Re: Grice on Aristotle

Speranza

Jones writes:

"Though I first began to consider the Grice/Code material on multiplicity of being in Aristotle back in 2009, I worked then primarily from the semi-formal assertions posted by Speranza, and later from the Code version which could be seen on Google books. At that time I did not have access to either the paper by Grice on multiplicity of being or that paper of Code's (which I think is in PGRICE) and so my activity in the first instance was mainly a formal exercise in seeing whether the collection of propositions represented a coherent semi-formal model (of whatever)."

Good. It would be good to trace all the Code references. I do think his main exercise is indeed in the

Grandy/Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

---

--- (Code happens to be a literary executor to Grice, and I wish he could lead a student or former student of his to do research on Kantoteliana as found in the Grice Papers -- mabbe sometime in the future).

Alan Dodds Code is the name, and he was himself a former PhD student with Grice at UC/Berkeley. PhD dissertation on 'philosophical logic'. Code's interest in ancient philosophy and Aristotle in particular seems to have been a later development.

Jones continues:

"Soon, I decided to try to analyse the matter in conjunction with Aristotle's syllogistic, since it seemed that if formal logical tools were to be brought to bear, then they should involve those of Aristotle, and in this enterprise for lack of access to the detail the project assumed a life of its own and began to be directed by my own interests (to which the difference between "izz" and "hazz" did seem relevant).

----

As I see, Jones connects the 'izz' with the essence, and the 'hazz' with the contingency, and rightly he does so. I was suggesting that we could also consider Grice's thoughts on relative identity, since it seems we may need three predicates:

izz-p
izz-o
izz-f

i.e. izz in the past
izz in the present (o)
and izz in the future.

Also hazz-p, hazz-o, and hazz-f.

The point is that, to use Myro's example (in PGRICE, "Time and Identity"), drawn from Hobbes:

this ship gets dismantled, so it's no longer a ship (Hobbes's discussion of essence and identity in "Leviathan").

Aristotle's example: bronze becomes a sculpture. And so on.

--- In any case, Grice allows to deal with Leibniz's law without recourse to the [] Nec Operator of standard modal logic:

a = a --> [ ] a = a

i.e. if a=a, then it is necessary that a=a.

This may bear on discussions of _essence_. As Code notes, the standard way to approach those issues (The essentialism of Aristotle, say, or the contingentialism of Plato) was via first-order predicate logic, with necessity.

---

Jones:

"My interest in Aristotle is primarily twofold.
The first part is to understand what contribution Aristotle made towards the later establishment (not to speak of the even later disestablishment) of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the two closely related distinctions between necessary and contingent, and between the a priori and the a posteriori (passing over the slip into Latin).
Aristotle has much to say about all these, the question is how, close was he to the distinctions as they might now be appreciated (or deprecated)."

Good. An examination of Aristotle's modal logic should help. Noel Burton-Roberts, himself a linguist rather than a logician, or philosopher, has dealt with a funny implicature, in terms of the scale:



i.e.

S must be P.

Therefore S may be P.

---- This little inference above can be understood in terms of the modal square of opposition. It tells that what is necessary is possible.

--

Jones:

"Secondly, and of course closely related, to what extent can we find anything like semantics in Aristotle.
Quite recently I have begun occasionally to go to the British Library and this has improved my access to the literature generally and in particular enabled me to scan both the Grice and the Code papers (though it took me longer to find the Grice because some of his writings, or were they just speakings, were at conferences whose proceedings I never did find.
Still I don't spend a lot of time on this, and I didn't at first get on well with the Grice paper.
I am beginning now to get an idea of what he was about, and find that the distance between his motivations and mine is a lot smaller than I had imagined.
Firstly it is interesting to note that his conclusions connect his analysis with the analytic/synthetic distinction in the following way.
He argues that anyone who accepts his account of unity of meaning (in connection with multiplicity of being) is "not free" to combine it with rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction."

WHAT AN EXCELLENT POINT.

His account of 'unity of meaning' is an excellent thing. It turns out that the multiplicity of being was 'alleged'. The essay should have been title,

Aristotle and the alleged multiplicity of being (or something). Grice is all for focal unity. Or, to echo Jones, if there is semantic multiplicity (homonymy), it is in the end UNIFIED semantic multiplicity (paronymy). Or something.

