Grice and Carnap, doctrines schools and tendencies

Roger Bishop Jones, for The Grice Club

Speranza and I have been exploring, over a very extended timescale, the (counterfactual) possibilities for dialogue between Grice and Carnap (counterfactual at least because they are long gone).

Interwoven with this we have the question of whether Oxford ordinary language, or North American nominalists constitute a school.  This does actually connect with the question of what the most significant impediments might be to a fruitful conversation between Grice and Carnap, so I shall try here one way to make that connection.

Our starting point in examining the Grice/Carnap question has been Grice's Betes Noires, which turn out to be aspects of "minimalism".   At first blush Carnap, as a Positivist (Viennese red neck) is in many ways a minimalist, but on closer inspection he seems (for a positivist, though he was not so sure of that label later on) insufficiently dogmatic on these.  Particularly, just like Grice, he is an ontological pragmatist.

When I look closer to the details  of these points of possible conflict I find myself unconvinced that Grice and Carnap might not reach a mutual and constructive understanding.  But when I step back to survey the scene. some of the more pungent critiques on both sides (Carnap's rhetoric on metaphysics, especially but not exclusively his youthful rhetoric, and Grice's throwaway line about Viennese rednecks) seem symptomatic of a cultural rift which reasoned debate might be powerless to bridge.

Our discussion of minimalism, including extensionalism, lead naturally into consideration of metaphysics (for minimalism is often ontological) and also into the issue whether philosophy should be primarily (or exclusively) concerned with artificial or natural languages.

These are both issues on which, though we can see signs in both Grice and Carnap of moderation and tolerance, substantial cultural divergence is evident, of a kind which might be inimical to constructive dialogue.

Carnap's tolerance gives him an ontological flexibility which still sits alongside an intolerance of what he considers "metaphysics" (and does not include these pragmatic choices of ontology, which are not for Carnap metaphysical but conventional).  Grice, though seemingly sharing a pragmatic attitude toward ontology (which perhaps feeds his antipathy toware minimalism) has nevertheles a genuine interest in metaphysics, and a difficulty in reconciling Carnap's anti-metaphysical rhetoric with that interest.

I imagine that I can see how Carnap might be persuaded to take less dismissively many of the questions which Grice might consider as worthwhile and metaphysical.
This is because in general "metaphysical" and "meaningless" are so strongly coupled for Carnap that if one can show that a question has some meaning, even if only in a pragmatic way, then one has shown the question not to be mere metaphysics.
At the same time, Grice's ontological pragmatism suggests that he may be less absolute in his metaphysics than is typical.
But despite these reconciling considerations, or perhaps making Carnap and Grice blind to such possibilities, there may be something like a cultural block, which might be seen in a reluctance of either to contemplate the possibility that the others rhetoric is, under the cloak of differences in usage, not so severely incompatible as it might seem.

Cultural divergence may be even more significant when we come to the ordinary language versus "constructed" languages issue.
Until Oxford comes under attack Grice appears as a moderating force, moderating some of the excesses of "ordinary language philosophy".
But under attack Grice closes ranks with the culture to which be belongs.

My suggestion is here, that what is under attack, and is being defended, is not a doctrine or a school, but a culture or a tendency.
Though denying that there is any school or any collection of doctrines or methods shared by the group under attack, Grice is also capable of describing to us the essential features of ordinary language philosophy.
For Grice the essential feature is something like a belief that all philosophical problems should be approached via a careful study of the relevant features of our language.
In contrasting Oxford philosophy as a non-school with the supposed "school" of nominalists, Grice is putting up a paper tiger.
If a school is identified using a particular doctrine (in this case nominalism) as a defining characteristic of its members, then that does make possible a criticism of all via a critique of that particular doctrine.
However, most philosophical doctrines come in infinite variety.
At one point, when Carnap was for a year or so at Harvard, Quine, Goodman and Carnap collaborated on a nominalistic project, but there may still have been no single notion of nominalism to which they all subscribed.
Carnap for example, would have been interested at best in exploring what could been done with minimal ontologies without endorsing any nominalistic dogmas, but Goodman may well have been motivated by more definite doubts about more generous ontologies (we can see from his contribution to the Carnap Schilpp volume that he was unhappy about the criticisms which Carnap levelled at his own Aufbau as he moved on from that project, as discussed in the recent workshop at UEA in Norwich).

I have failed to maintain focus here as much as I would have liked.

Let me summarise where I now feel that I am in relation to the Carnap/Grice conversation.

I feel that the problem of reconciliation, of discovering whether that might be possible or at what points there might be irresolvable conflicts, falls into two quite different parts.

Firstly, there are a number of particular problems which one can approach, attempting to analyse apparant differences and establish whether they are substantive or could possibly be resolved.
There would be much detail here, and many uncertainties about what either philosopher would do in the face of attempts at reconciliation.
Would Carnap, for example, countenance a change of language to admit the use of the word "Metaphysics" for certain meaningful investigations which would not otherwise fall under his concept of metaphysics and would not fall foul of his critique.
Would either philosopher be willing to extend their conception of philosophy to encompass those kinds of useful work done by the other which do not fall within their present conception,  e.g. Carnap to admit some empirical studies of natural languages as belonging to philosophy, or Grice to admit that there are genuinely philosophical problems which can be exposed and progressed in formal languages without any significant prior analysis of natural language?

Those kinds of stumbling blocks might possibly originate in the other (second) part, which is concerned with the broader cultural or perhaps "political" issues.  Often these manifest themselves in differences of language, especially if we admit that different view about the nature and scope of philosophy are at bottom different positions about language, about the use of that word "philosophy".

Sometimes such issues are associated with major and irreconcilable rifts, sometimes they seem insignificant. For example, Carnap took the view that philosophy produces only analytic truths, and regarded all synthetic claims as belonging to empirical science.
But he came from a positivist tradition, of which David Hume is often consider the first, even though Hume himself modelled philosophy on empirical science, and thought it the business of philosophy to achieve an understanding of human nature based on careful observation.
In many other ways Carnap's views break with the positivist tradition of which he was a part, another conspicuous place is in his conception of metaphysics.

We might progress the first kind, what one might call the technical issues, without ever impacting upon the second, the cultural issues, for in these people are often blind to detail and sensitive only, perhaps, to their sense of belonging, their desire to defend home territory against an alien culture.

RBJ