H. P. Grice, "Gricese"

gricese: nglish, being English or the genius of the ordinary. H. P. Grice refers to “The English tongue.” A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic of classical Eng. Phil. from Ireland-born Berkeley to Scotland-born Hume, Scotland-born Reid, and very English Jeremy Bentham and New-World Phil. , whether in transcendentalism Emerson, Thoreau or in pragmatism from James to Rorty. But this orientation did not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by Vienna-born Witters, translated by C. K. Ogden, very English Brighton-born Ryle, and especially J. L. Austin and his best companion at the Play Group, H. P. Grice, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of a phrase Grice lauged at: “‘ordinary’-language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the English Midlanders such as H. P. Grice, such as the gerund that often make it difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to emphasize this paradox because English Midlander philosopher, such as H. P. Grice, claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as an important philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century, due mainly to the efforts of H. P. Grice. English, but especially Oxonian Phil. has a specific relationship to ‘ordinary’ language (even though for Grice, “Greek and Latin were always more ordinary to me – and people who came to read Eng. at Oxford were laughed at!”), as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is not limited to the theories of the Phil. of language, in which an Eng. philosopher such as H. P. Grice appears as a pioneer. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical speculation that is, Met. and always prefers to return to its original home, as Witters puts it: the natural environment of everyday words Philosophical Investigations. Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the ordinary in Scots Hume, Irish Berkeley, Scots Reid, and very English Jeremy Bentham and what will become in Irish London-born G. E. Moore and Witters after he started using English, at least orally and then J. L. Austin’s and H. P. Grice’s ‘ordinary’-language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several areas. First, in the exploitation of all the resources of the language, which is considered as a source of information and is valid in itself. Second, in the attention given to the specificities—and even the defects, or ‘implicata,’ as Grice calls them —of the vernacular -- which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can learn. Finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the technical language of Philosophy —the former being the object of an agreement deeper than the latter. Then there’s The Variety of Modes of Action. The passive. There are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in tr.. Agency is a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself v. AGENCY. A classic difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from J. Stuart Mill’s To gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to examine a couple of newspaper headlines. “Killer’s Car Found” On a retrouvé la voiture du tueur, “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead.” On craint la mort du fils Kennedy; or the titles of a philosophical essay, “Epistemology Naturalized,” L’Épistémologie naturalisée; Tr. J. Largeault as L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle; a famous article by Quine that was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American Phil. and “Consciousness Explained” La conscience expliquée by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this PASSIVE VOICE kind of construction—which seems so awkward in Fr. compared with the active voice— is perceived by its Eng. users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of Eng. so profound that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse récessive the loss of the agent has become a characteristic of the Eng. language itself, and not only of the passive. Thus, e. g. , a Fr. reader irresistibly gains the impression that a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions. “This book reads well.” ce livre se lit agréablement. “His poems do not translate well.” ses poèmes se traduisent difficilement. “The door opens.” la porte s’ouvre. “The man will hang.” l’homme sera pendu. In reality, here again, Eng. simply does not need to mark by means of the reflexive pronoun se the presence of an active agent. Do, make, have Eng. has several terms to translate the single Fr. word faire, which it can render by to do, to make, or to have, depending on the type of agency required by the context. Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of examples of tr. problems in the Oxonian seminars by J. L. Austin. In Sense and Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say that” p. To translate such a passive construction, Fr. is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” je as if it were considered from the outside: On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que p. But at the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified, and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Philosophical language also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented by Chomsky’s discovery Syntactic Structures, of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an undergoing, as is shown by the example She was offered a bunch of flowers. In particular, language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the ellipsis of the agent as is shown by the common expression Eng. spoken. For a philosopher, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in Fr. only by on, an indeterminate subject defined as differentiated from moi. “It is clearly implied, that “Now this, at least if it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as examples, familiar objects The expression is not further defined On sous-entend clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des objets familiers On n’approfondit pas la définition de l’expression . . . 