H. P. Grice: "Form and matter"

If anything characterizes ‘analytic’ philosophy, then it is presumably the emphasis placed on analysis.

But as history shows, there is a wide range of conceptions of analysis, so such a characterization says nothing that would distinguish analytic philosophy from much of what has either preceded or developed alongside it.

Given that the decompositional conception is usually offered as the main conception, it might be thought that it is this that characterizes analytic philosophy, even Oxonian 'informalists' like Strawson.

But this conception was prevalent in the early modern period, shared by both the British Empiricists and Leibniz, for example.

Given that Kant denied the importance of de-compositional analysis, however, it might be suggested that what characterizes analytic philosophy is the value it places on such analysis.

This might be true of G. E. Moore's early work, and of one strand within analytic philosophy; but it is not generally true.

What characterizes analytic philosophy as it was founded by Frege and Russell is the role played by logical analysis, which depended on the development of modern logic.

Although other and subsequent forms of analysis, such as 'linguistic' analysis, were less wedded to systems of FORMAL logic, the central insight motivating logical analysis remained. 

Pappus's account of method in ancient Greek geometry suggests that the regressive conception of analysis was dominant at the time — however much other conceptions may also have been implicitly involved.

In the early modern period, the decompositional conception became widespread.

What characterizes analytic philosophy—or at least that central strand that originates in the work of Frege and Russell—is the recognition of what was called earlier the transformative or interpretive dimension of analysis.

Any analysis presupposes a particular framework of interpretation, and work is done in interpreting what we are seeking to analyze as part of the process of regression and decomposition.

This may involve transforming it in some way, in order for the resources of a given theory or conceptual framework to be brought to bear.

Euclidean geometry provides a good illustration of this.

But it is even more obvious in the case of analytic geometry, where the geometrical problem is first ‘translated’ into the language of algebra and arithmetic in order to solve it more easily.

What Descartes and Fermat did for analytic geometry, Frege and Russell did for analytic PHILOSOPHY.

Analytic philosophy is ‘analytic’ much more in the way that analytic geometry (as Fermat's and Descartes's) is ‘analytic’ than in the crude decompositional sense that Kant understood it. 

The interpretive dimension of philosophical analysis can also be seen as anticipated in medieval scholasticism and it is remarkable just how much of modern concerns with propositions, meaning, reference, and so on, can be found in the medieval literature.

Interpretive analysis is also illustrated in the nineteenth century by Bentham's conception of paraphrasis, which he characterized as

"that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity."

Bentham, a palaeo-Griceian, applies the idea in ‘analyzing away’ talk of ‘obligations’, and the anticipation that we can see here of Russell's theory of descriptions has been noted by, among others, Wisdom and Quine in ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism.'

vide: Wisdom on Bentham as palaeo-Griceian.

What was crucial in analytic philosophy, however, was the development of quantificational theory, which provided a far more powerful interpretive system than anything that had hitherto been available.

In the case of Frege and Russell, the system into which statements were ‘translated’ was predicate calculus, and the divergence that was thereby opened up between the 'matter' and the logical 'form' meant that the process of 'translation' (or logical construction or deconstruction) itself became an issue of philosophical concern.

This induced greater self-consciousness about our use of language and its potential to mislead us (the infamous implicatures, which are neither matter nor form -- they are IMPLICATED matter, and the philosopher may want to arrive at some IMPLICATED form -- as 'the'), and inevitably raised semantic, epistemological and metaphysical questions about the relationships between language, logic, thought and reality which have been at the core of analytic philosophy ever since. 

Both Frege and Russell (after the latter's initial flirtation with then fashionable Hegelian Oxonian idealism -- "We were all Hegelians then") were concerned to show, against Kant, that arithmetic (or number theory, from Greek 'arithmos,' number -- if not geometry) is a system of analytic and not synthetic truths, as Kant misthought.

In the Grundlagen, Frege offers a revised conception of analyticity, which arguably endorses and generalizes Kant's logical as opposed to phenomenological criterion, i.e., (ANL) rather than (ANO) (see the supplementary section on Kant): 

(AN)

A truth is analytic if its proof depends only on general logical laws and definitions.

The question of whether arithmetical truths are analytic then comes down to the question of whether they can be derived purely logically.

This was the failure of Ramsey's logicist project.

Here we already have ‘transformation’, at the theoretical level — involving a reinterpretation of the concept of analyticity.

To demonstrate this, Frege realized that he needed to develop logical theory in order to 'FORMALISE' a mathematical statements, which typically involve multiple generality or multiple quantification -- alla "The altogether nice girl loves the one-at-at-a-time sailor"  (e.g., ‘Every natural number has a successor’, i.e. ‘For every natural number x there is another natural number y that is the successor of x’).

