Hell and Conversation

Speranza

"In the course of our conversations Russell would often exclaim: "Logic's hell!"--And this fully expresses what we were thinking about the problems of logic; namely their immense difficulty. Their hardness--their hard & slippery texture. The primary ground of this experience, I think, was this fact: that each phenomenon of language that we might retrospectively think of could show our earlier explanation to be. But that is the difficulty Socrates gets caught up in when he tries to give the definition of a concept. Again and again an application of the word emerges that seems not to be compatible with the concept to which other applications have led us. We say: but that isn't how it is!--it is like that though!--& all we can do is keep repeating these antitheses." (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 35; ]MS 119 59: 1.10.1937])

---

Cfr.

Grice,

"Logic and conversation".

For Grice, Logic's paradise.

I'm never sure if Witters was transcribing a Russell quote that needs requoted. It seems rude.

---- But the point is nicely illustrated by Grice.

Grice always regarded himself (or hisself, as he hisself would prefer) as an 'anti-Wittersian'. His first output, in the 1940s, was directed against "Wittgensteinian" comments in the theory of sense data.

Grice wants to show that while logic may seem hell, it is purgatory and paradise, rather.

Take the connectives.

In "Logic and conversation" he shows how each of the connectives: from the one-place one like "not" (that does not really connect) to functors like "and", "or" and "if" -- and to which he adds "all", "some", and "the" for good measure, there is a way to show that

LANGUAGE is actually very clever.

If for Witters's Russell, "Logic's hell", for Grice, "How clever language is."

In reality,

"how clever language is"

is a trick of a phrase (c) Grice (-- as transmitted by Warnock). It may mean:

Language is clever.
Language is VERY clever.

This is an Austinian thing to say, but still.

The point is then that by way of some Kantotelian transcendental justification we can arrive at 'rules' of logic (and pragmatics) that explain any apparent divergence between, say "not" and "~".

Those 'maxims' or pragmatic dimensions are defeasible in the sense that indeed, the slippery texture may be brought in.

At this point, Grice speaks of DISIMPLICATURE.

Implicature allows us to explain how we may mean more than we say.
Disimplicature is the way to explain how we may actually mean LESS (than we say).

And so on.

Cheers.