Grice as intentionalist: comments on Jones, "Behaviourist, dispositional, functionalist"

Speranza

In "Behaviourist, dispositional, functional", Jones writes: "JL and I had an exchange about the relationship between "behaviourist" and "dispositional" (I wanted to know the difference)."

And a fine difference too! (Etymologically, of course, 'fine', applies best to differences!).

(Perhaps 'nice' applies best to differences, too).

Jones goes on:

"I was Googling today and found an account by [the sometime Oxonian philosopher A. N.] Prior of the difference between behaviourism and functionalism which casts some light on this. I've lost the Prior site, but no matter, there is a more complete account under "functionalism" by Janet Levin at [the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]"

which is especially Griceian in spirit, since Grice couldn't look outside the window without thinking "Stanford" (He lived in Berkeley, overlooking the bay). Keyword: "Hands across the Bay".

Jones:

"I propose here a little discussion of how Turing, Grice, Ryle and Carnap may be placed relative to the varieties of behaviourism and functionalism described by Levin and each other (dispositional appears in the definition of behaviourism)."

Good. Levin should have access to "Disposition and Intention". That may make change, dispositionally, her mind on this -- and that!

Jones:

"At SEP under the heading "Antecedents of Functionalism" we find a section on the Turing test and a section on behaviourism.  I discuss the latter first."

Good. I suppose Levin got that from Block. I was fascinated to see that Block discusses Grice and Functionalism and Turing in, alas, "PROBLEMS with Functionalism" -- or problems of functionalism, I forget. _His_ problems with functionalism, or is he being, philosophically, more generally? (and speaking on behalf of other people NEEDING to find a problem where there ain't?)

Jones goes on:

"Two varieties of behaviourism, empirical and logical or analytic, are distinguished, and are considered precursors to corresponding variants of functionalism (which seek to remedy defects in the behaviourist theories)."

Good. With Ryle the main exponent of 'analytic' bheaviourism, I trust. I guess he would rather see himself dead than a living 'empirical behaviourist' alla Watson!

Jones:

"Both of these behaviourisms seek to explain something in terms of behavioural dispositions (so, both the behaviourisms and the subsequent functionalisms are dispositional)."

Perhaps Grice would use a formalism here. Take "A" to represent "A" (open the umbrella).

The disposition to open the umbrella.

Or the disposition to laugh.

Or the disposition to smile.

--- I guess we have to be specific. Only a few items counts as good follow-ups for clauses reporting 'dispositions'.

----

"2 + 2" for example, does not have a disposition to be "4".

Neither does a bachelor a disposition to be an unmarried male!

-----

Nor Spring a disposition to follow Winter!

Jones goes on:

"The empirical behaviourist explains behaviour in that way, the logical behaviourist explains the meanings of mental concepts in that way (Malcolm, Ryle and perhaps the later Wittgenstein are mentioned)."

As they should!

I am slightly saddened that Ryle chose "The concept of mind" as the title of his book. He should have called it: "The ghost without the machine", or something.

----- But he was provocative enough to have Chomsky writing "Cartesian linguistics" and bringing the anti-behaviouristic movement back to the forum (cf. Chomsky's review of Skinner?)

Jones goes on:

"The principal difference between behaviourism and functionalism is that the former deny the reality of mental states and seek explanations of behaviour or language which are independent of mental states or concepts, whereas the latter insist on mental states and offer explanations of mental states or concepts which may involve other mental states or concepts."

Indeed. Aristotle was, surprisingly, a functionalist. But of course, the way 'function' is used by Aristotelians differs from this more 'mathematical' idea of 'function', which is what functionalists use when they say that psychological attitude

psi

(in symbols, Pap ---- Agent A has psychological attitude P towards proposition p)

co-relates to some perceptual INPUT (which need not be reported in psychologistic terms) and behavioural output ('open the umbrella') (which again need not be reported in psychologistic terms).

----

Jones writes:

"It sounds as if there is a metaphysical aspect here, which relates to Ryle's desire to refute Cartesian dualism, but there are more concrete differences as well."

Indeed, and I'm glad I mentioned Chomsky's "Cartesian linguistics" because the standard mainstream Anglo-American tradition that Chomsky is criticizing is usually associated with Empiricism and Behaviourism, and, who knows, some sort of Monistic Materialism.