Jones:

"Secondly both his conclusions and his observations about larger issues show that he is very much concerned with meaning (perhaps not quite the same thing as semantics, but closely related) and metaphysics (about which my own brand of positivism is also curious).
So my interest in this work is reinforced as I now become acquainted belatedly with its sources, and it won't be abandoned any time soon (though it will continue to spend most of its time on a back burner)."

Good to learn.

------ Indeed, Grice was into 'semantics', rather than 'pragmatics'. And he liked to play with 'metaphysics', because he saw the connections.

As he left Oxford, but found himself in charge of seminars on Aristotle at UC/Berkeley, it is only natural that he played with a critical commentary on the Aristotle classics.

I tend to think that Grice went deeper in these areas in association with his former student at Oxford, P. F. Strawson.

There are PILES of unpublications in the Grice Papers, (c) Grice/Strawson. They were formal material presented to seminars on the "Categories" of Aristotle.

At the time, Grice was not into presenting a formal system, but his notes retain a charm as he engages in linguistic botany.

By the time he was invited to contribute to the Quine festschrift, Grice had developed a System -- what he called System Q, but Myro relabelled System G. Within System G, the nuances and implicatures regarding categorial (intracategorial) predication receive a formalisation.

While Grice loved Aristotle, he saw himself as a follower of Kantotle.

Kantotle was used by J. F. Bennett, in his review of PGRICE: "In the tradition of Kantotle", he entitled it.

The connections between Aristotle and Kant, even at the level of categories, are interesting. Kant kept an Aristotelian logic of sorts, and of course, reconsidered all that needed to be reconsidered about the analytic-synthetic, apriori-aposteriori distinction.

By calling himself a Kantotelian, Grice wants to separate himself from the narrowest fields of linguistic botany proper. He feels that behind the analysis of the nuances of linguistic forms lies an interest in the broader issues of metaphysics, and what Grice irritatingly (somewhat) calls "philosophical eschatology".

---

Consider his example of metaphor (WoW:34):

You are the cream in my coffee.

Grice writes:

"Examples like "You are the cream in my coffee" [oddly, the title of the song is "You're the cream in my coffee," rather] INVOLVE

***** CATEGORIAL FALSITY *****"

This is a critical notion here, as it pertains to Kantotelian categories as studied by Grice/Strawson.

Grice goes on:

""You're the cream in my coffee" ... involve[s] CATEGORIAL falsity"

This is different form:

"Virtue is square".

The issue is relevant to the study of negation. If Virtue is square is a categorial falsity, "Virtue is not square" comes out as true.

Also,

"You are NOT the cream in my coffee".

Grice goes on:

"Examples like "You are the cream in my coffee
characteristically involve categorial falsity."

One cannot think what Grice is thinking. I once studied the lyrics to that song: "My only necessity is you". Examples like Cole Porter's "You're the tops: you're the Coliseum", may also apply.

----

"characteristically involve CATEGORIAL
FALSITY"

intracategorial falsity.

The idea is that a human co-conversationalist cannot be an organic liquid (as cream is).

"involve categorial falsity"

Recall that in WOW:Philosophical Eschatology, he considers Metaphor, Parable, and Simile, and Analogy as modes for eschatological study.

"involve categorial falsity"

and yet they are things we say. "So the contradictory
of what th speaker has made it as if to say will, strictly
speaking, be a truism."

IT IS NOT the case that you are the cream in my coffee.

He is considering this just after his account of irony, where 'p' becomes '-p'.

So this is a different rhetoric animal, yet involving,

"Say the truth" qua conversational maxim.

---

"So, it cannot be THAT that such a speaker
is trying to get across."

It is not the case that you are the cream in my coffee.

Since, being a truism, it needn't be communicated, unlike:

"That car has all the windows intact" (by uttering, "One of the windows is broken", WoW:iii -- irony).

"The most likely supposition" is that

S IZZ P

is

S IZZ-LIKE P.

"the most likely supposition is that the
speaker is attributing to his [HUMAN] audience
some feature or features in respect of which
the audience resembles (more or less fancifully)
the mentioned substance."

----

Analysis by Aristotle, Kant, or Kantotle, of metaphor, should also help. Or not!