Norman Malcolm, Herbert Paul Grice, and Keith Sedgwick Donnellan

Speranza

It was Malcolm who invited Grice to Cornell. But Grice knew Black well, too -- and Black will dedicate a brilliant essay to Grice in an attempt to refute him ("The best homage to a philosopher is trying to refute him" -- he was being Popperian. Black failed.

Malcolm being on a sabbatical leave, the Sage (School) provided that semester Grice's seminar on implicature (mainly concentrating on Malcolm, who was absent), and a course on logic (notably Strawson, Introduction to logical theory, that he'll go on to try and refute) given by Donnellan.

Grice's interest in Malcolm's philosophy is an early one. After all, Grice spent most of the early post-war years hearing Austin say, "Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man", and Malcolm was more or less Wittgensteinian, and more to the point, anti-Moorean. Grice quotes from Malcolm's early essay on "Moore and ordinary language".

Grice is concerned with what Malcolm and Grice list as "Philosopher's Paradoxes" (using "Philosopher" as a proper name, almost).

1. There are no material things.

2. Time is unreal.

3. Space is unreal.

4. No-one ever perceives a material thing.

5. No material thing exists unperceived.

6. All that one ever sees when he looks at a thing is part of his own brain.

7. There are no other minds – my sensations are the only sensations that exist.

8. We do not know for certain that there are any other minds.

9. We do not know for certain that the world was not created five minutes ago.

10. We do not know for certain the truth of any statement about material things.

11. All empirical statements are hypotheses.

12. A priori statements are rules of grammar.

Grice refutes Malcolm, and provides ingenious variants of the alleged paradoxes.

When in Cornell, Grice quoted from a later essay by Malcolm (he was on sabbatical leave when Grice gave this Cornell seminar on conversational implicature.

Grice notes that Malcolm injustly accused Moore of having misused the word “know” when he said that he knew that this was one human hand and that this was another human hand.

Malcolm claims that an essential part of the concept “know” is the implication that an inquiry is under way.

But surely that's merely a conversational implicature! 

For the record, self-contradictions are ‘incorrect’ uses of language, but not all so-called ‘incorrect’ uses of language, on this view, are necessarily meaningless.
 

For example, the ‘sceptical’ use of the term ‘know’ is classified, on Malcolm’s view, as a ‘misuse’ of the term, but only because it is not the ordinary use.

Such a use is, of course, allowed, and obviously it is not meaningless.

But using the term this way requires some further explanation, or indication to the effect that it is not being used in its ordinary sense.

So, contrary to some detractors, on the Ordinary Language view, not all ‘incorrect’ uses, or even ‘misuses’ of expressions are thereby false – nor are they prohibited.

So, it is not prohibited to use expressions in ‘philosophical’ or other novel ways – but one must make reference back to the ordinary use in order to make the new use clear.

When Malcolm was back in Cornell ("the Witters man"), Grice was, paradoxically, gone [+> back in Oxford].

Unlike Black, Malcolm had perhaps a better ear for 'ordinary language' -- but neither Black nor Malcolm had the solid philosophical intuitions and eye for examples that both Grice and Donnellan did.

 

 

 

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-- Grice as an English Futilitarian.

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--- Wrigley to Grice: I will base my dissertation on Dummett's "Frege". Have you read it. Grice: "I haven't, and I hope I won't."

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