both).

---

Jones:

"Does this amount to a competence in the analytic/synthetic
distinction?
I think not.
I am inclined to doubt that common sense has any clear
distinction between what follows of logical necessity from
what follows of any other kind of necessity, i.e. what
follows on the implicit assumption of any amount of factual
background."

Good.

"So I suspect, that though you could obtain agreement from
the philosophically naive on the truth of a large number of
analytic propositions, but not actually on their analyticity
Is there a better way of testing comprehension of analyticty
than expecting a grasp of whether an argument is deductively
sound?
Probably there is.
Talk about meanings.
Does "azure" mean a shade of blue?
This takes us right back to Plato and Aristotle who
recognised that the starting point in demonstrative proof is
definitions."

VERY GOOD. Horismos, in Greek.

"Shame that so many words (usually including colour words)
don't actually have definitions."

Too true. There's also the question of Robinson-Crusoe's language. For what is the point of "red" unless it's the point of _communicating_ red ("Pass me the red brick"). It seems otiose to bother too much for colour terminology when it comes to the things that should interest the empiricist most: perception (alla Grice, "Causal theory of perception"). Recall Grice's example:

"That pillar box seems _red_ to me."

"Scarlet," she corrected.

----

Jones:

"Here Carnap's meaning postulates might come to the rescue.
So I am vacillating here between believing the
Grice/Strawson defence of analyticity from ordinary language
and common sense, and doubting it.
Carnap did not attempt to make the case for analyticity or
semantics natural languages being determinate or definable,
and this is probably why in "Two dogmas" Quine is forceful in
asserting that he believes the problem of giving a definite
semantics is just as intractable for formal as for natural
languages.
This leads me into a final observation in relation to those
colour words and the question of the analyticity of colour
exclusion statements."

I once attended a full Tanner lecturer (his lectures) delivering on this. Fascinating. There's lots of stuff in Locke, indeed, and Witters, and Barry Stroud, and so many others. Quite a topic.

---- And it's back to

"That pillar box seems red to me."

Grice was probably also interested in Daltonism. For what is "to see red", "to see green". Note his "Some remarks about the senses". -- And the Molyneux problem (He touched the coin as round but he saw it as square). Locke's corpuscular theory alla Boyle was ready to provide an answer to that, but there's more to the QUALIA and experiential uniqueness of Daltonism than he realised. Or not.

Jones:

"Whether they are analytic or synthetic depends upon their
meaning, and these are cases where it's hard to disentagle
sense from reference."

Indeed. One would think Lord Russell expanded on this, but he didn't. He thought "THIS" was the logical proper name. Rather than "red".

At the Play Group they were fascinated by this, mostly G. A. Paul, with his "Is there a problem about sense data?" which can here translate as:

"Is there a problem about red?"

For what is a sense datum if it's not _red_.

Red is the predicate upon which we build, alla Hume. Locke and Hume disregarded substance:

x is red
x is sweet
x grows on trees.

x is an apple.

so "red" is the 'idea' that comes to us, from seeing a _red_ thing, and so on.

If Grice's "Causal theory of perception" holds, metaphorically, water, the point is not trivial:

Grice's perceiving the red pillar box as RED (i.e. the red pillar SEEMING red to Grice) is CAUSED (hence the title of his theory of perception) by the red pillar BEING red.

I never understood that distintion. For a time, I was unable to distinguish between:

The pillar box IS red.

The pillar box SEEMS red.

For how can a thing be red without it seeming to you red. Grice made that clear to me in WoW:iii when he considers buying a tie:

"It is red in this light, but orange in this."

He notes that strictly, the way to go is:

"It LOOKS red in this light, and orange in this". But "surely change of actual colour is out of the question." Next disimplicature, then?

---

Jones:

"Does a colour word mean that particular colour or does it
just happen to refer to it?
In the former case the exclusion will probably be analytic,
in the latter, synthetic."

Mmm. Should reconsider that. I'm not too happy with Fregeanisms here. I spent a whole seminar, with my tutor, on Mill's System of Logic, thinking his denotation/connotation distinction. Mill considers colour words, and perhaps his connotation/denotation distinction is not as clear as Frege's but worth revising. I would think that 'red' connotes _danger_ say (hence traffic signs). What 'red' denotes is a _different_ animal, metaphorically.

Grice wants to say that all this belongs to _science_, not philosophy. He wants to say that the answer to the "causal theory of perception", which he held true, needs to be filled, in scientific detail, by the psychologist of perception (alla Wason).

------ So, I would think that that chapter in psychology, perception (of colour) should provide the answers. As Jones notes, it is then up to the philosopher who shows an interest on this, in considering an intensionalist or an extensionalist approach.

An extensionalist approach to colour words ("red things fall within this class") seem less interesting, even if true, than an intensionalist approach, that defines each colour, scientifically, in terms of radiation, or something. But I should revise all this. And then read Peacocke, on "Sense and Content", since he, above anyone else, did bring the topic of Qualia and perception, to the philosophical fore. Almost.

Jones:

"It may not be the same in all cases.
That red and green really do mean different colours is
plausible, but possibly red and aquamarine don't.
Does "aquamarine" mean a specific colour which is a shade of
blue, or does it mean the colour of sea water, which
contingently is a shade of blue?"

------- Should revise the taxonomy. I once discussed this with a student of Anglo-Saxon. Lots of Anglo-Saxon obscure words for colours. Books written on them. One book for each colour. ---. Again, it would be good to revise, via perhaps the Stanford Encyclopaedia, the different proposals by philosophers, to findings by psychologists of perception, say.

---

"Though I hate Quine's indeterminacy arguments, because I find
his story about the way field linguists work highly
unbelievable, without argument I accept indeterminacy of
translation, because it just is hard to translate between
language, and even between particular persons idioms (e.g.
Frege's sinn and bedeutung).
And also indeterminacy of meaning in natural languages, it
seems to me that there is no fact of the matter in many
cases about exactly what words mean (which is one reason why
science, or any advance in knowledge, evolves new language).
Having lightly debated the matter, I conclude of the Grice
Strawson defence, that it does support a not very precise
notion of analyticity, and is a worthwhile response to
Quine, but that it falls short of carrying the case
sufficiently well for the defence of analyticity as a
philosophical concept of great importance and utility (and
of course Quine later fell back from outright repudiation to
asserting philosophical inutility of the dichotomy)
For this I think one also does need a more direct response
to the detailed sceptical arguments of Quine."

Good points. Someone should spend a semester or two with Grice's papers at the Grice Collection, and come up with a 'doable' (Grice's words) better defense to the underdogma he felt always welcomed a defense (or two).

And so on.
Many thanks for your commentary and input.

---