Silly uses of 'the' and their implications (conventional, conversational)

Speranza

Thanks to R. B. Jones for his commentary to my "How silly can Grice get?". We are expanding on this famous (or infamous, as I prefer -- call me silly) quote by Russell: silly people (like Strawson) do say silly things -- and the worst thing is that some sillier philosophers (Grice) think their task is to analyse them.

Jones writes:

"I love the etymology of silly".

--- Indeed, it is lovely.

"Here's another Russellian sally (on "the cult of ordinary usage")" -- up the Russellian ally, as it were (I love that song by Gracie Fields, "Sally" -- and I like your alliteration).

Russell writes as follows and Jones asks, "We may ask, who were Russell's target's here?
Surely not Grice. Did anyone fit this bill?"

Mmm. Let's re-read and re-vise:

Russell:

"The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the significance of common terms."

Well, Grice was ambivalent here. His hero was of course Austin, who would say that the language of daily life was sufficient, yet comes up with 'phatic', 'rhetic', 'per-locution' and 'il-locution' to name a few, or Hare who writes in "The language of morals" that he's into 'must' and 'ought' and 'good' and comes up with 'clistic', 'tropic', 'phrastic' and 'neustic'.

Grice himself (or hisself -- bless his silly soul) with 'conversational implicatum', radical, radix, prothetic, alethic, not to mention the 'pirot' and the 'immanuel'.

In "Reply to Richards", Grice makes the explicit point about Austin's use of special terminology as not being inconsistent with a more general dogma that Ordinary Language is Enough.

Russell goes on:

"I find myself totally unable to accept this view. I object to it:
Because it is insincere;
Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics and neurology in those who have had only a classical education;"

I love this reference to 'a classical education'. Note the 'a': "a classical education", rather than just 'classical education'. Is education, as grammarians would say, 'countable' or a mass-term? Grice surely was aware of this kind of criticism as coming from Gellner (in "Words and Things") and Bergmann. And we SHOULD bear in mind that the members -- or distinguished members -- of Grice's Play Group ('the class whose members have no other class", as Grice qualified it) had all

Lit. Hum.

i..e. THIS was the degree that counted -- and surely NOT a doctorate. A mere MA will do. Doctorates were thought of as overqualified.

H. P. Grice, MA (Lit. Hum.).

--- So 'a classical education' indeed. O. T. O. H., Strawson was NOT: he belonged to this generation where Oxonian philosophers (some of them, or the majority of them) started to get PPE instead (Philosophy-Cum-Politics and Economics). THIS was "not" a classical education.

Grice's 'a classical education' can and should and ought and must indeed be traced back to CLIFTON -- because there was no way you could be a member of the Play Group without a public school background. This meant that 'a classical education' did not really belong in OXFORD, but was a 'pre-Oxonian' thing: Clifton in Grice's case. This meant that their familiarity with the grammar of classical languages -- Greek and Latin -- was well into their system, and would regard English as an offspring of that. They would try to see the mechanisms of English grammar (with their implications) in terms of what they knew, second-hand, from their masters in the Sixth Form of their corresponding public schools.

Indeed, just because Grice was so good at GREEK at Clifton, he gained the scholarship to Corpus Christi. A thing that made for the exception to the rule: he was a "Midlands scholarship boy" who came from the 'wrong side of the tracks', and would thus NOT belong to J. L. Austin's very first "play group" that met with the 'hoi oligoi' (the happy few) in All Souls on Thursday Evenings (Hampshire, Hart, Berlin, Ayer, and a few others did).

----

In "Aspects of reason", when Grice goes on to analyse 'moods' (like indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative) in an attempt for an elucidation of the alethic/practical distinction) he does comment that he regrets the mood system in English is never as refined as that of the classical counterparts of Greek and Latin.

Similarly, in "Intention and uncertainty" he makes a similar point regarding the old-fashioned (he felt) distinction between "I shall go to London, but I will not" as NOT being contradictory -- again a point of grammar, and perhaps a 'silly thing' some 'silly people' will (but shall not?) say, or is it vice versa?

As for the references to neurology made by Russell, suffice it to say that Grice called it the 'devil of scientism'.

Russell's love for 'twentieth-centuryh physics', Grice responds with a modification of Russell's other slogan: it's not 'stone age metaphysics' we (silly philosophers into silly things people say) are engaged with, but

'stone-age PHYSICS',

rather.


Russell goes on:

"Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if opposition to it were a sin against democracy; Because it makes philosophy trivial; Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense."

Well, the reference to common sense must be a Scottish thing, where it originates. But the other day I came across a cartoon, I will try to trace and share here (when I do retrace it).

It referred to ways in which philosophers, physicists, and mathematicisans assess their subject-matters.

The philosopher said, 'elementary'.

The mathematician said, 'trivial'.

And the physicist was fascinated by it, and found it to be 'true'.

We should then perhaps distinguish the use made by philosophers of words like 'trivial' and 'elementary'. Indeed, Grice spends some time with 'trivial' (etymologically, part of the trivium) in "Aspects of reason"

"p because p"

he finds 'trivial', but nonetheless valid. And so on.

Of course, the strong word in Russell's prose seems to be 'muddle-headedness' but this, as I say, I connect with the Scottish brand of common sense philosophy that Grice never really adhered to. He did played with G. E. Moore's and Malcolm's idea that 'ordinary language' and 'common sense' are co-extensive -- especially in the two or three earliest essays in the second Part to "Way of Words".

The title of the post refers to 'the'.

As we know, Strawson criticised Russell's theory of descriptions.

Russell, in his explicit tirade against Oxonian philosophy, came up with "Mr. Strawson on referring", which closes with a paragraph against ordinary-language philosophy.

Grice wrote "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular".

The distinction between Grice and Strawson here is subtle. Grice wants to say that if there is a difference between 'the' and the iota operator (used by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica), it is a difference in CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE. In "If and the horseshoe", in PGRICE, Strawson makes it clear that his position is not as weak. He would like to say that the distinction between a formal device and its vernacular countepart (the horseshoe and 'if', for example) is one of a CONVENTIONAL implicature, rather.

Grandy addresses these topics in his contribution to the Berkeley University symposium, "Legacy of Grice".

So we have three positions:

Russell, arguing for a distinction between formal and ordinary language.
Strawson, mis-identifying (in my opinion, which follows Grice) the distinction as a matter of conventional implicature (and thus somewhat attached 'conventionally' to the 'meaning' of the expressions involved, if not, openly, their truth-conditions)
Grice, saying it all 'boils down' to implicature of the conversational kind, and its corresponding 'disimplicature', i.e. to issues of 'maxims' and pragmatic constraints on ordinary language that don't necessarily operate when we engage with a formal calculus.

And so on.

Cheers.






We may ask, who were Russell's target's here?
Surely not Grice. Did anyone fit this bill?