(But functionalists need not be monists).

----

Jones goes on:

"The functionalist allows himself to talk about mental states when giving an account of mental concepts, he does not have to give an account exclusively in terms of behaviours."

This is something that somewhat irritated Grice, when commenting on Witters. Because Witters is saying that if we say something like,

"He raised his arm against me."

WHILE a purely physical interpretation may be possible, it seems that the vocabulary used to describe behaviour is psychologically-theory-laden, as Hanson would put it.

Jones goes on:

"Functionalism comes in three varieties according to its origins.  Different varieties come from early AI research (and therefore connect with Turing), and from the empirical (or "psycho-") and logical behaviourisms (the latter connecting with Ryle, the former being an empirical theory rather than a philosophical one or a philosophical theory about empirical scientific theories of mind)."

Good. Of course, Grice concentrates on Ryle in his "Method in Philosophical Psychology". I guess that as an Oxonian philosopher Grice was VERY TIRED of having to deal with Ryle's book as the opus magnum of post-war Oxford philosophy!

----

Jones goes on

"The description of "machine state functionalism" given by Levin is I hope, not quite correct (it would otherwise reflect badly on Putnam), because she seems not to understand the difference between a finite-state automaton and a Turing machine (the difference is the tape, which is a big difference)."

Good. I think Grice knew Putnam well. I love a phrase by Grice on Putnam. I guess they met when Grice first went to Harvard, although I would NOT be surprised if Putnam had had a scholarship at Oxford (it seems all American philosophers then had!). Grice writes that he used to be too formal, until, "Putnam (of all people) told me I was." I just love the implicature of "of all people".

I cannot use "of all people" without triggering the wrong implicature. I guess Grice can be literal, and he means, that, out of the set of all people, Putnam told Grice that he was _too_ formal, implicating there is something wrong about 'too'. There shouldn't. (I like my coffee too sweet, for example).

Putnam was possible formal enough, and that is where Grice's joke lies. Cfr. Putnam on H20 and XYZ.

Jones:

"If we recast her definition appropriately then Putnam's account of this kind of functionalism asserts that any creature with a mind "can be regarded as" (this seems very weak) a Turing machine and that its mental states are then to be identified with the states of the Turing machine (and that would have to be the state of the automaton and the content and position its tape, though Levin talks only of the state of the automaton)."

Excellent point.

It may all relate to the KEYWORD: multiple physical realisability, if I may use a techno-kryptical expression.

I.e. the identification (or individuation, as I prefer -- cfr. Grice's ontological marxism) of a psychological state need to be made with the STATE of the automaton AND THE CONTENT AND POSITION OF THE TAPE!

Jones:

"I quote Levin for the nub of her description of the other two kinds of functionalism."

Good.

"What is distinctive about psycho-functionalism is its claim that mental states and processes are just those entities, with just those properties, postulated by the best scientific explanation of human behavior."

I like her distinction (or difference) between a 'state' and a process. Or an event, as I may prefer. Thus,

I think that Grice is an Englishman.
I think that all Englishmen are brave.
----
Therefore, I think that Grice is brave.

Here we seem to have THREE states (three beliefs) but also one event or process. MY believing that Grice is an Englishman AND that all Englishmen are brave YIELDS or causes my belief that Grice is brave.

----

Jones goes on to quote from Levin:

"the goal of analytic functionalism is to provide “topic-neutral” translations, or analyses, of our ordinary mental state terms or concepts".

I think the vocabulary is Broadian?

Jones:

"So how do our four protagonists relate to these various kinds of behaviourism and functionalism This is my present impression. Turing so far as I can see from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" does not fit well into any of these schemes."

If Hodges is right (and he makes the point quite a few times) that Turing was no philosopher, then Turing would NOT care! The problem is that he possibly did not see as a psychologist either (But then why submit an essay to "Mind"?). He saw himself as a mathematician, and mathematicians need not commit to any of the varieties defined (rather arbitrarily) by Levin.

Jones:

"First of all, [Turing] is very clear that his test does not test for thinking, and he explicitly disavows any opinion about whether machines can think.  I think the manner of his dismissal might be thought to implicate a similar attitude to other mental concepts. Here is a salient quote: "It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the  matter. Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10⁹, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion." He does not appear to be interested in analysis of the meaning of mental concepts, and therefore is neither an analytic behaviourist nor an analytic functionalist.
Furthermore, the above quote I believe gives the central purpose of his paper, which is to make a claim about what computers will be able to achieve at some point in the future.  He not only lacks interest in the meaning of mental concepts (beyond what is unavoidable is describing his thesis), but also does not appear to be interested in scientific theories about the mind."