1 Langage, langue, parole: A virtual distinction. Contrary to what is too often believed, the Eng. language does not conflate under the term language what Fr. distinguishes following Saussure with the terms langage, langue, and parole. In reality, Eng. also has a series of three terms whose semantic distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as Fr. : First there’s Grice’s “tongue,”which serves to designate a specific language by opposition to another; speech, which refers more specifically to parole but which is often translated in Fr. by discours; and language in the sense of faculté de langage. Nonetheless, Fr. ’s set of systematic distinctions can only remain fundamentally virtual in English, notably because the latter refuses to radically detach langue from parole. Thus in Chrestomathia, Bentham uses “tongue” (Bentham’s tongue – in Chrestomathia) and language interchangeably and sometimes uses language in the sense of langue: “Of all known languages the Grecian [Griceian] is assuredly, in its structure, the most plastic and most manageable. Bentham even uses speech and language as equivalents, since he speaks of parts of speech. But on the contrary, he sometimes emphasizes differences that he ignores here. And he proceeds exactly like Hume in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, where we find, e. g. , But it must also be allowed, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for from the very nature of language. The word, virtue, with its equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, . Hume, D. . Of the Standard of Taste. In Four Dissertations. London: Thoemmes Continuum, . First published in 175 Saussure, F. de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. by Bally and Sechehaye. Tr. R. Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, . First published in circulation among these forms. This formal continuity promotes a great methodological inventiveness through the interplay among the various grammatical entities that it enables. The gerund: The form of -ing that is the most difficult to translate Eng. is a nominalizing language. Any verb can be nominalized, and this ability gives the Eng. philosophical language great creative power. “Nominalization,” as Grice calls it, is in fact a substantivization without substantivization: the verb is not substantivized in order to refer to action, to make it an object of discourse which is possible in any language, notably in philosophical Fr. and G. , but rather to nominalize the verb while at the same time preserving its quality as a verb, and even to nominalize whole clauses. Fr. can, of course, nominalize faire, toucher, and sentir le faire, le toucher, even le sentir, and one can do the same, in a still more systematic manner, in G. . However, these forms will not have the naturalness of the Eng. expressions: the making and unmaking the doing and undoing, the feeling, the feeling Byzantine, the meaning. Above all, in these languages it is hard to construct expressions parallel to, e. g. , the making of, the making use of, my doing wrongly, “my meaning this,” (SIGNIFICATUM, COMMUNICATUM), his feeling pain, etc., that is, mixtures of noun and verb having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of the gerund — the external distribution of a nominal expression and the internal distribution of a verbal expression. These forms are so common that they characterize, in addition to a large proportion of book titles e. g. , The Making of the Eng. Working Class, by E. P. Thomson; or, in Phil. , The Taming of Chance, or The taming of the true, by I. Hacking, the language of classical Eng. Phil. . The gerund functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger between grammatical forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic by introducing into it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the language itself, a kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the translator finds awkward when he understands the message without being able to retain its lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks, regarding the idea, of the manner of its being conceived, which a Fr. translator might render as sa façon d’être conçue or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not quite the same thing. And we v. agency and the gerund connected in a language like that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb and noun: much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having yet been brought within the reach of the Eng. reader ChrestomathiTranslators often feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le fait de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its gerund, Eng. avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and arguing only on that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by Fr. when it translates the Eng. gerund is all the more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when Eng. uses the fact or the case from when it uses the gerund. The importance of the event, along with the distinction between trial, case, and event, on the one hand and happening on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the doctrine that we do perceive material things. Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous devons embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses matérielles. Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative, which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of do and on its sense of action, a duality that v.ms to be at the origin of the theory of the performative, I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife—as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony Oui à savoir: je prends cette femme pour épouse’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words. On the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, Eng. uses to make and to have—He made Mary open her bags il lui fit ouvrir sa valise; He had Mary pour him a drink il se fit verser un verre—with this difference: that make can indicate, as we v., coercion, whereas have presupposes that there is no resistance, a difference that Fr. can only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century Eng. philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in A Plea for Excuses, Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression doing something, and the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of action—Is to sneeze to do an action? There is indeed a vague and comforting idea that doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements. Further, we need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in acting. Philosophical Papers No matter how partial they may be, these opening remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation between ordinary language and philosophical language in English language Phil. . This enables us to better understand why the most Oxonian philosophers are so comfortable resorting to idiomatic expressions cf. H. Putnam and even to clearly popular usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head.” It ain’t necessarily so.As for the title of Manx-ancestry Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of View, which at first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a logical point of view, Always marry women uglier than you. The Operator -ing: Properties and Antimetaphysical Consequences -ing: A multifunctional operator Although grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of -ing—present participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what strikes the reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the free in Phil. , You are v.ing something Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding a stick in water; I really am perceiving the familiar objects Ayer, Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. The passage to the form be + verb + -ing indicates, then, not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the metalanguage peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of perception. The sole exception is, curiously, to know, which is practically never used in the progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and epistemological literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or he was knowing, as if knowledge could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great variety of what are customarily called aspects, through which the status of the action is marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in Fr. or G. , once again because of the -ing ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb to be with a verb ending in -ing imperfect or progressive, by opposition to the simple present or past perfect. Moreover, Grice mixes several aspects in a single expression: iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in it cannot fail to have been noticed Austin, How to Do Things. These are nuances, or implicate, as Labov and then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written Eng. but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or allegedly ungrammatical. The vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working” —that is, between having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment, standard usage being limited to “he is working” Pinker, Language Instinct. Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in Eng. there is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads Oxonian philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising inventions, such as that of ‘implicatum,’ or ‘visum,’ or ‘disimplicatum.’ The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance Fictive entities Thus the verb + -ing operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb, that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the substantiality of the I think asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually all the Eng. philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity can be constituted by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, it does not require positing a substance: the substantivization of making and giving meets the need. We can also consider the way in which Russell Analysis of Matter, ch.27 makes his reader understand far more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category of an epistemological obstacle, that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on subjective probability, is based on this status of the happening, the event conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses -ing, a new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An interesting case of tr. difficulty is, e. g. , the one posed by Austin precisely when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to distinguish between the sentence and the act of saying it, between statement and utterance: there are utterances, such as the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action How to Do Things. The tr. difficulty here is caused by the combination in the construction in -ing of the syntactical flexibility of the gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the -ing construction indicate the act, or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to choose to translate “On Referring” P. F. Strawson as De la référence rather than as De l’action de référer. Should one translate On Denoting Russell as De la dénotation the usual tr. or as Du dénoter? The progressive in the strict sense—be + verb + -ing— indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has already begun but is not yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to gauge the ease of Eng. in the whole of these operations. “To utter the sentence is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing. The Fr. tr. gives, correctly: Énoncer la phrase, ce n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je suis en train de faire en parlant ainsi, but this remains unsatisfying at best, because of the awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de is simply not suitable insofar as the -ing does not indicate duration: e. g. , in At last I am v.ing . It is interesting to examine from this point of view the famous category of verbs of perception, verbum percipiendi. It is remarkable that these verbs v., hear can be in some cases used with the construction be + verb + -ing, since it is generally said even in grammar books that they can be used only in the present or simple past and not in the progressive. This rule probably is thought to be connected with something like the immediacy of perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the verbs to know and to understand are also almost always in the present or the simple past, as if the operations of the understanding could not be presented in the progressive form and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the contrary, they transcended the course of time. In reality, there are counterexamples. “I don’t know if I’m understanding you correctly”; You are hearing voices; and often Oxonian Phil. , which makes their tr. particularly indigestible, especially in Fr. , where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to the classifications translated. In addition to the famous term realism, which has been the object of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates over past decades that it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention some common but particularly obscure for anyone not familiar with the theoretical context terms: “cognitivism,” noncognitivism, coherentism, eliminativism, consequentialism, connectionism, etSuch terms in which moral Phil. is particularly fertile are in general transposed into Fr. without change in a sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost forgone tr.. More generally, in Eng. as in G. , words can be composed by joining two other words far more easily than in Fr. —without specifying the logical connections between the terms: toothbrush, pickpocket, lowlife, knownothing; or, for more philosophical terms: aspect-blind, language-dependent, rule-following, meaning-holism, observer-relative, which are translatable, of course, but not without considerable awkwardness. Oxonian philosophese. Oxonian Phil. seems to establish a language that is