demonstratum: Cf. illatum – In act of communication, Grice’s focus is on
the reasoning on the emissor’s part. This is end-means. The conversational
moves is the most effectively designed move. The potential uptake by the
emissee is also taken into the consideration by the emissor. And actual uptake
is not of philosophical importance. hen Grice tried to conceptualise what
‘communicating’ and ‘smoke means fire’ have in common he came with the idea of
‘consequentia,’ as a dyadic relation that, eventually, will become triadic,
with the missor and the missee brought into the bargain. “Look that smoke,
there must be fire somewhere’ – “By that handwave, he meant that he was about
to leave me.” In any case, Grice’s arriving at ‘consequentia’ is exactly
Hobbes’s idea in “Computatio.’ And ‘con-sequentia’ involves a bit of
‘demonstratio.’ One thing follows the other. One thing YIELDS the other. The
link may be causal (smoke means fire) or ‘communicative’). ‘Rationality’ is one
of those words Austin forbids to use. Grice would venture with ‘reason,’ and
better, ‘reasons’ to make it countable, and good for botanising. Only in the
New World, and when he started to get input from non-philosophers, did Grice
explore ‘rationality’ itself. Oxonians philosophers take it for granted, and do
not have to philosophise about it. Especially those who belong to Grice’s play
group of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers! Oxonian philosophers will quote from
the Locke version! Obviously, while each of the four lectures credits their own
entry below, it may do to reflect on Grices overall aim. Grice structures the
lectures in the form of a philosophical dialogue with his audience. The
first lecture is intended to provide a bit of linguistic botanising for
reasonable, and rational. In later lectures, Grice tackles reason qua noun.
The remaining lectures are meant to explore what he calls the
Aequi-vocality thesis: must has only one Fregeian that crosses what he calls
the buletic-doxastic divide. He is especially concerned ‒ this being
the Kant lectures ‒ with Kants attempt to reduce the
categorical imperative to a counsel of prudence (Ratschlag der Klugheit), where
Kants prudence is Klugheit, versus skill, as in rule of skill, and even if Kant
defines Klugheit as a skill to attain what is good for oneself ‒
itself divided into privatKlugheit and Weltklugheit. Kant re-introduces the
Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia. While a further lecture on happiness as
the pursuit of a system of ends is NOT strictly part of the either the
Kant or the Locke lectures, it relates, since eudaemonia may be
regarded as the goal involved in the relevant
imperative. “Aspects”, Clarendon, Stanford, The Kant memorial
Lectures, “Aspects,” Clarendon, Some aspects of reason, Stanford; reason,
reasoning, reasons. The lectures were also delivered as the Locke
lectures. Grice is concerned with the reduction of the categorical
imperative to the hypothetical or suppositional imperative. His main
thesis he calls the æqui-vocality thesis: must has one unique or singular
sense, that crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic divide. “Aspects,”
Clarendon, Grice, “Aspects, Clarendon, Locke lecture notes: reason. On
“Aspects”. Including extensive language botany on rational, reasonable, and
indeed reason (justificatory, explanatory, and mixed). At this point, Grice
notes that linguistic botany is indispensable towards the construction of a
more systematic explanatory theory. It is an exploration of a range of
uses of reason that leads him to his Aequi-vocality thesis that must has only
one sense; also ‘Aspects of reason and reasoning,’ in Grice, “Aspects,”
Clarendon, the Locke lectures, the Kant lectures, Stanford, reason,
happiness. While Locke hardly mentions reason, his friend Burthogge does,
and profusely! It was slightly ironic that Grice had delivered these
lectures as the Rationalist Kant lectures at Stanford. He was honoured to
be invited to Oxford. Officially, to be a Locke lecture you have to be
*visiting* Oxford. While Grice was a fellow of St. Johns, he was still
most welcome to give his set of lectures on reasoning at the Sub-Faculty of
Philosophy. He quotes very many authors, including Locke! In his proemium,
Grice notes that while he was rejected the Locke scholarship back in the day,
he was extremely happy to be under Lockes ægis now! When preparing for his second
lecture, he had occasion to revise some earlier drafts dated pretty early, on
reasons, Grice, “Aspects,” Clarendon, reason, reasons. Linguistic
analysis on justificatory, explanatory and mixed uses of reason. While
Grice knows that the basic use of reason is qua verb (reasoner reasons from
premise p to conclusion c), he spends some time in exploring reason as
noun. Grice found it a bit of a roundabout way to approach
rationality. However, his distinction between justificatory and
explanatory reason is built upon his linguistic botany on the use of reason qua
noun. Explanatory reason seems more basic for Grice than justificatory
reason. Explanatory reason explains the behaviour of a rational
agent. Grice is aware of Freud and his rationalizations. An agent may
invoke some reason for his acting which is not legitimate. An agent may
convince himself that he wants to move to Bournemouth because of the weather;
when in fact, his reason to move to Bournemouth is to be closer to Cowes and
join the yacht club there. Grice loved an enthymeme. Grices enthymeme. Grice,
the implicit reasoner! As the title of the lecture implies, Grice takes the
verb, to reason, as conceptually prior. A reasoner reasons, briefly, from a
premise to a conclusion. There are types of reason: flat reason and gradual
reason. He famously reports Shropshire, another tutee with Hardie, and his
proof on the immortality of the human soul. Grice makes some remarks on akrasia
as key, too. The first lecture is then dedicated to an elucidation, and indeed
attempt at a conceptual analysis in terms of intentions and doxastic conditions
reasoner R intends that premise P yields conclusion C and believes his
intention will cause his entertaining of the conclusion from his entertaining
the premise. One example of particular interest for a study of the use of
conversational reason in Grice is that of the connection between implicaturum
and reasoning. Grice entitles the sub-section of the lecture as Too good to be
reasoning, which is of course a joke. Cf. too much love will kill you, and
Theres no such thing as too much of a good thing (Shakespeare, As you like it).
Grice notes: I have so far been considering difficulties which may arise from
the attempt to find, for all cases of actual reasoning, reconstructions of
sequences of utterances or explicit thoughts which the reasoner might plausibly
be supposed to think of as conforming to some set of canonical patterns of
inference. Grice then turns to a different class of examples, with regard to
which the problem is not that it is difficult to know how to connect them with
canonical patterns, but rather that it is only too easy (or shall I say
trivial) to make the connection. Like some children (not many), some cases of
reasoning are too well behaved for their own good. Suppose someone says to
Grice, and It is very interesting that Grice gives conversational examples.
Jack has arrived, Grice replies, I conclude from that that Jack has arrived. Or
he says Jack has arrived AND Jill has *also* arrived, And Grice replies, I
conclude that Jill has arrived.(via Gentzens conjunction-elimination). Or he
says, My wife is at home. And Grice replies, I reason from that that someone
(viz. your wife) is at home. Is there not something very strange about the
presence in my three replies of the verb conclude (in example I and II) and the
verb reason (in the third example)? misleading, but doxastically fine,
professor! It is true, of course, that if instead of my first reply I had said
(vii) vii. So Jack has arrived, has he? the strangeness would have been
removed. But here so serves not to indicate that an inference is being made,
but rather as part of a not that otiose way of expressing surprise. One might
just as well have said (viii). viii. Well, fancy that! Now, having spent a sizeable
part of his life exploiting it, Grice is not unaware of the truly fine
distinction between a statements being false (or axiologically satisfactory),
and its being true (or axiologically satisfactory) but otherwise
conversationally or pragmatically misleading or inappropriate or pointless,
and, on that account and by such a fine distinction, a statement, or an
utterance, or conversational move which it would be improper (in terms of the
reasonable/rational principle of conversational helfpulness) in one way or
another, to make. It is worth considering Grices reaction to his own
distinction. Entailment is in sight! But Grice does not find himself lured by
the idea of using that distinction here! Because Moores entailment, rather than
Grices implicaturum is entailed. Or because explicatu, rather than implicaturum
is involved. Suppose, again, that I were to break off the chapter at this
point, and switch suddenly to this argument. ix. I have two hands (here is one
hand and here is another). If had three more hands, I would have five. If I
were to have double that number I would have ten, and if four of them were
removed six would remain. So I would have four more hands than I have now. Is
one happy to describe this performance as reasoning? Depends whos one and whats
happy!? There is, however, little doubt that I have produced a canonically
acceptable chain of statements. So surely that is reasoning, if only
conversationally misleadingly called so. Or suppose that, instead of writing in
my customary free and easy style, I had framed my remarks (or at least the
argumentative portions of my remarks) as a verbal realization, so to speak, of
sequences of steps in strict conformity with the rules of a natural-deduction
system of first-order predicate logic. I give, that is to say, an updated
analogue of a medieval disputation. Implicaturum. Gentzen is Ockham. Would
those brave souls who continued to read be likely to think of my performance as
the production of reasoning, or would they rather think of it as a crazy formalisation
of reasoning conducted at some previous time? Depends on crazy or
formalisation. One is reminded of Grice telling Strawson, If you cannot
formalise, dont say it; Strawson: Oh, no! If I can formalise it, I shant say
it! The points suggested by this stream of rhetorical questions may be
summarized as follows. Whether the samples presented FAIL to achieve the title
of reasoning, and thus be deemed reasoning, or whether the samples achieve the
title, as we may figuratively put it, by the skin of their teeth, perhaps does
not very greatly matter. For whichever way it is, the samples seem to offend
against something (different things in different cases, Im sure) very central
to our conception of reasoning. So central that Moore would call it entailment!
A mechanical application of a ground rule of inference, or a concatenation
thereof, is reluctantly (if at all) called reasoning. Such a mechanical
application may perhaps legitimately enter into (i.e. form individual steps in)
authentic reasonings, but they are not themselves reasonings, nor is a string
of them. There is a demand that a reasoner should be, to a greater or lesser
degree, the author of his reasonings. Parroted sequences are not reasonings
when parroted, though the very same sequences might be reasoning if not
parroted. Ped sequences are another matter. Some of the examples Grice gives
are deficient because they are aimless or pointless. Reasoning is
characteristically addressed to this or that problem: a small problem, a large
problem, a problem within a problem, a clear problem, a hazy problem, a
practical problem, an intellectual problem; but a problem! A mere flow of ideas
minimally qualifies (or can be deemed) as reasoning, even if it happens to be
logically respectable. But if it is directed, or even monitored (with
intervention should it go astray, not only into fallacy or mistake, but also
into such things as conversational irrelevance or otiosity!), that is another
matter! Finicky over-elaboration of intervening steps is frowned upon, and in
extreme cases runs the risk of forfeiting the title of reasoning. In
conversation, such over-elaboration will offend against this or that
conversational maxim, against (presumably) some suitably formulated maxim
conjoining informativeness. As Grice noted with regard to ‘That pillar box
seems red to me.’ That would be baffling if the addressee fails to detect the
communication-point. An utterance is supposed to inform, and what is the above
meant to inform its addressee? In thought, it will be branded as pedantry or
neurotic caution. If a distinction between brooding and conversing is to be
made! At first sight, perhaps, one would have been inclined to say that greater
rather than lesser explicitnessness is a merit. Not that inexplicitness, or implicaturum-status,
as it were ‒ is bad, but that, other things being equal, the more explicitness
the better. But now it looks as if proper explicitness (or explicatum-status)
is an Aristotelian mean, or mesotes, and it would be good some time to enquire
what determines where that mean lies. The burden of the foregoing observations
seems to me to be that the provisional account of reasoning, which has been
before us, leaves out something which is crucially important. What it leaves
out is the conception of reasoning, as I like to see conversation, as a
purposive activity, as something with goals and purposes. The account or
picture leaves out, in short, the connection of reasoning with the will!
Moreover, once we avail ourselves of the great family of additional ideas which
the importation of this conception would give us, we shall be able to deal with
the quandary which I laid before you a few minutes ago. For we could say e.g.
that R reasons (informally) from p to c just in case R thinks that p and
intends that, in thinking c, he should be thinking something which would be the
conclusion of a formally valid argument the premisses of which are a
supplementation of p. This will differ from merely thinking that there exists
some formally valid supplementation of a transition from p to c, which I felt
inclined NOT to count as (or deem) reasoning. I have some hopes that this
appeal to the purposiveness or goal-oriented character of authentic reasoning
or good reasoning might be sufficient to dispose of the quandary on which I
have directed it. But I am by no means entirely confident that this is the
case, and so I offer a second possible method of handling the quandary, one to
which I shall return later when I shall attempt to place it in a larger
context. We have available to us (let us suppose) what I might call a hard way
of making inferential moves. We in fact employ this laborious, step-by-step
procedure at least when we are in difficulties, when the course is not clear,
when we have an awkward (or philosophical) audience, and so forth. An
inferential judgement, however, is a normally desirable undertaking for us only
because of its actual or hoped for destinations, and is therefore not desirable
for its own sake (a respect in which, possibly, it may differ from an inferential
capacity). Following the hard way consumes time and energy. These are in
limited supply and it would, therefore, be desirable if occasions for employing
the hard way were minimized. A substitute for the hard way, the quick way,
which is made possible by habituation and intention, is available to us, and
the capacity for it (which is sometimes called intelligence, and is known to be
variable in degree) is a desirable quality. The possibility of making a good
inferential step (there being one to be made), together with such items as a
particular inferers reputation for inferential ability, may determine whether
on a particular occasion we suppose a particular transition to be inferential
(and so to be a case of reasoning) or not. On this account, it is not essential
that there should be a single supplementation of an informal reasoning which is
supposed to be what is overtly in the inferers mind, though quite often there
may be special reasons for supposing this to be the case. So Botvinnik is properly
credited with a case of reasoning, while Shropshire is not. Drawing from his
recollections of an earlier linguistic botany on reason. Grice distinguishes
between justificatory reason and explanatory reason. There is a special case of
mixed reason, explanatory-cum-justificatory. The lecture can be seen as the way
an exercise that Austin took as taxonomic can lead to explanatory adequacy,
too! Bennett is an excellent correspondent. He holds a very interesting
philosophical correspondence with Hare. This is just one f. with Grices
correspondence with Bennett. Oxford don, Christchurh, NZ-born Bennett, of
Magdalen, B. Phil. Oxon. Bennett has an essay on the interpretation of a formal
system under Austin. It is interesting that Bennett was led to consider the interpretation
of a formal system under Austins Play Group. Bennett attends Grices seminars.
He is my favourite philosopher. Bennett quotes Grice in his Linguistic
behaviour. In return, Grice quotes Bennett in the Preface
toWOW. Bennett has an earlier essay on rationality, which evidences that
the topic is key at Grices Oxford. Bennett has studied better than anyone the
way Locke is Griceian. A word or expression does not just stand for idea, but
for the intention of the utterer to stand for it! Grice also enjoyed construal
by Bennett of Grice as a nominalist. Bennett makes a narrow use of the epithet.
Since Grice does distinguish between an utterance-token (x) and an
utterance-type, and considers that the attribution of meaning from token to
type is metabolic, this makes Grice a nominalist. Bennett is one of the few to
follow Kantotle and make him popular on the pages of the Times Literary
Supplement, of all places. Refs.: The locus classicus is “Aspects,” Clarendon.
But there are allusions on ‘reason’ and ‘rationality, in The H. P. Grice
Papers, BANC.
Griceian
Dennett – Dennett knew Grice from the Oxford days – and
quotes him extensively – He is what Grice called “a New-World Griceian.” D.
C., philosopher, author of books on
topics in the philosophy of mind, free will, and evolutionary biology, and
tireless advocate of the importance of philosophy for empirical work on
evolution and on the nature of the mind. Dennett is perhaps best known for
arguing that a creature or, more generally, a system, S, possesses states of
mind if and only if the ascription of such states to S facilitates explanation
and prediction of S’s behavior The Intentional Stance, 7. S might be a human
being, a chimpanzee, a desktop computer, or a thermostat. In ascribing beliefs
and desires to S we take up an attitude toward S, the intentional stance. We
could just as well although for different purposes take up other stances: the
design stance we understand S as a kind of engineered system or the physical
stance we regard S as a purely physical system. It might seem that, although we
often enough ascribe beliefs and desires to desktop computers and thermostats,
we do not mean to do so literally as
with people. Dennett’s contention, however, is that there is nothing more nor
less to having beliefs, desires, and other states of mind than being explicable
by reference to such things. This, he holds, is not to demean beliefs, but only
to affirm that to have a belief is to be describable in this particular way. If
you are so describable, then it is true, literally true, that you have beliefs.
Dennett extends this approach to consciousness, which he views not as an
inwardly observable performance taking place in a “Cartesian Theater,” but as a
story we tell about ourselves, the compilation of “multiple drafts” concocted
by neural subsystems see Conciousness Explained, 1. Elsewhere Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea, 5 Dennett has argued that principles of Darwinian selection
apply to diverse domains including cosmology and human culture, and offered a
compatibilist account of free will with an emphasis on agents’ control over
their actions Elbow Room, 4.
denotatum
-- denotation, the thing or things that an expression applies to; extension.
The term is used in contrast with ‘meaning’ and ‘connotation’. A pair of
expressions may apply to the same things, i.e., have the same denotation, yet
differ in meaning: ‘triangle’, ‘trilateral’; ‘creature with a heart’, ‘creature
with a kidney’; ‘bird’, ‘feathered earthling’; ‘present capital of France’,
‘City of Light’. If a term does not apply to anything, some will call it
denotationless, while others would say that it denotes the empty set. Such
terms may differ in meaning: ‘unicorn’, ‘centaur’, ‘square root of pi’.
Expressions may apply to the same things, yet bring to mind different
associations, i.e., have different connotations: ‘persistent’, ‘stubborn’,
‘pigheaded’; ‘white-collar employee’, ‘office worker’, ‘professional
paper-pusher’; ‘Lewis Carroll’, ‘Reverend Dodgson’. There can be confusion
about the denotation-connotation terminology, because this pair is used to make
other contrasts. Sometimes the term ‘connotation’ is used more broadly, so that
any difference of either meaning or association is considered a difference of
connotation. Then ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with a liver’ might be
said to denote the same individuals or sets but to connote different
properties. In a second use, denotation is the semantic value of an expression.
Sometimes the denotation of a general term is said to be a property, rather
than the things having the property. This occurs when the
denotation-connotation terminology is used to contrast the property expressed
with the connotation. Thus ‘persistent’ and ‘pig-headed’ might be said to
denote the same property but differ in connotation.
Grice’s
deontic operator – Grice was aware of Bentham’s play on
words with deontology -- as a Kantian, Griceian is a deontologist. However, he
refers to the ‘sorry story of deontic logic,’ because of von Wright (from whom
he borrowed but to whom he never returned ‘alethic’) deontic logic, the logic
of obligation and permission. There are three principal types of formal deontic
systems. 1 Standard deontic logic, or SDL, results from adding a pair of
monadic deontic operators O and P, read as “it ought to be that” and “it is
permissible that,” respectively, to the classical propositional calculus. SDL
contains the following axioms: tautologies of propositional logic, OA S - P -
A, OA / - O - A, OA / B / OA / OB, and OT, where T stands for any tautology.
Rules of inference are modus ponens and substitution. See the survey of SDL by
Dagfinn Follesdal and Risto Hilpinin in R. Hilpinin, ed., Deontic Logic, 1. 2
Dyadic deontic logic is obtained by adding a pair of dyadic deontic operators O
/ and P / , to be read as “it ought to
be that . . . , given that . . .” and “it is permissible that . . . , given
that . . . ,” respectively. The SDL monadic operator O is defined as OA S OA/T;
i.e., a statement of absolute obligation OA becomes an obligation conditional
on tautologous conditions. A statement of conditional obligation OA/B is true
provided that some value realized at some B-world where A holds is better than
any value realized at any B-world where A does not hold. This axiological
construal of obligation is typically accompanied by these axioms and rules of
inference: tautologies of propositional logic, modus ponens, and substitution,
PA/C S - O-A/C, OA & B/C S [OA/C & OB/C], OA/C / PA/C, OT/C / OC/C,
OT/C / OT/B 7 C, [OA/B & OA/C] / OA/B 7 C, [PB/B 7 C & OA/B 7 C] /
OA/B, and [P< is the negation of any tautology. See the comparison of
alternative dyadic systems in Lennart Aqvist, Introduction to Deontic Logic and
the Theory of Normative Systems, 7. 3 Two-sorted deontic logic, due to Castañeda
Thinking and Doing, 5, pivotally distinguishes between propositions, the
bearers of truth-values, and practitions, the contents of commands,
imperatives, requests, and such. Deontic operators apply to practitions,
yielding propositions. The deontic operators Oi, Pi, Wi, and li are read as “it
is obligatory i that,” “it is permissible i that,” “it is wrong i that,” and
“it is optional i denotation deontic logic 219
219 that,” respectively, where i stands for any of the various types of
obligation, permission, and so on. Let p stand for indicatives, where these
express propositions; let A and B stand for practitives, understood to express
practitions; and allow p* to stand for both indicatives and practitives. For
deontic definition there are PiA S - Oi - A, WiA S Oi - A, and LiA S - OiA
& - Oi - A. Axioms and rules of inference include p*, if p* has the form of
a truth-table tautology, OiA / - Oi - A, O1A / A, where O1 represents
overriding obligation, modus ponens for both indicatives and practitives, and
the rule that if p & A1 & . . . & An / B is a theorem, so too is p
& OiA1 & . . . & OiAn / OiB.
-- deontic paradoxes, the paradoxes of deontic logic, which typically
arise as follows: a certain set of English sentences about obligation or
permission appears logically consistent, but when these same sentences are
represented in a proposed system of deontic logic the result is a formally
inconsistent set. To illustrate, a formulation is provided below of how two of
these paradoxes beset standard deontic logic. The contrary-to-duty imperative
paradox, made famous by Chisholm Analysis, 3, arises from juxtaposing two
apparent truths: first, some of us sometimes do what we should not do; and
second, when such wrongful doings occur it is obligatory that the best or a better
be made of an unfortunate situation. Consider this scenario. Art and Bill share
an apartment. For no good reason Art develops a strong animosity toward Bill.
One evening Art’s animosity takes over, and he steals Bill’s valuable
lithographs. Art is later found out, apprehended, and brought before Sue, the
duly elected local punishment-and-awards official. An inquiry reveals that Art
is a habitual thief with a history of unremitting parole violation. In this
situation, it seems that 14 are all true and hence mutually consistent: 1 Art
steals from Bill. 2 If Art steals from Bill, Sue ought to punish Art for
stealing from Bill. 3 It is obligatory that if Art does not steal from Bill,
Sue does not punish him for stealing from Bill. 4 Art ought not to steal from
Bill. Turning to standard deontic logic, or SDL, let sstand for ‘Art steals
from Bill’ and let p stand for ‘Sue punishes Art for stealing from Bill’. Then
14 are most naturally represented in SDL as follows: 1a s. 2a s / Op. 3a O- s /
- p. 4a O - s. Of these, 1a and 2a entail Op by propositional logic; next,
given the SDL axiom OA / B / OA / OB, 3a implies O - s / O - p; but the latter,
taken in conjunction with 4a, entails O - p by propositional logic. In the
combination of Op, O - p, and the axiom OA / - O - A, of course, we have a
formally inconsistent set. The paradox of the knower, first presented by
Lennart Bqvist Noûs, 7, is generated by these apparent truths: first, some of
us sometimes do what we should not do; and second, there are those who are
obligated to know that such wrongful doings occur. Consider the following
scenario. Jones works as a security guard at a local store. One evening, while
Jones is on duty, Smith, a disgruntled former employee out for revenge, sets
the store on fire just a few yards away from Jones’s work station. Here it
seems that 13 are all true and thus jointly consistent: 1 Smith set the store
on fire while Jones was on duty. 2 If Smith set the store on fire while Jones
was on duty, it is obligatory that Jones knows that Smith set the store on
fire. 3 Smith ought not set the store on fire. Independently, as a consequence
of the concept of knowledge, there is the epistemic theorem that 4 The
statement that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire entails the statement
that Smith set the store on fire. Next, within SDL 1 and 2 surely appear to
imply: 5 It is obligatory that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire.
But 4 and 5 together yield 6 Smith ought to set the store on fire, given the
SDL theorem that if A / B is a theorem, so is OA / OB. And therein resides the
paradox: not only does 6 appear false, the conjunction of 6 and 3 is formally
inconsistent with the SDL axiom OA / - O - A. The overwhelming verdict among
deontic logicians is that SDL genuinely succumbs to the deontic operator
deontic paradoxes 220 220 deontic
paradoxes. But it is controversial what other approach is best followed to
resolve these puzzles. Two of the most attractive proposals are Castañeda’s two-sorted
system Thinking and Doing, 5, and the agent-and-time relativized approach of
Fred Feldman Philosophical Perspectives, 0.
Grice
on types of priority -- Grice often uses ‘depend’ – but not
clearly in what sense – there’s ontological dependence, the basic one.
dependence, in philosophy, a relation of one of three main types: epistemic
dependence, or dependence in the order of knowing; conceptual dependence, or
dependence in the order of understanding; and ontological dependence, or
dependence in the order of being. When a relation of dependence runs in one
direction only, we have a relation of priority. For example, if wholes are
ontologically dependent on their parts, but the latter in turn are not
ontologically dependent on the former, one may say that parts are ontologically
prior to wholes. The phrase ‘logical priority’ usually refers to priority of
one of the three varieties to be discussed here. Epistemic dependence. To say
that the facts in some class B are epistemically dependent on the facts in some
other class A is to say this: one cannot know any fact in B unless one knows
some fact in A that serves as one’s evidence for the fact in B. For example, it
might be held that to know any fact about one’s physical environment e.g., that
there is a fire in the stove, one must know as evidence some facts about the
character of one’s own sensory experience e.g., that one is feeling warm and
seeing flames. This would be to maintain that facts about the physical world
are epistemically dependent on facts about sensory experience. If one held in
addition that the dependence is not reciprocal
that one can know facts about one’s sensory experience without knowing
as evidence any facts about the physical world
one would be maintaining that the former facts are epistemically prior
to the latter facts. Other plausible though sometimes disputed examples of
epistemic priority are the following: facts about the behavior of others are
epistemically prior to facts about their mental states; facts about observable
objects are epistemically prior to facts about the invisible particles
postulated by physics; and singular facts e.g., this crow is black are
epistemically prior to general facts e.g., all crows are black. Is there a
class of facts on which all others epistemically depend and that depend on no further
facts in turn a bottom story in the
edifice of knowledge? Some foundationalists say yes, positing a level of basic
or foundational facts that are epistemically prior to all others. Empiricists
are usually foundationalists who maintain that the basic level consists of
facts about immediate sensory experience. Coherentists deny the need for a
privileged stratum of facts to ground the knowledge of all others; in effect,
they deny that any facts are epistemically prior to any others. Instead, all
facts are on a par, and each is known in virtue of the way in which it fits in
with all the rest. Sometimes it appears that two propositions or classes of
them each epistemically depend on the other in a vicious way to know A, you must first know B, and to know
B, you must first know A. Whenever this is genuinely the case, we are in a
skeptical predicament and cannot know either proposition. For example,
Descartes believed that he could not be assured of the reliability of his own
cognitions until he knew that God exists and is not a deceiver; yet how could
he ever come to know anything about God except by relying on his own
cognitions? This is the famous problem of the Cartesian circle. Another example
is the problem of induction as set forth by Hume: to know that induction is a
legitimate mode of inference, one would first have to know that the future will
resemble the past; but since the latter fact is establishable only by
induction, one could know it only if one already knew that induction is
legitimate. Solutions to these problems must show that contrary to first
appearances, there is a way of knowing one of the problematic propositions
independently of the other. Conceptual dependence. To say that B’s are
conceptually dependent on A’s means that to understand what a B is, you must
understand what an A is, or that the concept of a B can be explained or
understood only through the concept of an A. For example, it could plausibly be
claimed that the concept uncle can be understood only in terms of the concept male.
Empiricists typically maintain that we understand what an external thing like a
tree or a table is only by knowing what experiences it would induce in us, so
that the concepts we apply to physical things depend on the concepts we apply
to our experideontological ethics dependence 221 221 ences. They typically also maintain that
this dependence is not reciprocal, so that experiential concepts are
conceptually prior to physical concepts. Some empiricists argue from the thesis
of conceptual priority just cited to the corresponding thesis of epistemic
priority that facts about experiences
are epistemically prior to facts about external objects. Turning the tables,
some foes of empiricism maintain that the conceptual priority is the other way
about: that we can describe and understand what kind of experience we are
undergoing only by specifying what kind of object typically causes it “it’s a
smell like that of pine mulch”. Sometimes they offer this as a reason for
denying that facts about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about
physical objects. Both sides in this dispute assume that a relation of
conceptual priority in one direction excludes a relation of epistemic priority
in the opposite direction. But why couldn’t it be the case both that facts
about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about physical objects and
that concepts of physical objects are conceptually prior to concepts of
experiences? How the various kinds of priority and dependence are connected
e.g., whether conceptual priority implies epistemic priority is a matter in
need of further study. Ontological dependence. To say that entities of one sort
the B’s are ontologically dependent on entities of another sort the A’s means
this: no B can exist unless some A exists; i.e., it is logically or
metaphysically necessary that if any B exists, some A also exists. Ontological
dependence may be either specific the existence of any B depending on the
existence of a particular A or generic the existence of any B depending merely
on the existence of some A or other. If B’s are ontologically dependent on A’s,
but not conversely, we may say that A’s are ontologically prior to B’s. The
traditional notion of substance is often defined in terms of ontological
priority substances can exist without
other things, as Aristotle said, but the others cannot exist without them.
Leibniz believed that composite entities are ontologically dependent on simple
i.e., partless entities that any
composite object exists only because it has certain simple elements that are
arranged in a certain way. Berkeley, J. S. Mill, and other phenomenalists have
believed that physical objects are ontologically dependent on sensory
experiences that the existence of a
table or a tree consists in the occurrence of sensory experiences in certain
orderly patterns. Spinoza believed that all finite beings are ontologically
dependent on God and that God is ontologically dependent on nothing further;
thus God, being ontologically prior to everything else, is in Spinoza’s view the
only substance. Sometimes there are disputes about the direction in which a
relationship of ontological priority runs. Some philosophers hold that
extensionless points are prior to extended solids, others that solids are prior
to points; some say that things are prior to events, others that events are
prior to things. In the face of such disagreement, still other philosophers
such as Goodman have suggested that nothing is inherently or absolutely prior
to anything else: A’s may be prior to B’s in one conceptual scheme, B’s to A’s
in another, and there may be no saying which scheme is correct. Whether
relationships of priority hold absolutely or only relative to conceptual
schemes is one issue dividing realists and anti-realists.
de re: as opposed to de
dicto, of what is said or of the proposition, as opposed to de re, of the
thing. Many philosophers believe the following ambiguous, depending on whether
they are interpreted de dicto or de re: 1 It is possible that the number of
U.S. states is even. 2 Galileo believes that the earth moves. Assume for
illustrative purposes that there are propositions and properties. If 1 is
interpreted as de dicto, it asserts that the proposition that the number of
U.S. states is even is a possible truth
something true, since there are in fact fifty states. If 1 is
interpreted as de re, it asserts that the actual number of states fifty has the
property of being possibly even
something essentialism takes to be true. Similarly for 2; it may mean
that Galileo’s belief has a certain content
that the earth moves or that
Galileo believes, of the earth, that it moves. More recently, largely due to
Castañeda and John Perry, many philosophers have come to believe in de se “of
oneself” ascriptions, distinct from de dicto and de re. Suppose, while drinking
with others, I notice that someone is spilling beer. Later I come to realize
that it is I. I believed at the outset that someone was spilling beer, but
didn’t believe that I was. Once I did, I straightened my glass. The distinction
between de se and de dicto attributions is supposed to be supported by the fact
that while de dicto propositions must be either true or false, there is no true
proposition embeddable within ‘I believe that . . .’ that correctly ascribes to
me the belief that I myself am spilling beer. The sentence ‘I am spilling beer’
will not do, because it employs an “essential” indexical, ‘I’. Were I, e.g., to
designate myself other than by using ‘I’ in attributing the relevant belief to
myself, there would be no explanation of my straightening my glass. Even if I
believed de re that LePore is spilling beer, this still does not account for
why I lift my glass. For I might not know I am LePore. On the basis of such
data, some philosophers infer that de se attributions are irreducible to de re
or de dicto attributions. Internal-external
distinction – de re -- externalism, the view that there are objective reasons
for action that are not dependent on the agent’s desires, and in that sense
external to the agent. Internalism about reasons is the view that reasons for
action must be internal in the sense that they are grounded in motivational
facts about the agent, e.g. her desires and goals. Classic internalists such as
Hume deny that there are objective reasons for action. For instance, whether
the fact that an action would promote health is a reason to do it depends on
whether one has a desire to be healthy. It may be a reason for some and not for
others. The doctrine is hence a version of relativism; a fact is a reason only
insofar as it is so connected to an agent’s psychological states that it can
motivate the agent. By contrast, externalists hold that not all reasons depend
on the internal states of particular agents. Thus an externalist could hold
that promoting health is objectively good and that the fact that an action
would promote one’s health is a reason to perform it regardless of whether one
desires health. This dispute is closely tied to the debate over motivational
internalism, which may be conceived as the view that moral beliefs for instance
are, by virtue of entailing motivation, internal reasons for action. Those who
reject motivational internalism must either deny that expressive completeness
externalism 300 300 sound moral beliefs
always provide reasons for action or hold that they provide external reasons.
Derridaian
implicaturum -- J., philosopher, author of
deconstructionism, and leading figure in the postmodern movement. Postmodern
thought seeks to move beyond modernism by revealing inconsistencies or aporias
within the Western European tradition from Descartes to the present. These
aporias are largely associated with onto-theology, a term coined by Heidegger
to characterize a manner of thinking about being and truth that ultimately
grounds itself in a conception of divinity. Deconstruction is the methodology
of revelation: it typically involves seeking out binary oppositions defined
interdependently by mutual exclusion, such as good and evil or true and false,
which function as founding terms for modern thought. The ontotheological
metaphysics underlying modernism is a metaphysics of presence: to be is to be
present, finally to be absolutely present to the absolute, that is, to the
divinity whose own being is conceived as presence to itself, as the coincidence
of being and knowing in the Being that knows all things and knows itself as the
reason for the being of all that is. Divinity thus functions as the measure of
truth. The aporia here, revealed by deconstruction, is that this modernist
measure of truth cannot meet its own measure: the coincidence of what is and
what is known is an impossibility for finite intellects. Major influences on
Derrida include Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Saussure, and structuralist
thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, but it was his early critique of Husserl, in
Introduction à “L’Origine de la géometrie” de Husserl 2, that gained him
recognition as a critic of the phenomenological tradition and set the
conceptual framework for his later work. Derrida sought to demonstrate that the
origin of geometry, conceived by Husserl as the guiding paradigm for Western
thought, was a supratemporal ideal of perfect knowing that serves as the goal
of human knowledge. Thus the origin of geometry is inseparable from its end or
telos, a thought that Derrida later generalizes in his deconstruction of the
notion of origin as such. He argues that this ideal cannot be realized in time,
hence cannot be grounded in lived experience, hence cannot meet the “principle
of principles” Husserl designated as the prime criterion for phenomenology, the
principle that all knowing must ground itself in consciousness of an object
that is coincidentally conscious of itself. This revelation of the aporia at
the core of phenomenology in particular and Western thought in general was not
yet labeled as a deconstruction, but it established the formal structure that
guided Derrida’s later deconstructive revelations of the metaphysics of
presence underlying the modernism in which Western thought culminates.
descriptum:
descriptivism, the thesis that the meaning of any evaluative statement is
purely descriptive or factual, i.e., determined, apart from its syntactical
features, entirely by its truth conditions. Nondescriptivism of which emotivism
and prescriptivism are the main varieties is the view that the meaning of
full-blooded evaluative statements is such that they necessarily express the
speaker’s sentiments or commitments. Nonnaturalism, naturalism, and
supernaturalism are descriptivist views about the nature of the properties to
which the meaning rules refer. Descriptivism is related to cognitivism and
moral realism.
de sensu implicaturum: vide casus obliquus. The casus
rectus/casus obliquus distinction. Peter Abelard, Kneale, Grice, Aristotle.
Aquinas. de sensu implicaturum. Ariskantian quessertions on de sensu implicate.
“My sometimes mischievous friend Richard Grandy once
said, in connection with some other occasion on which I was talking, that to
represent my remarks, it would be necessary to introduce a new form of speech
act, or a new operator, which was to be called the operator
of quessertion. It is to be read as “It is perhaps possible that someone might
assert that . . .” and is to be symbolized “?├”; possibly it might even be iterable […].
Everything I shall suggest here is highly quessertable.”
Grice 1989:297.
If Grice had one thing, he had linguistic creativity. Witness his ‘implicaturum,’
and his ‘implicaturum,’ not to mention his ‘pirotologia.’Sometime, somewhere,
in the history of philosophy, a need was felt by some Griceian philosopher,
surely, for numbering intentions. The verb, denoting the activity, out of which
this ‘intention’ sprang was Latin ‘intendere,’ and somewhere, sometime, the
need was felt to keep the Latinate /t/ sound, and sometimes to make it
sibilate, /s/. The source of it all
seems to be Aristotle in Soph. Elen., 166a24–166a30, which was
rendered twice om Grecian to Latin. In the second Latinisation, ‘de sensu’
comes into view. Abelard proposes to use ‘de rebus,’ or ‘de re,’ for what the previous
translation had as ‘per divisionem.’ To make the distinction, he also proposes
to use ‘de sensu’ for what the previous translation has as ‘per compositionem,’
and ‘per conjunctionem.’ But what did either mean? It was a subtle question,
indeed. And trust Nicolai Hartmann, in his mediaevalist revival, to add numbers
and a further distinction, now the ‘recte/’oblique’ distinction, and ‘intentio’
being ‘prima,’ ‘seconda,’ ‘tertia,’ and so on, ad infinitum. The proposal is
clear. We need a way to conceptualise first-order propositions. But we also
need to conceptualise ‘that’-clauses. The ‘that’-clause subordination is indeed
open-ended. ‘mean.’ Grice’s motivation in the presentation at the Oxford
Philosophical Society is to offer, as he calls it, a ‘proposal.’ In his words,
notice the emphasis on the Latinate ‘intend,’ – where it occurs, as applied to
an emissor, and as having as content, following that ‘that’-clause, an
‘intensional’ verb like ‘believe,’ which again, involves an ‘intentio tertia,’
now referring to a state back in the emissor expressed by yet another
intensional verb – all long for, ‘you communicate that p if you want your
addressee to realise that you hold this or that propositional attitude with
content p.’ "A
meantNN something by x" is (roughly) equivalent to "A intended the
utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the
recognition of this intention"; and we may add that to ask what A meant is
to ask for a specification of the intended effect (though, of course, it may
not always be possible to get a straight answer involving a "that"
clause, for example, "a belief that . . ."). (Grice 1989: 220). Grice’s motivation is to
‘reduce’ “mean” to what has come to be known in the Griceian [sic] literature
as a ‘Griceian’ [sic] ‘reflexive’ intention – he prefers M-intention -- which
we will read as involving an intentio seconda, and indeed intentio tertia, and
beyond, which makes its appearance explicitly in the second clause -- or
‘prong,’ as he’d prefer -- of his ‘reductive’ analysis. Prong 1 then
corresponds to the intention prima or intention recta: Utterer U intends1
that Addressee A believes that Utterer U holds psychological state or attitude
ψ with content “p.”
Prong 2 corresponds to the intentio
seconda or intentio obliqua: Utterer U intends2 that
Addressee A believes (i) on the ‘rational,’ and not just ‘causal,’ basis of
(ii), i.e. of the addressee A’s recognition of the utterer U’s intentio seconda
or intentio obliqua i2, that Addressee A comes to believe that
Utterer U holds psychological state or attitude ψ with content “p.” In Grice’s
wording, “i2” acts as a ‘reason,’ and not merely a ‘cause’ for
Addressee A’s coming to believe that U holds psychological state or attitude ψ
with content “p”. Kemmerling has used “↝”
to represent this ‘reason’ (i1 ↝ i2,
Kemmerling in Grandy/Warner, 1986, cf. Petrus in Petrus 2010). Prong 3 is a
closure prong, now involving a self-reflective third-order intention, there is
no ‘covert’ higher-order intention involved in (i)-(iii). Meaning-constitutive
intentions in utterer u’s meaning that p should be out there ‘in the open,’ or
‘above board,’ to count as having been ‘communicated.Grice quotes only one
author in ‘Meaning’: C. L. Stevenson, who started his career with a degree in
English from Yale. Willing to allow a ‘metabolical’ use of ‘mean’ he
recognises, he scare quotes it: “There is a
sense, to be sure, in which a groan “means“ something, just a reduced
temperature may at times ”mean” convalescence.” Stevenson 1944:38). This
remark will have Grice later attempting an ‘evolutionary’ model of how an ‘x’
causing ‘y’ may proceed from ‘natural’ to less natural ones. Consider ‘is in
pain.’ A creature is physically hurt, and the expression of pain comes up
naturally as an effect. But if the creature attains rational control over his
expressive behaviour, and the creature is in pain (or expects his addressee A
to think that he is in pain), U can now imitate or replicate, in a something
like a Peirceian iconic mode, the natural behaviour manifested by a spontaneous
response to a hurtful stimulus. The ‘simulated’ pain will be an ‘icon’ of the
natural pain. Grice is getting Peirceian by the day, and he is not telling us!
There are, Grice says, as if to simplify Peirce the most he can, two modes of
representation. The primary one is now the explicitly Peirceian iconic one. The
‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam’ of Occam. And then, there’s
the derivative *non*-iconic representation, in that order. The first is, shall
we say, ‘natural,’ and beyond the utterer U’s voluntary control (cf. Darwin on
the expression of emotions in man and animals); the second is not. Grice is
allowing for smoke representing fire, or if one must, alla Stevenson,
‘representing’ it. In Grice’s motivation to along the right lines, his
psychologist austere views of his 1948 ‘Meaning,’ when he rather artificially
disjoins a ‘natural’ “mean” and an ‘artificial’ “mean,” when merely different
‘uses’ stand for what he then thought were senses, he wants now to re-introduce
into philosophical discourse the iconic natural representation or meaning that
he had left aside.If this is part of what he calls a ‘myth,’ even if an
evolutionary one, to account for the emergence of ‘systems of communication,’
it does starts with an utterer U expressing (very much alla Croce or Marty) a
psychological state or attitude ψ by displaying some behavioural pattern in an
unintentional way. Grice is being Wittgensteinian here, and quotes almost
verbatim from Anscombe’s rendition, “No psychological concept except when
backed in behaviour that manifests it.”
If Ockham notes that “Risus naturaliter significat interiorem
laetitiam,” Grice shows this will allow to avoid, also alla Ockham, a polysemy
to ‘mean.’In Grice’s three clauses in his 1948 conceptual analysis of ‘meaning’
– the first clause of exhibitiveness, the second clause of intentio seconda or
reflexivity, and the third clause of communicative overtness, voluntary control
on the part of the utterer U is already in order. Since the utterer’s addressee
A is intended to recognise this, no longer is it required any prior ‘iconic’
association between a simulated behaviour and the behaviour naturally displayed
as a response to a stimulus. This amounts, for Grice to deeming the system of
expression as having become a full system now of intention-based
‘communication.’‘know’’ Intentio seconda or intentio obliqua comes up nicely
when Grice delivers the third William James Lecture, later reprinted as
“Further notes on logic and conversation.” There, Grice targets one type of
anti-Gettier scenario for the use of a factive psychological state or attitude
expressed by a verb like “know,” again followed by a “that”-clause. Grice is
criticisign Austin’s hasty attempt to analyse ‘know’ in terms of the
‘performatory’ ‘guarantee.’ As Grice puts it in “Prolegomena,” “to say ‘I know’
is to give a guarantee.” (Grice 1989:9) which can be traced back to Austin,
although since, as Grice witnessed it, Austin ‘all too frequently ignored’ the
real of emissor’s communicatum, one is never sure. In any case, Grice wants to overcome this
‘performatory’ fallacy, and he expands on the ‘suspect’ example of the
Prolegomena in the Third lecture. Grice’s troubles with ‘know’ were long-dated.
