Speranza
The blurb for Halpin's book on 'analyticity' (one of Grice's main concerns, and obviously, the pillar of 'philosophical analysis' as we know it) reads:
"On the STANDARD view, analyticity secures empirical indefeasibility and truth."
"In this book, the author presents an alternative" -- non-standard, or 'deviant' as Susan Haack it would have it? -- "account of analyticity inspired
by Frege, Grice and Strawson - endorsement on pain of reinterpreting the
language."
As I was noting on the blog post by R. B. Jones, it was sort of nice to see that Galen Strawson (and M. Montague) decided to include "In defense of a dogma" in Strawson's "Philosophical Writings". The story of that little paper is quite 'historical', if that's not tautological: it all happened when Grice and Strawson felt they needed to 'entertain' (somehow) their 'visiting fellow': Willard van Orman Quine.
(I note incidentally, that, as I write this, the wiki for Quine, while citing Grice, has the date wrong: it's 1956 -- the quote rather goes: "Grice, Paul and Peter Strawson. "In Defense of a Dogma". The Philosophical Review 65 (1965)".
The blurb to Halpin's book continues:
"So construed, analyticity secures empirical indefeasibility without
entailing truth."
My introduction to the idea of 'defeasibility', oddly enough, was G. P. Baker, the American philosopher, who contributed a paper to the H. L. A. Hart festschrift on 'defeasibility and meaning'. It was perhaps LATER that I became fascinated by Levinson's typo (You see, in his Pragmatics, he misquotes Grice's paper as being "Probability, Defeasibility and Mood Operators", where in fact the title runs, "Probability, DESIRABILITY, and mood operators" -- or 'mode' if you must.
The idea of indefeasbility without 'alethic' (as R. B. Jones and I would prefer) content seems fascinating!
The blurb concludes:
"This notion of analyticity is used to construct a consistent
neo-Carnapian meta-theory."
At this point, welcome to my favourite affix: meet
"palaeo-",
or, strictly,
palæo-
as in palæo-Griceian, palæo-Carnapian.
"In some respects," the blurb adds, "the book [by Halpin] constitutes a reply to
Sider's, Writing the Book of the World" -- understood as a question.
Cheers!
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Frege built endorsement into the syntax, by way of the judgement stroke.
ReplyDeleteI build endorsement and rejection into the syntax by way of 'T' and 'F', which are semantically insignificant bits of the object langauge syntax with novel valence (They attach to sentences in the object language).
'True' and 'False' are treated as expressions of the meta-language that indicate correspondence between the intrepretation/cotent of a sentence and the world.
Where S is a sentence, S-T and S-F recieve numerically distinct interpretations/contents. A statement is analytic iff S-T is interpreted and S-F is un-interpreted.
A speaker who rejected an analytic statement, i.e., assigned it 'F', would thereby fail to express anything. A speaker who endorsed it, i.e., assigned it T, would succeed in expressing something. (This aspect strikes me as very Grice/Strawson)
Thus, if S is analytic in L, the L-speaker is forced to endorse it. If she rejects it, she is reinterpreting the language, and hence,not speaking L. Thus, S is indefeasibile in L, in the sense that the rejection of S immediately takes one out of L and into another language.(This aspect also strikes me as very Grice/Strawson.)
Supposing S is analytic, S-T recieves an interpretation/content. Thus, S may well be semantically false if the content/interpretation fails to correspond to reality. In this case, revision of a theory involving an analytic statement is forced. However, because one cannot assign F to S (reject it) without reinterpreting the language, she is forced to reject the language itself, rather than merely adjusting the T/F (endorsement) assignment.
This is a brief sketch. More detial is presented in the book, which I am shamelessly self-promoting.
Quine's objections: The book begins with what I take to be the primary objection to analyticity in Two Dogmas, the rejection of the distinction between the linguistic and factual components in the truth of sentences. In response, I explain how to accomodate holism, the Duhem/Quine thesis, etc, using the materials above.
The book is short, 25,000 words, constituting a mere sketch of a meta-theory that treats analyticity and logicality descriptively, such that neither entials semantic truth.
With respect to exactly how Grice/Strawson the view is, I'm not sure. Some similarities are obvious enough, but I'm not familiar enough with all the ins and outs of their views to comment on that with any confidence.
Beautiful follow-up, L. P.!
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the claim that:
ReplyDelete"if S is analytic in L, the L-speaker is forced to endorse it. If she rejects it, she is reinterpreting the language"
overlooks various other possibilities, e.g. that the L-speaker intends to deceive, or that he is simply mistaken (as Fermat might have been but, we now have grounds to believe, was not).
I find that your book is not available on amazon.co.uk. Is that intentional, or did you accidentally not select european distribution at createspace?
Roger Jones