stylistically neutral and appears to be transparently translatable. Certain specific problems—the tr. of compound words and constructions that are more flexible in Eng. and omnipresent in current philosophical discourse, such as the thesis that la thèse selon laquelle, the question whether la question de savoir si, and my saying that le fait que je dise que—make Fr. tr.s of contemporary Eng. philosophical texts very awkward, even when the author writes in a neutral, commonplace style. Instead, these difficulties, along with the ease of construction peculiar to English, tend to encourage non-Oxonian analytical philosophers to write directly in Gricese, following the example of many of their European colleagues, or else to make use of a technical vernacular we have noted the -isms and compounds that is frequently heavy going and not very inventive when transRomang terms which are usually transliterated. This situation is certainly attributable to the paradoxical character of Gricese, which established itself as a philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century: it is a language that is apparently simple and accessible and that thus claims a kind of universality but that is structured, both linguistically and philosophically, around major stumbling blocks to do, -ing, etthat often make it untranslatable. It is paradoxically this untranslatability, and not its pseudo-transparency, that plays a crucial role in the process of universalization. . IThe Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Phil. The proximity of ordinary language and philosophical language, which is rooted in classical English-language Phil. , was theorized in the twentieth century by Austin and can be summed up in the expression “‘ordinary’-language philosophy”. Ordinary language Phil. is interested This sort of overall preeminence in Eng. of the verbal and the subjective over the nominal and the objective is clear in the difference in the logic that governs the discourse of affectivity in Fr. and in English. How would something that one is correspond to something that one has, as in the case of fear in Fr. avoir peur? It follows that a Fr. man—who takes it for granted that fear is something that one feels or senses—cannot feel at home with the difference that Eng. naturally makes between something that has no objective correlative because it concerns only feeling like fear; and what is available to sensation, implying that what is felt through it has the status of an object. Thus in Eng. something is immediately grasped that in Fr. v.ms a strange paradox, viz. that passion, as Bentham notes in Deontology, is a fictive entity. Thus what sounds in Fr. like a nominalist provocation is implicated in the folds of the Eng. language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus more easily undertaken in Eng. than in Fr. , and if an ontological conception of affectivity had to be formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would be encountered. Reversible derivations Another particularity of English, which is not without consequences in Phil. , is that its poverty from the point of view of inflectional morphology is compensated for by the freedom and facility it offers for the construction of all sorts of derivatives. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using suffixes such as -ity, -hood, -ness, -y. The resulting compounds are very difficult to differentiate in Fr. and to translate in general, which has led, in contemporary Fr. tr.s, to various incoherent makeshifts. To list the most common stumbling blocks: privacy privé-ité, innerness intériorité, not in the same sense as interiority, vagueness caractère vague, goodness bonté, in the sense of caractère bon, rightness  justesse, “sameness,” similarité, in the sense of mêmeté, ordinariness, “appropriateness,” caractère ordinaire, approprié, unaccountability caractère de ce dont il est impossible de rendre compte. Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous suffixes: -ful, -ous, -y, -ic, -ish, -al e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic, attitudinal, behavioral. Verbal derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with the suffixes -ize, -ify, -ate naturalize, mentalize, falsify, and even without suffixes when possible e.g., the title of an article “How Not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau,” i.e., how not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau. d. Polycategorial derivatives based on verbs, using suffixes such as -able, -er, -age, -ismrefutable, truthmaker. The reversibility of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential result of preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more difficult to avoid in Fr. and G. , where nominalization hardens and freezes notions compare intériorité and innerness, which designates more a quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an entity or a domain. But this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip side: the proliferation of -isms in liberties with the natural uses of the language. The philosophers ask, e. g. , how they can know that there is a real object there, but the question How do I know? can be asked in ordinary language only in certain contexts, that is, where it is always possible, at least in theory, to eliminate doubt. The doubt or question But is it a real one? has always must have a special basis, there must be some reason for suggesting that it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way in which it is suggested that this experience or item may be phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking Is it a real table? a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss how to prove it is a real one. It is the use of the word real in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that real has a single meaning the real world, material objects, and that a highly profound and puzzling one. Austin, Philosophical Papers This analysis of real is taken up again in Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticizes the notion of a sense datum and also a certain way of raising problems supposedly on the basis of common opinion e. g. , the common opinion that we really perceive things—but in reality on the basis of a pure construction. To state the case in this way, Austin says, is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing to him, the so-called philosophers’ view. Phil. ’s frequent recourse to the ordinary is characterized by a certain condescension toward the common man. The error or deception consists in arguing the philosopher’s position against the ordinary position, because if the in what we should say when. It is, in other words, a Phil. of language, but on the condition that we never forget that we are looking not merely at