In Causal Theory he lists as the third philosophical mistake, “What is known by
me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case.” (1989: 237).
Uncredited, but he may be having in mind Ryle’s odd characterisations with
terms such as ‘occurrence,’ ‘episode,’ and so on. In the section on ‘stress,’ Grice asks us to
assume that Grice knows that p. The question is whether this claim commits the
philosopher to the further clause, ‘Grice knows that Grice knows that p, and so
on, … to use the scholastic term we started this with, ad infinitum. It is not
that Grice is adverse to a regressive analysis per se. This is, in effect, with
what the third clause or prong in his analysis of ‘meaning’ does – ‘let all
meaning-constitutive intentions be overt, including this one. Indeed, when it comes to meaning or knowing,
we are talking optimal, we are talking ‘virtue.’ Both ‘meaning,’
‘communicating, ‘and ‘knowing,’ represent an ‘ideal,’ value-paradeigmatic
concept – where value, a favourite with Hartmann, appears under the guise of a
noumenon in the topos ouranos that only realises imperfectly in the sub-lunary
world. In the third William James lecture Grice cursorily dismisses these
demanding or restrictive anti-Gettier scenarios as too stipulatory for the
colloquial, ordinary, use – and thus ‘sense’ -- of ‘know.’ The approach Gettier
is cricising ends up being too convoluted, seeing that conversationalists tend
to make a rather loose use of the verb. Grice’s example illustrates linguistic
botanising. So we have Grice bringing the examinee who does know that the
battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815, with hardly conclusive evidence, or any
‘de sensu’ knowledge that the evidence (which he does not have) is conclusive.
Grice grants that, in a specially emphatic utterance of ‘know,’ there might be
a cancellable implicaturum to the effect that the knower does have conclusive
evidence for what he alleges to know. Grice’s explicit reference to this
‘regressive nature’ (p. 59) touches on the topic of intention de sensu. Grice
is contesting the strong view, as represented, according to Gettier, by
philosophers ranging from Plato’s Thaetetus to Ayer’s Problem of Empirical
Knowledge (indeed the only two loci Gettier cares to cite in his short essay)
that a claim, “Grice knows that p” entails a claim to the effect that there is
conclusive evidence for p, and which gives Grice a feeling of subjective
certainty, and that Grice knows that there is such conclusive evidence, and so
on, ad infinitum. Grice casts doubts on the intentio de sensu as applied to the
colloquial or ‘ordinary’ uses of ‘know’. If I know that p, must I know that I
know that p? Having just introduced his
“Modified Occam’s Razor” – ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’
--, Grice doesn’t think so. At this point, however, he adds a characteristic
bracket: “(cf. causal theory).” With that bracket, Grice is allowing that the
denotatum of “p,” qua content of U’s psychological state or attitude of
‘knowing,’ the state-of-affairs itself, as we may put it, should play something
like a causal role in U’s knowing that p. Grice is open-minded as to what type
of link or connection that is. It need not be strictly causal. He is merely
suggesting the open-endness of ‘know in terms of these “further conditions” as
to how Grice ‘comes’ to know that p, and refers to the ‘causal theory,’ as
later developed by philosophers like E. F. Dretske and others. As a linguistic
botanist, Grice is well aware that ‘know,’ like ‘see,’ is what the Kiparskys
(whom Grice refers to) call a ‘factive.’An ascription of “Grice knows that p,”
or, indeed, “Grice sees that p,” (unless Grice hallucinates) entails “p.” The
defeating ‘hallucination’ scenario is key. It involves what Grice calls a dis-implicaturum.
The utterer is using ‘know’ or‘see’ in a loose way (and meaning less, rather
than more than he explicitly conveys. Note incidentally, as Grice later noted
in later seminars, how his analysis proves the philosopher’s adage wrong.
Surely what is known by me to be the case is believed by me to be the case. Any
divergence to the contrary is a matter of ‘implicatural’ stress – by which he
means supra-segmentation.‘want’Soon after his delivering the William James
lectures, Grice got involved in a project concerning an evaluation of Quine’s
programme, where again he touches on issues of intentio seconda or intentio obliqua,
and brings us back to Russell and ‘the author of Waverley.’ Grice’s
presentation comes out in Words and Objections, edited by Davidson and
Hintikka, a pun on Quine’s Word and Object. Grice’s contribution, ‘Vacuous
Names,’ (later reprinted in part in Ostertag’s volume on Definite descriptions)
concludes with an exploration of “the” phrases, and further on, with some
intriguing remarks on the subtle issues surrounding the scope of an ascription
of a predicate standing for a psychological state or attitude. Grice’s choice
of an ascription now notably involves an ‘opaque’ (rather than ‘factive,’ like
‘know’) psychological state or attitude: ‘wanting,’ which he symbolizes as “W.”
Grice considers a quartet of utterances: Jack wants someone to marry him; Jack
wants someone or other to marry him; Jack wants a particular person to marry
him, and There is someone whom Jack wants to marry him. Grice notes that “there
are clearly at least *two* possible readings” of an utterance like our (i): a
first reading “in which,” as Grice puts it, (i) might be paraphrased by (ii).”
A second reading is one “in which it might be paraphrased by (iii) or by (iv).”
Grice goes on to symbolize the phenomenon in his own version of a first-order
predicate calculus. ‘Ja wants that p’ becomes ‘Wjap,’ where ‘ja’
stands for the individual constant “Jack” as a super-script attached to the
predicate standing for Jack’s psychological state or attitude. Grice writes:
“Using the apparatus of classical predicate logic, we might hope to represent,”
respectively, the external reading and the internal reading (involving an
intentio secunda or intentio obliqua) as ‘(Ǝx)WjaFxja’
and ‘Wja(Ǝx)Fxja.’ Grice then
goes on to discuss a slightly more complex, or oblique, scenario involving this
second internal reading, which is the one that interests us, as it involves an
‘intentio seconda.’ Grice notes: “But suppose that Jack wants a specific
individual, Jill, to marry him, and this because Jack has been “*deceived* into
thinking that his friend Joe has a highly delectable sister called Jill, though
in fact Joe is an only child.” (The Jill Jack eventually goes up the hill with
is, coincidentally, another Jill, possibly existent). Let us recall that
Grice’s main focus of the whole essay is, as the title goes, ‘emptiness’! In
these circumstances, one is inclined to say that (i) is true only on reading
(vii),” where the existential quantifier occurs within the scope of the
psychological-state or -attitude verb, “but we cannot now represent (ii) or
(iii), with ‘Jill’ being vacuous, by (vi), where the existential quantifier (Ǝx) occurs outside the scope of the
psychological-attitude verb, want, “since [well,] Jill does not really exist,”
except as a figment of Jack’s imagination. In a manoeuver that I interpret as
‘purely intentionalist,’ and thus favouring by far Suppes’s over Chomsky’s
characterisation of Grice as a mere ‘behaviourist,’ Grice hopes that “we should
be provided with distinct representations for two familiar readings” of, now:
Jack wants Jill to marry him; Jack wants ‘Jill’ to marry him. It is at this
point that Grice applies a syntactic scope notation involving sub-scripted
numerals, (ix) and (x), where the numeric values merely indicate the order of
introduction of the symbol to which it is attached in a deductive schema for
the predicate calculus in question. Only the first notation yields the internal
de sensu reading (where ‘ji’ stands for ‘Jill’): ‘W2ja4F1ji3ja4’
and ‘W3ja4F2ji1ja4.’
Note that in the alternative external notation, the individual constant for
“Jill,” ‘ji,’ is introduced prior to ‘want,’ – ‘ji’’s sub-script is 1, while
‘W’’s sub-script is the higher numerical value 3. If Russell could have avowed
of this he would have had that the Prince Regents, by issuing the invitation,
wants to confirm that ‘the author of Waverley’ isN Scott, already having
confirmed that the author of Waverley =M the author of Waverley. Grice warns
Quine. Given that Jill does not exist, only the internal reading “can be true,”
or alethically satisfactory. Similarly, we might imagine an alternative
scenario where the butler informs the Prince: ‘We are sorry to inform Your
Majesty that your invitation was returned: apparently the author of Waverley
does not SEEM to exist.’ Grice sums up his reflections on the representation of
the opaqueness of a verb standing for a psychological state or attitude like
that expressed by ‘wanting’ with one observation that further marks him as an
intentionalist, almost of a Meinongian type. If he justified a loose use of
‘know,’ he is now is ready to allow for ‘existential’ phrases in cases of ‘vacuous’
designata, which however baffling, should not lead a philosopher to the wrong
characterisation of the linguistic phenomena (as it led Austin with ‘know’).
Provided such a descriptors occur within an opaque, intensional, de sensu,
psychological-state or attitude verbs, Grice captures the nuances of ‘ordinary’
discourse, while keeping Quine happy. As Grice puts it, we should also have
available to us also three neutral, yet distinct, (Ǝx)-quantificational forms (together with their isomorphs),” as a
philosopher who thinks that Wittgenstein denies a distinction, craves for a
generality! “Jill” now becomes “x”: ‘W4ja5Ǝx3F1x2ja5,’
‘Ǝx5W2ja5F1x4ja3’,
and ‘Ǝx5W3ja4F1x2ja4
.’ Since in (xii) the individual variable ‘x’ (ranging over ‘Jill’) “does not
dominate the segment following the ‘(Ǝx)’
quantifier, the formulation does not display any ‘existential’ or de re,
‘force,’ and is suitable therefore for representing the internal readings (ii)
or (iii), “if we have to allow, as we do have, if we want to faithfully
represent ‘ordinary’ discourse, for the possibility of expressing the fact that
a particular person, Jill, does not actually exist.” At least Grice does not
write, “really,” for he knew that Austin detested a ‘trouser word.’ Grice
concludes that (xi) and (xiii) are derivable from each of (ix) and (x), while
(xii) will be “derivable only” from (ix).‘intend’By this time, Grice had been
made a Fellow of the British Academy and it was about time for the delivery of
the philosophical lecture that goes with it. It only took him six five years.
Grice choses “Intention and uncertainty” as its topic. He was provoked by two
members of his ‘playgroup’ at Oxford, Hart and Hampshire, who in an essay
published in Mind, what Grice finds, again, as he did with the anti-Gettier
cases of ‘know,’ as rather a too strong analysis of ‘intending.’ In his
British-Academy lecture, Grice plays now with the psychological state or
attitude, realised by the verbal form, ‘intend,’ when specifically followed by
a ‘that’-clause, “intends that…,” as an echo of his dealing with “meaning to”
as merely ‘natural.’ He calls himself a neo-Prichardian, reviving this ‘willing
that’ which Urmson had popularised at Oxford, bringing to publication
Prichard’s exploration of William James and his “I will that the distant chair
slides over the floor towards me. It does not.”Grice’s ‘intending that…’ is
notably a practical, boulemaic, or buletic, or desiderative, rather than
alethic or doxastic, psychological state or attitude. It involves not just an itentum,
but an intentum that involves both a desideratum AND a factum – for the ‘future
indicative’ is conceptually involved. Grice claims that, if the conceptual
analysis of “intending that…” is to represent ‘ordinary’ discourse, shows that
it contains, as one of its prongs, in the final ‘neo-Prichardian’ version that
Grice gives, also a ‘doxastic’ (rather than ‘factive’ and ‘epistemic’)
psychological state or attitude, notably a belief on the part of the ‘intender’
that his willing that p has a probability greater than 0.5 to the effect that p
be realised. Contra Hart and Hampshire, Grice acknowledges the investigations
by the playgroup member Pears on this topic. Interestingly, a polemic arose
elsewhere with Davidson, who trying to be more Griceian thatn Grice, sees this
doxastic constraint as a mere cancellable implicaturum. Grice grants it may be
a dis-implicaturum at most, as in loose cases of ‘know,’ or ‘see.’ Grice is
adamant in regarding the doxastic component as a conceptual ‘entailment’ in the
‘ordinary’ use of ‘intend,’ unless the verb is used in a merely
‘disimplicatural,’ loose fashion. Grice’s example, ‘Jill intends to climb
Everest next week,’ when the prohibitive conditions are all to evident to
anyone concerned with such an utterance of (xv), perhaps Jill included, and
‘intends’ has to be read only ‘internally’ and hyperbolically. At this point,
if in “Vacuous Names, he fights with Meinong while enjoying engaging in
emptiness, it should be stressed that Grice gives as an illustration of a ‘disimplicaturum,’
along with a use of ‘see’ in a Shakespeareian context. ‘See,’ like ‘know,’ or ‘mean,’ exhibit what
Grice calls diaphaneity. So it’s only natural Grice turns his attention to
‘see.’ Grice’s examples are ‘Macbeth saw Banquo’ and ‘Hamlet saw his father on
the ramparts of Elsinore,’ and both involve hallucination! It is worth
comparing the fortune of ‘disimplicaturum’ with that of ‘implicaturum.’ Grice
coins ‘to dis-implicate’ as an active verb, for a case where the utterer does
NOT, as in the case of implicaturum, mean MORE than he says, but LESS. Grice’s
point is a subtle one. It involves his concession on something like an
explicatum, but alsoo on something like Moore’s entailment. If the ‘doxastic
condition’ is entailed by “intending that…,’ an utterer U may STILL use, in an
‘ordinary’ fashion, a strong ‘intending that…’ in a scenario where it is common
ground between the utterer U and his addressee A that the probability of ‘p’
being realised is lower than 0.5. The expression of the psychological state or
attitude is loose, since the utterer is, as it were, dropping an ‘entailment’
that applies in a use of ‘intending that’ where that ‘common-ground’ assumption
is absent. One reason may be echoic. Jill may think that she can succeed in
climbing Mt. Everest; she herself has used ‘intend.’ When that information is
transmitted, the strong psychological verb is kept when the doxastic constraint
is no longer shared by the utterer U and his addressee A (Like an implicaturum,
a disimplicaturum has to be recognised as such to count as one. No such thing as an ‘unwanted’ disimplicaturum.‘motivate’Sometimes,
it would seem that, for Grice, the English philosopher of English
‘ordinary-language’ philosophy, English is not enough! Grice would amuse at
Berkeley seminars, with things like, ‘A pirot potches o as fang, or potches o
and o’ as F-id,’ just to attract his addressee’s attention. The full passage,
in what Grice calls, after Carnap, pirotese, reads: “A pirot can be said to
potch of some obble x as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble o, as
fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o’ as being fid to
one another.” Grice’s deciphering, with ‘pirot,” a tribute to Carnap – and
Locke -- as any agent, and an ‘obble’ as an object. Grice borrows, but does not
return, the ‘pirot’ from Carnap (for whom pirots karulise elatically – Carnap’s
example of a syntactically well-formed formula in Introduction to Semantics).
Grice uses ‘pirotese’ ‘to potch’ as a correlate for ‘perceive,’ such as the
factive ‘see’ and ‘to cotch’ as a correlate for the similarly factive
‘know.’While ‘perceive’ strictly allows for a ‘that’-clause (as in Grice
analysis of “I perceive that the pillar box is red” in “The causal theory of
perception”), for simplificatory purposes, Grice is using ‘to potch’ as
applying directly to an object, which Grice rephrases as an ‘obble.’ Since some
perceptual feature or other is required in a predication of ‘perceiving’ and
‘potching,’ ‘feng’ is introduced as a perceptual predicate. And since pirots
should also be allowed to perceive an ‘obble’ o in some relation with another
‘obble’ o2, Grice introduces the dyadic ‘relational’ feature ‘fid.’ Grice’s exegesis reads: “‘To potch’ is
something like ‘to perceive,’ whereas ‘to cotch’ is something like ‘to think.’
‘Feng’ and ‘fang’ are possible descriptions, much like our adjectives; ‘fid’ is
a possible relation between ‘obbles.’”).
At this point, Grice has been made, trans-territorially, the President
of the American Philosophical Association, and is ready to give his
Presidential Address (now reprinted in his Conception of Value, for Clarendon.
He chooses ‘philosophical psychology’ It’s when Grice goes on to play now with
the neo-Wittgensteinian issues of incorrigibility and privileged access, that
issues of intentio seconda become prominent.
For any psychological attitude ψ1, if U holds it, U holds, as
a matter of what Grice calls ‘genitorial construction,’ a meta-psychological
attitude, ψ2, a seconda intentio if ever there was one, -- Grice
even uses the numeral ‘2’ -- that has, as its content followed the second
‘that’-clause, the very first psychological attitude ψ1. The general
schema being given below, with an instance of specification: ‘ψup ⊃ ψuψup,’ and ‘if U
wills that p, U wills that U wills that p.’ The interesting bit, from the
perspective of our exploration of ‘intentio seconda,’ is that, if, alla Peano,
we apply this to itself, as in the anti-Gettier cases Grice discussed earlier,
we end with an ad-infinitum clause. It was Judith Baker, who earned her
doctorate under Grice at Berkeley who sees this clearlier than everyone (She
was a regular contributor to the Kant Society in Germany). Baker’s publications
are, like those of her tutor, scarce. But in a delightful contribution to the
Grice festschrift, “Do one’s motives have to be pure?” (in Grandy/Warner 1986),
Baker explores the crucial importance of that ad-infinitum chain of intentiones
secondæ as it applies to questions of not alethic but practical value or
satisfactoriness. Consider ‘ought’. Grice would say that ‘must’ is aequi-vocal,
i.e. it is not that ‘must’ has an alethic ‘sense’ and a practical ‘sense.’ Only
“one” must, if one must! (As Grice jokes, “Who needs ichthyological
necessity?”). Baker notes that the
ad-infinitum chain may explain how ‘duty’ ‘cashes out’ in ‘interest.’ Both
Grice and Baker are avowed Kantotelians. By allowing ‘duty’ to cash out in
interest they are merging Aristotle’s utilitarian teleology with Kant’s
deontology, and succeeding! It is possible to symbolize Grice’s and Baker’s
proposal. If there is a “p” SUCH AS, at some point in the iteration of willing
and intentiones secondæ, the agent is not willing to accept it, this blocks the
potential Kantian universalizability of the content of a teleological attitude
“p,” stripping “p” of any absolute value status that it may otherwise attain.In
Grice’s reductive analysis of ‘mean,’ ‘know,’ ‘want,’ ‘intend,’ and ‘motivate,’
we witness the subtlety of his approach that is only made possible from the
recognition of Aristotle’s insight back in “De Sophisticis Elenchis” to Kant’s
explorations on the purity of motives. It should not surprise us. It’s Grice’s
nod, no doubt, to an unjustly neglected philosopher, who should be neglected no
more.ReferencesBlackburn, S. W. 1984. Spreading the words: groundings in the
philosophy of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1872.
The expression of emotions in man and animals. London: Murray. Grandy, R. E.
and R. O. Warner 1986. Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions,
categories, ends. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1948. Meaning, The
Oxford Philosophical Society. Repr. in Grice 1989. Grice, H. P. 1961. The
causal theory of perception, The Aristotelian Society. Repr. in Grice 1989.
Grice, H. P. 1967. Logic and Conversation, The William James lectures. Repr. in
a revised 1987 form in Grice 1989. Grice, H. P. 1969. Vacuous Names, in
Davidson and Hintikka, Words and objections. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. Grice, H.
P. 1971. Intention and uncertainty, The British Academy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Grice, H. P. 1975. How pirots karulise elatically: some
simpler ways, The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. Grice, H. P. 1982. Meaning Revisited, in N.
V. Smith, Mutual knowledge. London: Croom Helm, repr. in Grice 1989. Grice,
H.P. 1987. Retrospective epilogue, in Studies in the Way of Words. Grice, H. P.
1989. Studies in the way of words. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press. Hart, H. L. A. and S. N. Hampshire 1958. Intention, decision,
and certainty, Mind, 67:1-12.Kemmerling, A. M. 1986. Utterer’s meaning
revisited, in Grandy/Warner 1986. Kneale, W. C. and M. Kneale. 1966. The
development of logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Pecocke, C. A. B. 1989. Transcendental Arguments in the Theory of Content: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered
Before the University of Oxford on 16 May 1989. Oxford University Press.
Prichard, H. A. 1968. Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest. Essays and
Lectures, edited by
W. D. Ross and J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University. Stevenson,
C. L. 1944. Ethics and language. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Strawson, P. F. 1964 Intention and convention in speech acts, The Philosophical
Review, repr. in Logico-Linguistic Papers, London, Methuen, 1971, pp. 149-169 as Blackburn puts it in
his discussion of Grice in the intention-based chapter of his “Spreading the
word: groundings in the philosophy of language.” Intentio seconda or obliqua
bears heavily on Grice’s presentation for the Oxford Philosophical Society. The
motivation behind Grice’s analysis pertains to philosophical methodology. Grice
is legitimizing an ascription of ‘mean’ to a rational agent, such as … a
philosopher. This very ascription Grice finds to be ‘seemingly denied by
Wittgenstein’ (Grice 1986). As an exponent of what he would later and in jest
dub “The Post-War Oxonian School of ‘Ordinary-Language’ Philosophy,” Grice
engages in a bit of language botany, and dealing with the intricacies of
‘communicative’ uses of “mean.” Interestingly, and publicly – although a
provision is in order here – Grice acknowledges emotivist Stevenson, who
apparently taught Grice about ‘metabolic’ uses of “mean.” Stevenson, who read
English as a minor at Yale, would not venture to apply ‘mean’ to moans!
Realising it as a colloquial extension, he is allowed to use ‘mean,’ but in
scare quotes only! (“Smith’s reduced temperature ‘means’ that he is is
convalescent.” “There is a sense, to be sure, in
which a groan “means“ something, just a reduced temperature may at times ”mean”
convalescence.” Stevenson 1944:38). Close enough but no cigar. Stevenson
has ‘groan,’ which at least rhymes with ‘moan.’ (As for the proviso, Grice
never ‘meant’ to ‘publish’ his talk on ‘Meaning,’ but one of his tutees
submitted for publication, and on acceptance, Grice allowed the publication).
In “Meaning” Grice does not provide a conceptual analysis for, ‘by moaning, U
means [simpliciter] that p.’ He will in his “Meaning Revisited” – the
metabolical scare quotes are justified on two counts: ‘By moaning U means that
p’ is legitimized on the basis of the generic ‘x ‘means’ y iff x is a
consequence of y.’ But it is also justified on the basis that there is a
continuum between U’s involuntarily moaning thereby meaning that he is in pain,
and U’s voluntarily moaning, thereby ‘communicating’ that he is in pain.
However, and more importantly for our exploration of the ‘intentum,’ Grice
hastens to add that he does not agree with Stevenson’s purely ‘causal’ account.
The main reason is not ‘anti-naturalistic.’ It is just that Grice sees
Stevenson’s proposal as as involving a vicious circle. Typically, Grice
extrapolates the relevant quote from Stevenson, slightly out of context. Grice
refers to Stevenson’s appeal to "an elaborate process of conditioning
attending … communication."Grice: “If we have to take seriously the second
part of the qualifying phrase ("attending … communication"),
Stevenson’s account of meaning is obviously circular. We might just as well
say, "U means” if “U communicates,” which, though true, is not helpful. It
MIGHT be helpful for Cicero translating from Grecian to Roman: ‘com-municatio’
indeed translates a Grecian turn of phrase involving ‘what is common.’ f. “con-”
and root “mu-,” to bind; cf.: immunis, munus, moenia.’And the suggestion would
be helpful if we say that to ‘communicate,’ or ‘mean,’ is just to bring some
intentum to be allotted ‘common ground,’ because of the psi-transmission it is
shared between the emissor and his intended addressee. This one hopes is both
true AND ‘helpful.’ In
any case, Grice’s tutee Strawson later found Grice’s elucidation of utterer’s
meaning to be ‘objection-proof’ (Starwson and Wiggins, 2001) in terms of a set
of necessary and sufficient conditions, of an utterer or emissor E meaning that
p, by uttering ‘x,’ and appealing to primary and secondary intentionality. But
is Grice’s intentionalism a sort of behaviourism? Grice denies that in “Method”
calling ‘behaviourism’ ‘silly. Grice further explores intentio obliqua as it
pertains to his remarks towards a general theory of “re-presentation.” The
place where this excursus takes place is crucial. It is his Valediction to his
compilation of essays, Studies in the Way of Words, posthumously published. At
this stage, he must have felt that, what he once regarded krypto-technic in
Peirce, is no more! Grice has already identified in that ‘Valediction’ many
strands of his philosophical thought, and concludes his re-assessment of his
‘philosophy of language’ and semiotics with an attempt to provide some general
remarks about ‘to represent’ in general, perhaps to counter the allegations of
vicious circularity which his approach had received, seeing that “p” features,
as a ‘gap-sign,’ as the content of both an ‘expression’ and a ‘psychological’
attitude. In trying to reconcile his austere views on “Meaning,” back in that
evening at the Oxford Philosophical Society, where he distinguished two senses
of ‘mean’ (“Smoke ‘means’ fire,” and ““Smoke” means ‘smoke’”). By focusing on
the most general of verbs for a psychological state or attitude, ‘to
represent,’ that even allows for a non-psychological reading, Grice wants to be
seen as answering the challenge of an alleged vicious circle with which his
intention-based approach is usually associated. The secondary-intentional
non-iconic mode of representation rests on a prior iconic mode and can be
understood as ‘pre-conventional,’ without any explicit recourse to the features
we associate with a developed system of communication. Grice needs no ‘language
of thought’ or sermo mentalis alla Ockham there. Grice allows that one can
communicate fully without the need to use what more conventional philosophers
call ‘a language.’ Artists do it all the time!
The passage from intentio prima to full intentio seconda is, for Grice,
gradual and complex. Grice means to adhere with ‘ordinary’ discourse, in its implicatura
and dis-implicaata. The passage also adhering to a functionalist approach qua
‘method in philosophical psychology,’ as he’d prefer, that needs not to
postulate a full-blown ‘linguistic entity’ as the object of intentional
thought. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the work of C. A. B. Peacocke,
who knew Grice from his Oxford days and later joined his seminars at Berkeley,
and who has developed this line of thought in a better fashion than less
careful philosophers. Grice’s programme has occasionally, and justly, been
compared with phenomenological approaches to expression and communication, such
as Marty’s. It is hoped that the previous notes have shed some light on those
aspects where this interface can further be elaborated. Even as we leave an
intentio seconda to resume the discussion for a longer day. In his explorations
on the embedding of intensional concepts, Grice should be inspirational to
philosophers in more than one way, but especially in the one that he favoured
most: the problematicity of it all. As he put it in another context, when
defending absolute value. “Such
a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or
incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting. If
philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be
finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not
be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy
for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never
dries up.” (Grice 1991). In the Graeco-Roman tradition, philosophers started to
use ‘intentio prima,’ ‘intentio secunda,’ ‘intentio tertia,’ and “… ad
infinitum,” as they would put it. In post-war Oxford, English philosopher H. P.
Grice felt the need. The formalist he was, he found subscribing numbers to
embedded intentions has a strong appeal for him. Grice’s main motivation is in
the philosophy of language, but as ancillary towards solving this or that
problem concerning the ‘linguistic’ methodology of his day. To appreciate
Grice’s contribution one need to abstract a little from his own historical
circumstances, or rather, place them in the proper context, and connect it with
the general history of philosophy. As a matter of history,
‘intentio prima,’ or ‘recta,’ as opposed to ‘obliqua,’ is part of Nicolai
Hartmann’s ‘mediaeval revival,’ as a reaction to mediaevalism having made scorn
by the likes of Rabelais that amused D. P. Henry. For the mediaeval
philosopher, to use Grice’s symbolism, was concerned with whether a chimaera
could eat ‘I2,’ a second intention. The mediaeval philosopher’s implicaturum
seems to be that a chimaera can easily eat ‘I1.’ Such a ‘quaestio
subtilissima,’ Rabelais jokes. If ‘I1,’ or, better, for
simplificatory purposes, ‘IR’ is a specific state, stance, or
attitude of the ‘soul,’ ‘ψ1’ or ‘ψR’ directed towards
its ‘de re’ ‘intentum,’ or ‘prae-sentatum,’ of the noumenon, ‘IO,’
‘intentio obliqua,’ is a state, stance, or attitude of the ‘soul,’ of the same
genus, ‘ψ2,’ or ‘ψS’ directed towards ‘ψR,’
its ‘de sensu’ ‘intentum’ now ‘re-prae-sentatum’ of the phainomenon or
ob-jectum (Abelard translates Aristotle’s ‘per divisionem’ as ‘de re’ and ‘per
compositionem’ and ‘per conjunctionem’ by ‘de sensu,’ and ‘per Soph. Elen.,
Kneale and Kneale, 1966). Grice’s intentionalism has been widely discussed, but
the defense he himself makes of intensionalism (versus extensionalism) has
proved inspiring, as when he assumes as an attending commentary to his
reductive analysis of the state of affairs by which the emissor communicates
that p, that he is putting forward “the legitimacy of [the] application of
[existential generalization] to a statement the expression of which contains
such [an] "intensional" verb[…] as "intend" (Grice 1989:
116 ). The expression ‘de sensu’ is due to Abelard, but Russell likes it. While
serving as Prince Regent of England in 1815, George IV casually remarks his
wish to meet ‘the author of Waverley’ in the flesh. The Prince was being funny,
you see. The prince would not know this, but when his press becomes embroiled
in pecuniary difficulties, Scotts set out to write a cash-cow. The result is
Waverley, a novel which did not name its author. It is a tale of the last
Jacobite rebellion in England, the “Forty-Five.” The novel meets with
considerable success. The next year, Scott. There follows a sequel, the same
general vein. Mindful of his reputation,
Scotts maintains the anonymous habit he displays with Waverley, and publishes the
sequel under “the Author of Waverley.” The identity “Author of Waverley” =
“Scott” is widely rumoured, and Scott is
given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who had wished to
meet “Author of Waverley” in the flesh for a ‘snug little dinner’ at Carleton,
on hearing ‘the author of Waverley’ was in town. The use of a descriptor may
lead to the implicaturum that His Majesty is p’rhaps not sure that ‘the author
of Waverley’ has a name, and isR Scott. Lack of certainty is one
thing, yet, to quote from Russell, “an interest in the law of identity can
hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe.” Grice admired Russell
profusely and one of his essays is wittily entitled, “Definite descriptions in
Russell and in the Vernacular,” so his explorations of ‘intentio’ ‘de sensu’
have an intrinsic interest. Keywords: H.
Paul Grice, intentio seconda, implicaturum, intentionalism, intentum, intentum de sensu,
‘that’-clause, the recte-oblique distinction. Grice explored issues of intentum
de sensu in various areas. First, ‘meaning.’ Second, ‘knowing.’ Third,
‘wanting.’ Fourth, ‘intending,’ Fifth, pirots, with incorrigibility and
privileged access. Sixth, morality and the regressus. Seventh, the continuum
and the unity. With Grice, it all starts, roughly, when Grice comes
up with a topic for a talk at The Oxford Philosophical Society.The Society is
holding one of those meetings, and Grice thinks of presenting a few conclusions
he had reached at his seminars on C. S. Peirce.What’s the good of an Oxford don
of keeping tidy lecture notes if you will not be able to lecture to a
philosophical addressee? Peirce is the philosopher on whom Grice choses to
lecture. In part, for “not being particularly popular on these shores,” and in
part because Grice noted the ‘heretic’ in Peirce with which he could
identify.Granted, at this stage, Grice disliked the un-Englishness of some of
Peirce’s over-Latinate jargon, what Grice finds the ‘krypto-technic.’ ‘Sign,’
‘symbol,’ ‘icon,’ and the rest of them!Instead, Grice thinks, initially for the
sake of his tutees and students – he was university lecturer -- sticking with
the simpler, ‘ordinary’, short English lexeme ‘mean.’A. M. Kemmerling, of all
people, who wrote the obituary for Grice for Synthese, has precisely cast
doubts on the ‘universal’ validity of Grice’s proposed conceptual reductive
analysis, notably in his Ph.D dissertation on ‘Meinen.’ Note the irony in Kemmerling’s title: Was Grice mit "Meinen" meint - Eine Rekonstruktion
der Griceschen Analyse rationaler
Kommunikation.” Nothing jocular in the subtitle, for this indeed is a
reconstruction of ‘rational’ communication. The funny bit is in “Was mit
“Meinen” Grice meint”! In that very phrase, which is rhetorical, and allows for
an answer, because ‘meinen’ is both mentioned and used, Kemmerling allows that
he is ‘buying’ Grice’s idea that his reductive analysis of ‘mean’ applies to
German ‘meinen.’ Kemmerling is also pointing to the ‘primacy’ (to use Suppes’s
phrase) of ‘utterer’s’ or ‘emissor’s “communicatum” or ‘Meinung.” Kemmerling
advertises his interest in exploring on what _Grice_ means – by uttering
‘meinen,’ almost! As Kemmerling notes, German ‘meinen,’ cognate via
common Germanic with English ‘mean,’ (cf. Frisian ‘mein,’ – and Hazzlitt,
“Bread, butter, and green cheese, very good English, very good cheese”) is none
other than ‘mean’ that Grice means. And ‘Grice means’ is the only literal, i.
e. non-metabolic use of the verb Grice allows – as applied to a rational agent,
which features in the subtitle to Kemmerling’s dissertation. Thus one reads in Kluge,
“Etymologische Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 1881, of “meinen,” rendered by J. F. Davis as ‘to think, opine, mean,’
from a MHG used to indicate, in
Davis’s rendition, ‘to direct one's thoughts to, have in view, aim at,
be affected towards a person, love,’ OHG meinen, meinan,
‘to mean, think, say, declare.’ = OS mênian, Du. meenen,
OE mœ̂nan, E mean (to this Anglo-Saxon mœ̂nan, cf. prob. moan – I know your meaning from your moaning),
all from WGmc. meinen, mainjan, ‘mênjan,’ and cognate with ‘man,’ ‘to think’ (cf. ‘mahnen,’ ‘Mann,’ and ‘Minne’). Kemmerling is
very apropos, because Grice engaged in philosophical discussion with him, as
testified by his perceptive contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. (Kemmerling, 1986).
On top, in his presentation for the Oxford Philosophical Society, Grice wants
to restrict the philosophical interest to ‘de sensu,’ the ‘that’-clause (cf.
the recte-oblique distinction), viz. not just ‘what Grice means,’ if this is
going to be expaned as ‘something wonderful.’ Not enough for Grice. It has to
be expanded, for the thing to have philosophical interest into a ‘propositional
clause,’, an ‘intensional’ context, i. e., ‘Grice means that…’ Grice cavalierly
dismisses other use of ‘mean,’ – notably the ubiquitous, ‘mean to…’ – He will
later explain his reason for this. It was after William James provoked
Prichard. For William James uttered: “I will that the distant table slides on
the floor toward me. It doesn’t’. Prichard turns this into the conceptual
priority of ‘will that…’ for which Grice gives him the credit he deserved at a
later lecture now on his being appointed a Fellow of The British Academy
(Grice, 1971). Strictly, what Grice does
in the Oxford Philosophical Socieety presentation is to distinguish between
various ‘mean’ and end up focusing on ‘mean’ as followed by a ‘that’-clause. In
the typical Oxonian fashion, that Grice borrows (but never returns) from J. C.
Wilson, Grice has the IO as ‘meaning that so-and-so’ (Grice, 1989:
217). Grice explicitly displays the primacy of a reductive analysis of the
conceptual circumstances involving an emissor (Anglo-Saxon ‘utterer’) who
‘means’ that p. It will be a longer ‘shaggy-dog’ story Grice tells when he
crosses the divide from ‘propositional’ (p) to ‘predicative’ ascriptions (“By
uttering ‘Fido is shaggy,’ Grice means that the dog is hairy-coated (Grice
1989). Grice notes that ‘metabolically,’ “mean,” at least in English, can be
applied to various other things, sometimes even involving a ‘that’-clause. “By
delivering his budget, the major means that we will have a hard year.’ Grice
finds that ‘but we won’t’ turns him into a self-contradicter. In Grice’s usage,
‘x ‘means’ y’ iff ‘y is a consequence [consequentia] of x’ --. Quite a
departure from Old Frisian. If Hume’s objection to the use of the verb ‘cause,’
is that it covers animistic beliefs (“Charles I’s decapitation willed his
death”), English allows for disimplicated or loose ‘metabolic’ uses of ‘will’
(“It ‘will’ rain”) and ‘mean’ (Grice’s moaning means that he is in pain).
desideratum: Qua volition,
a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes
taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition
is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have transformed it
by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or
beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary guises, are often
taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive, affective, and
conative elements. The conative element is the impetus – the underlying
motivation – for the action. A velleity is a conative element insufficient by
itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of abilities, that
yields the mental events involved in initiating action. There are three primary
theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is a reductive
account in which action is identified with the entire causal sequence of the
mental event (the volition) causing the bodily behavior. J. S. Mill, for
example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things:
the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he two
together constitute the action” (Logic). Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s
mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her
arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence (the
“causing”) is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is
maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the
resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two
non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating
volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the
volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are
mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to
be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In
plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand,
which was consequent upon my volition” (Three Dialogues). In this century,
Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something”
(Moral Obligation, 1949), where willing is sui generis (though at other places
Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do
something). In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come
under attack by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949). Ryle argues that it leads to a
vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do
it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is
nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of
Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of
art; “[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist
theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like]
‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” (Concept
of Mind). Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action
with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or
willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any
action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is
nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind
endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to
be in its power” (Essay concerning Human Understanding). This is a functional
account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm
rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her
willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch,
it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the
same. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal
theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example,
Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid
Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite
its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the
first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting
the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision
of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does
justice to the conative element. See also ACTION THEORY, FREE WILL PROBLEM,
PRACTICAL REASONING, WAYWARD CAUSAL CHAIN. M.B. volition volition. Grice makes a double use of this. It should be thus two
entries. There’s the conversational desideratum, where a desideratum is like a
maxim or an imperative – and then there are two specific desiderata: the
desideratum of conversational clarity, and the desideratum of conversational
candour. Grice was never sure what adjective to use for the ‘desiderative.’ He
liked buletic. He liked desideratum because it has the co-relate
‘consideratum,’ for belief. He uses
‘deriderative’ and a few more! Of course what he means is a sub-psychological
modality, or rather a ‘soul.’ So he would apply it ‘primarily’ to the soul, as
Plato and Aristotle does. The ‘psyche’, or ‘anima’ is what is ‘desiderativa.’
The Grecians are pretty confused about this (but ‘boulemaic’ and ‘buletic’ are
used), and the Romans didn’t help. Grice is concerned with a
rational-desiderative, that takes a “that”-clause (or oratio obliqua), and qua
constructivist, he is also concerned with a pre-rational desiderative (he has
an essay on “Needs and Wants,” and his detailed example in “Method” is a
squarrel (sic) who needs a nut. On top, while Grice suggest s that it goes both
ways: the doxastic can be given a reductive analaysis in terms of the buletic,
and the buletic in terms of the doxastic, he only cares to provide the former.
Basically, an agent judges that p, if his willing that p correlates to a state
of affairs that satisfies his desires. Since he does not provide a reductive
analysis for Prichard’s willing-that, one is left wondering. Grice’s position
is that ‘willing that…’ attains its ‘sense’ via the specification, as a
theoretical concept, in some law in the folk-science that agents use to explain
their behaviour. Grice gets subtler when he deals with mode-markers for the
desiderative: for these are either utterer-oriented, or addressee-oriented, and
they may involve a buletic attitude itself, or a doxastic attitude. When utterer-addressed,
utterer wills that utterer wills that p. There is no closure here, and indeed,
a regressus ad infinitum is what Grice wants, since this regressus allows him
to get univeersabilisability, in terms of conceptual, formal, and applicational
kinds of generality. In this he is being Kantian, and Hareian. While Grice
praises Kantotle, Aristotle here would stay unashamedly ‘teleological,’ and
giving priority to a will that may not be universalisable, since it’s the
communitarian ‘good’ that matters. what does Grice have to say about our
conversational practice? L and S have “πρᾶξις,” from “πράσσω,” and which they
render as ‘moral action,’ oποίησις, τέχνη;” “oποιότης,” “ἤθη καὶ πάθη καὶ π.,”
“oοἱ πολιτικοὶ λόγοι;” “ἔργῳ καὶ πράξεσιν, οὐχὶ λόγοις” Id.6.3; ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι
ὄντα τε καὶ πραττόμενα, “exhibited in actual life,” action in drama, “oλόγος;
“μία π. ὅλη καὶ τελεία.” With practical Grice means buletic. Praxis involves
acting, and surely Grice presupposes acting. By uttering, i. e. by the act of
uttering, expression x, U m-intends that p. Grice occasionally refers to action
and behaviour as the thing which an ascription of a psychological state
explains. Grice prefers the idiom of soul. Theres the ratiocinative soul.
Within the ratiocinative, theres the executive soul and the merely
administrative soul. Cicero had to translate Aristotle into prudentia, every
time Aristotle talked of phronesis. Grice was aware that the terminology
by Kant can be confusing. Kant used ‘pure’ reason for reason in the doxastic realm. The
critique by Kant of practical reason is hardly symmetrical to his critique of
doxastic reason. Grice, with his æqui-vocality thesis of must (must
crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic divide), Grice is being more of a
symmetricalist. The buletic, boulomaic, or volitive, is a part of the soul, as
is the doxatic or judicative. And judicative is a trick because there is such a
thing as a value judgement, or an evaluative judgement, which is hardly
doxastic. Grice plays with two co-relative operators: desirability versus
probability. Grice invokes the exhibitive/protreptic distinction he had
introduced in the fifth James lecture, now applied to psychological attitudes
themselves. This Grice’s attempt is to tackle the Kantian problem in the
Grundlegung: how to derive the categorical imperative from a counsel of
prudence. Under the assumption that the protasis is Let the agent be happy,
Grice does not find it obtuse at all to construct a universalisable imperative
out of a mere motive-based counsel of prudence. Grice has an earlier paper on
pleasure which relates. The derivation involves seven steps. Grice
proposes seven steps in the derivation. 1. It is a fundamental law of
psychology that, ceteris paribus, for any creature R, for any P and Q, if R
wills P Λ judges if P, P as a result of Q, R wills Q. 2. Place this
law within the scope of a "willing" operator: R wills for any
P Λ Q, if R wills P Λ judges that if P, P as a result of Q,
R wills Q. 3. wills turns to should. If rational, R will have to block
unsatisfactory (literally) attitudes. R should (qua rational) judge for any
P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory to will that P Λ it is
satisfactory to judge that if P, P as a result of Q, it is sastisfactory to
will that Q. 4. Marking the mode: R should (qua rational) judge for any
P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that !P Λ that if it .P, .P
only as a result of Q, it is satisfactory that !Q. 5. via (p & q
-> r) -> (p -> (q -> r)): R should (qua rational)
judge for any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that if .P, .P only
because Q, i is satisfactory that, if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 6. R
should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if P, P only because p
yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 7. For any P Λ Q if P,
P only because Q yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. Grice was
well aware that a philosopher, at Oxford, needs to be a philosophical
psychologist. So, wanting and needing have to be related to willing. A plant
needs water. A floor needs sweeping. So need is too broad. So is want, a
non-Anglo-Saxon root for God knows what. With willing things get closer to the
rational soul. There is willing in the animal soul. But when it comes to
rational willing, there must be, to echo Pritchard, a conjecture, some doxastic
element. You cannot will to fly, or will that the distant chair slides over the
floor toward you. So not all wants and needs are rational willings, but then
nobody said they would. Grice is interested in emotion in his power structure
of the soul. A need and a want may count as an emotion. Grice was never too
interested in needing and wanting because they do not take a that-clause. He
congratulates Urmson for having introduced him to the brilliant willing that …
by Prichard. Why is it, Grice wonders, that many ascriptions of buletic states
take to-clause, rather than a that-clause? Even mean, as ‘intend.’ In this
Grice is quite different from Austin, who avoids the that-clause. The
explanation by Austin is very obscure, like those of all grammars on the
that’-clause, the ‘that’ of ‘oratio obliqua’ is not in every way similar to the
‘that’-clause in an explicit performative formula. Here the utterer is not
reporting his own ‘oratio’ in the first person singular present indicative
active. Incidentally, of course, it is not in the least necessary that an
explicit performative verb should be followed by a ‘that’-clause. In important
classes of cases it is followed by ‘to . . .,’ or by or nothing, e. g. ‘I
apologize for…,’ ‘I salute you.’ Now many of these verbs appear to be quite
satisfactory pure performatives. Irritating though it is to have them as such,
linked with clauses that look like statements, true or false, e. g., when I say
‘I prophesy that …,’ ‘I concede that …’,
‘I postulate that …,’ the clause following normally looks just like a
statement, but the verb itself seems to be pure performatives. One
may distinguish the performative opening part, ‘I state that …,’ which makes
clear how the utterance is to be taken, that it is a statement, as distinct
from a prediction, etc.), from the bit in the that-clause which is required to
be true or false. However, there are many cases which, as language stands at
present, we are not able to split into two parts in this way, even though the
utterance seems to have a sort of explicit performative in it. Thus, ‘I liken x
to y,’ or ‘I analyse x as y.’ Here we both do the likening and assert that
there is a likeness by means of one compendious phrase of at least a
quasi-performative character. Just to spur us on our way, we may also mention
‘I know that …’, ‘I believe that …’, etc. How complicated are these examples?