Excellent point. The blame here is possibly SHERBORNE, his alma mater?

----- INTERLUDE ON SHERBORNE -- (Grice went to Clifton, and that's why he became a classicist, and Renaissance-interest person gaining a scholarship to Oxford -- On the other hand,


Sherborne's s origins date back to the eighth century, when a tradition of education in Sherborne was begun by St Aldhelm.

According to legend, Alfred the Great was one of the school's early pupils.

The school was then linked with Sherborne Abbey, formerly a Benedictine house. The earliest known Master was Thomas Copeland in 1437. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Edward VI re-founded the school in 1550 as King Edward's School, a free grammar school for local boys. The present-day school stands on land which once belonged to the abbey's monastery. The Library, Chapel, and Headmaster's rooms, which adjoin the Abbey Church, are modifications of its original monastic buildings.
The present school's earlier lives take us back four hundred, perhaps a thousand years."

"In the Beckett Room below the library there survives Anglo-Saxon masonry, a reminder that the school occupies all that remains of the site of Sherborne Abbey (AD 705, remodelled as a Benedictine abbey in 998). The Headmaster and the senior staff now have their offices, appropriately enough, in the Abbot's house, rather grandly refashioned, like the Abbey itself, in the 15th century; the library was, perhaps, the Abbot's "Guest Hall" (13th–15th century); the Chapel occupies another monastic refectory (12th–15th century, but much rebuilt and extended in the 19th century). Go just beyond the Headmaster’s block and face the Abbey and you can see quite clearly on the walls to your right the outlines of the monastic cloister with its curious first floor Abbot’s Chapel; the conduit, where the monks wash, was removed by the Victorians and rebuilt outside Bow House.
In 2005, Sherborne School was one of 50 of the country's leading independent schools that were found guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, which had allowed them to drive up fees for thousands of parents. Each school was required to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000. All schools involved in the scandal agreed to make ex-gratia payments, totalling £3 million, into a trust. The trust was designed to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in respect of which fee information was shared. However, Jean Scott, the head of the Independent Schools Council, said that independent schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and were unaware of the change to the law (on which they had not been consulted). She wrote to John Vickers, the OFT director-general, saying, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."



---- END OF INTERLUDE about Sherborne. My point is that perhaps while at Sherborne, Turing was motivated by the staff ONLY to concentrate on mathematics, hence his lack of interest in philosophy, the classics, or science! After all, it is an independent school. Meaning, 'independent' from the rest of the world?

----

Jones:

"This I think excludes [Turing] from being considered an empirical behaviourist or functionalist, at least as far as we can see from this paper (the paper does not exclude this, though we might think his assertion that the "Can Machines Think?" is meaningless does exclude him from being an analytic behaviourist or functionalist)."

Indeed. But then, of course, Ryle perhaps did enjoy that some of the questions that he thought meaningful, "can machines think?", say, turned out to be, according to Turing, a 'systematically misleading' one!

Jones:

"Turing is closest to a "Machine state functionalist", not surprisingly since they were probably influenced by his work.  But does he fit the description? Does he think anything with a mind "can be regarded as" a Turing machine? Possibly. But this is not, on my reading, the thesis which his paper presents. I believe he is asserting functional identity between minds and Turing machines (to each mind there is a corresponding Turing machine with which it is functionally identical), though he does not say that explicitly. But "can be regarded as" I still think, though vague, a little too strong."

Good points. Hodges, for that matter, teaches TURING at Wadham, and Oxford is of course strong in KEYWORD: Philosophy of Mind, so I would not be surprised that, if we search within the Oxford Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, people with interest in mathematics, logic, and philosophy of mind, we find a neo-Turingian -- or two!

----

Jones:

"Let us now consider Grice, which I am ill qualified to do, but perhaps these remarks will provoke a better informed response from Speranza."

I can all-ways talk!

Jones:
"Grice seems to me certainly to be an analyst and to be interested in the meanings of mental concepts.
I doubt that he is any kind of behaviourist, but it seems to me that he might well be an analytic functionalist."

