Grice's Extensionalists

In the first leg of exploring Grice's view on extensionalism and whether Carnap is for Grice due discredit for complying with Grice's conception of extensionalism, I came to the following naive point of view on which I intended to elaborate.

Firstly, that Grice meant by "Extensionalist" someone who identified a universal with its extension, and secondly that Carnap was not that kind of extensionalist, and therefore was not one of the targets of Grice's obloquy.  I then had intended to describe what kind of extensionalist Carnap was and to consider in more detail Grice's criticisms to see whether they would apply to the kind of extensionalist that Carnap was.

One might imagine here that Grice's extensionalist is a paper tiger, holding a position too naive and simplistic to be found in any real person, but perhaps instead this description of Grice's notion of extensionalism is the paper tiger, making Grice's point seem easier to dismiss than it is.

Sure enough, as soon as we move on from Grice's supposedly definitive example we find that Grice's extensionalist is a more complex character. His fault is not to identify a universal with its extension, but to look for some other extension or extensional object which will serve.

Now 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.

Carnap was interested in non-extensional languages, most conspicuously modal logics (perhaps because the notion of logical or analytic truth was so important to him, and correponded to the idea of necessary truth in modal logics, all of these being the principle locus of his difficulties with Quine).  Methods for defining the semantics of such non-extensional languages are discussed in "Meaning and Necessity".

The method which Carnap prefers and adopts in that book he calls the method of intensions and extensions.  The notions here correspond roughly with Frege's "Sinn" and "Bedeutung" (often translated "sense" and "reference").
The process of defining a language according to this method, involves defining in the chosen extensional metalanguage, for each phrase in the object language both its intension and extension.

The examples which Grice comes up with in his more detailed discussion of the tactics an extensionalist might resort to are not Carnap's, so its not immediately obvious whether Grice would find fault in Carnap's method's.  I could expore this in greater depth by detailed comparison of Grice's criticisms and Carnap's solutions, but there are some more general points of principle which perhaps should first be touched upon.

It seems to me to be in the spirit of Grice's critique that even if some formal correspondence could be established between the meaning of universals and the structure of certain sets, that Grice might nevertheless still not be willing to accept the idenitification of the two.  This is a manifestation of that tendency in minimalism which Grice abhors, the elimination of all but one class of entity by the identification of apparantly distinct kinds of entity with a subclass of that one special kind.

But Carnap is not that kind of extensionalist either.  He has no nominalistic zeal, he is happy to accept whatever kinds of abstract entity prove most practical for the task in hand.

Would this absolve him from Grice's critique.
Perhaps not, perhaps Grice is interested in what universals really are, not in what we might usefully suppose them to be, and this might be for Carnap an "external question", meaningless metaphysics.

Does the potential disagreement between Grice and Carnap on "Extensionalism" collapse into a disagreement on the status of metaphysics?

RBJ