We cannot assume that they are purely descriptive, which has Grice talking of
the pseudo-descriptive. Want etymologically means absence; need should be
preferred. The squarrel (squirrel) Toby needs intake of nuts, and youll soon
see gobbling them! There is not much philosophical bibliography on these two
psychological states Grice is analysing. Their logic is interesting. Smith
wants to play cricket. Smith needs to play cricket. Grice is
concerned with the propositional content attached to the want and need
predicate. Wants that sounds harsh; so does need that. Still, there
are propositional attached to the pair above. Smith plays cricket. Grice took
a very cavalier attitude to what linguists spend their lives analysing. He
thought it was surely not the job of the philosopher, especially from a
prestigious university such as Oxford, to deal with the arbitrariness of
grammatical knots attached to this or that English verb. He rarely used
English, but stuck with ordinary language. Surely, he saw himself in the
tradition of Kantotle, and so, aiming at grand philosophical truths: not
conventions of usage, even his own! 1. Squarrel Toby has a nut, N, in
front of him. 2. Toby is short on squarrel food (observed or assumed), so, 3.
Toby wills squarrel food (by postulate of Folk Pyschological
Theory θ connecting willing with intake of N). 4. Toby prehends a nut
as in front (from (1) by Postulate of Folk Psychological Theory θ, if it is
assumed that nut and in front are familiar to Toby). 5. Toby joins squarrel
food with gobbling, nut, and in front (i.e. Toby judges gobbling, on nut in
front, for squarrel food (by Postulate of Folk Psychological
Theory θ with the aid of prior observation. So, from 3, 4 and 5, 6.
Tobby gobbles; and since a nut is in front of him, gobbles the nut in front of
him. The system of values of the society to which the agent belongs forms the
external standard for judging the relative importance of the commitments by the
agent. There are three dimensions of value: universally human, cultural that
vary with societies and times; and personal that vary with individuals. Each
dimension has a standard for judging the adequacy of the relevant values. Human
values are adequate if they satisfy basic needs; cultural values are adequate
if they provide a system of values that sustains the allegiance of the
inhabitants of a society; and personal values are adequate if the conceptions
of well‐being formed out of them enable individuals to live
satisfying lives. These values conflict and our well‐being requires some way of settling their conflicts, but
there is no universal principle for settling the conflicts; it can only be done
by attending to the concrete features of particular conflicts. These features
vary with circumstances and values. Grice reads Porter.The idea of the value
chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a
manufacturing (or service) organization as a system, made up of subsystems each
with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation
processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources –
money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and
management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and
affects profits.In his choice of value system and value sub-system, Grice is
defending objectivity, since it is usually the axiological relativist who uses
such a pretentious phrasing! More than a value may co-ordinate in a system. One
such is eudæmonia (cf. system of ends). The problem for Kant is the reduction
of the categorical imperative to the hypothetical or
suppositional imperative. For Kant, a value tends towards the
Subjectsive. Grice, rather, wants to offer a metaphysical defence of objective
value. Grice called the manual of conversational maxims the Conversational
Immanuel. The keyword to search the H. P. Grice is ‘will,’ and ‘volitional,’
even ‘ill-will,’ (“Metaphysics and ill-will,” s. V, c. 7-f. 28) and
‘benevolence’ (vide below under ‘conversational benevolence”). Also
‘desirability’: “Modality, desirability, and probability,” s. V, c. 8-ff.
14-15, and the conference lecture in a different series, “Probability,
desirability, and mood operators,” s. II, c. 2-f.11). Grice makes systematic use of ‘practical’ to
contrast with the ‘alethic,’ too (“Practical reason,” s. V, c. 9-f.1), The H.
P. Grice Papers, BANC.
desideratum of conversational
candour: The term ‘desideratum’ has to be
taken seriously. It involves freedom. This includes the maximin. It should be
noted that candour is DESIRABLE. There is a desirability for candour. Candour
is not a given. Ditto for clarity. See conversational desideratum, simpliciter.
A rational desideratum is a desideratum by a rational agent and which he
expects from another rational agent. One should make the strongest move, and on
the other hand try not to mislead.Grice's Oxford "Conversation"
Lectures, 1966Grice: Between Self-Love and Benevolence As I was saying (somewhere),
Grice uses "self-love", charmingly qualified with capitals, as "Conversational
Self-Love", and, less charmingly,
"Conversational Benevolence", in lectures advertised at
Oxford, as "Logic and
Conversation" that he gave at Oxford in 1964 as "University Lecturer in Philosophy". He also gave
seminars on "Conversational helpfulness." A number of the lectures by
Grice include discussion of thetypes of behaviour people in general exhibit,
and thereforethe types of expectations[cfr. owings]they might bring to a
venture such as a conversation.Grice suggests that people in general both
exhibitand EXPECT a certain degree of helpfulness [-- alla Rosenschein,
epistemic/boulemaic:If A cognizes that B wills p, then A wills p.] "from OTHERS" [-- reciprocal vs.
reflexive, etc.] usually on the understanding that such helpfulness does NOT
get in the way of particular goals and does not involve undue effort cf. least
effort? - cfr. Hobbes on self-love. It two people, even complete strangers,are
going through a gate, the expectation isthat the FIRST ONE through will hold
thegate open, or at least leave it open, for thesecond. The expectation is such
that todo OTHERWISE without particular reasonwould be interpreted as RUDE. The
type of helpfulness exhibited andexpected in conversation is more
specificbecause of a particular, although not a unique feature of
conversation.It is a COLLABORATIVE venture betweenthe participants.There is a
SHARED aimGrice wonders. His words, Does "helpfulness in something WE ARE
DOING TOGETHER” equate to 'cooperation'?He seems to have decided that it
does. By the later lectures in the series, 'the principle of conversational
helpfulness'has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation.' During the
Oxford lectures, Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this
cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regularities, or principles,
detailing expected behaviour. The expression'maxim' to describe these
regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.Grice's INITIAL choices of
terms are 'objectives' and 'desiderata'.He was particularly fond of the latter.
He was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose
of achieving a joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits TWO such
desiderata. Those relating to candour on the one hand and clarity on the other.
The desideratum of candour contains his general PRINCIPLE of making the
strongest (MAX) possible statement and, as a LIMITING (MAX) factor on this, the
suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead. (Do not mislead). cfr.
our"We are brothers"-- but not mutual."We are married to each
other". "You _are_ a boor".----The desideratum of conversational
clarity concerns the manner of expression. [His later reference to Modus or
Mode as used by Kant as one of the four
categories] for any conversational contribution. It includes the IMPORTANT
expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main
import of an utterance be clear and explicit. (“Explicate!”) These two factors
are constantly to be WEIGHED against two
FUNDAMENTAL and SOMETIMES COMPETING DEMANDS. Contributions to a conversation
are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the PRINCIPLE of Conversational
Benevolence. The principle of CONVERSATIONAL SELF-LOVE ensures the assumption
on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble
[LEAST EFFORT] in framing their contribution. This has been a topic of interest
to Noh end. In "Conversational Immanuel" Grice tries different ways
of making sense -- it is very easy to do so -- of Grice's distinctions that go
over the head of some linguists I know! Reasonable versus rational for example.
A Rawlsian distinction of sorts. Rational is too weak. We need 'reasonable'.
So, what sort of reasonableness is that which results from this harmonious, we
hope, clash of self-love and benevolence? Grice tried, wittily, to extend the
purposes of conversation to involve MUTUALLY INFLUENCING EACH OTHER -- a
reciprocal. (WoW, ii). And there's a mythical reconstruction of this in his
"Meaning Revisited" which he contributed to this symposium organised
by N. Smith on Mutua knowledge. But issues remains, we hope. The concept of
‘candour’is especially basic for Grice since it is constitutive of what it
means to identify the ‘significatum.’ As he notes, ‘false’ information is no
information. This is serious, because it has to do with the acceptum. A
contribution which is not trustworthy is not deemed a contribution. It is
conceptually impossible to intend to PROVIDE information if you are aware that
you are not being trustworthy and not conveying it. As for the degree of
explicitness, as Grice puts it. Since in communication in a certain fashion all
must be public, if an idea or thesis is heavily obscured, it can no longer be
regarded as having been propounded. This gives acceptum justification to the
correlative desideratum of conversational clarity. On top, if there is a level
of obscurity, the thing is not deemed to have been a communicatum or
significatum. It is all about confidence, you know. U expects A will find him
confident. Thus we find in Short and Lewis, “confīdo,” wich they render as
“to trust confidently in something,” and also, “confide in, rely firmly upon,
to believe, be assured of,” as an enhancing of “sperare,” in Cicero’s Att. 6,
9, 1. Trust and rationality are pre-requisites of conversation. Urmson develops
this. They phrase in Urmson is "implied claim." Whenever U makes a
conversational contribution in a standard context, there is an implied claim to
U being trustworthy and reasonable. What do Grice and Urmson mean by an
"implied claim"? It is obvious enough, but they both love to expand.
Whenever U utters an expression which can be used to convey truth or falsehood
there is an implied claim to trustworthiness by U, unless the situation shows
that this is not so. U may be acting or reciting or incredulously echoing the
remark of another, or flouting the expectation. This, Grice and Urmson think,
may need an explanation. Suppose that U utters, in an ordinary
circumstance, ‘It will rain tomorrow,’ or ‘It rained yesterday,’ or ‘It is
raining.’ This act carries with it the claim that U should be trusted and
licenses A to believe that it will rain tomorrow. By this is meant that
just as it is understood that no U will give an order unless he is entitled to
give orders, so it is understood that no U will utter a sentence of a kind
which can be used to make a statement unless U is willing to claim that that
statement is true, and hence one would be acting in a misleading manner if one
uttered the sentence if he was not willing to make that claim. Here, the
predicate “implies that …,” Grice, Grant, Moore, Nowell-Smith, and Urmson
hasten to add, is being used in such a way that, if there is a an expectation
that a thing is done in Circumstance C, U implies that C holds if he does the
thing. The point is often made if not always in the terms Grice uses, and it
is, Urmson and Grice believe, in substance uncontroversial. Grice and Urmson
wish to make the point that, when an utterer U deploys a hedge with an indicative
sentence, there is not merely an implied claim that the whole statement is true
but also that is true. The implied or expressed claim by the utterer to
trustworthiness need not be very strong. The whole point of a hedge is to
modify or weaken (if not, as Grice would have it, flout) the claim by U to full
trustworthiness which would be implied by the unhedged assertion. But
even if U utters “He is, I suppose, at home;” or “I guess that the penny
will come down heads," U expresses, or for Urmson plainly implies,
with however little reason, that this is what U accepts as worth the trust by
A. Now Grice and Urmson meet an objection which is made by some philosophers to
this comparison. Grice and Urmson intend to meet the objection by a fairly
detailed examination of the example which they themselves would most likely
choose. In doing this Grice and Urmson further explain the use of a
parenthetical verb. The adverb is "probably" and the verb is “I
believe.” To say, that something is probable, the imaginary objector will say,
is to imply that it is reasonable to believe, that the evidence justifies a
guarded claim for the trust or trustworthiness of U and the truth of the
statement. But to say that someone else, a third person, believes something
does not imply that it is reasonable for U or A to believe it, nor that the
evidence justifies the guarded or implied claim to factivity or truth which U
makes. Therefore, the objector continues, the difference between the use
of “I believe” and “probably” is not, as Grice and Urmson suggest, merely one
of nuance and degree of impersonality. In one case, “probably,” reasonableness
is implied; in the other, “believe,” it is not. This objection is met by Grice
and Urmson. They do so by making a general point. To use the
rational-reasonable distinction in “Conversational implicaturum” and “Aspects,”
there is an implied claim by U to reasonableness. Further to an implied
claim to trust whenever a sentence is uttered in a standard context, now Grice
and Urmson add, to meet the sceptical objection about the contrast between
“probably” and “I believe” that, whenever U makes a statement in a standard
context there is an implied claim to reasonableness. This contention must be
explained alla Kant. Cf. Strawson on the presumption of conversational
relevance, and Austin, Moore, Nowell-Smith, Grant, and Warnock. To use
Hart’s defeasibility, and Hall’s excluder, unless U is acting or story-telling,
or preface his remarks with some such phrase as “I know Im being silly, but
…” or, “I admit it is unreasonable, but …” it is, Grice and
Urmson think, a presupposition or expectation of communication or conversation
that a communicator will not make a statement, thereby implying this trust,
unless he has some ground, however tenuous, for the statement. To
utter “The King is visiting Oxford tomorrow,” or “The President of the BA has a
corkscrew in his pocket,” and then, when asked why the utterer is uttering
that, to answer “Oh, for no reason at all,” would be to sin, theologically,
against the basic conventions governing the use of discourse. Grice goes on to
provide a Kantian justification for that, hence his amusing talk of maxims and
stuff. Therefore, Urmson and Grice think there is an implied or expressed
claim to reasonableness which goes with all our statements, i.e.
there is a mutual expectation that a communicator will not make a statement
unless he is prepared to claim and defend its reasonablenesss. Cf. Grice’s
desideratum of conversational candour, subsumed under the over-arching
principle of conversational helpfulness (formerly conversational
benevolence-cum-self-love). Grice thinks that the principle of
conversational benevolence has to be weighed against the principle of
conversational self-love. The result is the overarching principle of
conversational helpfulness. Clarity gets in the picture. The desideratum of
conversational clarity is a reasonable requirement for conversants to abide
by. Grice follows some observations by Warnock. The logical grammar
of “trust,” “candour,” “charity,” “sincerity,” “decency,” “honesty,” is subtle,
especially when we are considering the two sub-goals of conversation: giving
and receiving information/influencing and being influenced by others. In both
sub-goals, trust is paramount. The explorations of trust has become an Oxonian
hobby, with authors not such like Warnock, but Williams, and
others. Grice’s essay is entitled, “Trust, metaphysics, value.” Trust as a
corollary of the principle of conversational helpfulness. In a given conversational
setting, assuming the principle of conversational helpfulness is operating, U
is assumed by A to be trustworthy and candid. There are two modes of
trust, which relate to the buletic sub-goal and the doxastic sub-goal which
Grice assumes the principle of conversational helpfulness captures:
giving and receiving information, and influencing and being influenced by
others. In both sub-goals, trust is key. In the doxastic realm, trust
has to do, not so much or only, with truth (with which the expression is cognate),
or satisfactoriness-value, but evidence and probability. In the buletic realm,
there are the dimensions of satisfactoriness-value (‘good’ versus ‘true’), and
‘ground’ versus evidence, which becomes less crucial. But note that one is
trustworthy regarding BOTH the buletic attitude and the doxastic attitude.
Grice mentions this or that buletic attitudes which is not usually judged in
terms of evidential support (“I vow to thee my country.”) However, in the
buletic realm, U is be assumed as trustworthy if U has the buletic attitude he
is expressing. The cheater, the insincere, the dishonest, the untrustworthy,
for Grice is not irrational, just repugnant. How immoral is the idea that
honesty is the best policy? Is Kant right in thinking there is no right to
refrain from trust? Surely it is indecent. For Kant, there is no motivation or
‘motive,’ pure or impure, behind telling the truth – it’s just a right, and an
obligation – an imperative. Being trustworthy for Kant is associated with a
pure motive. Grice agrees. Decency comes into the picture. An indecent agent
may still be rational, but in such a case, conversation may still be seen as
rational (if not reasonable) and surely not be seen as rational helpfulness or
co-operation, but rational adversarial competition, rather, a zero-sum game.
Grice found the etymology of ‘decent’ too obscure. Short and Lewis have
“dĕcet,” which they deem cognate with Sanscrit “dacas,” ‘fame,’ and Grecian
“δοκέω,‘to seem,’ ‘to think,’ and with Latin ‘decus,’ ‘dingus.’ As an impersonal
verb, Short and Lewis render it as ‘it is seemly, comely, becoming,; it
beseems, behooves, is fitting, suitable, proper (for syn. v. debeo init.):
decere quasi aptum esse consentaneumque tempori et personae, Cic. Or. 22, 74;
cf. also nunc quid aptum sit, hoc est, quid maxime deceat in oratione videamus,
id. de Or. 3, 55, 210 (very freq. and class.; not in Caesar). Grice’s idea of
decency is connected to his explorations on rational and reasonable. To cheat
may be neither unreasonable nor rational. It is just repulsive. Indecent,
in other words. In all this, Grice is concerned with ordinary language,
and treasures Austin questioning Warnock, when Warnock was pursuing a
fellowship at Magdalen. “What would you say the difference is between ‘Smith
plays cricket rather properly’ and ‘Smith plays cricket rather incorrectly’?”
They spent the whole dinner over the subtlety. By desserts, Warnock was in love
with Austin. Cf. Grice on his prim and proper Aunt Matilda. The
exploration by Grice on trust is Warnockian in character, or vice versa. In
“Object of morality,” Warnock has trust as key, as indeed, the very object of
morality. Grice starts to focus on trust in an Oxford seminars on the implicaturum.
If there is a desideratum of conversational candour, and the goal of the
principle of conversational helpfulness is that of giving and receiving
information, and influencing and being influenced by others, ‘false’
‘information’ is just no information – Since exhibiteness trumps protrepsis,
this applies to the buletic, too. Grice loved that Latin dictum, “tuus candor.”
He makes an early defence of this in his fatal objection to Malcolm. A
philosopher cannot intentionally instill a falsehood in his tutee, such as
“Decapitation willed the death of Charles I” (the alleged paraphrase of the
paradoxical philosopher saying that ‘causing’ is ‘willing’ and rephrasing
“Decapitation was the cause of the death of Charles I.” There is, for both
Grice and Apel, a transcendental (if weak) justification, not just utilitarian
(honesty as the best policy), as Stalnaker notes in his contribution to the
Grice symposium for APA. Unlike Apel, the transcendental argument is a weak one
in that Grice aims to show that conversation that did not abide by trust would
be unreasonable, but surely still ‘possible.’ It is not a transcendental
justification for the ‘existence’ of conversation simpliciter, but for the
existence of ‘reasonable,’ decent conversation. If we approach charity in the
first person, we trust ourselves that some of our beliefs have to be true, and
that some of our desires have to be satisfactory valid, and we are equally
trusted by our conversational partners. This is Grice’s conversational golden
rule. What would otherwise be the point of holding that conversation is rational
co-operation? What would be the point of conversation simpliciter? Urmson
follows Austin, so Austin’s considerations on this, notably in “Other minds,”
deserve careful examination. Urmson was of course a member of Grice’s play
group, and these are the philosophers that we consider top priority. Another
one was P. H. Nowell-Smith. At least two of his three rules deserve careful
examination. Nowell-Smith notes that this or that ‘rule’ of contextual
implication is not meant to be taken as a ‘rigid rule’. Unlike this or that
rule of entailment, a conversational rule can be broken without the utterer
being involved in self-contradiction or absurdity. When U uses an expression to
make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.
Similarly, when he uses it to perform any of the other jobs for which sentences
are used, it is contextually implied that he is using it for one of the jobs
that it normally does. This rule is often in fact broken. Anti-Kantian lying,
Bernhard-type play-acting, Andersen-type story-telling, and Wildeian irony is
each a case in which U breaks the rule, or flouts the expectation, either
overtly or covertly. But each of these four cases is a secondary use, i.e. a
use to which an expression cannot logically or conceptually be put unless, as
Hart would have it, it has a primary use. There is no limit to the possible
uses to which an expression may be put. In many cases a man makes his point by
deliberately using an expression in a queer way or even using it in the ‘sense’
opposite to its unique normal one, as in irony (“He is a fine friend,” implying
that he is a scoundrel). The distinction between a primary and a secondary use
is important because many an argument used by a philosopher consists in
pointing out some typical example of the way in which some expression E is
used. Such an argument is always illegitimate if the example employed is an
example of a secondary use, however common such a use may be. U contextually
implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his
statement. Once again, we often break this rule and we have special devices for
indicating when we are breaking it. Phrases such as ‘speaking offhand …,’ 'I do
not really know but …,’ and ‘I should be inclined to say that …,’ are used by
scrupulous persons to warn his addressee that U has not got what seem to him
good reasons for his statement. But unless one of these guarding phrases is
used we are entitled to believe that U believes himself to have good reasons
for his statement and we soon learn to *mistrust* people who habitually
infringe this rule. It is, of course, a mistake to infer from what someone says
categorically that he has in fact good reasons for what he says. If I tell you,
or ‘inform’ to you, that the duck-billed platypus is a bird (because I '
remember ' reading this in a book) I am unreliable; but I am not using language
improperly. But if I tell you this without using one of the guarding phrases
and without having what I think good reasons, I am. What U says may be assumed
to be relevant to the interests of his addressee. This is the most important of
the three rules; unfortunately it is also the most frequently broken. Bores are
more common than liars or careless talkers. This rule is particularly obvious
in the case of answers to questions, since it is assumed that the answer is an
answer. Not all statements are answers to questions; information may be
volunteered. Nevertheless the publication of a text-book on trigonometry
implies that the author believes that there are people who want to learn about
trigonometry, and to give advice implies a belief that the advice is relevant
to one’s addressee's problem. This rule is of the greatest importance for
ethics. For the major problem of ethics is that of bridging the gap between a
decisions, an ought-sentence, an injunction, and a sentence used to give advice
on the one hand and the statements of *fact*, sometime regarding the U’s soul,
that constitute the reasons for these on the other. It is in order to bridge
these gaps that insight into necessary synthetic connexions is invoked. This
rule of contextual implication may help us to show that there is no gap to be
bridged because the reason-giving sentence must turn out to be also *practical*
from the start and not a statement of *fact*, even concerning the state of the
U’s soul, from which a practical sentence can somehow be deduced. This rule is,
therefore, more than a rule of good manners; or rather it shows how, in matters
of ordinary language, rules of good manners shade into logical rules. Unless we
assume that it is being observed we cannot understand the connexions between
decisions, advice, and appraisals and the reasons given in support of them. Refs.: The main reference is in the first set of ‘Logic and
conversation.’ Many keywords are useful, not just ‘candour,’ but notably
‘trust.’ (“Rationality and trust,” c. 9-f. 5, “Trust, metaphysics, and value,”
c. 9-f. 20, and “Aristotle and friendship, rationality, trust, and decency,” c.
6-f. 18), BANC.
desideratum of conversational
clarity. There is some overlap here with
Grice’s category of conversational manner – of Grice’s maxim of conversational
perspicuity [sic] – and at least one of the maxims proper, ‘obscuirty
avoidance,’ or maxim of conversational obscurity avoidance. But at Oxford he
defined the philosopher as the one whose profession it is to makes clear things
obscure. The word desideratum has to be taken seriously. It involves freedom.
In what way is “The pillar box seems red to me” less perspicuous than “The pillar
box is red”? In all! If mutual expectation not to mislead and produce the
stronger contribution are characteristics of candour, expectation of mutual
relevance to interests, and being explicit and clear in your point are two
characteristics of this desideratum. “Candour” and “clarity’ are somewhat
co-relative for Grice. He is interested in identifying this or that
desideratum. By having two of them, he can play. So, how UNCLEAR can a
conversationalist be provided he WANTS to be candid? Candour trumps clarity.
But too much ‘unperspicuity’ may lead to something not being deemed an ‘implicaturum’
at all. Grice is especially concerned with philosopher’s paradoxes. Why would
Strawson say that the usage of ‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘if,’ ‘if and only if,’
‘all,’ ‘some (at least one), ‘the,’ do not correspond to the logician’s use?
Questions of candour and clarity interact. Grice’s first application, which he
grants is not original, relates to “The pillar box seems red” versus “The
pillar box is red.” “I would not like to give the false impression that the
pillar box is not red” seems less clear than “The pillar box is red” – Yet the
unperspicuous contributin is still ‘candid,’ in the sense that it expresses a
truth. So one has to be careful. On top, philosophers like Lewis were using
‘clarity is not enough’ as a battle cry! Grice’s favourite formulations of the
imperatives here are ‘self-contradictory,’ and for which he uses ‘[sic]’,
notably: “Be perspicuous [sic]’ and “Be brief. Avoid unnecessary prolixity
[sic].’
desirability: Correlative: credibility. For Grice, credibility reduces
to desirability (He suggests that the reverse may also be possible but does not
give a proposal). This Grice calls the Jeffrey operator. If Urmson likes
‘probably,’ Grice likes ‘desirably.’ This theorem is a corollary of the
desirability axiom by Jeffrey, which is: "If prob XY = 0, for a prima
facie PF(A V B) A (x E w)] = PFA A (x E
w)] + PfB A (x El+ w)]. This is the account by Grice of the adaptability of a
pirot to its changeable environs. Grice borrows the notion of probability (henceforth,
“pr”) from Davidson, whose early claim to fame was to provide the logic of the
notion. Grice abbreviates probability by Pr. and compares it to a buletic operator
‘pf,’ ‘for prima facie,’ attached to ‘De’ for desirability. A rational agent
must calculate both the probability and the desirability of his
action. For both probability and desirability, the degree is crucial.
Grice symbolises this by d: probability in degree d; probability in degree d. The
topic of life Grice relates to that of adaptation and surival, and connects
with his genitorial programme of creature construction (Pology.): life as
continued operancy. Grice was fascinated with life (Aristotle, bios) because
bios is what provides for Aristotle the definition (not by genus) of
psyche. The steps are as follows. Pf(p ⊃!q)/Pr(p
⊃ q); pf((p1 ^ p2) ⊃!q)/pr(p1 ^ p2 ⊃q); pf((p1 ^ p2 ^ p3) ⊃!q)/pr(p1 ^ p2 ^ p3 ^ p4 ⊃q);
pf (all things before me ⊃!q)/pr (all things before me ⊃
q); pf (all things considered ⊃ !q)/pr(all things considered ⊃ q); !q/|- q; G wills !q/G judges q. Strictly, Grice avoids
using the noun probability (other than for the title of this or that lecture).
One has to use the sentence-modifier ‘probably,’ and ‘desirably.’ So the
specific correlative to the buletic prima facie ‘desirably’ is the doxastic ‘probably.’
Grice liked the Roman sound to ‘prima facie,’ ‘at first sight’: “exceptio, quae prima facie justa videatur.” Refs.:
The two main sources are “Probability, desirability, and mood operators,” c.
2-f. 11, and “Modality, desirability and probability,” c. 8-ff. 14-15. But most
of the material is collected in “Aspects,” especially in the third and fourth
lectures. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
detachability. A rather abstract notion. One thinks of ‘detach’ in
physical terms (‘semi-detached house’). Grice means it in an abstract way. To
detach – what is it that we detach? We detach an implicaturum. Grice is not so
much concerned with how to DETACH an implicaturum, but how sometimes you
cannot. It’s NON-detachability that is the criterion. And this should be a
matter of a prioricity. However, since style gets in the picture, he has to
allow for exceptions to this criterion. A conversational, even philosophically
interesting one, generated by the conversational category of modus (as the
maxim of orderliness: “he went to bed and took off his boots”) is detachable. How
to interpret this in an one-off predicament. Cf. non-detachability. And the
other features or tests or catalysts that Grice uses. In Causal Theory of
Perception, the ideas are FOUR, which he nicely summarises in WoW on the
occasion of eliminating the excursus. And then he expands on Essay II, as an
update. His tutees at Oxford are aware of the changes. Few care, though. Even
his colleagues don’t, they are into their own things. So let’s compare the two
versions of the catalysts in Causal and Essay II. Version of the four catalysts
up to the first two examples in “Causal”: The first cxample is a stock case of what
is sometimes called " prcsupposition " and it is often held that here
1he truth of what is irnplicd is a necessary condition of the original
statement's beirrg cither true or false. This might be disputed, but it is at
lcast arguable that it is so, and its being arguable might be enough to
distinguish-this type of case from others. I shall however for convenience
assume that the common view mentioned is correct. This consideration clearly
distinguishes (1) from (2); even if the implied proposition were false, i.e. if
there were no reason in the world to contrast poverty with honesty either in
general or in her case, the original statement could still be false; it would
be false if for example she were rich and dishonest. One might perhaps be less
comfortable about assenting to its truth if the implied contrast did not in
fact obtain; but the possibility of falsity is enough for the immediate
purpose. My next experiment on these examples is to ask what it is in each case
which could properly be said to be the vehicle of implication (to do the
implying). There are at least four candidates, not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Supposing someone to have uttered one or other of my sample
sentences, we may ask whether the vehicle of implication would be (a) what the
speaker said (or asserted), or (b) the speaker (" did he imply that . . .
.':) or (c) the words the speaker used, or (d) his saying that (or again his
saying that in that way); or possibly some plurality of these items. As regards
(a) I think (1) and (2) differ; I think it would be correct to say in the case
of (l) that what he speaker said (or asserted) implied that Smith had been
beating this wife, and incorrect to say in the case of (2) that what te said
(or asserted) implied that there was a contrast between e.g., honesty and
poverty. A test on which I would rely is the following : if accepting that the
implication holds involves one in r27 128 H. P. GRICE accepting an
hypothetical' if p then q ' where 'p ' represents the original statement and '
q' represents what is implied, then what the speaker said (or asserted) is a
vehicle of implication, otherwise not. To apply this rule to the given
examples, if I accepted the implication alleged to hold in the case of (1), I
should feel compelled to accept the hypothetical " If Smith has left off
beating his wife, then he has been beating her "; whereas if I accepted
the alleged implication in the case of (2), I should not feel compelled to
accept the hypothetical " If she was poor but honest, then there is some
contrast between poverty and honesty, or between her poverty and her
honesty." The other candidates can be dealt with more cursorily; I should
be inclined to say with regard to both (l) and (2) that the speaker could be
said to have implied whatever it is that is irnplied; that in the case of (2)
it seems fairly clear that the speaker's words could be said to imply a
contrast, whereas it is much less clear whether in the case of (1) the
speaker's words could be said to imply that Smith had been beating his wife;
and that in neither case would it be evidently appropriate to speak of his
saying that, or of his saying that in that way, as implying what is implied.
The third idea with which I wish to assail my two examples is really a twin
idea, that of the detachability or cancellability of the implication. (These
terms will be explained.) Consider example (1): one cannot fi.nd a form of
words which could be used to state or assert just what the sentence "
Smith has left off beating his wife " might be used to assert such that
when it is used the implication that Smith has been beating his wife is just
absent. Any way of asserting what is asserted in (1) involves the irnplication
in question. I shall express this fact by saying that in the case of (l) the
implication is not detqchable from what is asserted (or simpliciter, is not
detachable). Furthermore, one cannot take a form of words for which both what
is asserted and what is implied is the same as for (l), and then add a further
clause withholding commitment from what would otherwise be implied, with the
idea of annulling the implication without annulling the assertion. One cannot
intelligibly say " Smith has left off beating his wife but I do not mean
to imply that he has been beating her." I shall express this fact by
saying that in the case of (1) the implication is not cancellable (without THE
CAUSAL THEORY OF PERCEPTION r29 cancelling the assertion). If we turn to (2) we
find, I think, that there is quite a strong case for saying that here the
implication ls detachable. Thcrc sccms quitc a good case for maintaining that
if, instead of sayirrg " She is poor but shc is honcst " I were to
say " She is poor and slre is honcst", I would assert just what I
would havc asscrtcct ii I had used thc original senterrce; but there would now
be no irnplication of a contrast between e.g', povery and honesty. But the
question whether, in tl-re case of (2), thc inrplication is cancellable, is
slightly more cornplex. Thcrc is a sonse in which we may say that it is
non-cancellable; if sorncone were to say " She is poor but she is honest,
though of course I do not mean to imply that there is any contrast between
poverty and honesty ", this would seem a puzzling and eccentric thing to
have said; but though we should wish to quarrel with the speaker, I do not
think we should go so far as to say that his utterance was unintelligible; we
should suppose that he had adopted a most peculiar way of conveying the the
news that she was poor and honesl. The fourth and last test that I wish to
impose on my exarnples is to ask whether we would be inclined to regard the
fact that the appropriate implication is present as being a matter of the
meaning of some particular word or phrase occurring in the sentences in
question. I am aware that this may not be always a very clear or easy question
to answer; nevertheless Iwill risk the assertion that we would be fairly happy
to say that, as regards (2), the factthat the implication obtains is a matter
of the meaning of the word ' but '; whereas so far as (l) is concerned we
should have at least some inclination to say that the presence of the
implication was a matter of the meaning of some of the words in the sentence,
but we should be in some difficulty when it came to specifying precisely which
this word, or words are, of which this is true. After third example
introduced:It is plain that there is no case at all for regarding the truth of
what is implied here as a pre-condition of the truth or falsity cf 130 H. P.
GRICB what I have asserted; a denial of the truth of what is implied would have
no bearing at all on whether what I have asserted is true or false. So (3) is
much closer to (2) than (1) in this respect. Next, I (the speaker) could
certainly be said to have implied that Jones is hopeless (provided that this is
what I intended to get across) and my saying that (at any rate my saying /s/
that and no more) is also certainly a vehicle of implication. On the other hand
my words and what I say (assert) are, I think, not here vehicles of implication.
(3) thus differs from both (1) and (2). The implication is cancellable but not
detachable; if I add o'I do not of course mean to imply that he is no good at
philosophy " my whole utterance is intelligible and linguistically
impeccable, even though it may be extraordinary tutorial behaviour; and I can
no longer be said to have implied that he was no good, even though perhaps that
is what my colleagues might conclude to be the case if I had nothing else to
say. The implication is not however, detachable; any other way of making, in
the same context of utterance, just the assertion I have made would involve the
same implication. Finally, the fact that the implication holds is not a matter
of any particular word or phrase within the sentence which I have uttered; so
in this respect (3) is certainly different from (2) and, possibly different
from (1). One obvious fact should be mentioned before I pass to the last
example. This case of implication is unlike the others in that the utterance of
the sentence " Jones has beautiful handwriting etc." does not
standardly involve the implication here attributed to it; it requires a special
context (that it should be uttered at Collections) to attach the implication to
its uttgrance. After fourth and last example is introduced: in the case of (a)
I can produce a strong argument in favour of holding that the fulfllment of the
THE CAUSAL THEORY OF PERCEPTION implication of the speaker's ignorance is not a
precaution of the truth or falsity of the disjunctive statement. Suppose (c)
that the speaker knows that his wife is in the kitchen, (b) that the house has
only two rooms (and no passages etc.) Even though (a) is the casc, thc spcaker
can certainly say truly " My wife is in the housc "; he is merely not
being as informative as he could bc if nccd arose. But the true proposition
that his wife is in thc housc together with the true proposition that the house
consists entirely of a kitchen and a bedroom, entail the proposition that his
wife is either in the kitchen or in the bedroom. But il to cxpress the
proposition p in certain circumstances would bc to spcak truly, and p, togelher
with another true proposition, crrtails q, then surely to express 4 in the same
circvmstances must be to speak truly. So I shall take it that the disjunctive
statement in (4) does not fail to be true or false if the implied ignorance is
in fact not realized. Secondly, I think it is fairly clear that in this case,
as in the case of (3), we could say that the speaker had irnplied that he did
not know, and also that his saying that (or his saying that rather than
something else, v2., in which room she was) implied that he did not know.
Thirdly, the irnplication is in a sense non-detachable, in that if in a given
context the utterance of the disjunctive sentence would involve the implication
that the speaker did not know in which room his his wife was, this implication
would also be involved in the utterance of any other form of words which would
make the same assertion(e.g., "The alternatives are (1) .(2) " or
" One of the following things is the case: (a) (r) "). ln another
possible sense, however, the implication could perhaps bc said to be
detachable: for there will be some contexls of ruttcrance in Which the normal
implication will not hold; e.g., thc spokesman who announces, " The next
conference will be cither in Geneva or in New York " perhaps does not
imply that lrc does not know which; for he may well be just not saying which.
This points to the fact that the implication is cancellablg; :r nrarl could say,
" My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bctlroorn " in
circumstances in which the implication would rrornrally be present, and then go
on, " Mind you, I'm not saying tlrrrt I don't know which"; this might
be unfriendly (and grcr'lrrps ungrammatical) but would be perfectly
intelligible, I2 131 132 H. P. GRICB Finally, the fact that the utterance of
the disjunctive sentence normally involves the implication of the speaker's
ignorance of the truth-values of the disjuncts is, I should like to say, to be
explained by reference to a general principle governing the use of language.
Exactly what this principle is I am uncertain, but L first sftol would be the
following: "One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger
one unless there is a good reason for so doing." This is certainly not an
adequate formulation but will perhaps be good enough for my present purpose. On
the assumption that such a principle as this is of general application, one can
draw the conclusion that the utterance of a disjunctive sentence would imply
the speaker's ignorance of the truth-values of the disjuncts, given that (a)
the obvious reason for not making a statemcnt which there is some call on one
to make is that one is not in a position to make it, and given (6) the logical
fact that each disjunct entails the disjunctive, but not vice versa; which
being so, the disjuncts are stronger than the disjunctive. lf the outline just
given js on the right lines, then I would wish to say, we have a reason for
refusing in the case of (4) to regard the implication of the speaker's
ignorance as being part of the meaning of the word'or'; someone who knows about
the logical relation between a disjunction and its disjuncts, and who also knew
about the alleged general principle governing discourse, could work out for
hirnself that disjunctive utterances would involve the implication which they
do in fact involve. I must insist, however, that my aim in discussing this last
point has been merelyto indicate the position I would wish to take up, and not
to argue scriously in favour of it. My main purpose in this sub-section has
been to introduce four ideas of which l intend to make some use; and to provide
some conception of tlre ways in which they apply or fail to apply to various
types of implication. By the numbering of it, it seems he has added an extra.
It’s FIVE catalysts now. He’ll go back to them in Essay IV, and in
Presupposition and Conversational Impicature. He needs those catalysts. Why? It
seems like he is always thinking that someone will challenge him! This is
Grice: “We can now show that, it having been stipulated as being what it is, a
conversational implicaturum must possess certain features. Or rather here are
some catalyst ideas which will help us to determine or individuate. Four tests
for implicaturum as it were. First, CANCELLABILITY – as noted in “Causal
Theory” – for two of the examples (‘beautiful handwriting’ and ‘kitchen or
bedroom’ and NEGATIVE version of “You don’t cease to eat iron”) and the one of
the pillar box -- Since, to assume the presence of a conversational implicum,
we have to assume that the principle of conversational co-operation is being
observed, and since it is possible to opt out of the observation of this principle,
it follows that an implicaturum can be canceled in a particular case. It may be
explicitly canceled, if need there be, by the addition of a clause by which the
utterer states or implies that he has
opted out (e. g. “The pillar box seems red but it is.”). Then again it may be
contextually (or implicitly) canceled (e. g. to a very honest person, who knows
I disbelieve the examiner exists, “The loyalty examiner won’t be summoning you
at any rate”). The utterance that usually would carry an implicaturum is used
on an occasion that makes it clear or obvious that the utterer IS opting out
without having to bore his addressee by making this obviousness explicit. There
is a second litmus test or catalyst idea. nsofar as the calculation that a implicaturum
is present requires, besides contextual and background information only a
knowledge or understanding or processing of what has been said or explicitly
conveyed (‘are you playing squash? B shows bandaged leg) (or the ‘conventional’
‘commitment’ of the utterance), and insofar as the manner or style, of FORM,
rather than MATTER, of expression plays no role in the calculation, it will NOT
be possible to find another way of explicitly conveying or putting forward the
same thing, the same so-and-so (say that q follows from p) which simply ‘lacks’
the unnecessary implicaturum in question -- except [will his excluders never
end?] where some special feature of the substituted version [this other way
which he says is not conceivable] is itself relevant to the determination of
the implicaturum (in virtue of this or that conversational maxims pertaining to
the category of conversational mode. If we call this feature, as Grice does in
“Causal Theory,” ‘non-detachability’ – in that the implicaturum cannot be
detached from any alternative expression that makes the same point -- one may
expect the implicaturum carried by this or that locution to have a high degree
of non-detachability. ALTERNATIVES FOR “NOT” Not, it is not the case, it is
false that. There’s nothing unique about ‘not’.ALTERNATIVES FOR “AND” and, nothing,
furthermore, but. There isnothing unique about ‘and’ALTERNATIVES FOR “OR”: One
of the following is true. There is nothing unique about ‘or’ALTERNATIVES FOR
“IF” Provided. ‘There is nothing unique about ‘if’ALTERNATIVES FOR “THE” –
There is at least one and at most one. And it exists. (existence and
uniqueness). There is nothing unique about ‘the’.THIS COVERS STRAWSON’S first
problem.What about the other English philosophers?AUSTIN – on ‘voluntarily’
ALTERNATIVES to ‘voluntarily,’ with the will, willingly, intentionally. Nothing
unique about ‘voluntarily.’STRAWSON on ‘true’ – it is the case, redundance
theory, nothing. Nothing unique about ‘true’HART ON good. To say that ‘x is
commendable’ is to recommend x. Nothing unique about ‘good.’HART on ‘carefully.’
Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa carefully, with caution, with precaution. Nothing
unique about ‘carefully.’THIRD LITMUS TEST or idea. To speak approximately,
since the calculation of the presence of an implicaturum presupposes an initial
knowledge, or grasping, or understanding, or taking into account of the ‘conventional’
force (not in Austin’s sense, but translating Latin ‘vis’) of the expression
the utterance of which carries the implicaturum, a conversational implicaturum
will be a condition that is NOT, be definition, on risk of circularity of
otiosity, included in the original specification of the expression's
conventional force. If I’m saying that ‘seems’ INVOLVES, as per conventional
force, ‘doubt or denial,’what’s my point? If Strawson is right that ‘if’ has
the conventional force of conventionally committing the utterer with the belief
that q follows from p, why bother? And if that were so, how come the implicaturum
is still cancellable?Though it may not be impossible for what starts life, so
to speak, as a conversational implicaturum to become conventionalized, to
suppose that this is so in a given case would require special justification. (Asking
Lewis). So, initially at least, a conversational implicaturum is, by definition
and stipulation, not part of the sense, truth-condition, conventional force, or
part of what is explicitly conveyed or put forward, or ‘meaning’ of the
expression to the employment of which the impicatum attaches. FOURTH LITMUS
TEST or catalyst idea.Mentioned in “Causal theory” The alethic value –
conjoined with the test about the VEHICLE --. He has these as two different
tests in “Causal”. Since the truth of a conversational implicaturum is not
required by (is not a condition for) the truth of what is said or explicitly
conveyed (what is said or explicated – the explicatum or explcitum, or what is
explicitly conveyed or communicated) may be true -- what is implicated may be
false – that he has beautiful handwriting, that q follows from p, that the
utterer is ENDORSING what someone else said, that the utterer is recommending
x, that the person who is said to act carefully has taken precaution), the implicaturum
is NOT carried by what is said or the EXPLICATUM or EXPLICITUM, or is
explicitly conveyed, but only by the ‘saying’ or EXPLICATING or EXPLICITING of
what is said or of the explicatum or explicitum, or by 'putting it that
way.’.The fifth and last litmus test or catalyst idea. Since, to calculate a
conversational implicaturum is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to
preserve the supposition that the utterer is a rational, benevolent, altruist
agent, and that the principle of conversational cooperation is being observed,
and since there may be various possible specific explanations or alternatives
that fill the gap here – as to what is the content of the psychological
attitude to be ascribed to the utterer, a list of which may be open, or
open-ended, the conversational implicaturum in such cases will technically be
an open-ended disjunction of all such specific explanations, which may well be
infinitely non-numerable. Since the list of these IS open, the implicaturum
will have just the kind of INDETERMINACY or lack of determinacy that an implicaturum
appears in most cases to possess.
determinatum:
determinable, a general characteristic or property analogous to a genus except
that while a property independent of a genus differentiates a species that
falls under the genus, no such independent property differentiates a
determinate that falls under the determinable. The color blue, e.g., is a
determinate with respect of the determinable color: there is no property F
independent of color such that a color is blue if and only if it is F. In
contrast, there is a property, having equal sides, such that a rectangle is a
square if and only if it has this property. Square is a properly differentiated
species of the genus rectangle. W. E. Johnson introduces the terms
‘determinate’ and ‘determinable’ in his Logic, Part I, Chapter 11. His account
of this distinction does not closely resemble the current understanding
sketched above. Johnson wants to explain the differences between the
superficially similar ‘Red is a color’ and ‘Plato is a man’. He concludes that
the latter really predicates something, humanity, of Plato; while the former
does not really predicate anything of red. Color is not really a property or
adjective, as Johnson puts it. The determinates red, blue, and yellow are
grouped together not because of a property they have in common but because of
the ways they differ from each other. Determinates under the same determinable
are related to each other and are thus comparable in ways in which they are not
related to determinates under other determinables. Determinates belonging to
different determinables, such as color and shape, are incomparable. ’More
determinate’ is often used interchangeably with ‘more specific’. Many
philosophers, including Johnson, hold that the characters of things are
absolutely determinate or specific. Spelling out what this claim means leads to
another problem in analyzing the relation between determinate and determinable.
By what principle can we exclude red and round as a determinate of red and red
as a determinate of red or round?
determinism, the view that every event or state of affairs is brought
about by antecedent events or states of affairs in accordance with universal
causal laws that govern the world. Thus, the state of the world at any instant
determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all the positions of things
and the prevailing natural forces would permit an intelligence to predict the
future state of the world with absolute precision. This view was advanced by
Laplace in the early nineteenth century; he was inspired by Newton’s success at
integrating our physical knowledge of the world. Contemporary determinists do
not believe that Newtonian physics is the supreme theory. Some do not even
believe that all theories will someday be integrated into a unified theory.
They do believe that, for each event, no matter how precisely described, there
is some theory or system of laws such that the occurrence of that event under
that description is derivable from those laws together with information about
the prior state of the system. Some determinists formulate the doctrine
somewhat differently: a every event has a sufficient cause; b at any given
time, given the past, only one future is possible; c given knowledge of all
antecedent conditions and all laws of nature, an agent could predict at any
given time the precise subsequent history of the universe. Thus, determinists
deny the existence of chance, although they concede that our ignorance of the
laws or all relevant antecedent conditions makes certain events unexpected and,
therefore, apparently happen “by chance.” The term ‘determinism’ is also used
in a more general way as the name for any metaphysical doctrine implying that
there is only one possible history of the world. The doctrine described above
is really scientific or causal determinism, for it grounds this implication on
a general fact about the natural order, namely, its governance by universal
causal law. But there is also theological determinism, which holds that God
determines everything that happens or that, since God has perfect knowledge
about the universe, only the course of events that he knows will happen can
happen. And there is logical determinism, which grounds the necessity of the
historical order on the logical truth that all propositions, including ones
about the future, are either true or false. Fatalism, the view that there are
forces e.g., the stars or the fates that determine all outcomes independently
of human efforts or wishes, is claimed by some to be a version of determinism.
But others deny this on the ground that determinists do not reject the efficacy
of human effort or desire; they simply believe that efforts and desires, which
are sometimes effective, are themselves determined by antecedent factors as in
a causal chain of events. Since determinism is a universal doctrine, it
embraces human actions and choices. But if actions and choices are determined,
then some conclude that free will is an illusion. For the action or choice is
an inevitable product of antecedent factors that rendered alternatives
impossible, even if the agent had deliberated about options. An omniscient
agent could have predicted the action or choice beforehand. This conflict
generates the problem of free will and determinism.
deutero-esperanto: Also Gricese – Pirotese. “Gricese”
is best. Arbitrariness need not be a two-party thing. E communicates to himself
that there is danger by drawing a skull. Grice genially opposed to the idea of
a convention. He hated a convention. A language is not conventional. Meaning is
not conventional. Communication is not conventional. He was even unhappy with
the account of convention by Lewis in terms of an arbitrary co-ordination.
While the co-ordination bit passes rational muster, the arbitrary element is
deemed a necessary condition, and Grice hated that. For Grice there is natural,
and iconic. When a representation ceases to be iconic and becomes, for lack of
a better expression, non-iconic, things get, we may assume conventional. One
form of correlation in his last definition of meaing allows for a conventional
correlation. “Pain!,” the P cries. There is nothing in /pein/ that minimally
resembles the pain the P is suffering. So from his involuntary “Ouch” to his
simulated “Ouch,” he thinks he can say “Pain.” Bennett explored the stages after
that. The dog is shaggy is Grices example. All sorts of resultant procedures
are needed for reference and predication, which may be deemed conventional. One
may refer nonconventionally, by ostension. It seems more difficult to predicate
non-conventionally. But there may be iconic predication. Urquhart promises
twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven
genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in
eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. The language will translate any
idiom in any other language, without any alteration of the literal sense, but
fully representing the intention. Later, one day, while lying in his bath,
Grice designed deutero-esperanto. The obble is fang may be current only
for Griceian members of the class of utterers. It is only this or that
philosophers practice to utter The obble is fang in such-and-such
circumstances. In this case, the utterer U does have a readiness to utter The
obble is feng in such-and-such circumstances. There is also the scenario in
which The obble is fang is may be conceived by the philosopher not to be deemed
current at all, but the utterance of The obble is feng in such-and-such
circumstances is part of some system of communication which the utterer U
(Lockwith,, Urquart, Wilkins, Edmonds, Grice) has devised but which has never
been put into operation, like the highway code which Grice invent another day
again while lying in his bath. In that case, U does this or that basic or
resultant procedure for the obble is feng in an attenuated but philosophically
legitimate fashion. U has envisaged a possible system of practices which
involve a readiness to utter Example by Grice that does NOT involve a
convention in this usage. Surely Grice can as he indeed did, invent a
language, call it Deutero-Esperanto, Griceish, or Pirotese, which nobody
at Oxford ever uses to communicat. That makes Grice the authority - cf. arkhe,
authority, government (in plural), "authorities" - and Grice can lay
down, while lying in the tub, no doubt - what is proper. A P can be said
to potch of some obble o as fang or as feng. Also to cotch of some obble
o, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o as being fid
to one another.” In symbols: (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oy ^ potch(x, y, fang) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^
Oy ^ potch(x, y, feng) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oy ^ cotch(x, y, fang) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Ox ^
cotch(x, y, feng) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oz ^ Oy ^ cotch(x, fid(y,z)). Let’s say that Ps
(as Russell and Carnap conceived them) inhabit a world of obbles, material
objects, or things. To potch is something like to perceive; to cotch something
like to think. Feng and fang are possible descriptions, much like our
adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles. Grice provides a
symbolisation for content internalisation. The perceiver or cognitive
Subjects perceives or cognises two objects, x, y, as holding a relation of some
type. There is a higher level that Ps can reach when the object of their
potchings and cotchings is not so much objects but states of affairs. Its
then that the truth-functional operators will be brought to existence “^”:
cotch(p ^ q) “V”: cotch(p v q) “)”: )-cotch(p ) q) A P will be able
to reject a content, refuse-thinking: ~. Cotch(~p). When P1 perceives P2, the
reciprocals get more complicated. P2 cotches that P1!-judges that
p. Grice uses ψ1 for potching and ψ2 for cotching. If P2 is
co-operative, and abides by "The Ps Immanuel," P2 will honour, in a
Kantian benevolent way, his partners goal by adopting temporarily his partners
goal potch(x (portch(y, !p)) ⊃ potch(x, !p). But by then, its hardly simpler
ways. Especially when the Ps outdo their progenitor Carnap as metaphysicians.
The details are under “eschatology,” but the expressions are here “α izzes α.” This
would be the principle of non-contradiction or identity. P1 applies it war, and
utters War is war which yields a most peculiar implicaturum. “if α izzes
β ∧ β izzes γ, α izz γ.” This is
transitivity, which is crucial for Ps to overcome Berkeley’s counterexample to
Locke, and define their identity over time. “if α hazzes β, α izzes β.” Or,
what is accidental is not essential. A P may allow that what is essential
is accidental while misleading, is boringly true. “α hazzes β iff α hazzes
x ∧ x izzes β.” “If β is a
katholou or universalium, β is an eidos or forma.” For surely Ps need not be
stupid to fail to see squarrelhood. “if α hazzes β ∧ α izzes a particular, γ≠α ∧ α izz β.” “α izzes predicable
of β iff ((β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α). “α izzes essentially predicable of β ⊃⊂ β izzes α α izzes non-essentially/accidentally
predicable of β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α). α = β iff α izzes β ∧ β izzes α. “α izzes an atomon,
or individuum ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(β izzes α ⊃ α izzes β). “α izzes a particular ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(α izzes predicable of β ⊃ (α izzes β ∧ β izzes α)). α izzes a
universalium ⊃⊂ ◊(∃β)(α izzes predicable of α ∧ ~(α izzes β ∧ β izzes α). α izzes
some-thing ⊃ α izzes an individuum. α izzes an eidos or forma ⊃ (α izzes some-thing ∧ α izzes a universalium); α
izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ (β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α). “ α izzes essentially predicable of α
α izzes accidentally predicable of β ⊃ α ≠ β. ~(α izzes
accidentally predicable of β) ⊃ α ≠ β. α izzes an kathekaston or particular ⊃ α izzes an individuum; α izz a
particular ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izz α). ~(∃x).(x izzes a particular ∧ x izzes a forma) ⊢ α izzes a forma ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α). x izzes a
particular ⊃ ~(∃β)(α izzes β); α izzes a forma ⊃ ((α izzes predicable of
β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ β hazzes α); α izzes a
forma ∧ β
izzes a particular ⊃ (α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ β hazzes A); (α izzes a
particular ∧ β izzes a universalium ∧ β izzes predicable of α) ⊃ (∃γ)(α ≠ γ ∧ γ izzes essentially predicable
of α). (∃x) (∃y)(x izzes a particular ∧ y izzes a universalium ∧ y izzes predicable of x ⊃ ~(∀x)(x izzes a universalium ∧ x izzes some-thing). (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes some-thing). α izzes a
particular) ⊃ ~∃β.(α ≠ β ∧ β izzes essentially predicable of α). (α izzes
predicable of β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ α izzes non-essentially or accidentally predicable of
β. Grice is following a Leibnizian tradition. A philosophical
language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles
or certain ideologies. It is considered a type of engineered
language. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times,
partly motivated by the goal of recovering the lost Adamic or Divine
language. The term “ideal language” is sometimes used near-synonymously,
though more modern philosophical languages such as “Toki Pona” are less likely
to involve such an exalted claim of perfection. It may be known as a
language of pure ideology. The axioms and grammars of the languages
together differ from commonly spoken languages today. In most older
philosophical languages, and some newer ones, words are constructed from a limited
set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or fundamental.
"Philosophical language" is sometimes used synonymously with
"taxonomic language", though more recently there have been several
conlangs constructed on philosophical principles which are not taxonomic.
Vocabularies of oligo-synthetic communication-systems are made of compound
expressions, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of morphemes;
oligo-isolating communication-systems, such as Toki Pona, similarly use a
limited set of root words but produce phrases which remain s. of distinct
words. Toki Pona is based on minimalistic simplicity, incorporating
elements of Taoism. Láadan is designed to lexicalize and grammaticalise the
concepts and distinctions important to women, based on muted group
theory. A priori languages are constructed languages where the vocabulary
is invented directly, rather than being derived from other existing languages
(as with Esperanto, or Grices Deutero-Esperanto, or Pirotese or Ido). It all
starts when Carnap claims to know that pritos karulise elatically. Grice as
engineer. Pirotese is the philosophers engaging in Pology. Actually, Pirotese
is the lingo the Ps parrot. Ps karulise elatically. But not all of
them. Grice finds that the Pological talk allows to start from
zero. He is constructing a language, (basic) Pirotese, and the
philosophical psychology and world that that language is supposed to represent
or denote. An obble is a Ps object. Grice introduces potching and
cotching. To potch, in Pirotese, is what a P does with an obble: he perceives
it. To cotch is Pirotese for what a P can further do with an obble: know or
cognise it. Cotching, unlike potching, is factive. Pirotese would
not be the first language invented by a philosopher. Deutero-Esperanto
-- Couturat, L., philosopher and logician who wrote on the history of
philosophy, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and the possibility of a
universal language. Couturat refuted Renouvier’s finitism and advocated an
actual infinite in The Mathematical Infinite 6. He argued that the assumption
of infinite numbers was indispensable to maintain the continuity of magnitudes.
He saw a precursor of modern logistic in Leibniz, basing his interpretation of
Leibniz on the Discourse on Metaphysics and Leibniz’s correspondence with
Arnauld. His epoch-making Leibniz’s Logic 1 describes Leibniz’s metaphysics as
panlogism. Couturat published a study on Kant’s mathematical philosophy Revue
de Métaphysique, 4, and defended Peano’s logic, Whitehead’s algebra, and
Russell’s logistic in The Algebra of Logic 5. He also contributed to André
Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie 6. Refs.: While the reference to
“Deutero-Esperanto’ comes from “Meaning revisited,” other keywords are useful,
notably “Pirotese” and “Symbolo.” Also keywords like “obble,” and “pirot.” The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Grice
the Deweyian: Grice was John Dewey Lecturer -- Dewey,
J., philosopher, social critic, and theorist of education. During an era when
philosophy was becoming thoroughly professionalized, Dewey remained a public
philosopher having a profound international influence on politics and
education. His career began inauspiciously in his student days at the of Vermont and then as a high school teacher
before he went on to study philosophy at the newly formed Johns Hopkins . There
he studied with Peirce, G. S. Hall, and G. S. Morris, and was profoundly
influenced by the version of Hegelian idealism propounded by Morris. After
receiving his doctorate in 4, Dewey moved to the of Michigan where he rejoined Morris, who had
relocated there. At Michigan he had as a colleague the young social
psychologist G. H. Mead, and during this period Dewey himself concentrated his
writing in the general area of psychology. In 4 he accepted an appointment as
chair of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education at the of Chicago, bringing Mead with him. At
Chicago Dewey was instrumental in founding the famous laboratory school, and
some of his most important writings on education grew out of his work in that
experimental school. In 4 he left Chicago for Columbia , where he joined F. J.
E. Woodbridge, founder of The Journal of Philosophy. He retired from Columbia
in 0 but remained active in both philosophy and public affairs until his death
in 2. Over his long career he was a prolific speaker and writer, as evidenced
by a literary output of forty books and over seven hundred articles.
Philosophy. At the highest level of generality Dewey’s philosophical
orientation can be characterized as a kind of naturalistic empiricism, and the
two most fundamental notions in his philosophy can be gleaned from the title of
his most substantial book, Experience and Nature 5. His concept of experience
had its origin in his Hegelian background, but Dewey divested it of most of its
speculative excesses. He clearly conceived of himself as an empiricist but was
careful to distinguish his notion of experience both from that of the idealist
tradition and from the empiricism of the classical British variety. The
idealists had so stressed the cognitive dimension of experience that they
overlooked the non-cognitive, whereas he saw the British variety as
inappropriately atomistic and subjectivist. In contrast to these Dewey
fashioned a notion of experience wherein action, enjoyment, and what he called
“undergoing” were integrated and equally fundamental. The felt immediacy of
experience what he generally characterized as its aesthetic quality was basic
and irreducible. He then situated cognitive experience against this broader
background as arising from and conditioned by this more basic experience.
Cognitive experience was the result of inquiry, which was viewed as a process
arising from a felt difficulty within our experience, proceeding through the stage
of conceptual elaboration of possible resolutions, to a final reconstruction of
the experience wherein the initial fragmented situation is transformed into a
unified whole. Cognitive inquiry is this mediating process from experience to
experience, and knowledge is what makes possible the final more integrated
experience, which Dewey termed a “consummation.” On this view knowing is a kind
of doing, and the criterion of knowledge is “warranted assertability.” On the
first point, Dewey felt that one of the cardinal errors of philosophy from
Plato to the modern period was what he called “the spectator theory of
knowledge.” Knowledge had been viewed as a kind of passive recording of facts
in the world and success was seen as a matter of the correspondence of our
beliefs to these antecedent facts. To the contrary, Dewey viewed knowing as a
constructive conceptual activity that anticipated and guided our adjustment to
future experiential interactions with our environment. It was with this
constructive and purposive view of thinking in mind that Dewey dubbed his
general philosophical orientation instrumentalism. Concepts are instruments for
dealing with our experienced world. The fundamental categories of knowledge are
to be functionally understood, and the classical dualisms of philosophy
mindbody, meansend, fact value are ultimately to be overcome. The purpose of
knowing is to effect some alteration in the experiential situation, and for
this purpose some cognitive proposals are more effective than others. This is
the context in which “truth” is normally invoked, and in its stead Dewey
proposed “warranted assertability.” He eschewed the notion of truth even in its
less dangerous adjectival and adverbial forms, ‘true’ and ‘truly’ because he
saw it as too suggestive of a static and finalized correspondence between two
separate orders. Successful cognition was really a more dynamic matter of a
present resolution of a problematic situation resulting in a reconstructed
experience or consummation. “Warranted assertability” was the success
characterization, having the appropriately normative connotation without the
excess metaphysical baggage. Dewey’s notion of experience is intimately tied to
his notion of nature. He did not conceive of nature as “the-world-as-it-would-be-independent-of-human-experience”
but rather as a developing system of natural transactions admitting of a
tripartite distinction between the physicochemical level, the psychophysical
level, and the level of human experience with the understanding that this
categorization was not to be construed as implying any sharp discontinuities.
Experience itself, then, is one of the levels of transaction in nature and is
not reducible to the other forms. The more austere, “scientific”
representations of nature as, e.g., a purely mechanical system, Dewey construed
as merely useful conceptualizations for specific cognitive purposes. This
enabled him to distinguish his “naturalism,” which he saw as a kind of
nonreductive empiricism, from “materialism,” which he saw as a kind of
reductive rationalism. Dewey and Santayana had an ongoing dialogue on precisely
this point. Dewey’s view was also naturalistic to the degree that it advocated
the universal scope of scientific method. Influenced in this regard by Peirce,
he saw scientific method not as restricted to a specific sphere but simply as
the way we ought to think. The structure of all reflective thought is
future-oriented and involves a movement from the recognition and articulation
of a felt difficulty, through the elaboration of hypotheses as possible
resolutions of the difficulty, to the stage of verification or falsification.
The specific sciences physics, biology, psychology investigate the different
levels of transactions in nature, but the scientific manner of investigation is
simply a generalized sophistication of the structure of common sense and has no
intrinsic restriction. Dewey construed nature as an organic unity not marked by
any radical discontinuities that would require the introduction of non-natural
categories or new methodological strategies. The sharp dualisms of mind and
body, the individual and the social, the secular and the religious, and most
importantly, fact and value, he viewed as conceptual constructs that have far
outlived their usefulness. The inherited dualisms had to be overcome,
particularly the one between fact and value inasmuch as it functioned to block
the use of reason as the guide for human action. On his view people naturally
have values as well as beliefs. Given human nature, there are certain
activities and states of affairs that we naturally prize, enjoy, and value. The
human problem is that these are not always easy to come by nor are they always
compatible. We are forced to deal with the problem of what we really want and
what we ought to pursue. Dewey advocated the extension of scientific method to
these domains. The deliberative process culminating in a practical judgment is
not unlike the deliberative process culminating in factual belief. Both kinds
of judgment can be responsible or irresponsible, right or wrong. This
deliberative sense of evaluation as a process presupposes the more basic sense
of evaluation concerning those dimensions of human experience we prize and find
fulfilling. Here too there is a dimension of appropriateness, one grounded in
the kind of beings we are, where the ‘we’ includes our social history and
development. On this issue Dewey had a very Grecian view, albeit one transposed
into a modern evolutionary perspective. Fundamental questions of value and human
fulfillment ultimately bear on our conception of the human commuDewey, John
Dewey, John 230 230 nity, and this in
turn leads him to the issues of democracy and education. Society and education.
The ideal social order for Dewey is a structure that allows maximum
selfdevelopment of all individuals. It fosters the free exchange of ideas and
decides on policies in a manner that acknowledges each person’s capacity
effectively to participate in and contribute to the direction of social life.
The respect accorded to the dignity of each contributes to the common welfare
of all. Dewey found the closest approximation to this ideal in democracy, but
he did not identify contemporary democracies with this ideal. He was not
content to employ old forms of democracy to deal with new problems. Consistent
with instrumentalism, he maintained that we should be constantly rethinking and
reworking our democratic institutions in order to make them ever more
responsive to changing times. This constant rethinking placed a considerable
premium on intelligence, and this underscored the importance of education for
democracy. Dewey is probably best known for his views on education, but the
centrality of his theory of education to his overall philosophy is not always
appreciated. The fundamental aim of education for him is not to convey
information but to develop critical methods of thought. Education is
future-oriented and the future is uncertain; hence, it is paramount to develop
those habits of mind that enable us adequately to assess new situations and to
formulate strategies for dealing with the problematic dimensions of them. This
is not to suggest that we should turn our backs on the past, because what we as
a people have already learned provides our only guide for future activity. But
the past is not to be valued for its own sake but for its role in developing
and guiding those critical capacities that will enable us to deal with our
ever-changing world effectively and responsibly. With the advent of the
analytic tradition as the dominant style of philosophizing in America, Dewey’s
thought fell out of favor. About the only arenas in which it continued to
flourish were schools of education. However, with the recent revival of a
general pragmatic orientation in the persons of Quine, Putnam, and Rorty, among
others, the spirit of Dewey’s philosophy is frequently invoked. Holism,
anti-foundationalism, contextualism, functionalism, the blurring of the lines
between science and philosophy and between the theoretical and the practical all central themes in Dewey’s philosophy have become fashionable. Neo-pragmatism is a
contemporary catchphrase. Dewey is, however, more frequently invoked than read,
and even the Dewey that is invoked is a truncated version of the historical
figure who constructed a comprehensive philosophical vision.
diagoge: Grice makes a triad here: apagoge, diagoge, and epagoge. Cf.
Grice’s emphasis on the ‘argument’ involved in the conversational implciatum,
though. To work out an impilcatum is to reach it ‘by argument.’ No argument, no
conversational implicaturum. But cf. argument in Emissor draws skull and
communicates that there is danger. ARGUMENT involved in that Emissor intends
his addressee WILL REASON. Can the lady communicate to the pigeons that she is
selling ‘twopence a bag’ for their pleasure? Grice contrasted epagoge with
diagoge. Cooperation with competition. Cooperative game with competitive game. But
epagoge is induction, so here we’ll consider his views on probability and how
it contrastds with diagoge. The diagoge is easy to identity: Grice is a social
animal, with the BA, Philosophy, conferences, discussion, The American
Philosophical Association, transcripts by Randall Parker, from the audio-tapes
contained in c. 10 within the same s. IV miscellaneous, Beanfest, transcripts
and audio-cassettes, s. IV, c. 6-f. 8, and f. 10, and s. V, c. 8-f. 4-8 Unfortunately, Parker typed carulise
for karulise, or not. Re: probability, Grice loves to reminisce an anecdote
concerning his tutor Hardie at Corpus when Hardie invoked Mills principles
to prove that Hardie was not responsible for a traffic jam. In drafts on word
play, Grice would speak of not bringing more Grice to your Mill. Mills
System of Logic was part of the reading material for his degree in Lit.
Hum.at Oxford, so he was very familiar with it. Mill represents the best
of the English empiricist tradition. Grice kept an interest on inductive
methodology. In his Life and opinions he mentions some obscure essays by
Kneale and Keynes on the topic. Grice was interested in Kneales secondary
induction, since Grice saw this as an application of a
construction routine. He was also interested in Keyness notion of a
generator property, which he found metaphysically intriguing.
Induction. Induction ‒ Mill’s Induction, induction, deduction, abduction,
Mill. More Grice to the Mill. Grice loved Hardies playing with Mill’s
method of difference with an Oxford copper. He also quotes Kneale and Keynes on
induction. Note that his seven-step derivation of akrasia relies on an inductive
step! Grice was fortunate to associate with Davidson, whose initial work is on
porbability. Grice borrows from Davidson the idea that inductive probability,
or probable, attaches to the doxastic, while prima facie attaches to desirably,
or desirability. Jeffreys notion of desirability is
partition-invariant in that if a proposition, A, can be expressed as the
disjoint disjunction of both {B1, B2, B3} and {C1, C2, C3}, ∑ Bi ∈ AProb (Bi ∣∣ A).
Des (Bi) = ∑Ci ∈ A Prob (Ci ∣∣ A).
Des (Ci). It follows that applying the rule of desirability maximization
will always lead to the same recommendation, irrespective of how the decision
problem is framed, while an alternative theory may recommend different courses
of action, depending on how the decision problem is formulated. Here,
then, is the analogue of Jeffreys desirability axiom (D), applied to sentences
rather than propositions: (D) (prob(s and t) = 0 and prob(s or t) "#
0, ⊃ d ( ) prob(s)des(s)+ prob(t)des(t) es s or t
=-"---- prob( s) + prob(t ) (Grice writes prob(s) for the Subjectsive
probability of sand des(s) for the desirability or utility of s.) B. Jeffrey
admits that "desirability" (his terms for evidential value) does not
directly correspond to any single pre-theoretical notion of desire. Instead, it
provides the best systematic explication of the decision theoretic idea, which
is itself our best effort to make precise the intuitive idea of weighing
options. As Jeffrey remarks, it is entirely possibly to desire someone’s love
when you already have it. Therefore, as Grice would follow, Jeffrey has the
desirability operator fall under the scope of the probability operator. The
agents desire that p provided he judges that p does not obtain.
Diagoge/epagoge, Grices audio-files, the audio-files, audio-files of various
lectures and conferences, some seminars with Warner and J. Baker, audio files
of various lectures and conferences. Subjects: epagoge, diagoge. A
previous folder in the collection contains the transcripts. These are the
audio-tapes themselves, obviously not in folder. The kind of metaphysical
argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a dia-gogic
or trans-ductive as opposed to epa-gogic or in-ductive approach to
philosophical argumentation. Hence Short and Lewis have, for ‘diagoge,’ the
cognates of ‘trādūco,’ f. transduco. Now, the more emphasis is placed on
justification by elimination of the rival, the greater is the impetus given to
refutation, whether of theses or of people. And perhaps a greater emphasis on a
diagogic procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an
eirenic effect. Cf. Aristotle on diagoge, schole, otium. Liddell and Scott
have “διαγωγή,” which they render as “literally carrying across,” -- “τριήρων”
Polyaen.5.2.6, also as “carrying through,” and “hence fig.” “ἡ διὰ πάντων αὐτῶν
δ., “taking a person through a subject by instruction, Pl. Ep.343; so, course
of instruction, lectures, ἐν τῇ ἐνεστώσῃ δ. prob. in Phld. Piet.25; also
passing of life, way or course of life, “δ. βίου” Pl. R.344e: abs., Id.
Tht.177a, etc., way of passing time, amusement, “δ. μετὰ παιδιᾶς” Arist. EN
1127b34, cf. 1177a27; “δ. ἐλευθέριος” Id. Pol.1339b5; διαγωγαὶ τοῦ συζῆν public
pastimes, ib.1280b37, cf. Plu.126b (pl.). also delay, D.C. 57.3. management,
τῶν πραγμάτων δ. dispatch of business, Id.48.5. IV. station for ships, f. l. in
Hdn.4.2.8. And there are other entries to consider: διαγωγάν: διαίρεσιν,
διανομήν, διέλευσιν. Grice knew what he was talking about! Refs.: The main
sources listed under ‘desirability,’ above. There is a specific essay on
‘probability and life.’ Good keywords, too, are epagoge and induction The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
dialogical
implicaturum – Grice seldom uses ‘dialogue.’ It’s
always conversational with him. He must have thought that ‘dialogue’ was too
Buberian. In Roman, ‘she had a conversation with him’ means ‘she had sex with
him.’ “She had a dialogue with him” does not. Classicists are obsessed with the
beginning of Greek theatre: it all started with ‘dialogue.’ It wasn’t like
Aeschylus needed a partner. He wrote the parts for BOTH. Was he reconstructing
naturally-occurring Athenian dialogue? Who knows! The *two*-actor rule, which was indeed preceded by a
convention in which only a single actor would appear on stage, along with the
chorus. It was in 471 B. C. that Aeschylus introduces a second actor, called
Cleander. You see, Aeschylus always cast
himself as protagonist in his own plays. For the season of 471 B. C., the
Athenians were surprised when Aeschylus introduced Cleander as his
deuteragonist. “I can now conversationally implicate!” he said to a cheering
crowd! Dialogism -- Bakhtin: m. m., philosopher of dialogism -- and
cultural theorist whose influence is pervasive in a wide range of academic
disciplines from literary hermeneutics
to the epistemology of the human sciences, and cultural theory. He may
legitimately be called a philosophical anthropologist in the venerable
Continental tradition. Because of his seminal work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky’s
poetics, Baden School Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 70 70 his influence has been greatest in
literary hermeneutics. Without question dialogism, or the construal of
dialogue, is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue marks the existential
condition of humanity in which the self and the other are asymmetrical but
double-binding. In his words, to exist means to communicate dialogically, and
when the dialogue ends, everything else ends. Unlike Hegelian and Marxian
dialectics but like the Chin. correlative logic of yin and yang, Bakhtin’s
dialogism is infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate, i.e.,
“unfinalizable” to use his term.
Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the
future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present. Bakhtin’s
dialogism is paradigmatic in a threefold sense. First, dialogue is never
abstract but embodied. The lived body is the material condition of social
existence as ongoing dialogue. Not only does the word become enfleshed, but
dialogue is also the incorporation of the self and the other. Appropriately,
therefore, Bakhtin’s body politics may be called a Slavic version of Tantrism.
Second, the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin’s dialogism incorporates
points to the “jesterly” politics of resistance and protest against the
“priestly” establishment of officialdom. Third, the most distinguishing
characteristic of Bakhtin’s dialogism is the primacy of the other over the
self, with a twofold consequence: one concerns ethics and the other
epistemology. In modern philosophy, the discovery of “Thou” or the primacy of
the other over the self in asymmetrical reciprocity is credited to Feuerbach.
It is hailed as the “Copernican revolution” of mind, ethics, and social
thought. Ethically, Bakhtin’s dialogism, based on heteronomy, signals the birth
of a new philosophy of responsibility that challenges and transgresses the
Anglo- tradition of “rights talk.” Epistemologically, it lends our welcoming
ears to the credence that the other may be right the attitude that Gadamer calls the soul of
dialogical hermeneutics.
diaphaneity: Grice unique in his subtlety. Strawson and Wiggins. 'the
quality of being freely pervious to light; transparency', OED. This is a crucial
concept for Grice. He applies it ‘see,’ which which, after joint endeavours
with G. J. Warnock, he was obsessed! Grice considers the ascription, “Warnock
sees that it is raining.” And then he adds, “And it is true, I see that it is
raining, too.” What’s the diference. Then comes Strawson. “Strawson, you see
that it is raining, right?” So we have an ascription in the first, second, and
third persons. When it comes to the identification of a sense (like vision) via
experience or qualia, we are at a problem, because ‘see,’ allowing for what
Ryle calls a ‘conversational avowal,’ that nobody has an authority to distrust,
is what Grice calls a ‘diaphanous’ predicate. More formally. That means that
“Grice sees that it is raining,” in terms of experience, cannot really be
expanded except by expanding into WHAT IS that Grice sees, viz. that it is
raining. The same with “communicating that p,” and “meaning that p.”
dictum: Cf. dictor, and dictivenss. Not necessarily involved with
‘say,’ but with ‘deixis,’ So a dictum is involved in Emissor E drawing a skull,
communicating that there is danger. It is Hare who introduced ‘dictum’ in the
Oxonian philosophical literature in his T. H. Green Essay. Hare distinguishes
between the ‘dictum,’ that the cat is on the mat, from the ‘dictor,’ ‘I state
that the cat is on the mat, yes.’ ‘Cat, on the mat, please.’ Grice often refers
to Hare’s play with words, which he obviously enjoys. In “Epilogue,” Grice
elaborates on the ‘dictum,’ and turns it into ‘dictivitas.’ How does he coin
that word? He starts with Cicero, who has ‘dictivm,’ and creates an abstract
noun to match. Grice needs a concept of a ‘dictum’ ambiguous as it is. Grice
distinguishes between what an Utterer explicitly conveys, e. g. that Strawson
took off his boots and went to bed. Then there’s what Grice implicitly conveys,
to wit: that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed – in that order. Surely
Grice has STATED that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed. Grice has
ASSERTED that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed. But if Grice were to
order Strawson: “Put on your parachute and jump!” the implicatura may differ.
By uttering that utterance, Grice has not asserted or stated anything. So Grice
needs a dummy that will do for indicatives and imperatives. ‘Convey’ usually
does – especially in the modality ‘explicitly’ convey. Because by uttering that
utterance Grice has explicitly conveyed that Strawson is to put on his
parachute and jump. Grice has implicitly conveyd that Strawson is to put on his
parachute and THEN jump, surely.
Griceian
dignitas: a moral worth or status usually attributed to human
persons. Persons are said to have dignity as well as to express it. Persons are
typically thought to have 1 “human dignity” an dichotomy paradox dignity
234 234 intrinsic moral worth, a basic
moral status, or both, which is had equally by all persons; and 2 a “sense of
dignity” an awareness of one’s dignity inclining toward the expression of one’s
dignity and the avoidance of humiliation. Persons can lack a sense of dignity
without consequent loss of their human dignity. In Kant’s influential account
of the equal dignity of all persons, human dignity is grounded in the capacity
for practical rationality, especially the capacity for autonomous
self-legislation under the categorical imperative. Kant holds that dignity
contrasts with price and that there is nothing
not pleasure nor communal welfare nor other good consequences for which it is morally acceptable to
sacrifice human dignity. Kant’s categorical rejection of the use of persons as
mere means suggests a now-common link between the possession of human dignity
and human rights see, e.g., the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. One now widespread discussion of dignity concerns “dying with dignity”
and the right to conditions conducive thereto.
Griceian
dilemma, a trilemma,
tetralemma, monolemma, lemma – Grice
thought that Ryle’s dilemmas were overrated. Strictly, a ‘dilemma’ is a piece
of reasoning or argument or argument form in which one of the premises is a
disjunction, featuring “or.” Constructive dilemmas take the form ‘If A and B,
if C, D, A or C; therefore, B or D’ and are instances of modus ponendo ponens
in the special case where A is C and B is D; A so-called ‘destructive’ dilemma
is of the form ‘If A, B, if C, D, not-B or not-D; therefore, not-A or not-C’
and it is likewise an instance of modus
tollendo tollens in that special case. A dilemma in which the disjunctive
premise is false is commonly known as a “false” dilemma, which is one of Ryle’s
dilemmas: “a category mistake!”
diminutive: diminished
capacity: explored by Grice in his analysis of legal versus moral right -- a
legal defense to criminal liability that exists in two distinct forms: 1 the
mens rea variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to
cast doubt on the prosecution’s assertion that, at the time of the crime, the
defendant possessed the mental state criteria, the mens rea, required by the
legal definition of the offense charged; and 2 the partial responsibility
variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to support a
claim that, even if the defendant’s mental state satisfied the mens rea
criteria for the offense, the defendant’s responsibility for the crime is
diminished and thus the defendant should be convicted of a lesser crime and/or
a lesser sentence should be imposed. The mental abnormality may be produced by
mental disorder, intoxication, trauma, or other causes. The mens rea variant is
not a distinct excuse: a defendant is simply arguing that the prosecution
cannot prove the definitional, mental state criteria for the crime. Partial
responsibility is an excuse, but unlike the similar, complete excuse of legal
insanity, partial responsibility does not produce total acquittal; rather, a
defendant’s claim is for reduced punishment. A defendant may raise either or
both variants of diminished capacity and the insanity defense in the same case.
