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Wednesday, April 29, 2020

H. P. Grice reads G. E. Moore's essay on entailment (1919)

The quote by Moore, 1919 being:

"It might ... be suggested that we should say:


"p ent q"

means

"p ) q AND this proposition is
an instance of a formal implication, which is not
merely true but self-evident, like the laws of
formal logic"".

Moore goes on:

"This proposed definitions would
avoid the paradoxes involved in Mr. Strachey's
definition, since such true formal implications
as

"All the persons in this room are more than
five years old"

are certainly not self-evident; and,
so far as I can see, it may state something which
is in fact true of

p

and

q,

whenever and only
when

p ent q.

I do not myself think that it
gives the meaning of

"p ent q,"

since the kind of
relation which I see to hold between the premisses
and a conclusion of a syllogism seems to me
one which is purely "objective" in the sense that
no psychological term, such as is inovolved
in the meaning of "self-evident" is involved in
its definition (it it has one). I am not, however,
concerned to dispute that some such definition
of "p ent q" as this may be true.""

--- and so on. So, it is apparently all Strachey's fault.

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