This development, by extending the use of function-argument analysis in mathematics to logic and providing a notation for quantification, is  essentially the achievement of his Begriffsschrift, where he not only created the first system of predicate calculus but also, using it, succeeded in giving a logical analysis of mathematical induction (see Frege FR, 47-78). 

In Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Frege goes on to provide a logical analysis of number statements (as in "Mary had two little lambs; therefore she has one little lamb" -- "Mary has a little lamb" -- "Mary has at least one lamb and at most one lamb").

Frege's central idea is that a number statement contains an assertion about a 'concept.'

A statement such as

Jupiter has four moons.

is to be understood NOT as *predicating* of *Jupiter* the property of having four moons, but as predicating of the 'concept' "moon of Jupiter" the second-level property " ... has at least and at most four instances," which can be logically defined.

The significance of this construal can be brought out by considering negative existential statements (which are equivalent to number statements involving "0").

Take the following negative existential statement: 

Unicorns do not exist.
Or

Grice's

"Pegasus does not exist."
"A flying horse does not exist."


If we attempt to analyze this decompositionally, taking the 'matter' to leads us to the 'form,' which as philosophers, is all we care for, we find ourselves asking what these unicorns or this flying horse called Pegasus are that have the property of non-existence!

Martin, to provoke Quine, called his cat 'Pegasus.'

For Quine, x is Pegasus if x Pegasus-ises (Quine, to abbreviate, speaks of 'pegasise,' which is "a solicism, at Oxford."

We may then be forced to posit the Meinongian subsistence — as opposed to existence — of a unicorn -- cf. Warnock on 'Tigers exist' in "Metaphysics in Logic" -- just as Meinong (in his ontological jungle, as Grice calls it) and Russell did ('the author of Waverley does not exist -- he was invented by the literary society"), in order for there to be something that is the subject of our statement.

On the Fregean account, however, to deny that something exists is to say that the corresponding concept has no instance -- it is not possible to apply 'substitutional quantification.' (This leads to the paradox of extensionalism, as Grice notes, in that all void predicates refer to the empty set).

There is no need to posit any mysterious object, unless like Locke, we proceed empirically with complex ideas (that of a unicorn, or flying horse) as simple ideas (horse, winged).

The Fregean analysis of (0a) consists in rephrasing it into (0b), which can then be readily FORMALISED as


(0b) The concept unicorn is not instantiated.

(0c) ~(∃x) Fx. 

Similarly, to say that God exists is to say that the concept God is (uniquely) instantiated, i.e., to deny that the concept has 0 instances (or 2 or more instances).

This is actually Russell's example ("What does it mean that (Ex)God?")

But cf. Pears and Thomson, two collaborators with Grice in the reprint of an old Aristotelian symposium, "Is existence a predicate?"



On this view, existence is no longer seen as a (first-level) predicate, but instead, existential statements are analyzed in terms of the (second-level) predicate is instantiated, represented by means of the existential quantifier.

As Frege notes, this offers a neat diagnosis of what is wrong with the ontological argument, at least in its traditional form (GL, §53).

All the problems that arise if we try to apply decompositional analysis (at least straight off) simply drop away, although an account is still needed, of course, of concepts and quantifiers. 

The possibilities that this strategy of ‘translating’ 'MATTER' into 'FORM' opens up are enormous.

We are no longer forced to treat the 'MATTER' of a statement as a guide to 'FORM', and are provided with a means of representing that form.

This is the value of logical analysis.

It allows us to ‘analyze away’ problematic linguistic MATERIAL or matter-expressions and explain what it is going on at the level of the FORM, not the MATTER

Grice calls this 'hylemorphism,' granting "it is confusing in that we are talking 'eidos,' not 'morphe'."


This strategy was employed, most famously, in Russell's theory of descriptions (on 'the' and 'some') which was a major motivation behind the ideas of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

See

Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"

Although subsequent philosophers were to question the assumption that there could ever be a definitive logical analysis of a given statement, the idea that this or that 'material' expression may be systematically misleading has remained. 

To illustrate this, consider the following examples from Ryle's essay
‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’:  (Ua)

Unpunctuality is reprehensible.

Or from  Grice's and Strawson's seminar on Aristotle's Categories:

Smith's disinteresteness and altruism are in the other room.

Banbury is an egosim
Egoism is reprehensible

Banbury is malevolent
Malevolence is rephrensible

Banbury is an altruism
Altruism and cooperativeness are commendable.

