Grice's Bootstrap

Speranza


Jones was referring to, in his post to THIS CLUB -- to Carnap's meta-language:

"Now," Jones writes, "Carnap's extensionalism, insofar as I am aquainted with it myself, as well as being pragmatic rather than dogmatic, is metatheoretic rather than comprehensive.  He believed that for the purpose of defining the semantics of formal languages an extensional metalanguage could suffice."

The Bootstrap reference which I made in his footnote to his post, then, is expanded here.


On p. 93 of his "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions of Paul Grice" by Paul Grice, now repr. in PGRICE, ed.Grandy/Warner, Clarendon, Grice  considers a 'fine distinction' concerning levels of conceptual priority -- and adds:

"It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine
distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed
in the business of pulling ourselves up by our
own bootstraps."


"In this connection it will be
relevant for me to say that I once invented
(though I did not establish its validity) a
principle which I labelled as Bootstrap."



"The principle laid down that:
when one is introducing
the primitive concepts of a theory [ϑ] formulated
in an object-language [such as System G_HP, or System C_R -- after Rudolf Carnap],
one has freedom to use
any battery of concepts expressible in the
meta-language,
subject to the condition that
counterparts of such concepts are
subsequently definable
or
otherwise
derivable
in the object-language."


"So,"
"the more economically
one introduces the primitive object-language concepts,
the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow".
And so on...