Carnap and Grice: semantics and ontology -- and anti-empiricism?

Speranza

We should recall that one of the bêtes noires that Pilgrim Grice meets on his way to the City of Eternal Truth is indeed EMPIRICISM (while he regarded as 'enough of a rationalist' to engage in transcendental or metaphysical arguments).

Jones comments on a post on Carnap/Grice on Aristotle:

"I think one can reasonably say that Carnap's "Empiricism Semantics and Ontology" was primarily intended to explain how one can do semantics without engaging in metaphysics."

Good point.

"However, I don't attach much importance to Carnap mentioning Aristotle here."

Indeed. It seems like a gratuituous appeal, as the one Tarski makes, too -- On the other hand, more or less in those days, Jan Łukasiewicz seems to have been engaged in a more serious study of Aristotle: primarily his logic but I suppose the metaphysical background for his logic too?

(I am reminded of the title to Dummett's William James lectures: the logical basis of metaphyiscs -- but he is concerned with INTUITIONISM and the rejection of the "Tertium non datur").

Jones goes on:

"Carnap is not examining Aristotle here; he is simply using him in much the way I did when I earlier connected Carnap with Aristotle, just because Aristotle is the first and greatest philosopher with whom we associate the term "metaphysics" (if only because the term was not coined before Aristotle). I still press the case that there is an interesting enquiry and debate about whether or how much of Aristotle's metaphysics (and also about how much of Grice's Aristotelian studies) must be construed as the kind of metaphysics which Carnap eschewed."

Indeed, and those points were excellent.

For one, Aristotle's "Metaphysics" is concerned with 'physical' claims by the pre-socratics. Unfortunately, physicists never take the history of their discipline as seriously as philosophers do!

Also, much of what Aristotle says about 'being' is best understood as logical, rather than metaphysical -- as per the analytic commentary by Grice -- regarding izzing and hazzing.

This leaves us with the idea that Carnap's target of attack is OTHER: theoreticians who are into 'transcendental truths' of this or that sort: Heidegger, and perhaps before him Bradley, who, rather than an empiricist, was an 'idealist' (or as I prefer, a Hegelian).

Jones goes on:

"Carnap doesn't so far as I know get into these kinds of question (is that bit of so-called metaphysics really metaphysics); it's just a quirk of mine, partly for the purposes of fantasising about a Carnap/Grice conversation."

Indeed.

And the point about 'metaphysics ' and 'really metaphysics' sounds METAPHYSICAL! :)

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Perhaps the answer is in the philosophy of physics. For instrumentalism, and the many other doctrines that inform this field of study do not PERTAIN to physics, and so have a claim to belong to, er, metaphysics...

Or not!