The Cave Man as Griceian

Speranza

We are discussing, with R. B. Jones, the claims of metaphysics, and Grice's repartee to Russell re: Russellian "stone-age metaphysics" (versus a metaphysics that should accomodate what Russell calls "twentieth-century physics") is best understood, for Grice, as "stone-age physics".

Jones notes:

"It would be interesting to know something about why Grice made this remark, it might illuminate Grice's ideas about what is or is not metaphysics."

I think Russell is fighting with Strawson. Strawson had published, for Oxford (almost) his "Individuals", an essay in, as we know, descriptive (or is it revisionary?) metaphysics, according to which the world is composed of substances (or individuals) having this or that attribute.

I'm never sure what Russell had in mind when he spoke of 'stone-age metaphysics', but he certainly didn't like it!

Grice's response deals with the fact that, whatever the physics of the twentieth-century (and underlying metaphysics, a process-metaphysics alla Whitehead), the fact remains that subject-predicate structures permeate ordinary languages such as English -- The original English speakers were, as it were, cave men.

This leads Grice to distinguish between categories which are merely linguistic (subject-predicate) or ontological (substance-attribute) and wonder what the role of the philosopher (qua metaphysician) may be. Grice finds some value in even approaching the categories of subject and predicate as valid in an attempt to describe the 'ontological commitments' of this or that language.

It's a short passage or two in "Reply to Richards".

Russell was nowhere to respond, so Grice's correction of Russell's misguided idiom was perhaps itself misguided, or not.