So far so good. He is no behaviourist, I would think, because Grice took generations very seriously, and Ryle was born in 1900, while Grice was born in 1913 -- different generation, thus, different philosophies. What's the good of philosophy if we are not going to have a HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY? So, just to be different, Grice would NOT have liked to a be associated with Ryle, at all! (Oscar Wood did -- and other Oxonian philosophers did).

I would think Grice was a functionalist in that the basis for "Method in philosophical psychology" is said to be D. K. Lewis, and Lewis WAS a functionalist!

Jones:

"In relation to Turing, my impression is that there is little contact, neither agreement nor disagreement. Insofar as Grice is interested in automata, I would imagine this to be concerned with the insights which might be gleaned from them into the nature of language or other philosophical problems. Would he have any interest in predictions about what computers will be able to do at some point in the future?"

Don't think so. His wife said that Grice STRONGLY disliked computers for mainly two reasons:

Everytime he wrote 'sticky wicket', the spelling checking device in his computer noted that there was something wrong there.

The second reason is that his computer did not recognize "pirot" (and wanted it to be replaced, alla Locke, by parrot).

Grice had a beautiful handwriting. Is there an implicature there? And he disliked word processors, never mind computers!

-----

Also he possibly would have thought that Turing was overrated. There he was, Turing was, playing almost something like chess and crosswords -- I have to find this genial paragraph in "The imitation game" -- while Grice, qua Captain of the Royal Navy -- was offering the ultimate sacrifice in the mid-Atlantic theatre of operations!

(He was soon transferred to the Admiralty, though).

Jones:

"Ryle I should perhaps have mentioned before Grice, because he preceded Grice and behaviourism preceded functionalism we may think of Ryle (as he is cited by Levin) as being some kind of behaviourist."

Yes. Only he would not use the Americanism 'behaviour'. One tends to associate 'behaviour' with Watson, and Skinner -- a VERY AMERICAN thing, and let's recall that Ryle is famous in Oxford for avoiding the "American" influence in the city of the dreaming spires. They were reading Johnson, and Price and Cook Wilson, and all the obscure British authors -- but few American philosophers.

Perhaps there is a history of philosophical American behaviourism that connects with PRAGMATISM which seems to have been popular at Oxford for some time. I recall that when Lewis Carroll wrote "The Hunting of the Snark", it was parodied in a comical issue of "Mind" (called "Mind!") by a pragmatist philosopher of two.

William James, who was almost a behaviourist (or is he more of an introspectionalist?) was perhaps pretty influential too in Oxford. And let us not forget that when Grice went to the USA it was to give the bi-annual lecture in memory of William James co-ordinated by the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychology.

Let us not forget, either, that Grice lectured at Oxford on PEIRCE, whose theory of symbols, indexes, and icons (that Grice disliked) gave Grice impetus to create his theory of meaning as intention.

John Holloway is an interesting figure to consider -- Oxford educated, comes up with a book on "Language and Intelligence" that has the merit of having the name of "H. P. Grice" mentioned when H. L. A. Hart reviewed it for "The Philosophical Quarterly".

We should not forget, either, that the ONLY PHILOSOPHER that Grice quotes in "Meaning" is C. L. Stevenson (his Yale University Press book on language and ethics), and most of Stevenson's examples are BEHAVIOURISTIC in nature. In fact, D. E. Cooper and other historians of pragmatics (such as S. Levinson, in "Pragmatics", Cambridge textbooks in linguistics) traces the history of Griceian pragmatics to behaviourism, pragmatism, Peirce and Morris -- Carnap has something to do with these authors, too).

----

Jones: "Because of [Ryle's] anti-dualistic zeal and his belief that some of our language (if perhaps only at the meta-linguistic level) is tainted by dualism, it is hard to see his position as being purely analytic.  He attributes category errors to certain kinds of ordinary discourse about mental concepts.
It seems to me that Ryle is engaged (in his own terms) in both descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, in analysing the metaphysical content and pathologies of language as it is, and in undertaking a profylactic metaphysical synthesis."

I loved that!

God knows what he was attempting with his "Concept of Mind". At that time, "Mind", which he edited, was still subtitled, "A review of psychology and philosophy", I think, and I would not be surprised if some of his Ryle's friends WERE psychologists, and even behaviourists (George?)

