H. P. Grice, "Verum"

verum: The root of Latin ‘vero’ is cognate with an idea Grice loved: that of ‘sincerity.’ The point is more obviously realised lexically in the negative: the fallax versus the mendax. But ‘verum’ had to do with candidum – and thus very much cognate with the English that Grice avoided, ‘truth,’ cognate with ‘trust.’ quod non possit ab honestate sejungi The true and simple Good which cannot be separated from honesty, Cicero, Academica, I, 2, but also for the ontological which one can find in Cicero’s tr. Topica, 35 of etumologia ἐτυμολογία by veriloquium. Most contemporary hypotheses propose that verus —and the words signifying true, vrai, vérité, G. wahr, G. Wahrheit — derive from an Indo-European root, *wer, which would retain meanings of to please, pleasing, manifesting benevolence, gifts, services rendered, fidelity, pact. Chantraine Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque links it to the Homeric expression êra pherein ἦϱα φέϱειν, to please, as well as to ἐπίηϱα, ἐπίηϱος, and ἐπιήϱανος, agreeable Odyssey, 19, 343, just like the Roman verus cf. se-vere, without benevolence, the G. war, and the Russian vera, faith, or verit’ верить, to believe. Pokorny adds to this same theme the Grecian ἑοϱτή, religious feast, cult. And from the same basis have come terms signifying guarantee, protect: Fr. garir and later garant, G. Gewähren, Eng. warrant, to grant. According to Chantraine, this root *wer should be distinguished from another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian , verbum in Roman word in English, etc., and words from the family of vereor, revereor, to fear, to respect, verecundia respectful fear. According to Chantraine, this root *wer should be distinguished from another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian , verbum in Roman word in English, etc., and words from the family of vereor, revereor, to fear, to respect, verecundia respectful fear. Alfred Ernout does not support this separation. We should recall that plays on the words verum and verbum were common, as Augustine mentions verbum = verum boare, proclaiming the truth, Dialectics 1. P. Florensky, following G. Curtius, “Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie,” also claims a single root for the ensemble of these derivations, including the Sanskrit vratum, sacred act, vow, promise, the Grecian bretas βϱέτας, cult object, wooden idol Aeschylus, Eumenides, v. 258, and the Roman “ver-bum.” The signification of verus must be considered as belonging first to the field of religious ritual and subsequently of juridical formulas: strictly speaking, verus means protected or grounded in the sense of that which is the object of a taboo or consecration Pillar and Ground. Then there’s from the juridical to the philosophical. “Verum” implies a rectification of an adversarial allegation considered to be fraudulent, as is indicated by the original opposition verax/fallax-mendax. It thus signifies the properly founded in fact or in the rules of law: crimen verissimum a well-founded accusation Cicero, In Verrem, 5, 15. In texts of grammar and rhetoric, but also in juridical texts as well, verus and veritas signify the veracity of the rule, inasmuch as it can be distinguished from usage. “Quid verum sit intellego; sed alias ita loquor ut concessum est I know what is correct, but sometimes I avail myself of the variation in usage, Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical Library; Consule veritatem: reprehendet; refer ad auris: probabunt If you consult the strict rule of analogy, it will say this practice is wrong, but if you consult the ear, it will approve 1586. The juridical connotation of the word verus and thus of veritas is retained and subsequently reinforced. In the glosses of the Middle Ages, verus signifies legitimate and the Roman sense of the word, legal and authentic or conforming to existing law. One normally finds “verum est” in legal texts to certify that a new rule conforms to preexisting ones Digest, 8, 4, 1. It is this juridical dimension that produces the meaning of verus as authenticated, authentic in contrast to false, imitative, deceiving and thus real as in real cream or a genuine Rolex watch. The juridical here provides a foundation not only for the moral Verum et simplex bonum. The paradigm of “verum” is not easy to separate from any epistemological dimensions, as is evident in the varied fates of the Indo-European root *wer, from which derives, in addition to vera in Russian, belief, the old Fr. garir, in the sense of certifying as true, designating as true, whence the participle garant. The evolution of these derived words inscribes G. “wahr,” and “Wahrheit” in a semantic network from which emerge two directions, belief and salvation. Belief. “Wahr” is often linked back, in composite words, to the idea of belief, in the sense of true belief, to take as true. “Wahrsagen,” to predict, “wahr haben,” to admit, agree upon, “für wahr halten,” to hold as true, to believe. This is the term that Kant employs in the Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental theory of method, ch.2, 3 On Opinion, Science, and Belief: “das Fürwahrhalten” is a belief, as a modality of subjectivity, that can be divided into conviction Überzeugung or persuasion Überredung and that is capable of three degrees: opinion Meinung, belief Glaube, and science Wissenschaft. Safeguarding, conservation. Similarly “wahren,” “bewahren” in the sense of to guard, to conserve is linked to “Wahrung” in the sense of defending one’s interests or safeguarding. One might refer to Heidegger’s use of this etymological and semantic relation in reference to Nietzsche. It remains to be said that many common or colloquial expressions, in Fr. as well as in English, play on the semantic slippages of vrai and real, between the ontological sense and linguistic meanings. Thus in Fr. , c’est pas vrai! does not mean it is false, but rather that it is not reality. In English, the opposite is the case: get real! means come back down to earth, accept the truth. Grice’s main manoeuvre may be seen as intended to crack the crib of reality. For he wants to say some philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis are misled if they think an inappropriate usage reveals a truth-condition. By coining ‘implicature,’ his point is to give room for “Emissor E communicates that p,” as opposed to ‘emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’ Therefore, Grice can claim that an utterance may very well totally baffling and misleading YET TRUE (or otherwise ‘good’), and that in no way that reveals anything about the emissum itself. This is due to the fact that ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ is diaphanous. And one can conjoin what the emissor E communicates to what he explicitly conveys and NOT HAVE the emissor contradicting himself or uttering a falsehood. And that is what in philosophy should count. H. P. Grice was always happy with a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth. It was what Aristotle thought. So why change? The fact that Austin agreed helped. The fact that Strawson applied Austin’s shining new tool of the performatory had him fashion a new shining skid, and that helped, because, once Grice has identified a philosophical mistake, that justifies his role as methodologist in trying to ‘correct’ the mistake. The Old Romans did not have an article. For them it is the unum, the verum, the bonum, and the pulchrum. They were trying to translate the very articled Grecian ‘to alethes,’ ‘to agathon,’ and ‘to kallon.’ Grecian Grice is able to restore the articles. He would use ‘the alethic’ for the ‘verum,’ after von Wright. But occasionally uses the ‘verum’ root. E. g. when his account of ‘personal identity’ was seen to fail to distinguish between a ‘veridical’ memory and a non-veridical one. If it had not been for Strawson’s ‘ditto’ theory to the ‘verum,’ Grice would not have minded much. Like Austin, his inclination was for a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth alla Aristotle and Tarski, applied to the utterance, or ‘expressum.’ So, while we cannot say that an utterer is TRUE, we can say that he is TRUTHFUL, and trustworthy (Anglo-Saxon ‘trust,’ being cognate with ‘true,’ and covering both the credibility and desirability realms. Grice approaches the ‘verum’ in terms of predicate calculus. So we need at least an utterance of the form, ‘the dog is shaggy.’ An utterance of ‘The dog is shaggy’ is true iff the denotatum of ‘the dog’ is a member of the class ‘shaggy.’ So, when it comes to ‘verum,’ Grice feels like ‘solving’ a problem rather than looking for new ones. He thought that Strawson’s controversial ‘ditto’ was enough of a problem ‘to get rid of.’ Refs: Grice, “Rationality and Trust,” Grice, “The alethic.” “P. F. Strawson and the performatory account of ‘true’”, The Grice Papers.