words or ‘meanings,’ whatever they may be but also at the realities we use the words to talk about, as Austin emphasizes A Plea for Excuses, in Philosophical Papers. During the twentieth century or more precisely, between the 1940s and the s, there was a division of the paradigms of the Phil. of language between the logical clarification of ordinary language, on the one hand, and the immanent examination of ordinary language, on the other. The question of ordinary language and the type of treatment that it should be given—a normative clarification or an internal examination—is present in and even constitutive of the legacy of logical positivism. Wittgenstein’s work testifies to this through the movement that it manifests and performs, from the first task of the Phil. of language the creation of an ideal or formal language to clarify everyday language to the second the concern to examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses. The break thus accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement in his preface to The Linguistic Turn that the only difference between Ideal Language Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement about which language is ideal. In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal language, or a norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective that consists in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that is omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current analytical Phil. . Critique of language and Phil. More generally, Austin criticizes traditional Phil. for its perverse use of ordinary language. He constantly denounces Phil. ’s abuse of ordinary language—not so much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A defect in the Eng. language? Between according to Bentham Eng. philosophers are not very inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it is in G. or even in Fr. and discourages a certain kind of commentary. There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., -- cf. Grice on “to” and “or” – “Does it make sense to speak of the ‘sense’ of ‘to’?” -- through which Eng. constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topiLet us take the case of between, which Fr. can render only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre imply the number three in Fr. , since what is entre intervenes as a third term between two others which it separates or brings closer in Lat., in-ter; in Fr., en tiers; as a third. This is not the case in English, which constructs between in accord with the number two in conformity with the etymology of this word, by tween, in pairs, to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comon between three? relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually compared. The Eng. language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared in this particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar to it. By the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word between i.e., by twain, the number of the objects, to which this operation is represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Roman inter—by its Fr. derivation entre—no such limitation v.ms to be expressed. Chrestomathia REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come to an agreement on what we should say when such and such a thing, though I grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is what is missing in Phil. : a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice. Performatif-Constatif Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: Ordinary language cannot claim to have the last word. Only remember, it is the first word Philosophical Papers. The exploration of language is also an exploration of the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men ibid.. Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations. These are certainly more subtle and solid than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon ibid.. It is this ability to indicate differences that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the world. Who is we? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical Phil. , especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all the more powerful and surprising the return to Austin advocated by Stanley Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language Phil. that is emerging in his work and in contemporary American Phil. . What right do we have to refer to our uses? And who is this we so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All we have, as we have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We determine the meaning of a given word by its uses, and for Austin, it is nonsensical to ask the question of meaning for instance, in a general way or looking for an entity; v. NONSENSE. The quest for agreement is founded on something quite different from signification or the determination of the common meaning. The agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an intersubjective consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual agreements. It is an agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears as much on language as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this agreement? Where does it come from, and why should so much importance be accorded to it? That is the question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We Say? and then in The Claim of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Witters to say what they say about what we say? A claim is certainly involved here. That is what Witters means by our agreement in judgments, and in language it is based only on itself, on the latter exists, it is not on the same level. The philosopher introduces into the opinion of the common man particular entities, in order then to reject, amend, or explain it. The method of ordinary language: Be your size. Small Men. Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our ordinary use of ordinary words that have been confiscated by Phil. , such as ‘true’ and ‘real,’ in order to raise the question of truth: Fact that is a phrase designed for use in situations where the distinction between a true statement and the state of affairs about which it is a truth is neglected; as it often is with advantage in ordinary life, though seldom in Phil. . So speaking about the fact that is a compendious way of speaking about a situation involving both words and world. Philosophical Papers We can, of course, maintain along with a whole trend in analytical Phil. from Frege to Quine that these are considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any conclusions at all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to determine the nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary language as a relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s approach: the foot of the letter is the foot of the ladder ibid.. For Austin, ordinary words are part of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful objects is their complexity, their refinement as tools ibid.: We use words to inform ourselves about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if that v.ms too naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the situation in which we find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this claim possible is the proximity of dimension, of size, between words and ordinary objects. Thus philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is a substance, a quality, or a relation, take something more nearly their own size to strain at ibid.. The Fr. translators render size by mesure, which v.ms excessively theoretical; the reference is to size in the material, ordinary sense. One cannot know everything, so why not try something else? Advantages of slowness and cooperation. Be your size. Small Men. Conversation cited by Urmson in A Symposium Austin emphasizes that this technique of examining words which he ended up calling linguistic phenomenology (and Grice linguistic botany) is not new and that it has existed since Socrates, producing its slow successes. But Grice is the first to make a systematic application of such a method, which is based, on the one hand, on the manageability and familiarity of the objects concerned and, on the other hand, on the common agreement at which it arrives in each of its stages. The problem is how to agree on a starting point, that is, on a given. This given or datum, for Grice, is Gricese, not as a corpus consisting of utterances or words, but as the site of agreement about what we should say when. Austin regards language as an empirical datum or experimental dat -- Bayes, T. . An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. : Hafner, . 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First published in 195 . Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 195 we, as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of tr. we have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules, just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Witterscalls forms of life. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is and because it is terrifying. Must We Mean What We Say? The fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a reason for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize: the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature, finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s Americanization of ordinary language Phil. there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But isn’t this ordinary, e. g. , that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one that the whole of Eng. Phil. has been trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like Experience or Essays in Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more available to the senses. J.-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Performatif-Constatif. In La philosophie analytique, ed. by J. Wahl and L. Beck. : Editions du Minuit, . Tr. in Performative-Constative. In Phil. and Ordinary Language, ed. by E. Caton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . . Philosophical Papers. Ed. by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Ayer, J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract an established price to execute a project collection of taxes, supply of an army, a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction, assuming the hazards related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices that became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century. Let us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in his project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur translated in various ways into English: by contractor if the stress is placed on the engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to conditions negotiated in advance a certain time, a fixed price, firm price, tenant farming; by undertaker now rare in this sense when we focus on the engagement in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical realization, the setting in motion of the transaction; and by adventurer, enterpriser, and projector, to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Fr. word entreprise acquired the new meaning of an industrial establishment. Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a business of production superintendent, employer, manager. In France, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, the largest trial ever conducted by pen against the big financiers, entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom, who take advantage of its good administration its political economy in the name of the entrepreneurs of commerce and industry, who contribute to the increase in its wealth. Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. Chance in Business: Risk and Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale Essay on the nature of commerce in general. Having shown that all the classes and all the men of a State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land bk. 1, ch.12, he suggests that the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise, like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly bk. 1, of ch.1 He then describes in detail what composes the uncertain aspect of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts according to his ideas and without being able to predict, in which he conceives and executes his plans surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—naturally independent, Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Roman enuntiare to express, divulge; from ex out and nuntiare to make known; a nuntius is a messenger, a nuncio, ranges over the same type of entity as do proposition and phrase: it is a basic unit of syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the networks they constitute in different languages especially in English: sentence, statement, utterance, appears under PROPOSITION. V. also DICTUM and LOGOS, both of which may be acceptably Tr. énoncé. Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD especially WORD, Box The essential feature of an énoncé is that it is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with its énonciation: v. SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v. DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR FR. ENG. adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager, projector, undertaker, superintendent v. ACT, AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY. Refs.: G. J. Warnock, “English philosophy,” H. P. Grice, “Gricese,” BANC.