For example, a common definition of firstdegree murder requires the prosecution
to prove that a defendant intended to kill and did so after premeditation. A
defendant charged with this crime might raise both variants as follows. To deny
the allegation of premeditation, a defendant might claim that the killing
occurred instantaneously in response to a “command hallucination.” If believed,
a defendant cannot be convicted of premeditated homicide, but can be convicted
of the lesser crime of second-degree murder, which typically requires only
intent. And even a defendant who killed intentionally and premeditatedly might
claim partial responsibility because the psychotic mental state rendered the
agent’s reasons for action nonculpably irrational. In this case, either the
degree of crime might be reduced by operation of the partial excuse, rather
than by negation of definitional mens rea, or a defendant might be convicted of
first-degree murder but given a lesser penalty. In the United States the mens
rea variant exists in about half the jurisdictions, although its scope is
usually limited in various ways, primarily to avoid a defendant’s being
acquitted and freed if mental abnormality negated all the definitional mental
state criteria of the crime charged. In English law, the mens rea variant
exists but is limited by the type of evidence usable to support it. No jurisdiction has adopted a distinct,
straightforward partial responsibility variant, but various analogous doctrines
and procedures are widely accepted. For example, partial responsibility grounds
both the doctrine that intentional killing should be reduced from murder to
voluntary manslaughter if a defendant acted “in the heat of passion” upon
legally adequate provocation, and the sentencing judge’s discretion to award a
decreased sentence based on a defendant’s mental abnormality. In addition to
such partial responsibility analogues, England, Wales, and Scotland have
directly adopted the partial responsibility variant, termed “diminished
responsibility,” but it applies only to prosecutions for murder. “Diminished
responsibility” reduces a conviction to a lesser crime, such as manslaughter or
culpable homicide, for behavior that would otherwise constitute murder.
direction
of fit – referred to by Grice in “Intention and
uncertainty,” and symbolized by an upward arrow and a downward arrow – there
are only TWO directions (or senses) of fit: expressum to ‘re’ and ‘re’ to
expressum. The first is indicativus modus; the second is imperativus modus --
according to his thesis of aequivocality – the direction of fit is overrated --
a metaphor that derives from a story in Anscombe’s Intention 7 about a
detective who follows a shopper around town making a list of the things that
the shopper buys. As Anscombe notes, whereas the detective’s list has to match
the way the world is each of the things the shopper buys must be on the
detective’s list, the shopper’s list is such that the world has to fit with it
each of the things on the list are things that he must buy. The metaphor is now
standardly used to describe the difference between kinds of speech act
assertions versus commands and mental states beliefs versus desires. For
example, beliefs are said to have the world-to-mind direction of fit because it
is in the nature of beliefs that their contents are supposed to match the
world: false beliefs are to be abandoned. Desires are said to have the opposite
mind-to-world direction of fit because it is in the nature of desires that the
world is supposed to match their contents. This is so at least to the extent
that the role of an unsatisfied desire that the world be a certain way is to
prompt behavior aimed at making the world that way.
disgrice: In PGRICE, Kemmerling speaks of disgricing as the
opposite of gricing. The first way to disgrice Kemmerling calls ‘strawsonising.’For
Strawson, even the resemblance (for Grice, equivalence in terms of 'iff' -- cf.
his account of what an syntactically structured non-complete expression)
between (G) There is not a single volume in my uncle’s library which
is not by an English author,’and the negatively existential
form (LFG) ~ (Ex)(Ax . ~ Bx)’ is deceptive, ‘It is not the case that
there exists an x such that x
is a book in Grice’s uncle’s library and x
is written by an Englishman. FIRST, 'There
is not a single volume in uncle’s library which is not by an English author' -- as normally used, carries the
presupposition -- or entails, for Grice --
(G2) Some (at least one) book is in Grice’s uncle’s library. SECOND, 'There
is not a single volume in Grice’s uncle’s library which is not by an English
author,’ is far from being 'entailed' by (G3e) It is not the case that
there is some (at least one) book in my room. If we give ‘There not a single book in my room which is not by an English
author’ the modernist logical form ‘~
(Ex)(Ax .~ Bx),’ we see that this is ENTAILED
by the briefer, and indeed logicall stronger (in terms of entailments) ~ (Ex)Ax. So when Grice, with a solemn face, utters, ‘There
is not a single foreign volume in my uncle’s library, to reveal later that the library is empty, Grice should expect
his addressee to get some odd feeling. Surely not the feeling of having been
lied to -- or been confronted with an initial false utterance --, because we
have not. Strawson gets the feeling of having been made "the victim of a sort
of communicative outrage." "What you say is outrageous!" This
sounds stronger than it is. An outrage is believed to be an evil deed, offense,
crime; affront, indignity, act not within established or reasonable
limits," of food, drink, dress, speech, etc., from Old French outrage "harm, damage;
insult; criminal behavior; presumption, insolence, overweening" (12c.),
earlier oltrage (11c.),
From Vulgar Latin ‘ultraticum,’
excess," from Latin ultra,
beyond" (from suffixed form of PIE root *al- "beyond"). Etymologically, "the passing
beyond reasonable bounds" in any sense. The meaning narrowed in English
toward violent excesses because of folk etymology from out + rage. Of injuries to feelings,
principles, etc., from outrage, v. outragen,
"to go to excess, act immoderately," from outrage (n.) or from Old
French oultrager. From
1580s with meaning "do violence to, attack, maltreat." Related: Outraged; outraging. But Strawson gets the
feeling of having been made "the victim of a sort of communicative
outrage.” When Grice was only trying to tutor him in The Organon. Of
course it is not the case that Grice is explicitly conveying or expressing that
there there is some (at least one) book in his uncle's room. Grice has not said
anything false. Or rather, it is not the case that Grice utters an
utterance which is not alethically or doxastically satisfactory. Yet what Grice
gives Strawson the defeasible, cancellable, license to to assume that
Grice thinks there is at least one book. Unless he goes on to cancel the implicaturum,
Grice may be deemed to be misleading Strawson. What Grice explicitly conveys to
be true (or false) it is necessary (though not sufficient) that there should at
least one volume in his uncle’s library -- It is not the case that my uncle has
a library and in that library all the books are autochthonous to England, i.e.
it is not the case that Grice’s uncle has a library; for starters, it is not
the case that Grice has a literate uncle. Of this SUBTLE, nuantic, or cloudy or
foggy, "slight or delicate degree of difference in expression, feeling,
opinion, etc.," from Fr. nuance "slight difference, shade of colour,” from nuer "to
shade," from nue "cloud," from Gallo-Roman nuba, from
Latin nubes "a
cloud, mist, vapour," sneudh- "fog," source also of
Avestan snaoda "clouds,"
Latin obnubere "to
veil," Welsh nudd "fog," Greek nython, in
Hesychius "dark, dusky") According to Klein, the French usage is a
reference to "the different colours of the clouds,” in reference to color
or tone, "a slight variation in shade; of music, as a French term in
English -- 'sort' is the relation between ‘There is not a volume in my
uncle's library which is not by an English author,’ and ‘My uncle's
library is not empty. RE-ENTER GRICE. Grice suggested that Strawson see such a
fine point such as that, which Grice had the kindness to call an 'implicaturum',
the result of an act of an ‘implicatura’ (they were both attending Kneale’s
seminar on the growth and ungrowth of logic) is irrelevant to the issue of
‘entailment’. It is a 'merely pragmatic’ implicaturum, Grice would say,
bringing forward a couple of distinctions: logical/pragmatic point;
logical/pragmatic inference; entailment/implicaturum; conveying
explicitly/conveying implicitly; stating/implicating; asserting/implying; what
an utterer means/what the expression 'means' -- but cf. Nowell-Smith, who left
Oxford after being overwhelmed by Grice, "this is how the rules of
etiquette inform the rules of logic -- on the 'rule' of relevance in
"Ethics," 1955. If to call such a point, as Grice does, as
"irrelevant to logic" is vacuous in that it may be interpreted as
saying that that such a fine foggy point is not considered in a modernist
formal system of first-order predicate calculus with identity, this Strawson
wishes not to dispute, but to emphasise. Call it his battle cry! But to 'logic'
as concerned with this or that relation between this or that general class of
statement occurring in ordinary use, and the attending general condition under
which this or that statement is correctly called 'true' or 'false,' this fine
foggy nice point would hardly be irrelevant. GRICE'S FORMALIST (MODERNIST)
INTERPRETATION. Some 'pragmatic' consideration, or assumption, or expectation,
a desideratum of conversational conduct obviously underlies and in fact
'explains' the implicaturum, without having to change the ‘sense’ of
Aristotle’s syllogistics in terms of the logical forms of A, E, I, and O. If we
abide by an imperative of conversational helpfulness, enjoining the maximally
giving and receiving of information and the influencing and being influenced by
others in the institution of a decisions, the sub-imperative follows to the
effect, ‘Thou shalt NOT make a weak move compared to the stronger one that thou
canst truthfully make, and with equal or greater economy of means.’ Assume the
form ‘There is not a single … which is not . . .,’ or ‘It is not the case
that ... there is some (at least one) x that ... is not ... is introduced
in ‘ordinary’ language with the same SENSE as the expression in the ‘ideal’
language, ~(Ex)(Ax and ~Bx). Then prohibition inhibits the utterance of the
form where the utterer can truly and truthfully simply convey
explicitly ‘There is not a single ..., i. e. ~(Ex)(Fx). It is
defeasible prohibition which tends to confer on the overprolixic form ('it is
not the case that ... there is some (at least one) x that is not ...') just
that kind of an implicaturum which Strawson identifies. But having
detected a nuance in a conversational phenomenon is not the same thing as
rushing ahead to try to explain it BEFORE exploring in some detail what kind of
a nuance it is. The mistake is often commited by Austin, too (in "Other Minds,"
and "A Plea for Excuses"), and by Hart (on 'carefully'), and by Hare
(on "good"), and by Strawson on 'true,' (Analysis), ‘the,’ and 'if --
just to restrict to the play group. Grice tries to respond to anti-sense-datum
in "That pillar box seems red to me,” but Strawson was not listening. The overprolixic form in the ‘ordinary’
language, ‘It is not the case that there is some (at least one x) such that ...
x is not ...’ would tend, if it does not remain otiose, to develop or generate
just that baffling effect in one's addressee ('outrage!') that Strawson identifies,
as opposed to the formal-device in the ‘ideal’ language with which the the
‘ordinary’ language counterpart is co-related. What weakens our resistance
to the negatively existential analysis in this case more than in the case of
the corresponding "All '-sentence is the powerful attraction of the
negative opening phrase There is not …'. To avoid misunderstanding
one may add a point about the neo-traditionalist interpretation of the forms of
the traditional Aristotelian system. Strawson is not claiming that it
faithfully represents this or that intention of the principal exponent of the
Square of Opposition. Appuleius, who knows, was perhaps, more interested in
formulating this or that theorem governing this or that logical relation of
this or that more imposing general statement than this or that everyday general
statement that Strawson considers. Appuleius, who knows, might have
been interested, e. g., in the logical powers of this or that
generalisation, or this or that sentence which approximates more closely to the
desired conditions that if its utterance by anyone, at any time, at any place,
results in a true statement, so does its utterance by anyone else, at any other
time, at any other place. How far the account by the neo-traditionalist
of this or that general sentence of 'ordinary' langauge is adequate for every
generalization may well be under debate. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “In defence of
Appuleius,” BANC.
disimplicaturum: “We should not conclude from this that an implication of
the existence of thing said to be seen is NOT part of the conventional meaning
of ‘see’ nor even (as some philosophers have done) that there is one sense of
‘see’ which lacks this implication!” (WoW:44). If Oxonians are obsessed with
‘implication,’ do they NEED ‘disimplicaturum’? Grice doesn’t think so! But
sometimes you have to use it to correct a mistake. Grice does not give names,
but he says he has heard a philosopher claim that there are two SENSES of
‘see,’ one which what one sees exists, and one in which it doesn’t! It would be
good to trace that! It relates, in any case to ‘remembers,’but not quite, and
to ‘know.’ But not quite. The issue of ‘see’ is not that central, since Grice
realizes that it is just a modality of perception, even if crucial. He coined
‘visum’ with Warnock to play with the idea of ‘what is seen’ NOT being
existent. On another occasion, when he
cannot name a ridiculous philosopher, he invents him: “A philosopher will not
be given much credit if he comes with an account of the indefinite ‘one’ as
having three senses: one proximate to the emissor (“I broke a finger”), one
distant (“He’s meeting a woman”) and one where the link is not specified (“A
flower”). he target is of course Davidson having the cheek to quote Grice’s
Henriette Herz Trust lecture for the BA! Lewis and Short have ‘intendere’ under
‘in-tendo,’ which they render as ‘to stretch out or forth, extend, also to turn
ones attention to, exert one’s self for, to purpose, endeavour,” and finaly as
“intend”! “pergin, sceleste, intendere hanc arguere?” Plaut. Mil. 2, 4,
27 Grices tends towards claiming that you cannot extend what you dont
intend. In the James lectures, Grice mentions the use of is to mean seem (The
tie is red in this light), and see to mean hallucinate. Denying
Existence: The Logic, Epistemology and Pragmatics of ...books.google.com ›
books ... then it seems unidiomatic if not ungrammatical to speak of
hallucinations as ... that fighting people and 156 APPEARING UNREALS 4 Two
Senses of "See"? A. Chakrabarti - 1997 - Language Arts &
Disciplines The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality, and ...books.google.com › books sight, say sense-data; others will
then say that there are two senses of 'see'. ... wrong because I am dreaming or
hallucinating them, which of course could ... Stanley Cavell - 1999 -
Philosophy Wittgenstein and Perception - Page 37 - Google Books
Resultbooks.google.com › books For example, Gilbert Harman characterises the
two senses of see as follows: see† = 'the ... which is common to genuine cases
of seeing and to hallucinations. Michael Campbell, Michael O'Sullivan - 2015 -
Philosophy The Alleged Ambiguity of'See'www.jstor.org › stable including
dreams, hallucinations and the perception of physical objects. ... existence of
at least two senses of ' see' were his adherence to the doctrine that 'see' ...
by AR White - 1963 - Cited by 3 - Related articles Seeing and
Naming - jstorwww.jstor.org › stable there are or aren't two senses of 'see'.
If there are, I'm speaking of ... The third kind of case is illustrated by
Macbeth's dagger hallucination, at least if we assume ... by RJ Hall - 1977 -
Cited by 3 - Related articles Philosophy at LaGuardia Community
Collegewww.laguardia.edu › Philosophy › GADFLY-2011 PDF Lastly, I will
critically discuss Ayer's two senses of 'see', ... (e.g., hallucinations); it
thus seems correct to say that ... Hallucinations are hallucinations. There
are. Talking about seeing: An examination of some aspects of the
...etd.ohiolink.edu › ... I propose a distinction between delusions and
hallucinations,'and argue ... say that there are two senses of .'see* in
ordinary language or not, he does, as I will ... by KA Emmett - 1974 -
Related articles Wittgenstein and Perceptionciteseerx.ist.psu.edu
› viewdoc › download PDF 2 Two senses of 'see'. 33 ... may see things that are
not there, for example in hallucinations. ... And so, hallucinations are not
genuine perceptual experiences. by Y Arahata - Related articles
Allen Blur - University of Yorkwww-users.york.ac.uk › Publications_files PDF of
subjectively indistinguishable hallucination (e.g. Crane 2006). ... and
material objects of sight, and correlatively for a distinction between two
senses of 'see',. by K Allen - Related articles Austin and
sense-data - UBC Library Open Collectionsopen.library.ubc.ca › ... › UBC Theses
and Dissertations Sep 15, 2011 - (5) Illusions and Hallucinations It is not
enough to reject Austin's way of ... I will not deal with Austin and Ayer on
"two senses of 'see'" because I ... by DD Todd - 1967 - Cited by 1
- Related articles. Godfrey Vesey (1965, p. 73) deposes, "if a person sees
something at all it must look like something to him, even if it only looks like
'somebody doing something.' With Davidson, Grice was more cavalier,
because he could blame it on a different ‘New-World’ dialect or idiolect, about
‘intend.’ When Grice uses ‘disimplicaturum’ to apply to ‘cream in coffee’ that is
a bit tangential – and refers more generally to his theory of communication.
What would the rationale of disimplicaturum be? In this case, if the emissee
realizes the obvious category mistake (“She’s not the cream in your coffee”)
there may be a need to disimplicate explicitly. To consider. There is an
example that he gives that compares with ‘see’ and it is even more
philosophical but he doesn’t give examples: to use ‘is’ when one means ‘seem’
(the tie example). The reductive
analyses of being and seeing hold. We have here two cases of loose use (or disimplicaturum).
Same now with his example in “Intention and Uncertainty” (henceforth,
“Uncertainty”): Smith intends to climb Mt. Everest + [common-ground status:
this is difficult]. Grices response to Davidsons pretty unfair use of Grices
notion of conversational implicaturum in Davidsons analysis of intention caught
a lot of interest. Pears loved Grices reply. Implicaturum here is out of the
question ‒ disimplicaturum may not. Grice just saw that his theory of
conversation is too social to be true when applied to intending. The doxastic
condition is one of the entailments in an ascription of an intending. It cannot
be cancelled as an implicaturum can. If it can be cancelled, it is best seen as
a disimplicaturum, or a loose use by an utterer meaning less than what he says
or explicitly conveys to more careful conversants. Grice and Davidson were
members of The Grice and Davidson Mutual Admiration Society. Davidson, not
being Oxonian, was perhaps not acquainted with Grices polemics at Oxford with
Hart and Hampshire (where Grice sided with Pears, rather). Grice and Pears
hold a minimalist approach to intending. On the other hand, Davidson makes
what Grice sees as the same mistake again of building certainty into the
concept. Grice finds that to apply the idea of a conversational implicaturum
at this point is too social to be true. Rather, Grice prefers to coin the
conversational disimplicaturum: Marmaduke Bloggs intends to climb Mt
Everest on hands and knees. The utterance above, if merely reporting what
Bloggs thinks, may involve a loose use of intends. The certainty on the
agents part on the success of his enterprise is thus cast with
doubt. Davidson was claiming that the agents belief in the probability of
the object of the agents intention was a mere conversational implicaturum on
the utterers part. Grice responds that the ascription of such a belief is
an entailment of a strict use of intend, even if, in cases where the utterer
aims at a conversational disimplicaturum, it can be dropped. The
addressee will still regard the utterer as abiding by the principle of
conversational helpfulness. Pears was especially interested in the
Davidson-Grice polemic on intending, disimplicaturum, disimplicaturum. Strictly,
a section of his reply to Davidson. If Grices claim to fame is implicaturum, he
finds disimplicaturum an intriguing notion to capture those occasions when an
utterer means LESS than he says. His examples include: a loose use of intending
(without the entailment of the doxastic condition), the uses of see in
Shakespeareian contexts (Macbeth saw Banquo, Hamlet saw his father on the
ramparts of Elsinore) and the use of is to mean seems (That tie is blue under
this light, but green otherwise, when both conversants know that a change of
colour is out of the question. He plays with Youre the cream in my coffee being
an utterance where the disimplicaturum (i.e. entailment dropping) is total. Disimplicaturum
does not appeal to a new principle of conversational rationality. It is
perfectly accountable by the principle of conversational helpfulness, in
particular, the desideratum of conversational candour. In everyday explanation we exploit, as Grice notes,
an immense richness in the family of expressions that might be thought of as
the wanting family. This wanting family includes expressions like want, desire,
would like to, is eager to, is anxious to, would mind not…, the idea of appeals to me, is thinking of, etc. As Grice
remarks, The likeness and differences within this wanting family demand careful
attention. In commenting on Davidsons treatment of wanting in
Intending, Grice notes: It seems to Grice that the picture of the soul
suggested by Davidsons treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one
might almost say, computerized. It is the picture of an ideally decorous board
meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the standpoint of
their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of
action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action;
normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another
over-impressed with the presentation made by some particular member. Grices
soul doesnt seem to him, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more
like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout,
wont listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the
chairman, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to
impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since sometimes the meeting
breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in
reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the
outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.
Could it be that Davidson, of the New World, and Grice, of the Old World, have
different idiolects regarding intend? Could well be! It is said that the New
World is prone to hyperbole, so perhaps in Grices more cautious use, intend is
restricted to the conditions HE wants it to restrict it too! Odd that for all
the generosity he displays in Post-war Oxford philosophy (Surely I can help you
analyse you concept of this or that, even if my use of the corresponding
expression does not agree with yours), he goes to attack Davidson, and just for
trying to be nice and apply the conversational implicaturum to intend! Genial
Grice! It is natural Davidson, with his naturalistic tendencies, would like to
see intending as merely invoking in a weak fashion the idea of a strong
psychological state as belief. And its natural that Grice hated that! Refs.:
The source is Grice’s comment on Davidson on intending. The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
disjunctum: Strangely
enough Ariskant thought disjunctum, but not conjunctum a categorial related to
the category of ‘community’!Aulus Gellius (The Attic Nights, XVI, 8) tells us
about this disjunction: “There also is ■ another type of a^twpa which the
Greeks call and we call disjunctum, disjunctive sentence. Gellius notes that
‘or’ is by default ‘inclusive’: where one or several propositions may be
simultaneously true, without ex- cluding one another, although they may also
all be false. Gellius expands on the non-default reading of exclusive
disjunction: pleasure is either good or bad or it is neither good nor bad (“Aut
malum est voluplas, aut bonum, aul neque bonum, neque malum est”). All the
elements of the exclusive disjunctive exclude one another, and their
contradictory elements, Gr. avTtxs'-p.sva, are incompatible with one another”.
“Ex omnibus quae disjunguntiir, unum esse verum debet, falsa cetera.”Grice
lists ‘or’ as the second binary functor in his response to Strawson. But both
Grice and Strawson agreed that the Oxonian expert on ‘or’ is Wood. Mitchell is
good, too, though. The relations between “v” and “or” (or “either ... or …”)
are, on the whole, less intimate than those between “.” and “and,” but less
distant than those between “D” and “if.” Let us speak of a statement made by
coupling two clauses by “or” as an alternative statement ; and let us speak of
the first and second alternatesof such a statement, on analogy with our talk of
the antecedent and consequent of a hypothetical statement. At a bus-stop,
someone might say: “Either we catch this bus or we shall have to walk all the
way home.” He might equally well have said “If we don't catch this bus, we
shall have to walk all the way home.” It will be seen that the antecedent of
the hypothetical statement he might have made is the negation of the first
alternate of the alternative statement he did make. Obviously, we should not
regard our catching the bus as a sufficient condition of the 'truth' of either
statement; if it turns out that the bus we caught was not the last one, we
should say that the man who had made the statement had been wrong. The truth of
one of the alternates is no more a sufficient condition of the truth of the
alternative statement than the falsity of the antecedent is a sufficient
condition of the truth of the hypothetical statement. And since 'p"Dpyq'
(and, equally, * q"3p v q ') is a law of the truth-functional system, this
fact sufficiently shows a difference between at least one standard use of “or” and
the meaning given to “v.” Now in all, or almost all, the cases where we are
prepared to say something of the form “p or q,” we are also prepared to say
something of the form 4 if not-p, then q \ And this fact may us to exaggerate
the difference between “v” and “or” to think that, since in some cases, the
fulfilment of one alternate is not a sufficient condition of the truth of the
alternative statement of which It is an alternate, the fulfilment of one
alternate is a sufficient condition of the truth of an alternative statement.
And this is certainly an exaggeration. If someone says ; “Either it was John or
it was Robert but I couldn't tell which,” we are satisfied of the truth of the
alternative statement if either of the alternates turns out to be true; and we
say that the speaker was wrong only if neither turns out to be true. Here we
seem to have a puzzle ; for we seem to be saying that * Either it was John or
it was Robert ' entails 4 If it wasn't John, it was Robert * and, at the same
time, that ‘It was John’ entails the former, but not the latter. What we are
suffering from here is perhaps a crudity in our notion of entailraent, a
difficulty In applying this too undifferentiated concept to the facts of speech
; or, if we prefer it, an ambiguity in the notion of a sufficient condition.
The statement that it was John entails the statement that it was either John or
Robert in the sense thai it confirms it; when It turns out to have been John,
the man who said that either It was John or it was Robert is shown to have been
right. But the first statement does not entail the second in the sense that the
step ‘It was John, so it was either John or Robert’ is a logically proper step,
unless the person saying this means by it simply that the alternative statement
made previously was correct, i.e., 'it was one of the two '. For the
alternative statement carries the implication of the speaker's uncertainty as
to which of the two it was, and this implication is inconsistent with the
assertion that it was John. So in this sense of * sufficient condition ', the
statement that it was John is no more a sufficient condition of (no more
entails) the statement that it was either John or Robert than it is a
sufficient condition of (entails) the statement that if it wasn't John, it was
Robert. The further resemblance, which we have already noticed, between the
alternative statement and the hypothetical statement, is that whatever
knowledge or experience renders it reasonable to assert the alternative
statement, also renders it reasonable to make the statement that (under the
condition that it wasn't John) it was Robert. But we are less happy about
saying that the hypothetical statement is confirmed by the discovery that it
was John, than we are about saying that the alternative statement is confirmed
by this discovery. For we are inclined to say that the question of confirmation
of the hypothetical statement (as opposed to the question of its reasonableness
or acceptability) arises only if the condition (that it wasn't John) turns out
to be fulfilled. This shows an asymmetry, as regards confirmation, though not
as regards acceptability, between 4 if not p, then q ' and * if not qy then p '
which is not mirrored in the forms ‘either p or q’ and ‘either q or p.’ This
asymmetry is ignored in the rule that * if not p, then q ' and ‘if not q, then
p’ are logically equivalent, for this rule regards acceptability rather than
confirmation. And rightly. For we may often discuss the l truth ' of a
subjunctive conditional, where the possibility of confirmation is suggested by
the form of words employed to be not envisaged. It is a not unrelated
difference between * if ' sentences and ‘or’ sentences that whereas, whenever
we use one of the latter, we should also be prepared to use one of the former,
the converse does not hold. The cases in which it does not generally hold are
those of subjunctive conditionals. There is no ‘or’ sentence which would serve
as a paraphrase of ‘If the Germans had invaded England in 1940, they would have
won the war’ as this sentence would most commonly be used. And this is
connected with the fact that c either . . . or . . .' is associated with
situations involving choice or decision. 4 Either of these roads leads to
Oxford ' does not mean the same as ' Either this road leads to Oxford or that
road does’ ; but both confront us with the necessity of making a choice. This
brings us to a feature of * or ' which, unlike those so far discussed, is
commonly mentioned in discussion of its relation to * v ' ; the fact, namely,
that in certain verbal contexts, ‘either … or …’ plainly carries the
implication ‘and not both . . . and . . .', whereas in other contexts, it does
not. These are sometimes spoken of as, respectively, the exclusive and
inclusive senses of ‘or;’ and, plainly, if we are to identify 4 v’ with either,
it must be the latter. The reason why, unlike others, this feature of the
ordinary use of “or” is commonly mentioned, is that the difference can readily
be accommodated (1 Cf. footnote to p. 86.In the symbolism of the
truth-functional system: It is the difference between “(p y q) .~ (p . q)”
(exclusive sense) and “p v q” (inclusive sense). “Or,” like “and,” is commonly
used to join words and phrases as well as clauses. The 4 mutuality difficulties
attending the general expansion of 4 x and y are/ 5 into * x is /and y is/' do
not attend the expansion of 4 x or y isf into c r Is/or y is/ ? (This is not to
say that the expansion can always correctly be made. We may call “v” the
disjunctive sign and, being warned against taking the reading too seriously,
may read it as ‘or.' While he never approached the topic separately, it’s easy
to find remarks about disjunction in his oeuvre. A veritable genealogy of
disjunction can be traced along Griceian lines. DISJUNCTUM -- disjunction
elimination. 1 The argument form ‘A or B, if A then C, if B then C; therefore,
C’ and arguments of this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to
infer C from a disjunction together with derivations of C from each of the
disjuncts separately. This is also known as the rule of disjunctive elimination
or V-elimination. disjunction
introduction. 1 The argument form ‘A or B; therefore, A or B’ and arguments of
this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to infer a disjunction from
either of its disjuncts. This is also known as the rule of addition or
Vintroduction. . disjunctive proposition,
a proposition whose main propositional operator main connective is the
disjunction operator, i.e., the logical operator that represents ‘and/or’.
Thus, ‘P-and/orQ-and-R’ is not a disjunctive proposition because its main
connective is the conjunction operation, but ‘P-and/or-Q-and-R’ is disjunctive.
Refs.: Grice uses an illustration involving ‘or’ in the ‘implication’ excursus
in “Causal Theory.” But the systematic account comes from WoW, especially essay
4.
dispositum
-- H. P. Grice, “Disposition and intention” – Grice inspired D. F. Pears on this,
as they tried to refute Austin’s rather dogmatic views in ‘ifs’ and ‘cans’ –
where the ‘can’ relates to the disposition, and the ‘if’ to the conditional
analysis for it. Grice’s phrase is “if I can”. “I intend to climb Mt Everest on
hands and knees,” Marmaduke Bloggs says, “if a can.” A disposition, more
generally is, any tendency of an object or system to act or react in
characteristic ways in certain situations. Fragility, solubility, and
radioactivity, and intentionality, are typical dispositions. And so are
generosity and irritability. For Ryle’s brand of analytic behaviorism,
functionalism, and some forms of materialism, an event of the soul, such as the
occurrence of an idea, and states such as a belief, a will, or an intention, is
also a disposition. A hypothetical or
conditional statement is alleged to be ‘implicated’ by dispositional claims.
What’s worse, this conditional is alleged to capture the basic meaning of the
ascription of a state of the soul. The glass would shatter if suitably struck.
Left undisturbed, a radium atom will probably decay in a certain time. An
ascription of a disposition is taken as subjunctive rather than material
conditionals to avoid problems like having to count as soluble anything not
immersed in water. The characteristic mode of action or reaction shattering, decaying, etc. is termed the disposition’s manifestation or
display. But it need not be observable. Fragility is a regular or universal
disposition. A suitably struck glass invariably shatters. Radio-activity on the
other hand is alleged to be a variable or probabilistic disposition. Radium may
(but then again may not) decay in a certain situation. A dispositions may be
what Grice calls “multi-track,” i. e. multiply
manifested, rather than “single-track,” or singly manifested. Hardness or
elasticity may have different manifestations in different situations. In his
very controversial (and only famous essay), “The Concept of Mind,” Ryle, who
held, no less, the chair of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, argues – just to
provoke -- that there is nothing more to a dispositional claim than its
associated conditional. A dispositional property is not an occurrent property.
To possess a dispositional property is not to undergo any episode or
occurrence, or to be in a particular state. Grice surely refuted this when he
claims that the soul is in this or that a state. Consider reasoning. The soul
is in state premise; then the soul is in state conclusion. The episode or
occurrence is an event, when the state of the premise causes the state of the
conclusion. Coupled with a ‘positivist’ (or ultra-physicalist,
ultra-empiricist, and ultra-naturalist) rejection of any unobservable, and a
conception of an alleged episode or state of the soul as a dispositios, this
supports the view of behaviorism that such alleged episode or state is nothing
but a disposition TO observable behaviour – if Grice intends to climb Mt.
Everest on hands and knees if he can, there is no ascription without the
behaviour that manifests it – the ascription is meant to EXPLAIN (or explicate,
or provide the cause) for the behaviour. Grice reached this ‘functionalist’
approach later in his career, and presented it with full fanfare in “Method in
philosophoical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.” By contrast, realism
holds that dispositional talk is also about an actual or occurrent property or a
state, possibly unknown or unobservable – the ‘black box’ of the functionalist,
a function from sensory input to behavioural output. In particular, it is about
the bases of dispositions in intrinsic properties or states. Thus, fragility is
based in molecular structure, radioactivity in nuclear structure. A
disposition’s basis is viewed as at least partly the cause of its manifestation
in behaviour. Some philosophers, for fear of an infinite regress, hold that the
basis is categorical, not dispositional D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory
of Mind, 8. Others, notably Popper, Madden, and Harre (Causal powers) hold that
every property is dispositional. Grice’s essay has now historical interest –
but showed the relevance of these topics among two tightly closed groups in
post-war Oxford: the dispositionalists led by Ryle, and the
anti-dispositionalists, a one-member group led by Grice. Refs.: Grice,
“Intention and dispositions.”
distributum: distributio -- undistributed
middle: a logical fallacy in traditional syllogistic logic, resulting from the
violation of the rule that the middle term (the term that appears twice in
premises) must be distributed at least once in the premises. Any syllogism that
commits this error is invalid. Consider “All philosophers are persons,” and
“Some persons are bad.” No conclusion follows from these two premises because
“persons” in the first premise is the predicate of an affirmative proposition,
and in the second is the subject of a particular proposition. Neither of them
is distributed. “If in a syllogism the middle term is distributed in neither
premise, we are said to have a fallacy of undistributed middle.” Keynes, Formal
Logic. DISTRIBUTUM -- distribution, the property of standing for every
individual designated by a term. The Latin term distributio originated in the
twelfth century; it was applied to terms as part of a theory of reference, and
it may have simply indicated the property of a term prefixed by a universal
quantifier. The term ‘dog’ in ‘Every dog has his day’ is distributed, because
it supposedly refers to every dog. In contrast, the same term in ‘A dog bit the
mailman’ is not distributed because it refers to only one dog. In time, the
idea of distribution came to be used only as a heuristic device for determining
the validity of categorical syllogisms: 1 every term that is distributed in a
premise must be distributed in the conclusion; 2 the middle term must be
distributed at least once. Most explanations of distribution in logic textbooks
are perfunctory; and it is stipulated that the subject terms of universal
propositions and the predicate terms of negative propositions are distributed.
This is intuitive for A-propositions, e.g., ‘All humans are mortal’; the
property of being mortal is distributed over each human. The idea of
distribution is not intuitive for, say, the predicate term of O-propositions.
According to the doctrine, the sentence ‘Some humans are not selfish’ says in
effect that if all the selfish things are compared with some select human one
that is not selfish, the relation of identity does not hold between that human
and any of the selfish things. Notice that the idea of distribution is not
mentioned in this explanation. The idea of distribution is currently
disreputable, mostly because of the criticisms of Geach in Reference and
Generality 8 and its irrelevance to standard semantic theories. The related
term ‘distributively’ means ‘in a manner designating every item in a group
individually’, and is used in contrast with ‘collectively’. The sentence ‘The
rocks weighed 100 pounds’ is ambiguous. If ‘rocks’ is taken distributively,
then the sentence means that each rock weighed 100 pounds. If ‘rocks’ is taken
collectively, then the sentence means that the total weight of the rocks was
100 pounds. distributive laws, the
logical principles A 8 B 7 C S A 8 B 7 A 7 C and A 7 B 8 C S A 7 B 8 A 7 C.
Conjunction is thus said to distribute over disjunction and disjunction over
conjunction.
ditto: Or Strawson’s big mistake. Strawson quite didn’t
understand what “Analysis” was for, and submits this essay on the
perlocutionary effects of ‘true.’ Grice comes to the resuce of veritable
analysis. cf. verum. Grice disliked Strawson’s ditto theory in Analysis of
‘true’ as admittive performatory. 1620s, "in the month of the same
name," Tuscan dialectal ditto "(in) the said (month or year),"
literary Italian detto, past participle of dire "to say," from Latin
dicere "speak, tell, say" (from PIE root *deik- "to show,"
also "pronounce solemnly"). Italian used the word to avoid
repetition of month names in a series of dates, and in this sense it was picked
up in English. Its generalized meaning of "the aforesaid, the same thing,
same as above" is attested in English by 1670s. In early 19c. a suit of
men's clothes of the same color and material through was ditto or dittoes
(1755). Dittohead, self-description of followers of U.S. radio personality Rush
Limbaugh, attested by 1995. dittoship is from 1869.
dodgson:
c. l. – Grice quotes Carroll often. Cabbages and kings – Achilles and the
Tortoise – Humpty Dumpty and his Deutero-Esperanto -- Carroll, Lewis, pen name
of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 183298, English writer and mathematician. The
eldest son of a large clerical family, he was educated at Rugby and Christ
Church, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his uneventful life, as
mathematical lecturer until 1 and curator of the senior commonroom. His
mathematical writings under his own name are more numerous than important. He
was, however, the only Oxonian of his day to contribute to symbolic logic, and
is remembered for his syllogistic diagrams, for his methods for constructing
and solving elaborate sorites problems, for his early interest in logical
paradoxes, and for the many amusing examples that continue to reappear in
modern textbooks. Fame descended upon him almost by accident, as the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1865, Through the Looking Glass 1872, The
Hunting of the Snark 1876, and Sylvie and Bruno 9 93; saving the last, the only
children’s books to bring no blush of embarrassment to an adult reader’s cheek.
Dodgson took deacon’s orders in 1861, and though pastorally inactive, was in
many ways an archetype of the prim Victorian clergyman. His religious opinions
were carefully thought out, but not of great philosophic interest. The Oxford
movement passed him by; he worried about sin though rejecting the doctrine of
eternal punishment, abhorred profanity, and fussed over Sunday observance, but
was oddly tolerant of theatergoing, a lifelong habit of his own. Apart from the
sentimental messages later inserted in them, the Alice books and Snark are
blessedly devoid of religious or moral concern. Full of rudeness, aggression,
and quarrelsome, if fallacious, argument, they have, on the other hand, a
natural attraction for philosophers, who pillage Carneades Carroll, Lewis
119 119 them freely for illustrations.
Humpty-Dumpty, the various Kings and Queens, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar,
the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Unicorn, the Tweedle brothers, the
Bellman, the Baker, and the Snark make fleeting appearances in the s of
Russell, Moore, Broad, Quine, Nagel, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Blanshard, and even
Vitters an unlikely admirer of the Mock Turtle. The first such allusion to the
March Hare is in Venn’s Symbolic Logic 1. The usual reasons for quotation are
to make some point about meaning, stipulative definition, the logic of
negation, time reversal, dream consciousness, the reification of fictions and
nonentities, or the absurdities that arise from taking “ordinary language” too
literally. For exponents of word processing, the effect of running Jabberwocky
through a spell-checker is to extinguish all hope for the future of Artificial
Intelligence. Though himself no philosopher, Carroll’s unique sense of
philosophic humor keeps him and his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel effortlessly
alive in the modern age. Alice has been tr. into seventy-five languages; new
editions and critical studies appear every year; imitations, parodies,
cartoons, quotations, and ephemera proliferate beyond number; and Carroll
societies flourish in several countries, notably Britain and the United States.
dominium
-- domain – used by Grice in his treatment of Extensionalism -- of a science,
the class of individuals that constitute its subject matter. Zoology, number
theory, and plane geometry have as their respective domains the class of
animals, the class of natural numbers, and the class of plane figures. In
Posterior Analytics 76b10, Aristotle observes that each science presupposes its
domain, its basic concepts, and its basic principles. In modern formalizations
of a science using a standard firstorder formal language, the domain of the
science is often, but not always, taken as the universe of the intended
interpretation or intended model, i.e. as the range of values of the individual
variables.
donkey –
quantification – considered by Grice -- sentences, sentences exemplified by
‘Every man who owns a donkey beats it’, ‘If a man owns a donkey, he beats it’,
and similar forms (“Every nice girl loves a sailor”), which have posed logical
puzzles since medieval times but were noted more recently by Geach. At issue is
the logical form of such sentences
specifically, the correct construal of the pronoun ‘it’ and the
indefinite noun phrase ‘a donkey’. Translations into predicate logic by the
usual strategy of rendering the indefinite as existential quantification and
the pronoun as a bound variable cf. ‘John owns a donkey and beats it’ P Dx x is
a donkey & John owns x & John beats x are either ill-formed or have the
wrong truth conditions. With a universal quantifier, the logical form carries
the controversial implication that every donkey-owning man beats every donkey
he owns. Efforts to resolve these issues have spawned much significant research
in logic and linguistic semantics.
dossier: Grice is not clear about the status of this – but some
philosophers have been too mentalistic. How would a genitorial programme
proceed. Is there a dossier in a handwave by which the emissor communicates
that he knows the route or that he is about to leave his emissee. It does not
seem so, because the handwave is unstructured. Unlike “Fido is shaggy.” In the
case of “Fido is shaggy,” there must be some OVERLAP between the emissor’s soul
and the emissee’s soul – in terms of dossier. So perhaps there is overlap in
the handwave. There must be an overlap as to WHICH route he means. By making
the handwave the emissor communicates that HE, the emissor, subject IS (copula)
followed by predicate “knower of the route.” So here we have a definite ‘the
route.’ Which route? To heaven, to hell. Cf. The scots ‘high road,’ ‘low road.’
To Loch Lomond. If there is not this minimal common ground nothing can be
communicated. In the alternative meaning, “I (subject) am (copula) about to
leave you – where again there must be an overlap in the identification of the
denotata of the pronouns. In the case of Blackburn’s skull or the arrow at the
fork of a road, the common ground is instituted in situu in the one-off
predicament, and there still must be some overlap of dossier. In its most
technical usage, Grice wants to demystify Donnellan’s identificatory versus
non-identificatory uses of ‘the,’ as unnecessary implications to Russell’s
otherwise neat account. The topic interested Strawson (“Principle of assumption
of ignorance, knowledge and relevance”) and Urmson’s principle of aptitude. Grice’s
favourite vacuous name is ‘Bellerophon.’ ‘Vacuous names’ is an essay
commissioned by Davison and Hintikka for Words and objections: essays on the
work of W. V. Quine (henceforth, W and O) for Reidel, Dordrecht. “W and O” had
appeared (without Grices contribution) as a special issue of Synthese. Grices
contribution, along with Quines Reply to Grice, appeared only in the reprint of
that special issue for Reidel in Dordrecht. Grice cites from various
philosophers (and logicians ‒ this was the time when logic was starting to
be taught outside philosophy departments, or sub-faculties), such as Mitchell,
Myro, Mates, Donnellan, Strawson, Grice was particularly
proud to be able to quote Mates by mouth or book. Grice takes the
opportunity, in his tribute to Quine, to introduce one of two of his
syntactical devices to allow for conversational implicatura to be given maximal
scope. The device in Vacuous Namess is a subscription device to indicate
the ordering of introduction of this or that operation. Grice wants to
give room for utterances of a special existential kind be deemed
rational/reasonable, provided the principle of conversational helfpulness is
thought of by the addressee to be followed by the utterer. Someone isnt
attending the party organised by the Merseyside Geographical Society. That
is Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees. But who,
as it happened, turned out to be an invention of the journalists at the
Merseyside Newsletter, “W and O,” vacuous name, identificatory use,
non-identificatory use, subscript device. Davidson and Hintikka were well aware
of the New-World impact of the Old-World ideas displayed by Grice and
Strawson in their attack to Quine. Quine had indeed addressed Grices and
Strawsons sophisticated version of the paradigm-case argument in Word and
Object. Davidson and Hintikka arranged to publish a special issue for a
periodical publication, to which Strawson had already contributed. It was only
natural, when Davidson and Hintikka were informed by Reidel of their interest
in turning the special issue into a separate volume, that they would approach
the other infamous member of the dynamic duo! Commissioned by Davidson and
Hintikka for “W and O.” Grice introduces a subscript device to account for implicatura
of utterances like Marmaduke Bloggs won’t be attending the party; he was
invented by the journalists. In the later section, he explores
identificatory and non identificatory uses of the without involving himself in
the problems Donnellan did! Some philosophers, notably Ostertag, have
found the latter section the most intriguing bit, and thus Ostertag cared to
reprint the section on Descriptions for his edited MIT volume on the topic. The
essay is structured very systematically with an initial section on a calculus
alla Gentzen, followed by implicatura of vacuous Namess such as Marmaduke
Bloggs, to end with definite descriptions, repr. in Ostertag, and psychological
predicates. It is best to focus on a few things here. First his imaginary
dialogues on Marmaduke Bloggs, brilliant! Second, this as a preamble to his
Presupposition and conversational implicaturum. There is a quantifier phrase,
the, and two uses of it: one is an identificatory use (the haberdasher is
clumsy, or THE haberdasher is clumsy, as Grice prefers) and then theres a
derived, non-identificatory use: the haberdasher (whoever she was! to use
Grices and Mitchells addendum) shows her clumsiness. The use of the numeric
subscripts were complicated enough to delay the publication of this. The whole
thing was a special issue of a journal. Grices contribution came when Reidel
turned that into a volume. Grice later replaced his numeric subscript device by
square brackets. Perhaps the square brackets are not subtle enough,
though. Grices contribution, Vacuous Namess, later repr. in part “Definite
descriptions,” ed. Ostertag, concludes with an exploration of the phrases, and
further on, with some intriguing remarks on the subtle issues surrounding the
scope of an ascription of a predicate standing for a psychological state or
attitude. Grices choice of an ascription now notably involves an
opaque (rather than factive, like know) psychological state or attitude:
wanting, which he symbolizes as W. At least Grice does not write,
really, for he knew that Austin detested a trouser word! Grice concludes that (xi)
and (xiii) will be derivable from each of (ix) and (x), while (xii) will be
derivable only from (ix).Grice had been Strawsons logic tutor at St. Johns
(Mabbott was teaching the grand stuff!) and it shows! One topic that especially
concerned Grice relates to the introduction and elimination rules, as he later
searches for generic satisfactoriness. Grice
wonders [W]hat should be said of Takeutis conjecture (roughly)
that the nature of the introduction rule determines the character of
the elimination rule? There seems to be
no particular problem about allowing an introduction rule which tells
us that, if it is established in Xs personalized system that φ, then it is
necessary with respect to X that φ is true (establishable). The accompanying
elimination rule is, however, slightly less promising. If we suppose such a
rule to tell us that, if one is committed to the idea that it is necessary with
respect to X that φ, then one is also committed to whatever is expressed by φ,
we shall be in trouble; for such a rule is not acceptable; φ will be a volitive
expression such as let it be that X eats his hat; and my commitment to the idea
that Xs system requires him to eat his hat does not ipso facto involve me in
accepting (buletically) let X eat his hat. But if we take the elimination rule
rather as telling us that, if it is necessary with respect to X that let X eat
his hat, then let X eat his hat possesses satisfactoriness-with-respect-to-X,
the situation is easier; for this version of the rule seems inoffensive, even
for Takeuti, we hope. A very interesting concept Grice introduces in the
definite-descriptor section of Vacuous Namess is that of a conversational
dossier, for which he uses δ for a definite descriptor. The key concept is that
of conversational dossier overlap, common ground, or conversational pool. Let
us say that an utterer U has a dossier for a definite description δ if there is
a set of definite descriptions which include δ, all the members of which the
utterer supposes to be satisfied by one and the same item and the utterer U
intends his addressee A to think (via the recognition that A is so intended)
that the utterer U has a dossier for the definite description δ which the
utterer uses, and that the utterer U has specifically selected (or chosen, or
picked) this specific δ from this dossier at least partly in the hope that his
addressee A has his own dossier for δ which overlaps the utterers dossier for δ,
viz. shares a substantial, or in some way specially favoured, su-bset with the
utterers dossier. Its unfortunate that the idea of a dossier is not better
known amog Oxonian philosophers. Unlike approaches to the phenomenon by other
Oxonian philosophers like Grices tutee Strawson and his three principles
(conversational relevance, presumption of conversational knowledge, and
presumption of conversational ignorance) or Urmson and his, apter than
Strawsons, principle of conversational appositeness (Mrs.Smiths husband just delivered
a letter, You mean the postman!?), only Grice took to task the idea of
formalising this in terms of set-theory and philosophical
psychology ‒ note his charming reference to the utterers hope (never
mind intention) that his choice of d from his dossier will overlap with some d
in the dossier of his his addressee. The point of adding whoever he may be for
the non-identificatory is made by Mitchell, of Worcester, in his Griceian
textbook for Hutchinson. Refs.: The main reference is Grice’s “Vacuous names,”
in “W and O” and its attending notes, BANC.
doxastic –
discussed by J. L. Austin in the myth of the cave. Plato is doing some form of
linguistic botany when he distinguishes between the doxa and the episteme – Stich
made it worse with his ‘sub-doxastic’! from Grecian doxa, ‘belief’, of or
pertaining to belief. A doxastic mental state, for instance, is or incorporates
a belief. Doxastic states of mind are to be distinguished, on the one hand,
from such non-doxastic states as desires, sensations, and emotions, and, on the
other hand, from subdoxastic states. By extension, a doxastic principle is a
principle governing belief. A doxastic principle might set out conditions under
which an agent’s forming or abandoning a belief is justified epistemically or
otherwise.
doxographia
griceiana -- Griceian doxographers. A Griceian doxographer
is a a compiler of andcommentators on the opinions of Grice. “I am my first
doxographer,” Grice said. Grice enjoyed the term coined by H. Diels for the
title of his work “Doxographi Graeci,” which Grice typed “Doxographi Gricei”.
