Morton Deutsch, if you've heard of him (or as Grice would say, “even if you
haven’t”) is best described as an expert on Conflict Resolution, in other
words, an expert on, if not Popper, or Carnap, Grice!
One telling example:
After Morton Deutsch learned that Lydia Shapiro, his future wife (as it
happens) was sunbathing (yes! – this is a figure of speech – you only LITERALLY
bathe in water) along (of all places) the Charles River in Boston, while she
was supposed, rather, to be boringly interviewing ten subjects for one of
Deutsch’s contrived sociological experiments, Deutsch resorted to what D. K.
Lewis would call a rather “conventional” means of resolving a work-place dispute:
Deutsch fired Schapiro.
A little more than a year later, though, Deutsch took a more creative or
constructive approach to repairing their
frayed relationship: they became what Grice would call “fully cooperative
partners,” or in more Christian terms, husband and wife.
“I have in the past accused my wife of marrying me
to “get even,” as we say in New England, but she asserts, using a
Freudianism, that it was “pure masochism,”” Deutsch wryly recalls.
After completing his experiment in graduate
school, Deutsch, who lives on the isle of Manhattan, perfected his Griceian formula
for reconciliation to become a leading expert on Griceian conflict resolution
and mediation.
Deutsch not only remained married fory years, he
also co-wrote a prescriptive essay entitled “Preventing World War III,"
where "preventing" is conceptually related to 'predicting' (via
opposition) --. (You predict that p; you prevent p from happening).
Whatever credit Deutsch might have deserved for
thwarting another global military conflict, his principles provided (as a
matter of intellectual history) a theoretical framework for various Cold-War
negotiations (i.e. not hot-war ones, as Grice would disimplicate) for court
decisions that voided legally sanctioned racial segregation, and for Poland’s rather
peaceful transition from Communist rule.
Deutsch served on the faculty at Columbia --
"the uni in New York," as Grice explains, "not the country in
South America" -- until he became professor emeritus.
There, Deutsch founded the International Center
for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (since renamed for him), which he ran.
Deutsch should have called it "The Grice
Institute," or the "Manhattan Centre for Griceian Studies," if
you mustn't (but perhaps Grice is too Oxonian for that?)
Cfr. Grice's New York example, though:
A: Smith doesn't seem to be having a girl-friend
these days.
B: He's spending a lot of time in New York.
(Logic and Conversation,
II, Harvard). Implicating (or “+>” what?)
“The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and
Practice,” which he (Deutsch, not Grice -- now this is getting confusing)
edited with Peter T. Coleman and Eric C. Marcus, is (for those who know
it) a standard manual for dealing with labour, commercial, international and
(why not?) marital disputes.
John T. Jost, a social psychologist at New York
University (yes, they exist!) wrote in “The journal Social Justice Research” that
“in what is probably Deutsch’s most influential essay, “The Resolution of
Conflict,” Deutsch summarises the lessons of his research tutorials on,
among other things, Griceian cooperation and conflict” – where the ‘other
things’ are oddly Griceian, too!
“The point,” Jost notes, “is”, almost alla Witters
(as Grice calls Wittgenstein, “for short”), “that social forms are
self-fulfilling, so that anti-Griceian coercion, anti-Griceian intimidation, anti-Griceian
deception -- or ‘sneakiness,’ as Grice prefers – including D. F. Pears’s
favourite form, ‘self-deception’ --, anti-Grceian distrust and anti-Griceian hostility
are both causes and effects of competition, whereas Griceian assistance,
Griceian openness, Griceian information-sharing, Griceian perceived similarity,
and Griceian friendliness are both causes and effects of, of course, Griceian
cooperation,” or ‘helpfulness,’ as Grice less pretentiously puts it in his less
pretentious (than the Harvard ones) Oxford lectures on logic and conversation
where he coined the English term of art ‘implicature’ – “Implicatura” had been
used in Latin by Sidonius!
Morton Deutsch was born, of all places, in the
Bronx, to Charles and Ida Deutsch, Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland
(implicature: but then really wasn’t). His father, if you care to know, was a
butter and egg wholesaler (Implicature: his mother was not)
Raised in the picturesque Washington Heights
section of Manhattan (Grice lived on the Berkeley Heights), Deutsch read
Freud and Marx when he was ten years old, graduated from Townsend Harris Hall
and entered City College when he was fifteen years old planning, or
'intending', as Grice would prefer, to become a psychiatrist (vide Grice,
"Intention and Uncertainty").
“I became disenchanted with the idea of being a
pre-med student after dissecting a pig in a biology lab,” Deutsch, not
Grice, recalls.
Oddly, ‘grice’ means ‘pig’ in Scots.
“I was happy to switch to a psychology major,”
Deutsch notes.
Deutsch received a bachelor of science degree from
City College and a master’s from the Uni of Pennsylvania.
“I grew up in a time when, as a Jew, I experienced
many instances of prejudice, blatant as well as subtle, and could observe the
gross acts of injustice being suffered by blacks,” Deutsch recalls in an essay
in “Reflections on 100 Years of Experimental Social Psychology.”
Deutsch did not merely “observe,” to use a
Popperianism
Deutsch contributed lunch money to the Spanish
Loyalists in the 1930s; organized a protest against the quality of high-school
cafeteria food and a strike by fellow waiters at a summer resort during
college; challenged what he considered a racist statement by a professor; and,
after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, enlisted in the Army Air Forces and
flew 30 missions as a navigator over the Nazi-occupied Old World.
“Being in World War II and experiencing
the devastation and horror of war, even though I felt the war against the Nazis
was justified, I became interested in prevention of war,” Deutsch observes in “Teachers
College Today” magazine
It was at M.I.T., where Deutsch earned his
doctorate on the G.I. Bill, where he also met his afore-mentioned wife,
Shapiro.
It was also at M.I.T. where Deutsch became a
disciple of Kurt Lewin, the psychologist whose favourite dictum was something
Popper would perhaps approve of: “There’s nothing so practical as a good theory”
(Lewin is punning on the Aristotelian terms of art which happen to be opposite
for Aristotle, ‘theoria’, or contemplation, and ‘praxis’ or action).
Deutsch’s postgraduate studies were heavily
influenced by the atomic bombings of Japan, followed by the formation of the
United Nations.
Deutsch’s doctoral dissertation is the basis for
his Griceian theory of Griceian cooperation and competition, which postulates
that the success of a group – A and B -- depends on the extent to which its
members believe their goals are shared and see a potential to make common
cause.
cfr. Grice's keyword: "COOPERATIVE
PRINCIPLE".
More formally, let “G” stand for “goal”, and “BEL”
for “believe”.
BEL(B)G(A)p à G(B)p
In plain English, if B believes that A’s goal is
to secure the state of affairs, “p”, then B assumes that goal, if only
momentarily.
In other words,
The intersection of G(A) and G(B) is not null.
Cooperation, including conversation, is not a zero-sum game.
He (Deutsch, not Grice) had in mind the United Nation’s
Security Council, he says, when “I had an image of them either co-operating or
competing and had different senses of what the consequences would be for the
world.” (For Frege, there are only two senses: to the right (spin positive) and
to the left (spin negative); for Grice, there is only one sense – “do not
multiply senses beyond necessity”).
But the same rules (only for Grice they are not
rules) apply for confrontations big and small, and, since he fired (but later
married) Shapiro, his researcher at M.I.T., Deutsch says there were plenty of
occasions to practice what he preached.
“In our years of marriage,” he says, using an
expression meant to provoke Popper, “I have had splendid opportunities to
study conflict as a participant observer.”
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