Jones:

"[Ryle's] descriptive metaphysics reveals pathologies (category errors particularly) which his revisionary metaphysics seeks to repair. What makes him seem a behaviourist is that his metaphysics is monistic, materialistic.  Perhaps this is enough to call him an analytic behaviourist, but I am inclined to think that to crude a characterisation."

Yes, and perhaps too American to Ryle's taste. Note that after "Concept of Mind" he have lecture after lecture on "THINKING". Professionally, he was the official professor at Oxford of "Metaphysical Philosophy", to be succeeded by Strawson. So I guess that Ryle's favourite motto, from "Punch" was:

-- What is the matter?
-- Never mind!

---

Jones:

"Between Ryle and Turing I see no connection, their ideas seem logically independent, neither supporting nor confuting each other, though possibly mutually sympathetic in a weaker sense."

Yes. We've seen that Hodges seeks a link here, in that Ryle's Concept of Mind came out in 1949, and Turing's essay was published in "Mind", edited by Ryle, in 1950. But then, I don't think Turing was ever invited (being a Cambridge person) to educate Oxonians on this -- or that.


----

Jones:

"What of Ryle and Grice?"

---- The obituary by G. E. L. Owens of Ryle in "Aristotelian Society" is a good one. He says that Ryle belonged to this group that had Mabbott (fellow at St. John's, with Grice) and a few others. But this group never inter-acted with Austin's Play Group (we are talking post-war Oxford) to which Grice belonged ("the class of philosophers who have no other class"). Owens goes on to say that when Austin died, it was Grice who led this "Play Group" -- Ryle was still active then. Recall that Grice left Oxford for good in 1967 (although he would return for his Locke Lectures and was surprised at how rude Oxonians philosophes could be -- one, he met on High Street -- "I haven't seen you in a while. You've been away?" "Of course they knew", Mrs. Grice regrets).

Rumour has it that Grice left Oxford because when Ryle retired as Waynflete professor of philosophy, the chair was given to Grice's pupil, Strawson, rather than to Grice himself. But this seems nonsense. Grice came to LOVE Berkeley where he was given full professor credentials from the beginning and he soon was leading his own little group there -- Grice's "at homes", attended by Searle, Davidson, Barry Stroud, George Myro, Judith Baker, and almost EVERY PHILOSOPHER and graduate student on Moses Hall!

Jones:

"Of our four protagonists here, these two are probably the closest to each other." Physically, too. So English! I'm sure in their manners, they were very much alike. Public school background and all that. Only Grice grew out of that background and never allowed his son or his daughter to attend a public school!

Jones:

"Insofar as Ryle is engaged in metaphysics, this would be of interest to Grice, though perhaps only the descriptive rather than the revisionary metaphysics."

Indeed.

Ryle was hardly systematic, though. While Grice was the systematic philosopher par excellence. And the older he got he more systematic he became. On the other hand, one reads Ryle's collection of essays, and one doesn't know what he is trying to achieve! (I always find him entertaining, though, and find his "Fido"-Fido theory of meaning a delight to refute!).

Jones:

"Grice's ontological pragmatism" or Marxism, as I prefer, "would I imagine leave him poorly motivated to enter into a crusade against Cartesian dualism."

Indeed. I was fascinated, when I got my copy of WoW (Way of Words) to find that Grice cared to include a historical essay he had written, back in the day, on DESCARTES!

Grice is into criticizing Descartes's rather casual difference between

"It is certain".

and

"I am certain".

Certainly, Grice saw a world of a difference between what he calls 'objective certainty' ("It is certain that it is raining, hence Smith is dispositionally inclined to open his umbrella") and 'subjective certainty' ("Smith is certain that it will rain; of course, this is quite different from saying that he KNOWS that it will rain").

Subjective certainty had been posed by Ayer as a criterion for empirical knowledge, and Grice knew better than that! ("I was certain that p, but it turned out that p was false" makes a lot of sense; whereas, "I knew that p, but then it turned out that p was false" triggers a contradictory implicature!).

Jones:

"Functionalism is however very accommodating, it does not seem to exclude much, and so Grice might well be an analytic functionalist, the distinction between him and Ryle similar to that between an analytic functionalist and an analytic behaviourist."