In his “Doxographi,” Diels assembles a series of Grecian texts in which the
views of Grecian philosophers from the archaic to the Hellenistic era are set
out in a relatively schematic way. In the introduction, Diels reconstructs the
history of the writing of these opinions, viz. the doxography strictly – the
‘writing’ (graphein) of the ‘opinion’ (“doxa”) – cfr. the unwritten opinions;
Diels’s ‘Doxographi’ is now a standard part of the historiography of
philosophy. Doxography is important both as a source of information about a
philosopher, and also because a later philosopher (later than Grice, that is),
ancient, medieval, and modern, should rely on it besides what Diels calls the ‘primary’
material – “what Grice actually philosophised on.” The crucial text for Diels’s
reconstruction is the book Physical Opinions of the Philosophers Placita
Philosophorum, traditionally ascribed to Plutarch but no longer thought to be
by him. “Placita philosophorum” lists the views of various philosophers and
schools under subject headings such as “What Is Nature?” and “On the Rainbow.”
Out of this oeuvre and others Diels reconstructs a Collection of Opinions that
he ascribes to Aetius, a philosopher mentioned by Theodoret as its author.
Diels takes Aetius’s ultimate source to be Theophrastus, who wrote a more
discursive Physical Opinions. Because Aetius mentions the views of Hellenistic
philosophers writing after Theophrastus, Diels postulates an intermediate
source, which he calls the “Vetusta Placita.” The most accessible doxographical
material for Grice is in “The Life of Opinions of the Eminent Philosopher H. P.
Grice,” “Vita et sententiae H. P. Griceiani quo in philosophia probatus fuit.” by
H. P. Grice, après “Vitae et sententiae eorum qui in philosophia probati fuerunt,” by Diogenes Laertius, who is,
however, mainly interested in gossip. Laertius arranges philosophers by schools
and treats each school chronologically.
dummett –
Dummett on ‘implicaturum’ in “Truth and other enigmas” – Note the animosity by
Dummett against Grice’s playgroup for Grice never inviting him to a Saturday
morning!
“I will say this:
conversational implicaturum, or as he fastidiously would prefer, the ‘implicaturum,’
was, yes, ‘invented,’ by H. P. Grice, of St. John’s, but University Lecturer,
to boot, to replace an abstract semantic concept such as Frege’s ‘Sinn,’
expelled in Grice’s original Playgroup’s determination to pay attention, in the
typical Oxonian manner, to nothing but what an *emisor* (never mind his
emission!) ‘communicates’ in a ‘particularised’ context — so that was a good
thing -- for Grice!” “Truth and other enigmas.” Cited
by Grice in Way of Words -- dummett, m. a. e. – cited by H. P. Grice.
philosopher of language, logic, and mathematics, noted for his sympathy for
metaphysical antirealism and for his exposition of the philosophy of Frege.
Dummett regards allegiance to the principle of bivalence as the hallmark of a
realist attitude toward any field of discourse. This is the principle that any
meaningful assertoric sentence must be determinately either true or else false,
independently of anyone’s ability to ascertain its truth-value by recourse to
appropriate empirical evidence or methods of proof. According to Dummett, the
sentences of any learnable language cannot have verification-transcendent truth
conditions and consequently we should query the intelligibility of certain
statements that realists regard as meaningful. On these grounds, he calls into
question realism about the past and realism in the philosophy of mathematics in
several of the papers in two collections of his essays, Truth and Other Enigmas
8 and The Seas of Language 3. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics 1, Dummett
makes clear his view that the fundamental questions of metaphysics have to be
approached through the philosophy of language, and more specifically through
the theory of meaning. Here his philosophical debts to Frege and Vitters are
manifest. Dummett has been the world’s foremost expositor and champion of
Frege’s philosophy, above all in two highly influential books, Frege:
Philosophy of Language 3 and Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics 1. This is
despite the fact that Frege himself advocated a form of Platonism in semantics
and the philosophy of mathematics that is quite at odds with Dummett’s own
anti-realist inclinations. It would appear, however, from what Dummett says in
Origins of Analytical Philosophy 3, that he regards Frege’s great achievement
as that of having presaged the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that was to see
its most valuable fruit in the later work of Vitters. Vitters’s principle that
grasp of the meaning of a linguistic expression must be exhaustively manifested
by the use of that expression is one that underlies Dummett’s own approach to
meaning and his anti-realist leanings. In logic and the philosophy of
mathematics this is shown in Dummett’s sympathy for the intuitionistic approach
of Brouwer and Heyting, which involves a repudiation of the law of excluded
middle, as set forth in Dummett’s own book on the subject, Elements of
Intuitionism 7.
dworkin: analysed
by Grice in his exploration of legal versus moral right -- Ronald M. b.1, jurist, political philosopher, and a central
contributor to recent legal and political theory. He has served as professor of
jurisprudence, of Oxford 998, professor
of law, New York 5, and Quain Professor
of Jurisprudence, , London 8. He was the
first significant critic of Hart’s positivist analysis of law as based on a
determinable set of social rules. Dworkin argues that the law contains legal
principles as well as legal rules. Legal principles are standards phrased
generally e.g., ‘No one shall profit from his own wrong’; they do not have a
formal “pedigree,” but are requirements of morality. Nonetheless, courts are
obliged to apply such principles, and thus have no lawmaking discretion.
Judicially enforceable legal rights must derive from antecedent political
rights. Dworkin characterizes rights as political “trumps” hence his title Taking Rights Seriously 2d
ed., 8, which collects the papers that defend the views sketched. Dworkin
postulates an idealized judge, Hercules, who can invariably determine what
rights are legally enforceable. Dworkin denies any metaphysical commitments
thereby, and emphasizes instead the constructive and interpretive nature of
both adjudication and legal theory. These arguments are made in papers
collected in A Matter of Principle 5. Law’s Empire 6 systematizes his view. He
presents there a theory of “law as integrity.” The court’s obligation is to
make the community’s law the best it can be by finding decisions that best fit
both institutional du Vair, Guillaume Dworkin, Ronald M. 249 249 history and moral principle. Hercules
always best determines the best fit. Dworkin has also contributed to
substantive political theory. He defends a form of liberalism that makes
equality as prominent as liberty. His account of equality is found in a number
of independent papers; see, e.g., “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” Tanner
Lectures on Human Values XI 0. Dworkin has applied his liberal theory in two
ways. He has continually acted as a critical watchdog of the U.S. Supreme
Court, assessing decisions for their adherence to the ideals of principle,
respect for equality, and achievement of best fit. Some of these essays are in
the two collections mentioned; the most recent are in Freedom’s Law 6. Life’s
Dominion 3 derives from these ideals an account of abortion and euthanasia.
Dworkin’s philosophizing has a conceptual richness and rhetorical fire that,
when not wholly under control, give his theoretical positions a protean quality
at the level of detail. Nonetheless, the ideas that adjudication should be
principled and enforce rights, and that we all deserve equal dignity and
respect, exercise a powerful fascination.
e: the
‘universalis abdicative.’ Cf. Grice on the Square of Opposition, or figura
quadrata -- Grice, “Circling the square of Opposition.”
Ǝ: Ǝx. The existential
quantifier. When Gentzen used /\ and \/ for ‘all’ and ‘some’ he is being
logical, since ‘all’ and ‘some’ behave like ‘and’ and ‘or.’ This is not
transparently shown at all by the use of the inverted A and the inverted E.
This Grice called Grice’s Proportion: “and:or::every:some”. Grice: “Surely there is a relation of ‘every’ to ‘and’ and ‘some’
to ‘or.’” “Given a finite domain of
discourse D = {a1, ... an} “every” is equivalent to an “and” propositions “Pai
/\, … Pan.””“Analogously, “some (at least one”) is equivalent to an “or”
proposition having the same structure as before:“Pai V, … Pan.”“For an infinite
domain of discourse the equivalences are pretty similar, and I shouldn’t bother
you with it for two long. But consider the statement, “1 + 1, and 2 + 2, 3 + 3,
..., and 100 + 100, and ..., etc.” This is an infinite “and”
proposition. From the
point of view of a system like System G, this may seem a problem. Syntax rules are expected to generate finite formulae. But my
example above is fortunate in that there is a procedure to generate every
conjunct. Now, as Austin once suggested to me, having translated Frege, an
assertion were to be made about every *irrational* number, it would seem that
is no (Fregeian) way to enumerate every conjunct, since irrational numbers
cannot be enumerated. However, a succinct equivalent formulation which avoids
this problem with the ‘irrational’ number uses “every” quantification. For each natural number n, n ·
2 = n + n. An analogous
analysis applies to the “or” proposition: “1 is equal to 5 + 5, 2\/ is
equal to 5 + 5, \/ 3 is equal to 5 + 5, ... , \/ 100 is equal to 5 + 5, or ...,
etc.” This is easily rephrasable using “some (at least one)”
quantification: “For SOME natural number n, n is equal to 5+5. Aristotelian predicate calculus rescued from undue
existential import As ... universal quantifier and conjunction and,
on the other, between the existential quantifier and disjunction.
This analogy has
not passed unnoticed in logical circles. ... existential quantifiers correspond
to the conjunction and disjunction operators, ...analogous analysis
applies to propositional logic. ... symbol 'V' for the existential quantifier in
the 'Californian'
notation’ (so-called by H. P. Grice when briefly visiting Berkeley)
which was ... In Grice’s system G, the
quantifiers are symbolized with larger versions of the symbols used for
conjunction and disjunction. Although quantified expressions cannot be
translated into expressions without quantifiers, there is a conceptual
connection between the universal quantifier and conjunction and between the
existential quantifier and disjunction. Consider the sentence ∃xPxxPx, for example. It means that either the first member of the UD is
a PP, or the second one is, or the
third one is, . . . . Such a system uses the symbol ‘⋁’ instead of ‘∃.’ Grice’s manoeuver to think of the quantifier
versions of De Morgan's laws is an interesting one. The statement ∀xP(x)∀xP(x) is
very much like a big conjunction. If the universe of discourse is the positive
integers, for example, then it is equivalent to the statement that “P(1)∧P(2)∧P(3)∧⋯P(1)∧P(2)∧P(3)∧⋯”
or, more concisely, we might write
“⋀x∈UP(x),⋀x∈UP(x),” using notation similar to "sigma notation'' for sums. Of
course, this is not really a "statement'' in our official mathematical
logic, because we don't allow infinitely long formulas. In the same way, ∃xP(x)∃xP(x) can
be thought of as
“⋁x∈UP(x).⋁x∈UP(x). Now the first quantifier law can be written “¬⋀x∈UP(x)⇔⋁x∈U(¬P(x)),¬⋀x∈UP(x)⇔⋁x∈U(¬P(x)),” which looks very much like the law “¬(P∧Q)⇔(¬P∨¬Q),¬(P∧Q)⇔(¬P∨¬Q),” but with an infinite conjunction and disjunction. Note that
we can also rewrite De Morgan's laws for ∧∧ and ∨∨ as “¬⋀i=12(Pi(x))¬⋁i=12(Pi(x))⇔⋁i=12(¬Pi(x))⇔⋀i=12(¬Pi(x)).¬⋀i=12(Pi(x))⇔⋁i=12(¬Pi(x))¬⋁i=12(Pi(x))⇔⋀i=12(¬Pi(x)).” As Grice says, “this may look initially cumbersome, but it
reflects the close relationship with the quantifier forms of De Morgan's laws.”
Cited by Grice as translatable by “some (at least one)”.
Noting the divergence that Strawson identified but fails to identify as a
conversational implicaturum. It relates in the case of the square of opposition
to the ‘particularis’ but taking into account or NOT taking into account the
‘unnecessary implication,’ as Russell calls it. “Take ‘every man is mortal.’
Surely we don’t need the unnecessary implication that there is a man!”
eco:
u. – Econ provides a bridge between Graeco-Roman philosophy and Grice! Eco is
one of the few philosophers who considers the very origins of philosophy in
Bologna – and straight from Rome – On top, Eco is one of the first to
generalise most of Grice’s topics under ‘communication,’ rather than using the
Anglo-Saxon ‘mean’ that does not really belong in the Graeco-Roman tradition.
Eco cites H. P. Grice in “Cognitive constraints of communication.” Umberto
b.2, philosopher, intellectual
historian, and novelist. A leading figure in the field of semiotics, the
general theory of signs. Eco has devoted most of his vast production to the
notion of interpretation and its role in communication. In the 0s, building on
the idea that an active process of interpretation is required to take any sign
as a sign, he pioneered reader-oriented criticism The Open Work, 2, 6; The Role
of the Reader, 9 and championed a holistic view of meaning, holding that all of
the interpreter’s beliefs, i.e., his encyclopedia, are potentially relevant to
word meaning. In the 0s, equally influenced by Peirce and the structuralists, he offered a unified theory
of signs A Theory of Semiotics, 6, aiming at grounding the study of
communication in general. He opposed the idea of communication as a natural
process, steering a middle way between realism and idealism, particularly of
the Sapir-Whorf variety. The issue of realism looms large also in his recent
work. In The Limits of Interpretation 0 and Interpretation and
Overinterpretation 2, he attacks deconstructionism. Kant and the Platypus 7
defends a “contractarian” form of realism, holding that the reader’s
interpretation, driven by the Peircean regulative idea of objectivity and
collaborating with the speaker’s underdetermined intentions, is needed to fix
reference. In his historical essays, ranging from medieval aesthetics The
Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 6 to the attempts at constructing artificial and
“perfect” languages The Search for the Perfect Language, 3 to medieval
semiotics, he traces the origins of some central notions in contemporary
philosophy of language e.g., meaning, symbol, denotation and such recent
concerns as the language of mind and translation, to larger issues in the
history of philosophy. All his novels are pervaded by philosophical queries,
such as Is the world an ordered whole? The Name of the Rose, 0, and How much
interpretation can one tolerate without falling prey to some conspiracy
syndrome? Foucault’s Pendulum, 8. Everywhere, he engages the reader in the game
of controlled interpretations.
oeconomia: Cf. Grice on
the principle of oeconomia of rational effort. The Greeks used ‘oeconomia’ to
mean thrifty. Cf. effort. There were three branches of philosophia practica:
philosophia moralis, oeconomia and politica. Grice would often refer to ‘no undue effort,’
‘no unnecessary trouble,’ to go into the effort, ‘not worth the energy,’ and so
on. These utilitarian criteria suggest he is more of a futilitarian than the
avowed Kantian he says he is. This Grice also refers to as ‘maximum,’
‘maximal,’ optimal. It is part of his principle of economy of rational effort. Grice
leaves it open as how to formulate this. Notably in “Causal,” he allows that
‘The pillar box seems red” and “The pillar box is red” are difficult to
formalise in terms in which we legitimize the claim or intuition that ‘The
pillar box IS red” is ‘stronger’ than ‘The pillar box seems red.’ If this were
so, it would provide a rational justification for going into the effort of
uttering something STRONGER (and thus less economical, and more effortful)
under the circumstances. As in “My wife is in the kitchen or in the
bedroom, and the house has only two rooms (and no passages, etc.)” the reason
why the conversational implicaturum is standardly carried is to be found in the
operation of some such general principle as that giving preference to the
making of a STRONGER rather than a weaker statement in the absence of a reason
for not so doing. The implicaturum therefore is not of a part of the meaning of
the expression “seems.” There is however A VERY IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE between
the case of a ‘phenomenalist’ statement (Bar-Hillel it does not count as a
statement) and that of disjunctives, such as “My wife is in the kitchen or ind
the bedroom, and the house has only two rooms (and no passages, etc.).” A
disjunctive is weaker than either of its disjuncts in a straightforward LOGICAL
fashion, viz., a disjunctive is entailed (alla Moore) by, but does not entail,
each of its disjuncts. The statement “The pillar box is red” is NOT STRONGER
than the statement, if a statement it is, “The pillar box seems red,” in this
way. Neither statement entails the other. Grice thinks that he has,
neverthcless a strong inclination to regard the first of these statements as
STRONGER than the second. But Grice leaves it open the ‘determination’ of in
what fashion this might obtain. He suggests that there may be a way to provide
a reductive analysis of ‘strength’ THAT YIELDS that “The pillar box is red” is
a stronger conversational contribution than “The pillar box seems red.”
Recourse to ‘informativeness’ may not do, since Grice is willing to generalise
over the acceptum to cover informative and non-informative cases. While there
is an element of ‘exhibition’ in his account of the communicatum, he might not
be happy with the idea that it is the utterer’s INTENTION to INFORM his
addressee that he, the utterer, INTENDS that his addressee will believe that
he, the utterer, believes that it is raining. “Inform” seems to apply only to
the content of the propositional complexum, and not to the attending ‘animata.’
eddington:
“Some like Einstein, but Eddington’s MY man.” – H. P. Grice. Einstein –
discussed by Grice in “Eddington’s Two Tables” -- Albert 18795, G.-born physicist, founder of the special and general
theories of relativity and a fundamental contributor to several branches of
physics and to the philosophical analysis and critique of modern physics,
notably of relativity and the quantum theory. Einstein was awarded the Nobel
Prize for physics in 2, “especially for his discovery of the law of the
photoelectric effect.” Born in Ulm in the G. state of Württemberg, Einstein
studied physics at the Polytechnic in Zürich, Switzerland. He was called to
Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 4 at the peak of
the G. ultranationalism that surrounded World War I. His reaction was to
circulate an internationalist “Manifesto to Europeans” and to pursue Zionist
and pacifist programs. Following the dramatic confirmation of the general
theory of relativity 9 Einstein became an international celebrity. This fame
also made him the frequent target of G. anti-Semites, who, during one notable
episode, described the theory of relativity as “a Jewish fraud.” In 3 Einstein
left G.y for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although his life
was always centered on science, he was also engaged in the politics and culture
of his times. He carried on an extensive correspondence whose publication will
run to over forty volumes with both famous and ordinary people, including
significant philosophical correspondence with Cassirer, Reichenbach, Moritz
Schlick, and others. Despite reservations over logical positivism, he was
something of a patron of the movement, helping to secure academic positions for
several of its leading figures. In 9 Einstein signed a letter drafted by the
nuclear physicist Leo Szilard informing President Roosevelt about the prospects
for harnessing atomic energy and warning of the G. efforts to make a bomb.
Einstein did not further participate in the development of atomic weapons, and
later was influential in the movement against them. In 2 he was offered, and
declined, the presidency of Israel. He died still working on a unified field theory,
and just as the founders of the Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament
adopted a manifesto he had cosigned with Russell. Einstein’s philosophical
thinking was influenced by early exposure to Kant and later study of Hume and
Mach, whose impact shows in the operationalism used to treat time in his famous
5 paper on special relativity. That work also displays a passion for unity in
science characteristic of nearly all his physical thinking, and that may relate
to the monism of Spinoza, a philosopher whom he read and reread. Einstein’s own
understanding of relativity stressed the invariance of the space-time interval
and promoted realism with regard to the structure of spacetime. Realism also
shows up in Einstein’s work on Brownian motion 5, which was explicitly
motivated by his long-standing interest in demonstrating the reality of
molecules and atoms, and in the realist treatment of light quanta in his
analysis 5 of the photoelectric effect. While he pioneered the development of
statistical physics, especially in his seminal investigations of quantum
phenomena 525, he never broke with his belief in determinism as the only truly
fundamental approach to physical processes. Here again one sees an affinity
with Spinoza. Realism and determinism brought Einstein into conflict with the
new quantum theory 526, whose observer dependence and “flight into statistics”
convinced him that it could not constitute genuinely fundamental physics.
Although influential in its development, he became the theory’s foremost critic,
never contributing to its refinement but turning instead to the program of
unifying the electromagnetic and gravitational fields into one grand,
deterministic synthesis that would somehow make room for quantum effects as
limiting or singular cases. It is generally agreed that his unified field
program was not successful, although his vision continues to inspire other
unification programs, and his critical assessments of quantum mechanics still
challenge the instrumentalism associated with the theory. Einstein’s
philosophical reflections constitute an important chapter in twentieth-century
thought. He understood realism as less a metaphysical doctrine than a
motivational program, and he argued that determinism was a feature of theories
rather than an aspect of the world Einstein, Albert Einstein, Albert 256 256 directly. Along with the unity of
science, other central themes in his thinking include his rejection of
inductivism and his espousal of holism and constructivism or conventionalism,
emphasizing that meanings, concepts, and theories are free creations, not
logically derivable from experience but subject rather to overall criteria of
comprehensibility, empirical adequacy, and logical simplicity. Holism is also
apparent in his acute analysis of the testability of geometry and his rejection
of Poincaré’s geometric conventionalism.
eductum: eduction,
the process of initial clarification, as of a phenomenon, text, or argument,
that normally takes place prior to logical analysis. Out of the flux of vague
and confused experiences certain characteristics are drawn into some kind of
order or intelligibility in order that attention can be focused on them
Aristotle, Physics I. These characteristics often are latent, hidden, or
implicit. The notion often is used with reference to texts as well as
experience. Thus it becomes closely related to exegesis and hermeneutics,
tending to be reserved for the sorts of clarification that precede formal or
logical analyses.
effectum:
causa efficiencis -- effective procedure for the generation of a conversational
implicaturum --, a step-by-step recipe for computing the values of a function.
It determines what is to be done at each step, without requiring any ingenuity
of anyone or any machine executing it. The input and output of the procedure
consist of items that can be processed mechanically. Idealizing a little,
inputs and outputs are often taken to be strings on a finite alphabet. It is
customary to extend the notion to procedures for manipulating natural numbers,
via a canonical notation. Each number is associated with a string, its numeral.
Typical examples of effective procedures are the standard grade school
procedures for addition, multiplication, etc. One can execute the procedures
without knowing anything about the natural numbers. The term ‘mechanical
procedure’ or ‘algorithm’ is sometimes also used. A function f is computable if
there is an effective procedure A that computes f. For every m in the domain of
f, if A were given m as input, it would produce fm as output. Turing machines
are mathematical models of effective procedures. Church’s thesis, or Turing’s
thesis, is that a function is computable provided there is a Turing machine
that computes it. In other words, for every effective procedure, there is a Turing
machine that computes the same function.
egcrateia: or temperantia.
This is a universal. Strictly, it’s the agent who has the power – Or part of
his soul – the rational soul has the power – hence Grice’s metaphor of the
‘power structure of the soul.’ Grice is interested in the linguistic side to
it. What’s the use of “Don’t p!” if ‘p’ is out of the emissee’s rational
control? Cf. Pears on egcreateia as ‘irrationality,’ if motivated. Cfr mesotes.
the geniality of Grice was to
explore theoretical akrasia. Grice’s genius shows in seeing egcrateia and lack
thereof as marks of virtue. “C hasn’t been to prison yet” He is potentially
dishonest. But you cannot be HONEST if you are NOT potentially DISHONEST. Of
course, it does not paint a good picture of the philosopher why he should be
obsessed with ‘akrasia,’ when Aristotle actually opposed the notion to that of
‘enkrateia,’ or ‘continence.’ Surely a philosopher needs to provide a reductive
analysis of ‘continence,’ first; and the reductive analysis of ‘incontinence’
will follow. Aristotle, as Grice well knew, is being a Platonist here, so by
‘continence,’ he meant a power structure of the soul, with the ‘rational’ soul
containing the pre-rational or non-rational soul (animal soul, and vegetal
soul). And right he was, too! So, Grice's
twist is Έγκράτεια, sic in capitals! Liddell and Scott has it as ‘ἐγκράτεια’
[ρα^], which they render as “mastery over,” as used by Plato in
The Republic: “ἐ. ἑαυτοῦ,” meaning ‘self-control’ (Pl. R.390b; ἐ. ἡδονῶν καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν control over them, ib.430e, cf. X.Mem.2.1.1, Isoc.1.21; “περί τι” Arist.EN1149a21, al. Liddell
and Scott go on to give a reference to Grice’s beloved “Eth. Nich.” (1145b8) II. abs., self-control, X. Mem.1.5.1, Isoc.3.44, Arist. EN. 1145b8, al., LXX Si.18.30, Act.Ap. 24.25, etc. Richards, an emotivist, as well as
Collingwood (in “Language”) had made a stereotype of the physicist drawing a
formula on the blackboard. “Full of emotion.” So the idea that there is an
UN-emotional life is a fallacy. Emotion pervades the rational life, as does akrasia.
Grice was particularly irritated by the fact that Davidson, who lacked a
background in the humanities and the classics, could think of akrasia as
“impossible”! Grice was never too interested in emotion (or feeling) because
while we do say I feel that the cat is hungry, we also say, Im feeling
byzantine. The concept of emotion needs a philosophical elucidation. Grice was
curious about a linguistic botany for that! Akrasia for Grice covers both
buletic-boulomaic and doxastic versions. The buletic-boulomaic version may be
closer to the concept of an emotion. Grice quotes from Kennys essay on emotion.
But Grice is looking for more of a linguistic botany. As it happens, Kennys
essay has Griceian implicatura. One problem Grice finds with emotion is that
feel that sometimes behaves like thinks
that Another is that there is no good
Grecian word for emotio. Kenny, of St. Benets, completed his essay on
emotion under Quinton (who would occasionally give seminars with Grice), and
examined by two members of Grices Play Group: Pears and Gardiner. Kenny
connects an emotion to a feeling, which brings us to Grice on feeling boringly
byzantine! Grice proposes a derivation of akrasia in conditional steps for both
buletic-boulomaic and doxastic akrasia. Liddell
and Scott have “ἐπιθυμία,” which they render as desire, yearning, “ἐ.
ἐκτελέσαι” Hdt.1.32; ἐπιθυμίᾳ by passion, oπρονοίᾳ, generally, appetite, αἱ
κατὰ τὸ σῶμα ἐ. esp. sexual desire, lust, αἱ πρὸς τοὺς παῖδας ἐ.; longing after
a thing, desire of or for it, ὕδατος, τοῦ πιεῖν;” “τοῦ πλέονος;” “τῆς
τιμωρίας;” “τῆς μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν πολιτείας;’ “τῆς παρθενίας;’ “εἰς ἐ. τινὸς ἐλθεῖν;’ ἐν
ἐ. “τινὸς εἶναι;’ “γεγονέναι;” “εἰς ἐ. τινὸς “ἀφικέσθαι θεάσασθαι;” “ἐ. τινὸς
ἐμβαλεῖν τινί;” “ἐ. ἐμποιεῖν ἔς τινα an inclination towards;” =ἐπιθύμημα, object
of desire, ἐπιθυμίας τυχεῖν;” “ἀνδρὸς ἐ., of woman, “πενήτων ἐ., of sleep. There
must be more to emotion, such as philia, than epithumia! cf. Grice on Aristotle
on philos. What is an emotion? Aristotle, Rhetoric II.1; Konstan “Pathos
and Passion” R. Roberts, “Emotion”; W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion; Simo
Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Aristotle, Rhet.
II.2-12; De An., Eth.N., and Top.; Emotions in Plato and Aristotle; Philosophy
of Emotion; Aristotle and the Emotions, De An. II.12 and III 1-3; De Mem. 1;
Rhet. II.5; Scheiter, “Images, Imagination, and Appearances, V. Caston, Why
Aristotle Needs Imagination” M. Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational
Persuasion, J. Cooper, “An Aristotelian Theory of Emotion, G. Striker, Emotions
in Context: Aristotles Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoric and his Moral
Psychology." Essays on Aristotles Rhetoric (J. Dow, Aristotles Theory of
the Emotions, Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle PLATO. Aristotle,
Rhetoric I.10-11; Plato Philebus 31b-50e and Republic IV, D. Frede, Mixed
feelings in Aristotles Rhetoric." Essays on Aristotles Rhetoric, J. Moss,
“Pictures and Passions in Plato”; Protagoras 352b-c, Phaedo 83b-84a, Timaeus 69c
STOICS The Hellenistic philosophers; “The Old Stoic Theory of Emotion” The
Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, eEmotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic
Agitation to Christian Temptation, Sorabji, Chrysippus Posidonius Seneca: A High-Level
Debate on Emotion. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in
Hellenistic Ethics M. Graver, Preface and Introduction to Cicero on Emotion:
Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 M. Graver, Stoicism and emotion. Tusculan
Disputations 3 Recommended: Graver, Margaret. "Philo of Alexandria and the
Origins of the Stoic Προπάθειαι." Phronesis. Tusculan Disputations; "The
Stoic doctrine of the affections of the soul; The Stoic life: Emotions, duties,
and fate”; Emotion and decision in stoic psychology, The stoics, individual
emotions: anger, friendly feeling, and hatred. Aristotle Rhetoric II.2-3;
Nicomachean Ethics IV.5; Topics 2.7 and 4.5; Konstan, Anger, Pearson, Aristotle
on Desire; Scheiter, Review of Pearsons Aristotle on Desire; S. Leighton,
Aristotles Account of Anger: Narcissism and Illusions of Self‐Sufficiency: The Complex Evaluative
World of Aristotles Angry Man,” Valuing emotions. Aristotle Rhetoric II. 4; Konstan,
“Hatred” Konstan "Aristotle on Anger and the Emotions: the
Strategies of Status." Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, C.
Rapp, The emotional dimension of friendship: notes on Aristotles account of
philia in Rhetoric II 4” Grice endeavours to give an answer to the
question whether and to what extent philia (friendship), as it is treated by
Aristotle in Rhet. II.4, can be considered a genuine emotion as, for example,
fear and anger are. Three anomalies are identified in the definition and the
account of philia (and of the associated verb philein), which suggest a
negative response to the question. However, these anomalies are analysed and
explained in terms of the specific notes of philia in order to show that
Rhetoric II4 does allow for a consideration of friendship as a genuine
emotion. Seneca, On Anger (De Ira) Seneca, On Anger Seneca, On Anger
(62-96); K. Vogt, “Anger, Present Injustice, and Future Revenge in Senecas De
Ira” FEAR Aristotle, Rhet. II.5; Nicomachean Ethics III.6-9 Aristotles
Courageous Passions, Platos Laws; “Pleasure, Pain, and Anticipation in Platos
Laws, Book I” Konstan, “Fear” PITY Aristotle, Rhetoric II. 8-9; Poetics,
chs. 6, 9-19 ; Konstan, “Pity” E. Belfiore, Tragic pleasures: Aristotle
on plot and emotion, Konstan, Aristotle on the Tragic Emotions, The Soul of
Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama SHAME Aristotle, Rhet. II.6; Nicomachean
Ethics IV.9 Konstan, Shame J. Moss, Shame, Pleasure, and the Divided Soul, B.
Williams, Shame and Necessity. Aristotle investigates two character traits,
continence and incontinence, that are not as blameworthy as the vices but not
as praiseworthy as the virtues. The Grecian expressions are’enkrateia,’
continence, literally mastery, and krasia (“incontinence”; literally, lack of
mastery. An akratic person goes against reason as a result of some pathos
(emotion, feeling”). Like the akratic, an enkratic person experiences a feeling
that is contrary to reason; but unlike the akratic, he acts in accordance with
reason. His defect consists solely in the fact that, more than most people, he
experiences passions that conflict with his rational choice. The akratic person
has not only this defect, but has the further flaw that he gives in to feeling
rather than reason more often than the average person. Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of akrasia:
“propeteia,” or impetuosity and “astheneia, or weakness. The person who is weak
goes through a process of deliberation and makes a choice; but rather than act
in accordance with his reasoned choice, he acts under the influence of a
passion. By contrast, the impetuous person does not go through a process of
deliberation and does not make a reasoned choice; he simply acts under the
influence of a passion. At the time of action, the impetuous person experiences
no internal conflict. But once his act has been completed, he regrets what he
has done. One could say that he deliberates, if deliberation were something
that post-dated rather than preceded action; but the thought process he goes
through after he acts comes too late to save him from error. It is important to bear in mind that when
Aristotle talks about impetuosity and weakness, he is discussing chronic
conditions. The impetuous person is someone who acts emotionally and fails to
deliberate not just once or twice but with some frequency; he makes this error
more than most people do. Because of this pattern in his actions, we would be justified
in saying of the impetuous person that had his passions not prevented him from
doing so, he would have deliberated and chosen an action different from the one
he did perform. The two kinds of
passions that Aristotle focuses on, in his treatment of akrasia, are the
appetite for pleasure and anger. Either can lead to impetuosity and weakness.
But Aristotle gives pride of place to the appetite for pleasure as the passion
that undermines reason. He calls the kind of akrasia caused by an appetite for pleasure
(hedone) “unqualified akrasia”—or, as we might say, akrasia simpliciter, “full
stop.’ Akrasia caused by anger he considers a qualified form of akrasia and
calls it akrasia ‘with respect to anger.’ We thus have these four forms of
akrasia: impetuosity caused by pleasure, impetuosity caused by anger, weakness
caused by pleasure, weakness caused by anger. It should be noticed that
Aristotle’s treatment of akrasia is heavily influenced by Plato’s tripartite
division of the soul. Plato holds that either the spirited part (which houses
anger, as well as other emotions) or the appetitive part (which houses the
desire for physical pleasures) can disrupt the dictates of reason and result in
action contrary to reason. The same threefold division of the soul can be seen
in Aristotles approach to this topic. Although Aristotle characterizes akrasia
and enkrateia in terms of a conflict between reason and feeling, his detailed
analysis of these states of mind shows that what takes place is best described
in a more complicated way. For the feeling that undermines reason contains some
thought, which may be implicitly general. As Aristotle says, anger “reasoning
as it were that one must fight against such a thing, is immediately provoked.
And although in the next sentence he denies that our appetite for pleasure
works in this way, he earlier had said that there can be a syllogism that
favors pursuing enjoyment: “Everything sweet is pleasant, and this is sweet”
leads to the pursuit of a particular pleasure. Perhaps what he has in mind is
that pleasure can operate in either way: it can prompt action unmediated by a
general premise, or it can prompt us to act on such a syllogism. By contrast,
anger always moves us by presenting itself as a bit of general, although hasty,
reasoning. But of course Aristotle does
not mean that a conflicted person has more than one faculty of reason. Rather
his idea seems to be that in addition to our full-fledged reasoning capacity,
we also have psychological mechanisms that are capable of a limited range of
reasoning. When feeling conflicts with reason, what occurs is better described
as a fight between feeling-allied-with-limited-reasoning and full-fledged
reason. Part of us—reason—can remove itself from the distorting influence of
feeling and consider all relevant factors, positive and negative. But another
part of us—feeling or emotion—has a more limited field of reasoning—and
sometimes it does not even make use of it.
Although “passion” is sometimes used as a translation of Aristotles word
pathos (other alternatives are emotion” and feeling), it is important to bear
in mind that his term does not necessarily designate a strong psychological
force. Anger is a pathos whether it is weak or strong; so too is the appetite
for bodily pleasures. And he clearly indicates that it is possible for an
akratic person to be defeated by a weak pathos—the kind that most people would
easily be able to control. So the general explanation for the occurrence of
akrasia cannot be that the strength of a passion overwhelms reason. Aristotle
should therefore be acquitted of an accusation made against him by Austin in a
well-known footnote to ‘A Plea For Excuses.’ Plato and Aristotle, Austin says,
collapsed all succumbing to temptation into losing control of ourselves — a
mistake illustrated by this example. I am very partial to ice cream, and a
bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons
at High Table. I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus
succumbing to temptation and even conceivably (but why necessarily?) going
against my principles. But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch
the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation
of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and
even with finesse. With this, Aristotle can agree. The pathos for the bombe can
be a weak one, and in some people that will be enough to get them to act in a
way that is disapproved by their reason at the very time of action. What is most remarkable about Aristotle’s
discussion of akrasia is that he defends a position close to that of Socrates.
When he first introduces the topic of akrasia, and surveys some of the problems
involved in understanding this phenomenon, he says that Socrates held that
there is no akrasia, and he describes this as a thesis that clearly conflicts
with the appearances (phainomena). Since he says that his goal is to preserve
as many of the appearances as possible, it may come as a surprise that when he
analyzes the conflict between reason and feeling, he arrives at the conclusion
that in a way Socrates was right after all. For, he says, the person who acts
against reason does not have what is thought to be unqualified knowledge; in a
way he has knowledge, but in a way does not.
Aristotle explains what he has in mind by comparing akrasia to the
condition of other people who might be described as knowing in a way, but not
in an unqualified way. His examples are people who are asleep, mad, or drunk; he
also compares the akratic to a student who has just begun to learn a Subjects,
or an actor on the stage. All of these people, he says, can utter the very
words used by those who have knowledge; but their talk does not prove that they
really have knowledge, strictly speaking.
These analogies can be taken to mean that the form of akrasia that
Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity always results from some
diminution of cognitive or intellectual acuity at the moment of action. The
akratic says, at the time of action, that he ought not to indulge in this
particular pleasure at this time. But does he know or even believe that he
should refrain? Aristotle might be taken to reply: yes and no. He has some
degree of recognition that he must not do this now, but not full recognition.
His feeling, even if it is weak, has to some degree prevented him from
completely grasping or affirming the point that he should not do this. And so
in a way Socrates was right. When reason remains unimpaired and unclouded, its
dictates will carry us all the way to action, so long as we are able to
act. But Aristotles agreement with
Socrates is only partial, because he insists on the power of the emotions to
rival, weaken or bypass reason. Emotion challenges reason in all three of these
ways. In both the akratic and the enkratic, it competes with reason for control
over action; even when reason wins, it faces the difficult task of having to
struggle with an internal rival. Second, in the akratic, it temporarily robs
reason of its full acuity, thus handicapping it as a competitor. It is not
merely a rival force, in these cases; it is a force that keeps reason from
fully exercising its power. And third, passion can make someone impetuous; here
its victory over reason is so powerful that the latter does not even enter into
the arena of conscious reflection until it is too late to influence action.
That, at any rate, is one way of interpreting Aristotle’s statements. But it
must be admitted that his remarks are obscure and leave room for alternative
readings. It is possible that when he denies that the akratic has knowledge in
the strict sense, he is simply insisting on the point that no one should be
classified as having practical knowledge unless he actually acts in accordance
with it. A practical knower is not someone who merely has knowledge of general
premises; he must also have knowledge of particulars, and he must actually draw
the conclusion of the syllogism. Perhaps drawing such a conclusion consists in
nothing less than performing the action called for by the major and minor
premises. Since this is something the akratic does not do, he lacks knowledge;
his ignorance is constituted by his error in action. On this reading, there is
no basis for attributing to Aristotle the thesis that the kind of akrasia he
calls weakness is caused by a diminution of intellectual acuity. His
explanation of akrasia is simply that pathos is sometimes a stronger
motivational force than full-fledged reason.
This is a difficult reading to defend, however, for Aristotle says that
after someone experiences a bout of akrasia his ignorance is dissolved and he
becomes a knower again. In context, that appears to be a remark about the form
of akrasia Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity. If so, he is
saying that when an akratic person is Subjects to two conflicting
influences—full-fledged reason versus the minimal rationality of emotion—his
state of knowledge is somehow temporarily undone but is later restored. Here,
knowledge cannot be constituted by the performance of an act, because that is
not the sort of thing that can be restored at a later time. What can be
restored is ones full recognition or affirmation of the fact that this act has
a certain undesirable feature, or that it should not be performed. Aristotle’s
analysis seems to be that both forms of akrasia — weakness and impetuosity
—share a common structure: in each case, ones full affirmation or grasp of what
one should do comes too late. The difference is that in the case of weakness but
not impetuosity, the akratic act is preceded by a full-fledged rational
cognition of what one should do right now. That recognition is briefly and
temporarily diminished by the onset of a less than fully rational affect. There is one other way in which Aristotle’s
treatment of akrasia is close to the Socratic thesis that what people call
akrasia is really ignorance. Aristotle holds that if one is in the special
mental condition that he calls practical wisdom, then one cannot be, nor will
one ever become, an akratic person. For practical wisdom is present only in
those who also possess the ethical virtues, and these qualities require
complete emotional mastery. Anger and appetite are fully in harmony with
reason, if one is practically wise, and so this intellectual virtue is
incompatible with the sort of inner conflict experienced by the akratic person.
Furthermore, one is called practically wise not merely on the basis of what one
believes or knows, but also on the basis of what one does. Therefore, the sort
of knowledge that is lost and regained during a bout of akrasia cannot be
called practical wisdom. It is knowledge only in a loose sense. The low-level
grasp of the ordinary person of what to do is precisely the sort of thing that
can lose its acuity and motivating power, because it was never much of an
intellectual accomplishment to begin with. That is what Aristotle is getting at
when he compares it with the utterances of actors, students, sleepers, drunks,
and madmen. Grice had witnessed how Hare had suffere to try and deal with how
to combine the geniality that “The language of morals” is with his account of
akrasia. Most Oxonians were unhappy with Hares account of akrasia. Its like, in
deontic logic, you cannot actually deal with akrasia. You need buletics. You
need the desiderative, so that you can oppose what is desired with the duty,
even if both concepts are related. “Akrasia” has a nice Grecian touch about it,
and Grice and Hare, as Lit. Hum., rejoiced in being able to explore what
Aristotle had to say about it. They wouldnt go far beyond Aristotle. Plato and
Aristotle were the only Greek philosophers studied for the Lit. Hum. To venture
with the pre-socratics or the hellenistics (even if Aristotle is one) was not
classy enough! Like Pears in Motivated irrationality, Grice allows that
benevolentia may be deemed beneficentia. If Smith has the good will to give
Jones a job, he may be deemed to have given Jones the job, even if Jones never
get it. In buletic akrasia we must consider the conclusion to be desiring what
is not best for the agents own good, never mind if he refrains from doing what
is not best for his own good. Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor. We
shouldnt be saying this, but we are saying it! Grice prefers akrasia, but
he is happy to use the translation by Cicero, also negative, of this:
incontinentia, as if continentia were a virtue! For Grice, the alleged paradox
of akrasia, both alethic and practical, has to be accounted for by a theory of
rationality from the start, and not be deemed a stumbling block. Grice is
interested in both the common-or-garden buletic-boulomaic version of akrasia,
involving the volitive soul ‒ in term of desirability ‒ and doxastic
akrasia, involing the judicative soul proper ‒ in terms of
probability. Grice considers buletic akrasia and doxastic akrasia ‒ the latter
yet distinct from Moores paradox, p but I dont want to believe that p, in
symbols p and ~ψb-dp. Akarsia, see egcrateia. egcrateia: also spelled
acrasia, or akrasia, Grecian term for weakness of will. Akrasia is a character
flaw, also called incontinence, exhibited primarily in intentional behavior
that conflicts with the agent’s own values or principles. Its contrary is
enkrateia strength of will, continence, self-control. Both akrasia and
enkrateia, Aristotle says, “are concerned with what is in excess of the state
characteristic of most people; for the continent abide by their resolutions
more, and the incontinent less, than most people can” Nicomachean Ethics
1152a2527. These resolutions may be viewed as judgments that it would be best to
perform an action of a certain sort, or better to do one thing than another.
Enkrateia, on that view, is the power kratos to act as one judges best in the
face of competing motivation. Akrasia is a want or deficiency of such power.
Aristotle himself limited the sphere of both states more strictly than is now
done, regarding both as concerned specifically with “pleasures and pains and
appetites and aversions arising through touch and taste” [1150a910].
Philosophers are generally more interested in incontinent and continent actions
than in the corresponding states of character. Various species of incontinent
or akratic behavior may be distinguished, including incontinent reasoning and
akratic belief formation. The species of akratic behavior that has attracted
most attention is uncompelled, intentional action that conflicts with a better
or best judgment consciously held by the agent at the time of action. If, e.g.,
while judging it best not to eat a second piece of pie, you intentionally eat
another piece, you act incontinently
provided that your so acting is uncompelled e.g., your desire for the
pie is not irresistible. Socrates denied that such action is possible, thereby
creating one of the Socratic paradoxes. In “unorthodox” instances of akratic
action, a deed manifests weakness of will even though it accords with the
agent’s better judgment. A boy who decides, against his better judgment, to
participate in a certain dangerous prank, might
owing to an avoidable failure of nerve
fail to execute his decision. In such a case, some would claim, his
failure to act on his decision manifests weakness of will or akrasia. If,
instead, he masters his fear, his participating in the prank might manifest
strength of will, even though his so acting conflicts with his better judgment.