In terms of second-order predicate calculus.

If Banbury is altruist, Banbury is commendable.

 (Ta) Banbury hates (the thought of) going to hospital. 
Ray Noble loves the very thought of you.





In each case, we might be tempted to make unnecessary 'reification,' or subjectification, as Grice prefers (mocking 'nominalisation' -- a category shift) taking ‘unpunctuality’ and ‘the thought of going to hospital’ as referring to a thing, or more specifically a 'prote ousia,' or spatio-temporal continuant.


It is because of this that Ryle describes such expressions as ‘systematically misleading’.

As Ryle later told Grice, "I would have used 'implicaturally misleading,' but you hadn't yet coined the thing!"


(Ua) and (Ta) must therefore be rephrased:  (Ub)

Whoever is unpunctual deserves that other people should reprove him for being unpunctual.

Although Grice might say that it is one harmless thing to reprove 'interestedness' and another thing to recommend BANBURY himself, not his disinterestedness.





(Tb) Jones feels distressed when he thinks of what he will undergo IF he goes to hospital. 

Or in more behaviouristic terms:

The dog salivates when he salivates that he will be given food.

(Ryle avoided 'thinking' like the rats).

In this or that FORM of the MATTER, there is no overt talk at all of ‘unpunctuality’ or ‘thoughts’, and hence nothing to tempt us to posit the existence of any corresponding entities.

The problems that otherwise arise have thus been ‘analyzed away’. 

At the time that he wrote ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, Ryle too, assumed that every statement has a form -- even Sraffa's gesture has a form -- that was to be exhibited correctly.

But when he gave up this assumption (and call himself and Strawson 'informalist') he did not give up the motivating idea of conceptual analysis—to show what is wrong with misleading expressions.

In The Concept of Mind Ryle sought to explain what he called the ‘category-mistake’ involved in talk of the mind as a kind of ‘Ghost in the Machine’.

"I was so fascinated with this idea that when they offered me the editorship of "Mind," on our first board meeting I proposed we changed the name of the publication to "Ghost." They objected, with a smile."


Ryle's aim is to “'rectify' the conceptual geography or botany of the knowledge which we already possess," an idea that was to lead to the articulation of connective rather than 'reductive,' alla Grice, if not reductionist, alla Churchland, conceptions of analysis, the emphasis being placed on elucidating the relationships BETWEEN this or that concepts without assuming that there is a privileged set of intrinsically basic or prior concepts (v. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy). 

For Grice, surely 'intend' is prior to 'mean,' and 'utterer' is prior to 'expression'. Yet he is no reductionist. In "Negation," introspection and incompatibility are prior to 'not.'

In "Personal identity," memory is prior to 'self.'

Etc.

Vide, Grice, "Conceptual analysis and the defensible province of philosophy."

Ryle says, "You might say that if it's knowledge it cannot be rectified, but this is Oxford! Everything is rectifiable!"



What these varieties of conceptual analysis suggest, then, is that what characterizes analysis in analytic philosophy is something far richer than the mere ‘de-composition’ of a concept into its ‘constituents’.

Although reductive is surely a necessity.

The alternative is to take the concept as a 'theoretical' thing introduced by Ramseyfied description in this law of this theory.

For things which are a matter of intuition, like all the concepts Grice has philosophical intuitions for, you cannot apply the theory-theory model. You need the 'reductive analysis.' And the analysis NEEDS to be 'reductive' if it's to be analysis at all!



But this is not to say that the decompositional conception of analysis plays no role at all.

It can be found in Moore, for example.

It might also be seen as reflected in the approach to the analysis of concepts that seeks to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct employment, as  in Grice's infamous account of 'mean' for which he lists Urmson and Strawson as challenging the sufficiency, and himself as challenging the necessity!





Conceptual analysis in this way goes back to the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues -- and Grice thought himself an English Socrates -- and Oxonian dialectic as Athenian dialectic

-- "Even if I never saw him bothering people with boring philosophical puzzles."

But it arguably reached its heyday with Grice.

The definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified true belief’ is perhaps the second most infamous example; and this definition was criticised in Gettier's classic essay -- and again by Grice in the section on the causal theory of 'know' in WoW -- Way of Words.

The specification of necessary and sufficient conditions may no longer be seen as the primary aim of conceptual analysis, especially in the case of philosophical concepts such as ‘knowledge’, which are fiercely contested.

But consideration of such conditions remains a useful tool in the analytic philosopher's toolbag, along with the implicature, what Grice called his "new shining tool" "even if it comes with a new shining skid!"