Problem with Grice's "Method in philosophical psychology" is that when one was thinking he would get into Turing and all that, he starts discussing Aristotle's idea of a 'soul'!

Grice thinks that 'soul' can only be analysed 'gradually'. He notes that Aristotle says that there are a few concepts (not just 'soul') that require this 'gradual' analysis. The other is 'number'.

So, he dedicates the central part of "Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre", to see how we can create creatures (if you allow me the redundancy -- Grice calls them pirots -- and the science of pirots: pirotology) which more and more complex psychological abilities.

He is interested in embedding connectives within psychological states.

As if I were to say:

"If Grice thinks that all Englishmen are brave AND Grice thinks that he is an Englishman; Grice thinks that he is brave. And this is analytic".

This is still different from:

"Grice thinks that if all Englishmen are brave, and that he is an Englishman, he is brave. And he thinks that this is analytic".

I am thinking of the analytic conditional associated with a piece of valid deductive reasoning. And possibly failing!

Let us not forget that Grice's third book, "Aspects of reason", is ALL ABOUT psychology, and how psychological operators can embed complex logical expressions.

Jones: "I now come to Carnap, the scientifically oriented scourge of metaphysics. The special features which Carnap brought in his anti-metaphysical fervour are of interest here. Before Carnap we would expect a positivist to be also a phenomenalist, and therefore to have no truck with Cartesian dualism and to be close to analytical and psychological behaviourism."

Good you bring PHENOMENALISM in!

Jones goes on: "Carnap's anti-metaphysics is novel (for a positivist) in being ontologically liberal and pragmatic rather than nominalistic."

Indeed. His distinction between internal and external questions may relate here.

Jones:

"This is reflected in his linguistic pluralism, and so, though he worked primarily with ontologies in which there were no mental entities (phenomenal, physical, and theoretical languages), he would not have ruled them out on principle (that would violate his principle of tolerance)."

Indeed. And it would not be difficult to trace him to tendencies found in American pragmatism, alla Morris, and other philosophers who were into 'operational' approaches to 'mentalistic' talk.

Jones:

"In consequence Carnap could not be a doctrinaire behaviourist, but would admit a behaviouristic scientific theory if it could by empirically confirmed."

Indeed. As opposed to Popper who would rather endose any FALSIFIED theory anyday!

Grice spends some time on issues of falsification and confirmation of theories in "Method" and goes on to quote a few 'psychological laws' from the literature, as he calls them. He is especially interested in finding them EMPTY!

Qua functionalist, Grice is allowing for psychological predicates to be introduced (via Ramsified naming and Ramsified describing) as theoretical terms, to be correlated with perceptual input and behavioural input ("No need of psychological concepts without behaviour which such concepts are called on to explain" -- his rewrite of Witters's dictum).

Jones:

"[Carnap] was concerned with scientific method, and I think it plausible that he would have been some kind of empirical or psycho- functionalist. Carnap's conception of philosophy was as a kind of analysis, but like Turing, he lacked interest in the details of natural languages, for much the same reasons.  He advocated the use of formal notations and methods in philosophy and science, and explained the relationship between formalised concepts and those of natural languages as "explication", a relationship too weak perhaps to allow that the formal theories provided analyses of the natural concepts."

I like that. We have Carnap's explications and Grice's explicatures.

And I'm reminded of Byron who referring to an exegesis of a literary critic of a specially obscure poem, he wrote, "His explication is fine; but I fear we may need an explication of his explication." (I owe the quote to J. L. Borges, who gave the Eliot Lectures at Harvard while Grice was delivering the William James lectures).

Joness:

"Because of [Carnap's] desire to formalise and his scientific orientation it seems to me that Carnap is closer to Turing than to Ryle or Grice [...]"

and perhaps associated to the movement, so popular in America for a time, of a 'unified science'...

Jones: "[A]nd I see no conflict between the views of Carnap and Turing. Carnap's relationship to Ryle and Grice is more difficult."

Indeed, especially in view of a sort of generalized anti-scientism prominent in post-war Oxford. Grice kept lecturing on the 'devil of scientism' in his "Method in philosophical psychology", but he must have found that his audience had changed! (Perhaps Haugeland, Dreyfus, and Searle, found a strong sympathy on these issues, though).

Jones:

"As a formalist [Carnap] lacked interest in the minutiae of natural languages, as a positivist one would expect him to be antagonistic to the metaphysical  aspects of Ryle's thesis (nominalism is metaphysics for Carnap). What is the point of this long ramble?"