The occurrence of akratic actions seems to be a fact of life. Unlike many such
apparent facts, this one has received considerable philosophical scrutiny for
nearly two and a half millennia. A major source of the interest is clear:
akratic action raises difficult questions about the connection between thought
and action, a connection of paramount importance for most philosophical
theories of the explanation of intentional behavior. Insofar as moral theory
does not float free of evidence about the etiology of human behavior, the tough
questions arise there as well. Ostensible akratic action, then, occupies a
philosophical space in the intersection of the philosophy of mind and moral
theory. Refs.: The main references here are in three folders in two
different series. H. P. Grice, “Akrasia,” The H. P. Grice Papers, S. II, c.
2-ff. 22-23 and S. V, c. 6-f. 32, BANC.
Grice’s
ego:
“I follow Buber in distinguishing ‘ego’ from ‘tu.’ With conversation, there’s
the ‘we,’ too.” “If you were the only
girl in the world, there would not be a need for the personal pronoun ‘ego’” –
Grice to his wife, on the day of their engagement. “I went to Oxford. You went
to Cambridge. He went to the London School of Economics.” egocentric
particular, a word whose denotation is determined by identity of the speaker
and/or the time, place, and audience of his utterance. Examples are generally
thought to include ‘I,’ ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’, ‘past’,
‘present’, and ‘future’. The term ‘egocentric particular’ was introduced by
Russell in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth 0. In an earlier work, “The
Philosophy of Logical Atomism” Monist, 819, Russell called such words “emphatic
particulars.” Some important questions arise regarding egocentric particulars. Are
some egocentric particulars more basic than others so that the rest can be
correctly defined in terms of them but they cannot be correctly defined in
terms of the rest? Russell thought all egocentric particulars can be defined by
‘this’; ‘I’, for example, has the same meaning as ‘the biography to which this
belongs’, where ‘this’ denotes a sense-datum experienced by the speaker. Yet,
at the same time, ‘this’ can be defined by the combination ‘what I-now notice’.
Must we use at least some egocentric particulars to give a complete description
of the world? Our ability to describe the world from a speaker-neutral
perspective, so that the denotations of the terms in our description are
independent of when, where, and by whom they are used, depends on our ability
to describe the world without using egocentric particulars. Russell held that
egocentric particulars are not needed in any part of the description of the
world. -- egocentric predicament, each
person’s apparently problematic position as an experiencing subject, assuming
that all our experiences are private in that no one else can have them. Two
problems concern our ability to gain empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to
see how we gain empirical knowledge of what others experience, if all
experience is private. We cannot have their experience to see what it is like,
for any experience we have is our experience and so not theirs. Second, it is
hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of how the external world is,
independently of our experience. All our empirically justified beliefs seem to
rest ultimately on what is given in experience, and if the empirically given is
private, it seems it can only support justified beliefs about the world as we
experience it. A third major problem concerns our ability to communicate with
others. It is hard to see how we describe the world in a language others
understand. We give meaning to some of our words by defining them by other
words that already have meaning, and this process of definition appears to end
with words we define ostensively; i.e., we use them to name something given in
experience. If experiences are private, no one else can grasp the meaning of
our ostensively defined words or any words we use them to define. No one else
can understand our attempts to describe the world. Egoism: cf. H. P. Grice, “The principle of
conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence,” any
view that, in a certain way, makes the self central. There are several different
versions of egoism, all of which have to do with how actions relate to the
self. Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to do what is in their own
selfinterest. Psychological egoism is a view about people’s motives,
inclinations, or dispositions. One statement of psychological egoism says that,
as a matter of fact, people always do what they believe is in their
self-interest and, human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise.
Another says that people never desire anything for its own sake except what
they believe is in their own self-interest. Altruism is the opposite of egoism.
Any ethical view that implies that people sometimes ought to do what is in the
interest of others and not in their self-interest can be considered a form of
ethical altruism. The view that, human nature being what it is, people can do
what they do not believe to be in their self-interest might be called
psychological altruism. Different species of ethical and psychological egoism
result from different interpretations of self-interest and of acting from
self-interest, respectively. Some people have a broad conception of acting from
self-interest such that people acting from a desire to help others can be said
to be acting out of self-interest, provided they think doing so will not, on
balance, take away from their own good. Others have a narrower conception of
acting from selfinterest such that one acts from self-interest only if one acts
from the desire to further one’s own happiness or good. Butler identified
self-love with the desire to further one’s own happiness or good and
self-interested action with action performed from that desire alone. Since we
obviously have other particular desires, such as the desires for honor, for
power, for revenge, and to promote the good of others, he concluded that psychological
egoism was false. People with a broader conception of acting from self-interest
would ask whether anyone with those particular desires would act on them if
they believed that, on balance, acting on them would result in a loss of
happiness or good for themselves. If some would, then psychological egoism is
false, but if, given human nature as it is, no one would, it is true even if
self-love is not the only source of motivation in human beings. Just as there
are broader and narrower conceptions of acting from self-interest, there are
broader and narrower conceptions of self-interest itself, as well as subjective
and objective conceptions of self-interest. Subjective conceptions relate a
person’s self-interest solely to the satisfaction of his desires or to what
that person believes will make his life go best for him. Objective conceptions
see self-interest, at least in part, as independent of the person’s desires and
beliefs. Some conceptions of self-interest are narrower than others, allowing that
the satisfaction of only certain desires is in a person’s self-interest, e.g.,
desires whose satisfaction makes that person’s life go better for her. And some
conceptions of self-interest count only the satisfaction of idealized desires,
ones that someone would have after reflection about the nature of those desires
and what they typically lead to, as furthering a person’s self-interest.
See index to all Grice’s books with index – the first three
of them.
Einheitswissenschaft: Used by Grice ironically. While he was totally
ANTI-Einheitwisseschaft, he was ALL for einheitsphilosophie! The phrase is used by Grice in a more causal
way. He uses the expression ‘unity of science’ vis-à-vis the topic of
teleology. Note that ‘einheitswissenschaft,’ literally translates as
unity-science – there is nothing about ‘making’ if one, which is what –fied
implies. The reason why ‘einheitswissenschaft’ was transliterated as ‘unified
science’ was that Neurath thought that ‘unity-science’ would be a yes-yes in
New England, most New Englanders being Unitarians, but they would like to
include Theology there, ‘into the bargain.’ “Die Einheit von
Wissenschaft.” Die Einheit der Wissenschaft und die
neopositivistische Theorie der „Einheitswissenschaft”. O. Neurath, „Einheit der Wissenschaft als
Aufgabe“,Einheitswissenschaft oder Einheit der Wissenschaft?
| Frank F Vierter Internationaler Kongress für Einheit der Wissenschaft, Cambridge 1938
... Einheitswissenschaft als
Basis der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (pp. positivists held that no essential differences in aim and
method exist between the various branches of science. The scientists of all
disciplines should collaborate closely with each other and should unify the
vocabulary of sciences by logical analysis. According to this view, there is no
sharp demarcation
between natural sciences and social sciences.
In particular, to establish universal laws in the social sciences may be
difficult in practice, but it is not impossible in principle. Through Otto
Neurath, this ideal of scientific unity became a program for logical
positivists, who published a series of books in Vienna under the heading
Unified Science. After the dissolution of the Vienna Circle, Neurath renamed
the official journal Erkenntnis as The Journal of Unified Science, and planned
to continue publication of a series of works in the United States under the
general title The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He thought
that the work would be similar in historical importance to the
eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie under the direction of Diderot.
Unfortunately, this work was never completed, although Carnap and Morris
published some volumes originally prepared for it under the title Foundations
of the Unity of Science. “We have repeatedly pointed out that the formation of
the constructional system as a whole is the task of unified science.” Carnap,
The Logical Structure of the World.
Griceian
elenchus: a cross-examination or refutation. Typically in
Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates has a conversation with someone who claims to
have some sort of knowledge, and Socrates refutes this claim by showing the
interlocutor that what he thinks he knows is inconsistent with his other
opinions. This refutation Grice calls a ‘conversational elenchus.’ “It is not
entirely negative, for awareness of his own ignorance is supposed to spur one’s
conversational interlocutor to further inquiry, and the concepts and
assumptions employed in the refutations serve as the basis for positive
Griceian, and implicatural, treatments of the same topic.” “Now, in contrast, I’ll
grant you that a type of “sophistic elenchi” that one sometimes sees at Oxford,
usually displayed by Rhode scholars from
the New World or the Colonies, under the tutelage of me or others in my group,
may be merely eristic.” “They aim simply at the refutation of an opponent by
any means.” “That is why, incidentally, why Aristotle calls a fallacy that only
*appear* to be a refutation a “sophistici elenchi.”
Grice’s
“sc.”: as the elliptical disimplicaturum -- ellipsis as implicaturum:
an expression from which a ‘part’ has been deleted.. “I distinguish between the
expression-whole and the expression-part.” The term Grice uses for ‘part’ is
‘incomplete’ versus ‘complete,’ and it’s always for metabolical ascriptions
primarily. Thus Grice has "x (utterance-type) means '. . .' " which
is a specification of timeless meaning for an utterance-type ad which can be
either (i a) “complete” or (i b) non-complete (partial) or incomplete]. He also
has "x (utterance-type) meant here '...'", which is a specification
of applied timeless meaning for an utterance-type which again can be either
(2a) complete or (2b) partial, non-complete, or incomplete. So ellipsis can now
be redefined in terms of the complete-incomplete distinction. “Smith is” is
incomplete. “Smith is clever” is complete. “Uusually for conciseness.” As Grice notes,
“an elliptical or incomplete sentence is often used to answer a questions
without repeating material occurring in the question; e. g. ‘Grice’ may be the answer to the question of
the authorship of “The grounds of morality” or to the question of the
authorship of “Studies in the Way of Words.” ‘Grice’ can be seen as an ‘elliptical’
name when used as an ellipsis of ‘G. R. Grice’ or “H. P. Grice” and “Grice” can
be seen as an elliptical *sentence* when used as an ellipsis for ‘G. R. Grice
is the author of ‘The Grounds of Morality”” or “H. P. Grice is the author of
Studies in the Way of Words.’Other typical elliptical sentences are: ‘Grice is
a father of two [+> children]’, ‘Grice, or Godot, arrived for the tutorial
past twelve [+> midnight]’. A typical ellipsis that occurs in discussion of
ellipses involves citing the elliptical sentences with the deleted material
added in brackets often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’ – “Grice is a father of two
(sc. Children),” Grice, or Godot, as we tutees call him, arrived for the
tutorial past twelve (sc. midnight)” -- instead of also presenting the complete
sentence. As Grice notes, ellipsis can also occurs above the sentential level,
e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the course of argumentation, as
in “Grice is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.” ‘Enthymeme,’ literally,
‘in-the-breast,’ designates an elliptical argument expression from which one or
more premise-expressions have been deleted, “or merely implicated.” -- ‘elliptic
ambiguity’ designates ambiguity arising from ellipsis, as does ‘elliptic implicaturum.’
“Sc.” Grice calls “elliptical disimplicaturum.”
Emersonian implicaturum:
r. w., New-World (specifically New-England) philosophical essayist, lecturer,
and poet, a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement. He was born in
Boston and educated at Harvard. As a young man he taught school and served as a
Unitarian minister 182632. After he resigned his pastorate in 1832, he traveled
to Europe to visit Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. Upon his return, he
settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and began anew as a public lecturer,
essayist, and cultural critic. All the while he maintained a voluminous
correspondence and kept a detailed, evocative journal. Most of this material
has been published, and it casts considerable light on the depth of his
thought, at times more so than his public presentations and books. His life was
pockmarked by personal tragedies, notably the death of his father when Emerson
was eight; the death of his first wife, Ellen, after two years of marriage; and
the death of his oldest son, Waldo, at the age of five. Such afflictions belie
the commonly held assumption that Emerson was a thinker who did not face the
intractable problem of evil. To the contrary, his writings should be read as a
continuing struggle to render the richest possible version of our situation,
given that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Although Emerson did not
write a systematic work in philosophy, he unquestionably bequeathed an
important philosophical vision and countless philosophical pieces. Beginning
with his concentration on the motif of nature, its embracing quality, and the
rhythms of our inextricable presence within its activities, Emerson details the
“compensatory” ebb and flow of the human journey. The human soul and nature are
related as “print” to “seal,” and yet nature is not always beneficent. In his
essay “Compensation,” emanationism Emerson, Ralph Waldo 258 258 Emerson writes that “the value of the
universe continues to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so
is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion, if the force, so the
limitation.” After the acclaim given the publication of Emerson’s first book,
Nature 1836, he began to gather his public lectures, a presentational medium at
which he was riveting, convincing, and inspiring. In 1841 Emerson published his
Essays First Series, which included the
lovely piece “Circles,” wherein he follows the blunt maxim “we grizzle every
day” with the healing affirmation that “life is a series of surprises.” This
volume also contains “Self-Reliance,” which furnished a motto for the
self-proclaiming intrepidity of nineteenth-century individualism. The enthusiastic response to
Emerson’s essays enabled him to publish three additional collections within the
decade: Essays Second Series 1844,
Nature, Addresses and Lectures 1849, and Representative Men 1850. These books
and their successors contained lectures, orations, poems, and addresses over a
wide range of topics, philosophical, personal, characterological, travel,
historical, and literary. Emerson’s prose is swift, clear, and epigrammatic,
like a series of written stochastic probes, resulting in a Yankee crazy quilt,
munificent of shape and color. Emerson spoke to be heard and wrote to be read,
especially by the often denigrated “common” person. In fact, during Emerson’s
European lecture tour in 1848, a letter to a London newspaper requested lowering
the admission price so that poorer people could attend, for “to miss him is to
lose an important part of the Nineteenth Century.” Emerson’s deeply democratic
attitude had a reflective philosophical base. He believed that ordinary
experience was epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite
messages. Despite his Brahmanic appearance and demeanor, Emerson was in
continuous touch with ordinary things. He wrote, “Our chief experiences have
been casual.” His belief in the explosive and pedagogical character of ordinary
experience is especially present in his influential oration “The Scholar.” After criticizing thought as thoroughly derivative, he plots
the influences necessary to generate a genuine scholar, paramount among them
nature and the learning of the past, though he cautions us not to be trapped in
excessive retrospection at the expense of “an original relation to the
universe.” It is his discussion of “action” as the third influence on the
scholar that enables him to project his clearest statement of his underlying
philosophical commitment. Without action, “thought can never ripen into truth,”
moreover, “thinking is a partial act,” whereas living is a “total act.”
Expressly opposed to any form of psychological, religious, philosophical, or
behavioral dualism, he counsels us that the spiritual is not set apart, beyond
reach of those who toil in the everyday. Rather, the most profound meanings of
the human condition, “lurk” in the “common,” the “low,” the “familiar,” the
“today.” The influence of the thought of Emerson reaches across class, caste,
genre, and persuasion. Thinkers as diverse as James, Nietzsche, Whitman,
Proust, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law
Olmsted, and Wallace Stevens are among those deeply indebted to Emerson. Yet,
it was Dewey who best caught the enduring bequest of Emerson, writing of “the
final word of Emerson’s philosophy, [as] the identity of Being, unqualified and
immutable, with character.”
sender and sendee: Emissee: this
is crucial. There’s loads of references on this. Apparently, some philosopher
cannot think of communication without the emissee. But surely Grice loved
Virginia Woolf. “And when she was writing ‘The Hours,’ I’m pretty sure she
cared a damn whether the rest of the world existed!” Let's explore the issue
of the UTTERER'S OCCASION-MEANING IN THE ABSENCE OF A (so-called)
AUDIENCE -- or
sender without sendee, as it were. There are various scenarios of utterances by
which the utterer or sender is correctly said to have communicated that
so-and-so, such that there is no actual person or set of persons (or sentient
beings) whom the utterer or sender is addressing and in whom the sender intends
to induce a response. The range of these scenarios includes, or might be
thought to include, such items as -- the posting of a notice, like
"Keep out" or "This bridge is dangerous," -- an entry
in a diary, -- the writing of a note to clarify one's thoughts when
working on some problem, -- soliloquizing, -- rehearsing a part in a
projected conversation, and -- silent thinking. At least some of
these scenarios are unprovided for in the reductive analysis so far
proposed. The examples which Grice's account should cover fall into three
groups: (a) Utterances for which the utterer or sender thinks there may
(now or later) be an audience or sendee (as when Grice's son sent a letter to
Santa). U may think that some particular person, e. g. himself at a future
date in the case of a diary entry, may (but also may not) encounter U's utterance.Or
U may think that there may or may not be some person or other who is or will be
an auditor or sendee or recipient of his utterance. (b) An utterances
which the utterer knows that it is not to be addressed to any actual sendee,
but which the utterer PRETENDS to address or send to some particular person or
type of person, OR which he thinks of as being addressed (or sent) to some
imagined sendee or type of sendee (as in the rehearsal of a speech or of his
part in a projected conversation, or Demosthenes or Noel Coward talking to the
gulls.(c) An utterances (including what Occam calls an "internal"
utterance) with respect to which the utterer NEITHER thinks it possible that
there may be an actual sendee nor imagines himself as addressing sending so-and-so
to a sendee, but nevertheless intends his utterance to be such that it would
induce a certain sort of response in a certain perhaps fairly indefinite kind
of sendee were it the case that such a sendee *were* present.In the case of
silent thinking the idea of the presence of a sendee will have to be
interpreted 'liberally,' as being the idea of there being a sendee for a public
counter-part of the utterer's internal, private speech, if there is
one. Austin refused to discuss Vitters's private-language argument.In this
connection it is perhaps worth noting that some cases of verbal thinking
(especially the type that Vitters engages in) do fall outside the scope of
Grice's account. When a verbal though merely passes through
Vitters's head (or brain) as distinct from being "framed" by Vitters,
it is utterly inappropriate (even in Viennese) to talk of Vitters as having
communicated so-and-so by "the very thought of you," to echo Noble. Vitters is, perhaps, in
such a case, more like a sendee than a sender -- and wondering who such an
intelligent sender might (or then might not) be. In any case, to calm the neo-Wittgensteinians,
Grice propose a reductive analysis which surely accounts for the examples which
need to be accounted for, and which will allow as SPECIAL (if paradigmatic)
cases (now) the range of examples in which there is, and it is known by the
utterer that there is, an actual sendee. A soul-to-soul transfer. This redefinition is
relatively informal. Surely Grice could present a more formal version which would gain
in precision at the cost of ease of comprehension. Let "p" (and
k') range over properties of persons (possible sendees); appropriate
substituends for "O" (and i') will include such diverse expressions
as "is a passer-by," "is a passer-by who sees this
notice," "understands the Viennese cant," "is
identical with Vitters." As will be seen, for Grice to communicate
that so-and-so it will have to be possible to identify the value of
"/" (which may be fairly indeterminate) which U has in mind; but we
do not have to determine the range from which U makes a selection. "U
means by uttering x that *iP" is true iff (30) (3f (3c): I. U utters x intending
x to be such that anyone who has q would think that (i) x has f (2) f
is correlated in way c with M-ing that p (3) (3 0'): U intends x to be
such that anyone who has b' would think, via thinking (i) and (2), that U4's
that p (4) in view of (3), U O's that p; and II. (operative only for
certain substituends for "*4") U utters x intending that, should
there actually be anyone who has 0, he would via thinking (4), himself a that
p; ' and III. It is not the case that, for some inference-element E, U
intends x to be such that anyone who has 0 will both (i') rely on E in coming
to O+ that p and (2') think that (3k'): Uintends x to be such that anyone who
has O' will come to /+ that p without relying on E. Notes: (1)
"i+" is to be read as "p" if Clause II is operative, and as
"think that UO's" if Clause II is non-operative. (2) We need to
use both "i" and "i'," since we do not wish to require that
U should intend his possible audience to think of U's possible audience under
the same description as U does himself. Explanatory comments: (i) It
is essential that the intention which is specified in Clause II should be
specified as U's intention "that should there be anyone who has 0, he
would (will) . . ." rather than, analogously with Clauses I and II, as U's
intention "that x should be such that, should anyone be 0, he would ...
." If we adopt the latter specification, we shall be open to an objection,
as can be shown with the aid of an example.Suppose that, Vitters is married,
and further, suppose he married an Englishwoman. Infuriated by an afternoon
with his mother-in-law, when he is alone after her departure, Vitters relieves
his feelings by saying, aloud and passionately, in German:"Do not ye ever
comest near me again!"It will no doubt be essential to Vitters's momentary
well-being that Vitters should speak with the intention that his remark be such
that were his mother-in-law present, assuming as we say, that he married and
does have one who, being an Englishwoman, will most likely not catch the
Viennese cant that Vitters is purposively using, she should however, in a very
Griceian sort of way, form the intention not to come near Vitters
again. It would, however, be pretty unacceptable if it were represented as
following from Vitters's having THIS intention (that his remark be such that,
were his mother-in-law be present, she should form the intnetion to to come near
Vitters again) that what Vitters is communicating (who knows to who) that the
denotatum of 'Sie' is never to come near Vitters again.For it is false that, in
the circumstances, Vitters is communicating that by his remark. Grice's
reductive analysis is formulated to avoid that difficulty. (2) Suppose
that in accordance with the definiens o U intends x to be such that anyone who is f will
think ... , and suppose that the value of "O" which U has in mind is
the property of being identical with a particular person A. Then it will
follow that U intends A to think . . . ; and given the further condition,
fulfilled in any normal (paradigmatic, standard, typical, default) case, that U
intends the sendee to think that the sendee is the intended sendee, we are assured
of the truth of a statement from which the definiens is inferrible by the rule
of existential generalisation (assuming the legitimacy of this application of
existential generalisation to a statement the expression of which contains such
"intensional" verbs as "intend" and
"think"). It can also be shown that, for any case in which there
is an actual sendee who knows that he is the intended sendee, if the definiens
in the standard version is true then the definiens in the adapted version will
be true. If that is so, given the definition is correct, for any normal
case in which there IS an actual sendee the fulfillment of the definiens will
constitute a necessary and sufficient condition for U's having communicated
that *1p.
sendeeless: ‘audienceless’ “One good example of a
sendeeless implicaturum is Sting’s “Message in a bottle.” – Grice. Grice: “When
Sting says, “I’m sending out an ‘s.o.s’ he is being Peirceian.”
emissum: emissor. A construction out of ex- and ‘missum,’ cf. Grice
on psi-trans-mis-sion. Grice’s utterer, but turned Griceian, To emit, to
translate some Gricism or other. Cf. proffer. emissum. emissor-emissum distinction.
Frequently ignored by Austin. Grice usually formulates it ‘roughly.’ Strawson
for some reason denied the reducibility of the emissum to the emissor. Vide his
footnote in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford. it is a truth implicitly
acknowledged by communication theorists themselves -- this acknowledgement is
is certainly implicit in Grice's distinction between what speakers actually say,
in a favored sense of 'say', and what they imply (see "Utterer's Meaning,
SentenceMeaning and Word-Meaning," in Foundations of Language, 1968) -- that
in almost all the things we should count as sentences there is a substantial
central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of truth-conditions
or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from that of a
truth-condition, for example the notion, as we might call it, of a compliance
condition in the case of an imperative sentence or a fulfillment-condition in
the case of an optative. If we suppose, therefore, that an account can be given
of the notion of a truthcondition itself, an account which is indeed
independent of reference to communicationintention, then we may reasonably think
that the greater part of the task of a general theory of meaning has been
accomplished without such reference. So let us see if we can rephrase the
distinction for a one-off predicament. By drawing a skull, Blackburn
communicates to his fellow Pembrokite that there is danger around. The
proposition is ‘There is danger around’. Of the claims, one is literal; the
other metabolical. Blackburn means that there is danger around. Blackburn
communicates that there is danger around, possibly leading to death. The emissum,
Blackburn’s drawing of the skull ‘means’ that there is danger around. Since the
fact that Blackburn communicates that p is diaphanous, we have yet another way
of posing the distinction: Blackburn communicates that there is danger around.
What is communicated by Blackburn – his emissum – is true. Note that in this
diaphanous change from ‘Blackburn communicates that there is danger around’ and
‘What Blackburn communicates, viz. that there is danger around, is true’ we
have progressed quite a bit. There are ways of involving ‘true’ in the first
stage. Blackburn communicates that there is danger around, and he communicates
something true. In the classical languages, this is done in the accusative
case. emissum. emit. V. emissor. A good
verb used by Grice. It gives us ‘emitter, and it is more Graeco-Roman than his
‘utterer,’ which Cicero would think a barbarism.
emotum: the emotum, the motum. Grice enjoyed a bit of history of
philosophy. Cf. conatum. And Urmson’s company helped. Urmson produced a brilliant
study of the ‘emotive’ theory of ethics, which is indeed linguistic and based
on Ogden. Diog. Laert. of Zeno of Citium. πρὸς τὸν εἰπόντα, "πολλοί σου
καταγελῶσιν," "ἀλλ ἐγώ," ἔφη, "οὐ κατα- γελῶμαι; to the
question, who is a friend?, Zeno’s answer is, ‘a second self (alter ego). One
direct way to approach friend is via emotion, as Aristotle did, and found it
aporetic as did Grice. Aristotle discusses philia in Eth. Nich. but it is in
Rhet. where he allows for phulia to be an emotion. Grice was very fortunate to
have Hardie as his tutor. He overused Hardies lectures on Aristotle, too, and
instilled them on his own tutees! Grice is concerned with the rather
cryptic view by Aristotle of the friend (philos, amicus) as the alter
ego. In Grices cooperative, concerted, view of things, a friend in need is
a friend indeed! Grice is interested in Aristotle finding himself in an aporia.
In Nicomachean Ethics IX.ix, Aristotle poses the question whether the happy man
will need friends or not. Kosman correctly identifies this question as asking
not whether friends are necessary in order to achieve eudæmonia, but why we
require friends even when we are happy. The question is not why we need friends
to become happy, but why we need friends when we are happy, since the eudæmon
must be self-sufficient. Philia is required for the flourishing of the life of
practical virtue. The solution by Aristotle to the aporia here, however, points
to the requirement of friendships even for the philosopher, in his life of theoretical
virtue. The olution by Aristotle to the aporia in Nicomachean Ethics IX.ix
is opaque, and the corresponding passage in Eudeiman Ethics VII.xii is scarcely
better. Aristotle thinks he has found the solution to this aporia. We must take
two things into consideration, that life is desirable and also that the good
is, and thence that it is desirable that such a nature should belong to oneself
as it belongs to them. If then, of such a pair of corresponding s. there is
always one s. of the desirable, and the known and the perceived are in general
constituted by their participation in the nature of the determined, so that to
wish to perceive ones self is to wish oneself to be of a certain definite
character,—since, then we are not in ourselves possessed of each such
characters, but only in participation in these qualities in perceiving and
knowing—for the perceiver becomes perceived in that way in respect in which he
first perceives, and according to the way in which and the object which he
perceives; and the knower becomes known in the same way— therefore it is for
this reason that one always desires to live, because one always desires to
know; and this is because he himself wishes to be the object known. emotion, as
conceived by philosophers and psychologists, any of several general types of
mental states, approximately those that had been called “passions” by earlier
philosophers, such as Descartes and Hume. Anger, e.g., is one emotion, fear a
second, and joy a third. An emotion may also be a content-specific type, e.g.,
fear of an earthquake, or a token of an emotion type, e.g., Mary’s present fear
that an earthquake is imminent. The various states typically classified as
emotions appear to be linked together only by overlapping family resemblances
rather than by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus an adequate
philosophical or psychological “theory of emotion” should probably be a family
of theories. Even to label these states “emotions” wrongly suggests that they
are all marked by emotion, in the older sense of mental agitation a
metaphorical extension of the original sense, agitated motion. A person who is,
e.g., pleased or sad about something is not typically agitated. To speak of
anger, fear, joy, sadness, etc., collectively as “the emotions” fosters the
assumption which James said he took for granted that these are just
qualitatively distinct feelings of mental agitation. This exaggerates the
importance of agitation and neglects the characteristic differences, noted by
Aristotle, Spinoza, and others, in the types of situations that evoke the
various emotions. One important feature of most emotions is captured by the
older category of passions, in the sense of ‘ways of being acted upon’. In many
lanemotion emotion 259 259 guages
nearly all emotion adjectives are derived from participles: e.g., the English
words ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’, ‘ashamed’, ‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ‘embarrassed’,
‘excited’, ‘frightened’, ‘horrified’, ‘irritated’, ‘pleased’, ‘terrified’,
‘surprised’, ‘upset’, and ‘worried’. When we are, e.g., embarrassed, something
acts on us, i.e., embarrasses us: typically, some situation or fact of which we
are aware, such as our having on unmatched shoes. To call embarrassment a
passion in the sense of a way of being acted upon does not imply that we are
“passive” with respect to it, i.e., have no control over whether a given
situation embarrasses us and thus no responsibility for our embarrassment. Not
only situations and facts but also persons may “do” something to us, as in love
and hate, and mere possibilities may have an effect on us, as in fear and hope.
The possibility emotions are sometimes characterized as “forward-looking,” and
emotions that are responses to actual situations or facts are said to be
“backward-looking.” These temporal characterizations are inaccurate and
misleading. One may be fearful or hopeful that a certain event occurred in the
past, provided one is not certain as to whether it occurred; and one may be,
e.g., embarrassed about what is going to occur, provided one is certain it will
occur. In various passions the effect on us may include involuntary physiological
changes, feelings of agitation due to arousal of the autonomic nervous system,
characteristic facial expressions, and inclinations toward intentional action
or inaction that arise independently of any rational warrant.
Phenomenologically, however, these effects do not appear to us to be alien and
non-rational, like muscular spasms. Rather they seem an integral part of our
perception of the situation as, e.g., an embarrassing situation, or one that
warrants our embarrassment. emotive
conjugation: I went to Oxford; you went to Cambridge; he went to the London
School of Economics”: a humorous verbal conjugation, designed to expose and
mock first-person bias, in which ostensibly the same action is described in
successively more pejorative terms through the first, second, and third persons
e.g., “I am firm, You are stubborn, He is a pig-headed fool”. This example was
used by Russell in the course of a BBC Radio “Brains’ Trust” discussion. It was
popularized later that year when The New Statesman ran a competition for other
examples. An “unprecedented response” brought in 2,000 entries, including: “I
am well informed, You listen to gossip, He believes what he reads in the
paper”; and “I went to Oxford, You went to Cambridge, He went to the London
School of Economics” Russell was educated at Cambridge and later taught
there. -- emotivism, a noncognitivist
metaethical view opposed to cognitivism, which holds that moral judgments
should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions,
persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates
purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments or the
propositions that they express can be true or false, and that cognizers can
have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral
judgments express. Noncognitivism denies these claims; it holds that moral
judgments do not make assertions or express propositions. If moral judgments do
not express propositions, the former can be neither true nor false, and moral
belief and moral knowledge are not possible. The emotivist is a noncognitivist
who claims that moral judgments, in their primary sense, express the
appraiser’s attitudes approval or
disapproval toward the object of
evaluation, rather than make assertions about the properties of that object.
Because emotivism treats moral judgments as the expressions of the appraiser’s
pro and con attitudes, it is sometimes referred to as the boohurrah theory of
ethics. Emotivists distinguish their thesis that moral judgments express the
appraiser’s attitudes from the subjectivist claim that they state or report the
appraiser’s attitudes the latter view is a form of cognitivism. Some versions
of emotivism distinguish between this primary, emotive meaning of moral
judgments and a secondary, descriptive meaning. In its primary, emotive
meaning, a moral judgment expresses the appraiser’s attitudes toward the object
of evaluation rather than ascribing properties to that object. But secondarily,
moral judgments refer to those non-moral properties of the object of evaluation
in virtue of which the appraiser has and expresses her attitudes. So if I judge
that your act of torture is wrong, my judgment has two components. Its primary,
emotive sense is to express my disapproval of your act. Its secondary,
descriptive sense is to denote those non-moral properties of your act upon
which I base my disapproval. These are presumably the very properties that make
it an act of torture roughly, a causing
of intense pain in order to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. By
making emotive meaning primary, emotivists claim to preserve the univocity of
moral language between speakers who employ different criteria of application
for their moral terms. Also, by stressing the intimate connection between moral
judgment and the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture
the motivational properties of moral judgment. Some emotivists have also
attempted to account for ascriptions of truth to moral judgments by accepting the
redundancy account of ascriptions of truth as expressions of agreement with the
original judgment. The emotivist must think that such ascriptions of truth to
moral judgments merely reflect the ascriber’s agreement in noncognitive
attitude with the attitude expressed by the original judgment. Critics of
emotivism challenge these alleged virtues. They claim that moral agreement need
not track agreement in attitude; there can be moral disagreement without
disagreement in attitude between moralists with different moral views, and
disagreement in attitude without moral disagreement between moralists and
immoralists. By distinguishing between the meaning of moral terms and speakers’
beliefs about the extension of those terms, critics claim that we can account for
the univocity of moral terms in spite of moral disagreement without introducing
a primary emotive sense for moral terms. Critics also allege that the emotivist
analysis of moral judgments as the expression of the appraiser’s attitudes
precludes recognizing the possibility of moral judgments that do not engage or
reflect the attitudes of the appraiser. For instance, it is not clear how
emotivism can accommodate the amoralist
one who recognizes moral requirements but is indifferent to them.
Critics also charge emotivism with failure to capture the cognitive aspects of
moral discourse. Because emotivism is a theory about moral judgment or
assertion, it is difficult for the emotivist to give a semantic analysis of
moral predicates in unasserted contexts, such as in the antecedents of
conditional moral judgments e.g., “If he did wrong, then he ought to be
punished”. Finally, one might want to recognize the truth of some moral
judgments, perhaps in order to make room for the possibility of moral mistakes.
If so, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivist’s appeal to redundancy
or disquotational accounts of the ascription of truth. Emotivism was introduced
by Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic 2d ed., 6 and refined by C. L. Stevenson
in Facts and Values 3 and Ethics and Language 4. Refs.:
There is an essay on “Emotions and akrasia,” but the topic is scattered in
various places, such as Grice’s reply to Davidson on intending. Grice has an
essay on ‘Kant and friendship,’ too, The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
conversational empathy – principle of conversational
empathy -- Principle of Conversational Empathy – a term devised
by Grice for the expectation a conversationalist has that his co-partner will
honour his conversational goal, however transitory. imaginative projection into
another person’s situation, especially for vicarious capture of its emotional
and motivational qualities. The term is an English rendering by the Anglo
psychologist E. G. Titchener, 1867 7 of the G. Einfühlung, made popular by
Theodore Lipps 18514, which also covered imaginative identification with
inanimate objects of aesthetic contemplation. Under ‘sympathy’, many aspects
were earlier discussed by Hume, Adam Smith, and other Scottish philosophers.
Empathy has been considered a precondition of ethical thinking and a major
contributor to social bonding and altruism, mental state attribution, language
use, and translation. The relevant spectrum of phenomena includes automatic and
often subliminal motor mimicry of the expressions or manifestations of
another’s real or feigned emotion, pain, or pleasure; emotional contagion, by
which one “catches” another’s apparent emotion, often unconsciously and without
reference to its cause or “object”; conscious and unconscious mimicry of
direction of gaze, with consequent transfer of attention from the other’s
response to its cause; and conscious or unconscious role-taking, which
reconstructs in imagination with or without imagery aspects of the other’s
situation as the other “perceives” it.
empedocles:
Grecian preSocratic philosopher who created a physical theory in response to
Parmenides while incorporating Pythagorean ideas of the soul into his
philosophy. Following Parmenides in his rejection of coming-to-be and
perishing, he accounted for phenomenal change by positing four elements his “roots,”
rizomata, earth, water, air, and fire. When they mix together in set
proportions they create compound substances such as blood and bone. Two forces
act on the elements, Love and Strife, the former joining the different
elements, the latter separating them. In his cyclical cosmogony the four
elements combine to form the Sphere, a completely homogeneous spherical body
permeated by Love, which, shattered by Strife, grows into a cosmos with the
elements forming distinct cosmic masses of earth, water the seas, air, and
fire. There is controversy over whether Empedocles posits one or two periods
when living things exist in the cycle. On one view there are two periods,
between which intervenes a stage of complete separation of the elements.
Empedocles accepts the Pythagorean view of reincarnation of souls, seeing life
as punishment for an original sin and requiring the expiation of a pious and
philosophical life. Thus the exile and return of the individual soul reflects
in the microcosm the cosmic movement from harmony to division to harmony.
Empedocles’ four elements became standard in natural philosophy down to the
early modern era, and Aristotle recognized his Love and Strife as an early
expression of the efficient cause. Vide
“Italic Griceians” – While in the New World, ‘Grecian philosophy’ is believed
to have happened ‘in Greece,’ Grice was amused that ‘most happened in Italy!’
empiricism:
One of Grice’s twelve labours -- Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, philosopher, an
empiricist who was considered the great analytical mind of his generation.
Close to Rousseau and Diderot, he stayed within the church. He is closely
perhaps excessively identified with the image of the statue that, in the Traité
des sensations Treatise on Sense Perception, 1754, he endows with the five
senses to explain how perceptions are assimilated and produce understanding cf.
also his Treatise on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 1746. He maintains a
critical distance from precursors: he adopts Locke’s tabula rasa but from his
first work to Logique Logic, 1780 insists on the creative role of the mind as
it analyzes and compares sense impressions. His Traité des animaux Treatise on
Animals, 1755, which includes a proof of the existence of God, considers sensate
creatures rather than Descartes’s animaux machines and sees God only as a final
cause. He reshapes Leibniz’s monads in the Monadologie Monadology, 1748,
rediscovered in 0. In the Langue des calculs Language of Numbers, 1798 he
proposes mathematics as a model of clear analysis. The origin of language and
creation of symbols eventually became his major concern. His break with
metaphysics in the Traité des systèmes Treatise on Systems, 1749 has been
overemphasized, but Condillac does replace rational constructs with sense
experience and reflection. His empiricism has been mistaken for materialism,
his clear analysis for simplicity. The “ideologues,” Destutt de Tracy and
Laromiguière, found Locke in his writings. Jefferson admired him. Maine de
Biran, while critical, was indebted to him for concepts of perception and the
self; Cousin disliked him; Saussure saw him as a forerunner in the study of the
origins of language. Empiricism – one of Grice’s twelve labours – This
implicates he saw himself as a Rationalist, rather -- Cordemoy, Géraud de,
philosopher and member of the Cartesian school. His most important work is his
Le discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours, published in 1666 and
reprinted under slightly different titles a number of times thereafter. Also
important are the Discours physique de la parole 1668, a Cartesian theory of
language and communication; and Une lettre écrite à un sçavant religieux 1668,
a defense of Descartes’s orthodoxy on certain questions in natural philosophy.
Cordemoy also wrote a history of France, left incomplete at his death. Like
Descartes, Cordemoy advocated a mechanistic physics explaining physical
phenomena in terms of size, shape, and local motion, and converse Cordemoy,
Géraud de 186 186 held that minds are
incorporeal thinking substances. Like most Cartesians, Cordemoy also advocated
a version of occasionalism. But unlike other Cartesians, he argued for atomism
and admitted the void. These innovations were not welcomed by other members of
the Cartesian school. But Cordemoy is often cited by later thinkers, such as
Leibniz, as an important seventeenth-century advocate of atomism. Empiricism: one of Grice’s twelve labours --
Cousin, V., philosopher who set out to merge the psychological tradition with the pragmatism
of Locke and Condillac and the inspiration of the Scottish Reid, Stewart and G.
idealists Kant, Hegel. His early courses at the Sorbonne 1815 18, on “absolute”
values that might overcome materialism and skepticism, aroused immense
enthusiasm. The course of 1818, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien Of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good, is preserved in the Adolphe Garnier edition of student
notes 1836; other early texts appeared in the Fragments philosophiques
Philosophical Fragments, 1826. Dismissed from his teaching post as a liberal
1820, arrested in G.y at the request of the
police and detained in Berlin, he was released after Hegel intervened
1824; he was not reinstated until 1828. Under Louis-Philippe, he rose to
highest honors, became minister of education, and introduced philosophy into
the curriculum. His eclecticism, transformed into a spiritualism and cult of
the “juste milieu,” became the official philosophy. Cousin rewrote his work
accordingly and even succeeded in having Du Vrai third edition, 1853 removed
from the papal index. In 1848 he was forced to retire. He is noted for his
educational reforms, as a historian of philosophy, and for his translations
Proclus, Plato, editions Descartes, and portraits of ladies of
seventeenth-century society. Empiricism – one of Grice’s twelve labours --
empirical decision theory, the scientific study of human judgment and decision
making. A growing body of empirical research has described the actual
limitations on inductive reasoning. By contrast, traditional decision theory is
normative; the theory proposes ideal procedures for solving some class of
problems. The descriptive study of decision making was pioneered by figures
including Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, and Lee Ross, and
their empirical research has documented the limitations and biases of various
heuristics, or simple rules of thumb, routinely used in reasoning. The
representativeness heuristic is a rule of thumb used to judge probabilities
based on the degree to which one class represents or resembles another class.