"Should rambles have a point?" This is a favourite question in one of my favourite books.

Edward Step.

Step E. (1930) Nature Rambles: an Introduction to Country-lore, (4 volumes) Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd., London & NY: 256 pp.

Jones concludes:

"Well, one thing which I think important is a point about varieties of analysis."

Or "Annals of Anaysis", as I prefer -- Travis's title for his LONG review of Grice's WoW -- Way of Words -- in "Philosophical Review"!

Jones:

"Analytic philosophers seem often exclusively concerned with the analysis of ordinary language, and may too readily assume that what other philosophers (or even non-philosophical analysts) are doing is the analysis of language."

Or worse, English!

I am often amused by the fact that Grice found Latin and Greek superior to English. In "Aspects of Reason" he is discussing psychological predicates and the clauses by which they are followed, and find that Greek and Latin (that he had learned at Clifton) allow for nuances that English doesn't. Example: the imperative mode (never mood!) -- the optative mode, the so-called 'subjunctive' mood. Why are they becoming archaic in English? True, they ARE archaic in the archaic Greek and Latin he learned at Clifton too!

(Grice was amused that of all things, this was the minutiae that Gellner and Bergmann cared to choose when criticisng the "Oxford" type of analysis -- "futilitarianism", Bergmann called it -- a sensitivity for English usage found only, Gellner and Grice agree, on those educated at public school and later one of what Grice (and many others) call the 'stone-wall' Oxbridge, never redbrick! Grice is amused by this because he knew Gellner was oversimplifying: of course you don't have to be a public school Oxbridge type to delight in this or that linguistic mannerism!)

Jones: "Turing and Carnap in different ways offer examples of work which may be misconstrued as concerned with the analysis of ordinary language. Turing may be misconstrued as giving a test for or an analysis of the meaning of the concepts of "thought" or of "intelligence" when his purpose was simply to argue that humans had no intellectual capacities which could not be realised in a machines"

- and he proved that! (I love that episode when he breaks his engagement with Ms. Clarke, played by Keira Knightley -- I should find her genial riposte -- or is it retort? -- in the screenplay)

Jones:

"Carnap can be construed as primarily concerned with the explication of terms in ordinary language, and it is the central thrust of Carus's book on Carnap and 20th Century thought that the notion of explication is the centrepiece of Carnap's philosophy."

As perhaps Grice's explicature ain't!

Jones:

"However, this flies in the face of what Carnap writes about his motivations and objectives.  His principal aim was to apply the new methods he learned first from Frege to the advancement of science, and to progress Russell's conception of a scientific philosophy using formal methods.
In my view "explication" is merely Carnap's way of connecting his methods with ordinary language for the benefit of philosophers who would not otherwise understand it."

Good. I guess that Rorty would say that Carnap saw that there was a 'linguistic turn' in the air and that even HE would rather not ignore it!

Jones: "For many philosophers it seems that the only purpose of formal languages is to provide models of aspects of the semantics and logic of natural languages"

such as English. As if an English speaker cared as to what an Oxbridge (or other) has to say about what he (the English speaker) is allegedly IMPLICATING! (or cancelling, for that matter! -- all implicatures are otiosely cancellable!).

Jones:

"But just as one speaks a second language fluently only when thinking in that language rather than translating into it,"

or as my French teacher used to say, "DREAMING" in that language too. Perhaps she had read Malcom on "Dreaming".

Jones:

"proficiency in the application of formal languages results in their native use.  A formal language is the best kind of language for a variety of tasks involving the analysis of some non-linguistic subject matter, and the role of natural languages in this process is ancillary.  One begins with the formal model, and perhaps adds some informal annotation to help the reader see the point.  The analysis yields no information about language. This kind of analysis, of problems or of scientific domains, is more important to Carnap than the analysis of language, and should not be confused with it.
Turing is one step further from the analysis of language, for his central purpose is not analytic at all, it is technological, he is talking about what kinds of machine will in the future be constructed."

Indeed. And apparently, his prognosis went wrong. For he was rightly writing in 1950, and talking about what would be achieved in 'fifty years from now'.

And if SAYGIN is right, what we are having is computer-generated conversations that don't stop from violating Grice's maxims and stuff!