For example, we assume that basketball players have a “hot hand” during a
particular game producing an
uninterrupted string of successful shots
because we underestimate the relative frequency with which such successful
runs occur in the entire population of that player’s record. The availability
heuristic is a rule of thumb that uses the ease with which an instance comes to
mind as an index of the probability of an event. Such a rule is unreliable when
salience in memory misleads; for example, most people incorrectly rate death by
shark attack as more probable than death by falling airplane parts. For an
overview, see D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment Under
Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 2. These biases, found in laypeople and
statistical experts alike, have a natural explanation on accounts such as
Herbert Simon’s 7 concept of “bounded rationality.” According to this view, the
limitations on our decision making are fixed in part by specific features of
our psychological architecture. This architecture places constraints on such
factors as processing speed and information capacity, and this in turn produces
predictable, systematic errors in performance. Thus, rather than proposing
highly idealized rules appropriate to an omniscient Laplacean genius more characteristic of traditional normative
approaches to decision theory empirical
decision theory attempts to formulate a descriptively accurate, and thus
psychologically realistic, account of rationality. Even if certain simple rules
can, in particular settings, outperform other strategies, it is still important
to understand the causes of the systematic errors we make on tasks perfectly
representative of routine decision making. Once the context is specified,
empirical decision-making research allows us to study both descriptive decision
rules that we follow spontaneously and normative rules that we ought to follow
upon reflection. empiricism from empiric,
‘doctor who relies on practical experience’, ultimately from Grecian empeiria,
‘experience’, a type of theory in epistemology, the basic idea behind all
examples of the type being that experience has primacy in human knowledge and
justified belief. Because empiricism is not a single view but a type of view
with many different examples, it is appropriate to speak not just of empiricism
but of empiricisms. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction to be drawn among
the various empiricisms is that between those consisting of some claim about
concepts and those consisting of some empirical empiricism 262 262 claim about beliefs call these, respectively, concept-empiricisms
and belief-empiricisms. Concept-empiricisms all begin by singling out those
concepts that apply to some experience or other; the concept of dizziness,
e.g., applies to the experience of dizziness. And what is then claimed is that
all concepts that human beings do and can possess either apply to some
experience that someone has had, or have been derived from such concepts by someone’s
performing on those concepts one or another such mental operation as
combination, distinction, and abstraction. How exactly my concepts are and must
be related to my experience and to my performance of those mental operations
are matters on which concept-empiricists differ; most if not all would grant we
each acquire many concepts by learning language, and it does not seem plausible
to hold that each concept thus acquired either applies to some experience that
one has oneself had or has been derived from such by oneself. But though
concept-empiricists disagree concerning the conditions for linguistic
acquisition or transmission of a concept, what unites them, to repeat, is the
claim that all human concepts either apply to some experience that someone has
actually had or they have been derived from such by someone’s actually
performing on those the mental operations of combination, distinction, and
abstraction. Most concept-empiricists will also say something more: that the
experience must have evoked the concept in the person having the experience, or
that the person having the experience must have recognized that the concept
applies to his or her experience, or something of that sort. What unites all
belief-empiricists is the claim that for one’s beliefs to possess one or
another truth-relevant merit, they must be related in one or another way to
someone’s experience. Beliefempiricisms differ from each other, for one thing,
with respect to the merit concerning which the claim is made. Some
belief-empiricists claim that a belief does not have the status of knowledge
unless it has the requisite relation to experience; some claim that a belief
lacks warrant unless it has that relation; others claim that a belief is not
permissibly held unless it stands in that relation; and yet others claim that
it is not a properly scientific belief unless it stands in that relation. And
not even this list exhausts the possibilities. Belief-empiricisms also differ
with respect to the specific relation to experience that is said to be
necessary for the merit in question to be present. Some belief-empiricists
hold, for example, that a belief is permissibly held only if its propositional
content is either a report of the person’s present or remembered experience, or
the belief is held on the basis of such beliefs and is probable with respect to
the beliefs on the basis of which it is held. Kant, by contrast, held the
rather different view that if a belief is to constitute empirical knowledge, it
must in some way be about experience. Third, belief-empiricisms differ from
each other with respect to the person to whose experience a belief must stand
in the relation specified if it is to possess the merit specified. It need not
always be an experience of the person whose belief is being considered. It
might be an experience of someone giving testimony about it. It should be
obvious that a philosopher might well accept one kind of empiricism while
rejecting others. Thus to ask philosophers whether they are empiricists is a
question void for vagueness. It is regularly said of Locke that he was an
empiricist; and indeed, he was a concept-empiricist of a certain sort. But he
embraced no version whatsoever of belief-empiricism. Up to this point,
‘experience’ has been used without explanation. But anyone acquainted with the
history of philosophy will be aware that different philosophers pick out
different phenomena with the word; and even when they pick out the same
phenomenon, they have different views as to the structure of the phenomenon that
they call ‘experience.’ The differences on these matters reflect yet more
distinctions among empiricisms than have been delineated above.
enantiamorphs:
“When Moore said that he knew he had two hands, he implicated, ‘I have two
enantiamorphic hands,’ before they were able to cancel his talk and his implicaturum.”
from Grecian enantios, ‘opposite’, and morphe, ‘form’, objects whose shapes
differ as do those of a right and left hand. One of a pair of enantiamorphs can
be made to look identical in shape to the other by viewing it in a mirror but
not merely by changing its spatial orientation. Enantiamorphs figure
prominently in the work of Kant, who argued that the existence of
enantiamorphic pairs entailed that Leibnizian relational theories of space were
to be rejected in favor of Newtonian absolutist theories, that some facts about
space could be apprehended empiricism, constructive enantiamorphs 263 263 only by “pure intuition,” and that space
was mind-dependent.
ENCYCLOPÆDIA
GRICEIANA: encyclopædia Griceiana. Grice went to Paris and
became enamoured with encyclopedia, or “encyclopédie,” “or a Descriptive
Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades,” launched by the Parisian
publisher Le Breton, who had secured d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s editorship, the
Encyclopedia was gradually released despite a temporary revocation of its royal
privilege. Comprising seventeen folio volumes of 17,818 articles and eleven
folio volumes of 2,885 plates, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA GRICEIANA required a staff of
272 Griceian engravers. “But the good thing,” Grice says, “is that it
incorporates the accumulated knowledge and rationalist, secularist views of
the Enlightenment and prescribed
economic, social, and political reforms.” Strawson adds: “Enormously successful
at Oxford, ENCYCLOPÆDIA GRICEIANA was reprinted with revisions five times
before Grice died.” “Contributions were made by anyone we could bribe!” – As in
the old encycloopaedia, the philosophes Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu,
d’Holbach, Naigeon, and Saint-Lambert; the writers Duclos and Marmontel; the
theologians Morellet and Malet; enlightened clerics, e.g. Raynal; explorers,
e.g. La Condamine; natural scientists, e.g. Daubenton; physicians, e.g.
Bouillet; the economists Turgot and Quesnay; engineers, e.g. Perronet; horologists,
e.g. Berthoud; and scores of other experts. “The purpose of the ENCYCLOPÆDIA
GRICEIANA,” writes Grice in the “Foreword”, “is to collect this or that bit of
Griceian knowledge dispersed on the surface of the earth, and to unfold its
general system.” “The Encyclopedia,” Strawson adds, “offers the educated
Oxonian a comprehensive, systematic, and descriptive repository of contemporary
liberal and mechanical arts, with an appendix on implicaturum by Grice
hisself.” D’Alembert and Diderot developed a sensationalist epistemology, “but
I don’t.” “Preliminary Discourse” under the influence of Locke and Condillac.
Grice and Strawson (with the occasional help from Austin, Warnock, Pears and
Thomson) compiled and rationally classified existing knowledge according to the
noetic process memory, imagination, and reason. Based on the assumption of the
unity of theory and praxis, the approach of the ENCYCLOOPÆDIA GRICEIANA is
positivistic and ‘futilitarian.’ The ENCYCLOPÆDIA GRICEIANA vindicates
experimental reason and the rule of nature, fostered the practice of criticism,
and stimulated the development of both old and new sciences. In religious
matters, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA GRICEIANA cultivates ambiguity and implicaturum to
escape censorship by Queen Elizabeth II, an avid reader of the supplements. Whereas
most contributors held either conciliatory or orthodox positions, J. F. Thomson
barely concealed his naturalistic and atheistic opinions. Thomson’s radicalism
was pervasive. Supernaturalism, obscurantism, and fanaticism, and
Heideggerianism are among the Encyclopedists’ favorite targets. The Griceian
Encyclopaedists identify Roman Catholicism (of the type Dummett practiced) with
superstition and theology with occult magic; assert the superiority of natural
morality over theological ethics; demand religious toleration; and champion
human rights and conventional implicaturum alike. They innovatively retrace the
historical conditions of the development of Oxford (“and a little Cambridge”)
philosophy. They furthermore pioneer ideas on trade and industry and anticipate
the relevance of historiography, sociology, economics, and ‘conversational
pragmatics.’ As the most ambitious and expansive reference work Oxford ever saw,
the ENCYCLOPÆDIA GRICEIANA crystallizes the confidence of England’s midlands bourgeoisie
in the capacity of reason to dispel the shadows of ignorance and improve
society – “at least Oxonian society, if I can.”
English futilitarians, The: Bergmann’s pun on H. P. Grice and
J. L. Austin. from futile. Cf. conversational futilitarianism. Can there be a
futilitarian theory of communication? Grice’s! The issue is a complex one. Some
may interpret Grice’s theory as resting “on Kantian grounds.” Not everybody was
present at Grice’s seminars at Oxford on helpfulness, where he discusses the
kind of reasoning that a participant to a conversation will display in assuming
that his co-conversationalist is being conversationally helpful,
conversationally benevolent, conversationally ‘altruist,’ almost, and
conversationally, well, co-operative. So, as to the basis for this. We can
simplify the scenario by using the plural. A conversationalist assumes that his
co-conversationalist is being co-operative on Kantian grounds. What are the
alternatives, if any? One can re-describe “Kantian grounds” as “moral grounds.”
Conversationalists abide with the principle of conversational helpfulness on
Kantian, moral grounds. Kant wrote the “Critique of practical reason,” so Kant
would allow for a rephrase of this as follows. Conversationalists abide with
the principle of conversational helpfulness on practical, indeed moral, grounds
– which is the topic of Grice’s last Kant lecture at Stanford. How to turn a
‘counsel of prudence,’ which is ‘practical’ into something that covers Kant’s
“Kategorische Imperativ.” And then there’s the utilitarian. Utilitarianism IS a
moral theory, or a meta-ethical theory. So one would have to allow for the
possibility that conversationalists abide by the principle of conversational
helpfulness on “utilitarian grounds,” which would be “practical grounds,” AND
“moral grounds,” if not Kantian grounds. In any case, the topic WAS raised, and
indeed, for someone like Grice who wrote on ‘pleasure,’ and ‘happiness,’ it
does not seem futilitarian to see him as a futilitarian. Unfortunately, you
need a serious philosophical background to appreciate all this, since it
touches on the very serious, or ‘deep,’ as Grice would say, “and fascinating,”
suburbia or practicality. But surely the keyword ‘utilitarian’ as per “conversationalists
abide by the principle of conversational helpfulness on utilitarian grounds” is
a possibility. Cf. Grice’s reference to the ‘least effort,’ and in the Oxford
lectures on helpfulness to a conversationalist not getting involved in “undue
effort,” or getting into “unnecessary trouble.” “Undue effort” is ‘forbidden’
by the desideratum of conversational candour; the ‘unnecessary trouble’ is
balanced by the ‘principle of conversational self-love.’ And I don’t think Kant
would ever considered loving himself! Grice being keen on neuter adjectives, he
saw the ‘utile’ at the root of utilitarianism. There is much ‘of value’ in the
old Roman concept of ‘utile.’ Lewis and Short have it as Neutr.
absol.: ūtĭle , is, n., what is useful, the useful: omne tulit punctum, qui
miscuit utile dulci, Hor. A. P. 343: “bonus atque fidus Judex honestum
praetulit utili,” id. C. 4, 9, 41: “utilium tardus provisor,” id. A. P. 164:
“sententiae de utilibus honestisque,” Quint. 3, 8, 13; cf. id. 1, 2, 29. —Ultimately, Grice’s meta-ethics,
like Hare’s, Nowell-Smith’s, Austin’s, Hampshire’s, and Warnock’s derives into
a qualified utilitarianism, with notions of agreeableness and eudaemonia being
crucial. Grice well knows that for Aristotle pleasure is just one out of the
three sources for phulia; the others being profit, and virtue. As an
English utilitarian, or English futilitarian, Grice plays with Griceian
pleasures. Democritus, as Grice remarks, seems to be the earliest
philosopher to have categorically embraced a hedonistic philosophy. Democritus
claims that the supreme goal of life is contentment or cheerfulness, stating
that joy and sorrow are the distinguishing mark of things beneficial and
harmful. The Cyrenaics are an ultra-hedonist Grecoam school of philosophy
founded by Aristippus. Many of the principles of the school were set by his
grandson, Aristippus the Younger, and Theodorus. The Cyrenaic school is one of
the earliest Socratic schools. The Cyrenaics teach that the only intrinsic
‘agathon’ is pleasure ‘hedone,’ which means not just the absence of pain, but a
positively enjoyable momentary sensation. A physical pleasure is stronger than
a pleasure of anticipation or memory. The Cyrenaics do, however, recognize the
value of social obligation, and that pleasure may be gained from altruism. The
Cyrenaic school dies out within a century, and is replaced by
Epicureanism. The Cyrenaics are known for their sceptical epistemology.
The Cyrenaics reduce logic to a basic doctrine concerning the criterion of
truth. The Cyrenaics think that one can only know with certainty his immediate
sense-experience, e. g., that he is having a sweet sensation. But one can know
nothing about the nature of the object that causes this sensation, e.g., that
honey is sweet. The Cyrenaics also deny that we can have knowledge of what the
experience of others are like. All knowledge is immediate sensation. Sensation
is a motion which is purely subjective, and is painful, indifferent or
pleasant, according as it is violent, tranquil or gentle. Further, sensation is
entirely individual and can in no way be described as constituting absolute
objective knowledge. Feeling, therefore, is the only possible criterion of
knowledge and of conduct. The way of being affected is alone knowable. Thus the
sole aim for everyone should be pleasure. Cyrenaicism deduces a single,
universal aim for all which is pleasure. Furthermore, feeling is momentary and
homogeneous. It follows that past and future pleasure have no real existence
for us, and that in present pleasure there is no distinction of kind. Socrates
speaks of the higher pleasure of the intellect. The Cyrenaics denies the
validity of this distinction and say that bodily pleasure (hedone somatike),
being more simple and more intense, is preferable. Momentary pleasure, preferably
of a physical kind, is the only good for a human. However, an action which
gives immediate pleasure can create more than their equivalent of pain. The
wise person should be in control (egcrateia) of pleasure rather than be
enslaved to it, otherwise pain results, and this requires judgement to evaluate
this or that pleasure of life. Regard should be paid to law and custom, because
even though neither law nor custom have an intrinsic value on its own,
violating law or custom leads to an unpleasant penalty being imposed by others.
Likewise, friendship and justice are useful because of the pleasure they
provide. Thus the Cyrenaics believe in the hedonistic value of social
obligation and altruistic behaviour. Epicureanism is a system of philosophy
based upon the teachings of Epicurus, an atomic materialist, following in the
steps of Democritus and Leucippus. Epicurus’s materialism leads him to a
general stance against superstition or the idea of divine intervention.
Following Aristippus, Epicurus believes that the greatest good is to seek
modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of tranquility and freedom
from fear (ataraxia) and absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of
the workings of the world and the limits of desire. The combination of these
two states, ataraxia and aponia, is supposed to constitute happiness in its
highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it
declares pleasure as the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain
as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different
from hedonism as it is commonly understood. In the Epicurean view, the highest
pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) is obtained by knowledge,
friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. Epicurus lauds the
enjoyment of a simple pleasure, by which he means abstaining from the bodily
desire, such as sex and the appetite, verging on asceticism. Epicurus argues
that when eating, one should not eat too richly, for it could lead to dissatisfaction
later, such as the grim realization that one could not afford such delicacies
in the future. Likewise, sex could lead to increased lust and dissatisfaction
with the sexual partner. Epicurus does not articulate a broad system of social
ethics that has survived but had a unique version of the golden rule. It
is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and
justly, agreeing neither to harm nor be harmed, and it is impossible to live
wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life. Epicureanism is
originally a challenge to Platonism, though later it became the main opponent
of Stoicism. Epicurus and his followers shun politics. After the death of
Epicurus, his school is headed by Hermarchus. Later many Epicurean societies
flourish in the Late Hellenistic era and during the Roman era, such as those in
Antiochia, Alexandria, Rhodes and Ercolano. The poet Lucretius is its most
known Roman proponent. By the end of the Roman Empire, having undergone attack
and repression, Epicureanism has all but died out, and would be resurrected in
the seventeenth century by the atomist Pierre Gassendi. Some writings by
Epicurus have survived. Some scholars consider the epic poem “De natura rerum”
by Lucretius to present in one unified work the core arguments and theories of
Epicureanism. Many of the papyrus scrolls unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri
at Herculaneum are Epicurean texts. At least some are thought to have belonged
to the Epicurean Philodemus. Cf. Barnes on epicures and connoiseurs. Many
a controversy arising out of this or that value judgement is settled by saying,
‘I like it and you don’t, and that s the end of the matter.’ I am content to
adopt this solution of the difficulty on matters such as food and drink. Even here,
though, we admit the existence of epicures and connoisseurs.Why are we not
content to accept the same solution on every matter where value is concerned?
The reason I am not so content lies in the fact that the action of one man
dictated by his approval of something is frequently incompatible with the
action of another man dictated by his approval of something. This is
obviously philosophical, especially for the Grecian hedonistic Epicureians made
popular by Marius and Walter Pater at Oxford. L and S have "ἡδονή,” also
“ἁδονά,” or in a chorus in tragedy, “ἡδονά,” ultimately from "ἥδομαι,”
which they render it as “enjoyment, pleasure,” “prop. of sensual pleasure.” αἱ
τοῦ σώματος or περὶ τὸ σῶμα ἡ.; αἱ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα ἡ. Plato, Republic, 328d; σωματικαὶ
ἡ. Arist. Eth. Nich. 1151a13; αἱ περὶ πότους καὶ περὶ ἐδωδὰς ἡ. Plato,
Republic, 389e; but also ἀκοῆς ἡ; ἡ ἀπὸ τοῦ εἰδέναι ἡ. Pl. R. 582b; of
malicious pleasure, ἡ ἐπὶ τοῖς τῶν φίλων κακοῖς, ἐπὶ ταῖς λοιδορίαις ἡ.; ἡδονῇ
ἡσσᾶσθαι, ἡδοναῖς χαρίζεσθαι, to give way to pleasure; Pl. Lg. 727c; κότερα
ἀληθείη χρήσομαι ἢ ἡδονῆ; shall I speak truly or so as to humour you? εἰ ὑμῖν
ἡδονὴ τοῦ ἡγεμονεύειν; ἡ. εἰσέρχεταί τιϝι εἰ, “one feels pleasure at the
thought that …” ; ἡδονὴν ἔχειν τινός to be satisfied with; ἡδονὴν ἔχει, φέρει;
ἡδονὴ ἰδέσθαι (θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι), of a temple; δαίμοσιν πρὸς ἡδονήν; ὃ μέν ἐστι πρὸς ἡ.; πρὸς ἡ. Λέγειν, “to speak
so as to please another”; δημηγορεῖν; οὐ πρὸς ἡ. οἱ ἦν τὰ ἀγγελλόμενα; πάντα
πρὸς ἡ. ἀκούοντας; later πρὸς ἡδονῆς εἶναί τινι; καθ᾽ ἡδονὴν κλύειν; καθ᾽
ἡδονήν ἐστί μοι; καθ᾽ ἡ. τι δρᾶν, ποιεῖν; καθ᾽ ἡδονὰς τῷ δήμῳ τὰ πράγματα
ἐνδιδόναι; ἐν ἡδονῇ ἐστί τινι, it is a pleasure or delight to another; ἐν ἡδονῇ
ἔχειν τινάς, to take pleasure in them; ἐν ἡδονῇ ἄρχοντες, oοἱ λυπηροί; μεθ᾽
ἡδονῆς; ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς; ὑπὸ τῆς ἡ; ἡδονᾷ with pleasure; a pleasure; ἡδοναὶ
τραγημάτων sweetmeats; plural., desires after pleasure, pleasant lusts. In
Ionic philosophers, taste, flavour, usually joined with χροιή. Note that
Aristotle uses somatike hedone. As a Lit. Hum. Oxon., and especially as a
tutee of Hardie at Corpus, Grice is almost too well aware of the centrality of
hedone in Aristotles system. Pleasure is sometimes rendered “placitum,” as in
“ad placitum,” in scholastic philosophy, but that is because scholastic
philosophy is not as Hellenic as it should be. Actually, Grice prefers
“agreeable.” One of Grices requisites for an ascription of eudaemonia (to have
a fairy godmother) precisely has the system of ends an agent chooses to realise
to be an agreeable one. One form or mode of agreeableness, Grice notes, is,
unless counteracted, automatically attached to the attainment of an object of
desire, such attainment being routinely a source of satisfaction. The
generation of such a satisfaction thus provides an independent ground for
preferring one system of ends to another. However, some other mode of
agreeableness, such as e. g. being a source of delight, which is not routinely
associated with the fulfilment of this or that desire, could discriminate,
independently of other features relevant to such a preference, between one
system of ends and another. Further, a system of ends the operation of which is
especially agreeable is stable not only vis-à-vis a rival system, but also
against the somewhat weakening effect of ‘egcrateia,’ incontinence, or akrasia,
if you mustn’t. A disturbing influence, as Aristotle knows from experience, is
more surely met by a principle in consort with a supporting attraction than by
the principle alone. Grices favourite hedonistic implicaturum was “please,” as
in “please, please me,” by The Beatles. While
Grice claims to love Kantotle, he cannot hide his greater reverence for
Aristotle, instilled early on at Corpus. An Oxonian need not recite Kant in
what during the Second World War was referred to as the Hun, and while
Aristotle was a no-no at Clifton (koine!), Hardie makes Grice love him. With
eudaemonia, Grice finds a perfect synthetic futilitarian concept to balance his
innate analytic tendencies. There is Grecian eudaemonism and there is Griceian
eudaemonism. L and S are not too helpful. They have “εὐδαιμονία” (Ion. –ιη),
which they render not as happiness, but as “prosperity, good fortune,
opulence;” “χρημάτων προσόδῳ καὶ τῇ ἄλλῃ εὐ.;” of countries; “μοῖρ᾽
εὐδαιμονίας.” In a second use, the expression is indeed rendered as “true,
full happiness;” “εὐ. οὐκ ἐν βοσκήμασιν οἰκεῖ οὐδ᾽ ἐν χρυσῷ; εὐ. ψυχῆς,
oκακοδαιμονίη, cf. Pl. Def. 412d, Arist. EN 1095a18, sometimes personified as a
divinity. There is eudaemonia and there is kakodaemonia. Of course, Grice’s
locus classicus is EN 1095a18, which is Grice’s fairy godmother, almost. Cf.
Austin on agathon and eudaimonia in Aristotle’s ethics, unearthed by Urmson and
Warnock, a response to an essay by Prichard in “Philosophy” on the meaning of
agathon in Aristotle’s ethics. Pritchard argues that Aristotle regards
“agathon” to mean conducive to “eudaemonia,” and, consequently, that Aristotle
maintains that every deliberate action stems, ultimately, from the desire for
eudaemonia. Austin finds fault with this. First, agathon in Aristotle does not
have a single usage, and a fortiori not the one Pritchard suggests. Second, if
one has to summarise the usage of “agathon” in one phrase, “being desired”
cannot fulfil this function, for there are other objects of desire besides “τό
άγαθόν,” even if Davidson would disagree. Prichard endeavours to specify what
Aristotle means by αγαθον. In some contexts, “agathon” seems to mean simply
that being desired or an ultimate or non‐ultimate end or aim
of a person. In other contexts, “αγαθον” takes on a normative quality. For his
statements to have content, argues Prichard, Aristotle must hold that when we
pursue something of a certain kind, such as an honour, we pursue it as “a
good.” Prichard argues that by "αγαθον" Aristotle actually means,
except in the Nicomachean Ethics, conducive to eudaemonia, and holds that when
a man acts deliberately, he does it from a desire to attain eudaemonia.
Prichard attributes this position to Plato as well, despite the fact that both
thinkers make statements inconsistent with this view of man’s ultimate aim.
Grice takes life seriously: philosophical biology. He even writes an essay
entitled “Philosophy of life,” listed is in PGRICE. Grice bases his thought on
his tutee Ackrill’s Dawes Hicks essay for the BA, who quotes extensively from
Hardie. Grice also reviews that “serious student of Greek philosophy,” Austin,
in his response to Prichard, Grice’s fairy godmother. Much the most plausible
conjecture regarding what Grecian eudaimonia means is that eudaemonia is to be
understood as the name for that state or condition which one’s good dæmon
would, if he could, ensure for one. One’s good dæmon is a being motivated, with
respect to one, solely by concern for one’s eudaemonia, well-being or happiness.
To change the idiom, eudæmonia is the general characterisation of what a
full-time and unhampered fairy godmother would secure for one. Grice is
concerned with the specific system of ends that eudaemonia consists for
Ariskant. Grice borrows, but never returns, some reflections by his fomer
tuttee at St. Johns, Ackrill. Ackrills point is about the etymological basis
for eudaemonia, from eudaemon, the good dæmon, as Grice prefers. Grice thinks
the metaphor should be disimplicated, and taken literally. Grice concludes with
a set of ends that justify our ascription of eudaemonia to the agent. For
Grice, as for Kantotle, telos and eudaemonia are related in subtle ways. For
eudaemonia we cannot deal with just one end, but a system of ends, although
such a system may be a singleton. Grice specifies a subtle way of
characterising end so that a particular ascription of an end may entail an
ascription of eudaemonia. Grice follows the textual criticism of his tutee
Ackrill, in connection with the Socratic point that eudaemonia is literally
related to the eudaemon. In PGRICE Warner explores Grice’s concept of
eudaemonia. Warner is especially helpful with the third difficult Carus lecture
by Grice, a metaphysical defence of absolute value. Warner connects with Grice
in such topics as the philosophy of perception seen in an evolutionary light
and the Kantotelian idea of eudaemonia. In response to Warner’s overview of the
oeuvre of Grice for the festschrift that Warner co-edited with Grandy, Grice
refers to the editors collectively as Richards. While he feels he has to use
“happiness,” Grice is always having Aristotle’s eudaemonia in mind. The implicaturum
of Smith is ‘happy’ is more complex than Kantotle thinks. Austen knew. For
Emma, you decide if youre happy. Ultimately, for Grice, the rational life is
the happy life. Grice took life seriously: philosophical biology! Grice is
clear when reprinting the Descartes essay in WOW, where he does quote from
Descartes sources quite a bit, even if he implicates he is no Cartesian scholar
– what Oxonian would? It concerns certainty. And certainty is originally
Cantabrigian (Moore), but also Oxonian, in parts. Ayer says that to know is to
assure that one is certain or sure. So he could connect. Grice will at various
stages of his development play and explore this authoritative voice of
introspection: incorrigibility and privileged access. He surely wants to say
that a declaration of an intention is authoritative. And Grice plays with
meaning, too when provoking Malcolm in a don recollection: Grice: I want you to
bring me a paper tomorrow. Strawson: You mean a newspaper? Grice: No, a
philosophical essay. Strawson: How do you know? Are you certain you mean that?
Grice finds not being certain about what one means Strawsonian and otiose.
Tutees. Grice loved to place himself in the role of the philosophical hack,
dealing with his tutees inabilities, a whole week long – until he could find
refreshment in para-philosophy on the Saturday morning. Now, the logical form
of certain is a trick. Grice would symbolize it as numbering of operators. If
G ψs p, G ψs ψs p, and G ψs ψs ψs p, and so ad
infinitum. This is a bit like certainty. But not quite! When he explores trust,
Grice considers something like a backing for it. But does conclusive evidence
yield certainty? He doesnt think so. Certainty, for Grice should apply to any
psychological attitude, state or stance. And it is just clever of him that when
he had to deliver his BA lecture he chooses ‘intention and uncertainty’ as its
topic, just to provoke. Not surprisingly, the “Uncertainty” piece opens with
the sceptics challenge. And he will not conclude that the intender is certain.
Only that theres some good chance (p ˃0.5) that what he intends will get
through! When there is a will, there is a way, when there is a neo-Prichardian
will-ing, there is a palæo-Griceian way-ing! Perhaps by know Moore means
certain. Grice was amused by the fact that Moore thought that he knew that
behind the curtains at the lecture hall at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, there was a window, when there wasnt. He uses Moores misuse of know – according
to Malcolm – both in Causal theory and Prolegomena. And of course this relates
to the topic of the sceptics implicaturum, above, with the two essays
Scepticism and Common sense and Moore and Philosophers Paradoxes repr.
partially in WOW. With regard to certainty, it is interesting to compare it, as
Grice does, not so much with privileged access, but with
incorrigibility. Do we not have privileged access to our own beliefs
and desires? And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals
of our beliefs and desires are incorrigible? One of Grices problems
is, as he puts it, how to accommodate privileged access and,
maybe, incorrigibility. This or that a second-order state may be, in
some fashion, incorrigible. On the contrary, for Grice, this or that
lower-order, first-order judging is only a matter for privileged
access. Note that while he is happy to allow privileged access to
lower-order souly states, only those who are replicated at a higher-order or
second-order may, in some fashion, be said to count as an incorrigible avowal.
It rains. P judges it rains (privileged access). P judges that P judges that it
rains (incorrigible). The justification is conversational. It rains says the P,
or expresses the P. Grice wants to be able to say that if a P expresses that p,
the P judges2 that p. If the P expresses that it rains, the P
judges that he judges that it rains. In this fashion, his second-order,
higher-order judging is incorrigible, only. Although Grice may allow for it to
be corrected by a third-order judging. It is not required that we should stick
with judging here. Let Smith return the money that he owes to Jones. If P
expresses !p, P ψ-s2 that !p. His second-order, higher-order
buletic state is incorrigible (if ceteris paribus is not corrected by a
third-order buletic or doxastic state). His first-order buletic state is a
matter only of privileged access. For a study of conversation as rational
co-operation this utilitarian revival modifies the standard exegesis of Grice as
purely Kantian, and has him more in agreement with the general Oxonian
meta-ethical scene. Refs.: Under ‘futilitarianism,’ we cover Grice’s views on
‘pleasure’ (he has an essay on “Pleasure,”) and “eudaemonia” (He has an essay
on ‘happiness’); other leads are given under ‘grecianism,’ since this is the
Grecian side to Grice’s Ariskant; for specific essays on ‘pleasure,’ and
‘eudaimonia,’ the keywords ‘pleasure’ and ‘happiness’ are useful. A good source
is the essay on happiness in “Aspects,” which combines ‘eudaemonia’ and
‘agreebleness,’ his futilitarianism turned Kantotelian. BANC.
ens
a se: Grice defines an ‘ens a se’ as a being that is completely independent and self-sufficient. Since
every creature depends at least upon God for its existence, only God could be
ens a se. In fact, only God is, and he must be. For if God depended on any
other being, he would be dependent and hence not self-sufficient. To the extent
that the ontological argument is plausible, it depends on conceiving of God as
ens a se. In other words, God as ens a se is the greatest conceivable being.
The idea of ens a se is very important in the Monologion and Proslogion of
Anselm, in various works of Duns Scotus, and later Scholastic thought. Ens a se
should be distinguished from ens ex se, according to Anselm in Monologion. Ens
a se is from itself and not “out of itself.” In other words, ens a se does not
depend upon itself for its own existence, because it is supposed to be
dependent on absolutely nothing. Further, if ens a se depended upon itself, it
would cause itself to exist, and that is impossible, according to medieval and
Scholastic philosophers, who took causality to be irreflexive. It is also
transitive and asymmetric. Hence, the medieval idea of ens a se should not be
confused with Spinoza’s idea of causa sui. Later Scholastics often coined
abstract terms to designate the property or entity that makes something to be
what it is, in analogy with forming, say, ‘rigidity’ from ‘rigid’. The Latin
term ‘aseitas’ is formed from the prepositional phrase in ‘ens a se’ in this
way; ‘aseitas’ is tr. into English as ‘aseity’. A better-known example of
forming an abstract noun from a concrete word is ‘haecceitas’ thisness from
‘haec’ this. -- ens rationis Latin, ‘a
being of reason’, a thing dependent for its existence upon reason or thought;
sometimes known as an intentional being. Ens rationis is the contrasting term
for a real being res or ens in re extra animam, such as an individual animal.
Real beings exist independently of thought and are the foundation for truth. A
being of reason depends upon thought or reason for its existence and is an
invention of Enlightenment ens rationis 266
266 the mind, even if it has a foundation in some real being. This conception
requires the idea that there are degrees of being. Two kinds of entia rationis
are distinguished: those with a foundation in reality and those without one.
The objects of logic, which include genera and species, e.g., animal and human,
respectively, are entia rationis that have a foundation in reality, but are
abstracted from it. In contrast, mythic and fictional objects, such as a
chimera or Pegasus, have no foundation in reality. Blindness and deafness are
also sometimes called entia rationis. --
ens realissimum: used by Grice. Latin, ‘most real being’, an informal term for
God that occurs rarely in Scholastic philosophers. Within Kant’s philosophy, it
has a technical sense. It is an extension of Baumgarten’s idea of ens
perfectissimum most perfect being, a being that has the greatest number of
possible perfections to the greatest degree. Since ens perfectissimum refers to
God as the sum of all possibilities and since actuality is greater than
possibility, according to Kant, the idea of God as the sum of all actualities,
that is, ens realissimum, is a preferable term for God. Kant thinks that human
knowledge is “constrained” to posit the idea of a necessary being. The
necessary being that has the best claim to necessity is one that is completely
unconditioned, that is, dependent on nothing; this is ens realissimum. He
sometimes explicates it in three ways: as the substratum of all realities, as
the ground of all realities, and as the sum of all realities. Ens realissimum
is nonetheless empirically invalid, since it cannot be experienced by humans.
It is something ideal for reason, not real in experience. According to Kant,
the ontological argument begins with the concept of ens realissimum and
concludes that an existing object falls under that concept Critique of Pure
Reason, Book II, chapter 3.
entelecheia
-- used by Grice in his philosophical
psychology -- from Grecian entelecheia, energeia, actuality. Aristotle, who
coins both terms, entelecheia and energeia, treats entelecheia as a near
synonym of Energeia (“which makes me often wonder why he felt the need to coin
TWICE” – H. P. Grice.). Entelecheia figures in Aristotle’s definition of the
soul (psyche) as the first actuality of the natural body (De Anima, II.1). This
is explained by analogy with knowledge: first actuality is to knowledge as
second actuality is to the active use of knowledge. ’Entelechia’ is also a
technical term, but in German, in Leibniz for the primitive active force in
every monad, which is combined with primary matter, and from which the active
force, vis viva, is somehow derived (“But I rather use ‘entelecheia’ in the
original Grecian.” – Grice). “The vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch used the
Aristotelian term in his account of biology, and I feel vitalistic on
occasion.” “Life, Driesch holds, is not a bowl of cherries, but an entelechy;
and an entelechy is a substantial entity, rather like a mind, that controls
organic processes.” “To me, life is rather a bowl of cherries, don’t make it
serious! It’s just mysterious!”
implicaturum – “I am aware that with ‘implicaturum,’ as opposed to ‘implicaturum,’
the distinction with ‘implicatio’ is lost – for ‘what is implied,’ in contrast,
sounds vulgar.” And then there’s ‘entailment” is not as figurative as it
sounds: it inovolves property and limitation -- “Paradoxes of entailment,”
“Paradoxes of implication.” Philo and his teacher. Grice is not sure about ‘implicaturum.’
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." This proposed definitions would avoid the paradoxes
involved in 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 whenp 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 premises and a conclusion of a syllogism seems to me one which is
purely 'objective' in the sense that no psychological term, such as is involved
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. This
view as to what φA . ent . ψA means has, for instance, if I understand him
rightly, been asserted by Mr. O. Strachey in Mind, N.S., 93; since he asserts
that, in his opinion, this is what Professor C. I. Lewis means by “φA strictly
implies ψA,” and undoubtedly what Professor Lewis means by this is what I mean
by φA . ent . ψA. And the same view has been frequently suggested (though I do
not know that he has actually asserted it) by Mr. Russell himself (e.g.,
Principia Mathematica, p. 21). I 1903 B. Russell Princ.
Math. ii. 14 How far formal implication is definable in terms
of implication simply, or material implication as it may be called,
is a difficult question. Source : Principles : Chapter III. Implication and Formal Implication.
– Source : Principia, page 7 : "When it is necessary explicitly to
discriminate "implication" [i.e. "if p, then q" ] from
"formal implication," it is called "material implication."
– Source : Principia, page 20 : "When an implication, say ϕx.⊃.ψx, is said to
hold always, i.e. when (x):ϕx.⊃.ψx, we shall say that ϕx formally implies ψx"Many logicians did use ‘implicaturum’ not necessarily to
mean ‘conversational implicaturum,’ but as the result of ‘implicatio’.
‘Implicatio’ was often identified with the Megarian or Philonian ‘if.’ Why? thought
that we probably did need an entailment. The symposium was held in New York with
Dana Scott and R. K. Meyer. The notion had been mis-introduced (according to
Strawson) in the philosophical literature by Moore. Grice is especially
interested in the entailment + implicaturum pair. A philosophical expression
may be said to be co-related to an entailment (which is rendered in terms of a
reductive analysis). However, the use of the expression may co-relate to
this or that implicaturum which is rendered reasonable in the light of the assumption
by the addressee that the utterer is ultimately abiding by a principle of
conversational helfpulness. Grice thinks many philosophers take an implicaturum
as an entailment when they surely shouldnt! Grice was more interested than
Strawson was in the coinage by Moore of entailment for logical consequence. As
an analyst, Grice knew that a true conceptual analysis needs to be reductive
(if not reductionist). The prongs the analyst lists are thus entailments of the
concept in question. Philosophers, however, may misidentify what is an
entailment for an implicaturum, or vice versa. Initially, Grice was interested
in the second family of cases. With his coinage of disimplicaturum, Grice
expands his interest to cover the first family of cases, too. Grice remains a
philosophical methodologist. He is not so much concerned with any area or
discipline or philosophical concept per se (unless its rationality), but with
the misuses of some tools in the philosophy of language as committed by some of
his colleagues at Oxford. While entailment, was, for Strawson mis-introduced in
the philosophical literature by Moore, entailment seems to be less involved in
paradoxes than if is. Grice connects the two, as indeed his tutee Strawson did!
As it happens, Strawsons Necessary propositions and entailment statements is
his very first published essay, with Mind, a re-write of an unpublication
unwritten elsewhere, and which Grice read. The relation of consequence may be
considered a meta-conditional, where paradoxes arise. Grices Bootstrap is
a principle designed to impoverish the metalanguage so that the philosopher can
succeed in the business of pulling himself up by his own! Grice then takes a
look at Strawsons very first publication (an unpublication he had written
elsewhere). Grice finds Strawson thought he could provide a simple solution to
the so-called paradoxes of entailment. At the time, Grice and Strawson were
pretty sure that nobody then accepted, if indeed anyone ever did and did make,
the identification of the relation symbolised by the horseshoe with the
relation which Moore calls entailment, p⊃q,
i. e. ~(pΛ~q) is rejected as an analysis of p entails q because it involves
this or that allegedly paradoxical implicaturum, as that any false proposition
entails any proposition and any true proposition is entailed by any
proposition. It is a commonplace that Lewiss amendment had consequences
scarcely less paradoxical in terms of the implicatura. For if p is impossible,
i.e. self-contradictory, it is impossible that p and ~q. And if q is
necessary, ~q is impossible and it is impossible that p and ~q; i. e., if p
entails q means it is impossible that p and ~q any necessary proposition is
entailed by any proposition and any self-contradictory proposition entails any
proposition. On the other hand, Lewiss definition of entailment (i.e. of the
relation which holds from p to q whenever q is deducible from p) obviously
commends itself in some respects. Now, it is clear that the emphasis laid on
the expression-mentioning character of the intensional contingent statement by
writing pΛ~q is impossible instead of It is impossible that p and ~q does not
avoid the alleged paradoxes of entailment. But it is equally clear that the
addition of some provision does avoid them. One may proposes that one
should use “entails” such that no necessary statement and no negation of a
necessary statement can significantly be said to entail or be entailed by any
statement; i. e. the function p entails q cannot take necessary or
self-contradictory statements as arguments. The expression p entails q is to be
used to mean p⊃q is necessary, and neither p nor q is either necessary or
self-contradictory, or pΛ~q is impossible and neither p nor q, nor either of
their contradictories, is necessary. Thus, the paradoxes are avoided. For let
us assume that p1 expresses a contingent, and q1 a necessary, proposition. p1
and ~q1 is now impossible because ~q1 is impossible. But q1 is necessary. So,
by that provision, p1 does not entail q1. We may avoid the paradoxical
assertion that p1 entails q2 as merely falling into the equally paradoxical
assertion that p1 entails q1 is necessary. For: If q is necessary, q is
necessary is, though true, not necessary, but a contingent intensional
(Latinate) statement. This becomes part of the philosophers lexicon: intensĭo,
f. intendo, which L and S render as a stretching out, straining, effort.
E. g. oculorum, Scrib. Comp. 255. Also an intensifying, increase. Calorem suum
(sol) intensionibus ac remissionibus temperando fovet,” Sen. Q. N. 7, 1, 3. The
tune: “gravis, media, acuta,” Censor. 12. Hence:~(q is necessary) is,
though false, possible. Hence “p1Λ~(q1 is necessary)” is, though false,
possible. Hence p1 does NOT entail q1 is necessary. Thus, by adopting the view
that an entailment statement, and other intensional statements, are
non-necessary, and that no necessary statement or its contradictory can entail
or be entailed by any statement, Strawson thinks he can avoid the paradox that
a necessary proposition is entailed by any proposition, and indeed all the
other associated paradoxes of entailment. Grice objected that Strawsons cure
was worse than Moores disease! The denial that a necessary proposition can
entail or be entailed by any proposition, and, therefore, that necessary
propositions can be related to each other by the entailment-relation, is too
high a price to pay for the solution of the paradoxes. And here is where Grices
implicaturum is meant to do the trick! Or not! When Levinson proposed + for
conversationally implicaturum, he is thinking of contrasting it with ⊢. But things aint that easy.
Even the grammar is more complicated: By uttering He is an adult, U explicitly
conveys that he is an adult. What U explicitly conveys entails that he is not a
child. What U implies is that he should be treated accordingly. Refs.: One
good reference is the essay on “Paradoxes of entailment,” in the Grice papers;
also his contribution to a symposium for the APA under a separate series, The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
enthymeme: an
incompletely stated syllogism, with one premise, or even the conclusion, omitted.
The term sometimes designates incompletely stated arguments of other kinds. We
are expected to supply the missing premise or draw the conclusion if it is not
stated. The result is supposed to be a syllogistic inference. For example: ‘He
will eventually get caught, for he is a thief’; or ‘He will eventually be
caught, for all habitual thieves get caught’. This notion of enthymeme as an
incompletely stated syllogism has a long tradition and does not seem
inconsistent with Aristotle’s own characterization of it. Thus, Peter of Spain
openly declares that an enthymeme is an argument with a single premise that
needs to be reduced to syllogism. But Peter also points out that Aristotle
spoke of enthymeme as “being of ycos and signum,” and he explains that ycos
here means ‘probable proposition’ while signum expresses the necessity of
inference. ‘P, therefore Q’ is an ycos in the sense of a proposition that
appears to be true to all or to many; but insofar as P has virtually a double
power, that of itself and of the proposition understood along with it, it is
both probable and demonstrative, albeit from a different point of view.
conversational entropy. -- Principle of Conversational
entropy, a measure of disorder or “information.” The number of states accessible
to the various elements of a large system of particles such as a cabbage or the
air in a room is represented as “W.” Accessible microstates might be, e. g.,
energy levels the various particles can reach. One can greatly simplify the
statement of certain laws of nature by introducing a logarithmic measure of
these accessible microstates. This measure, called “entropy” by H. P. Grice is
defined by the formula: SEntropy % df. klnW, where “k” is Grice’’s constant.
When the conversational entropy of a conversational system increases, the
system becomes more random and disordered (“less dove-tailed,” in Grice’s
parlance) in that a larger number of microstates become available for the
system’s particles to enter. If a large system within which exchanges of energy
occur is isolated, exchanging no energy with its environment, the entropy of
the system tends to increase and never decreases. This result is part of the
second law of thermodynamics. In real, evolving physical systems effectively
isolated from their environments, entropy increases and thus aspects of the
system’s organization that depend upon there being only a limited range of
accessible microstates are altered. A cabbage totally isolated in a container e.
g. would decay as complicated organic molecules eventually became unstructured
in the course of ongoing exchanges of energy and attendant entropy increases.
In Grice’s information theory, a state or event (or conversational move) is
said to contain more information than a second state or event if the former
state is less probable and thus in a sense more surprising (or “baffling,” in
Grice’s term) than the latter. Other plausible constraints suggest a
logarithmic measure of information content. Suppose X is a set of alternative
possible states, xi , and pxi is the
probability of each xi 1 X. If state xi has occurred the information content of
that occurrence is taken to be -log2pxi . This function increases as the
probability of xi decreases. If it is unknown which xi will occur, it is
reasonable to represent the expected information content of X as the sum of the
information contents of the alternative states xi weighted in each case by the
probability of the state, giving: This is called the Shannon’s or Grice’s
entropy. Both Shannon’s and Grice’s entropy and physical entropy can be thought
of as logarithmic measures of disarray. But this statement trades on a broad
understanding of ‘disarray’. A close relationship between the two concepts of
entropy should not be assumed, not even by Grice, less so by Shannon.
environmental
implicaturum: For Grice, two pirots need to share an
environment -- environmental philosophy, the critical study of concepts
defining relations between human beings and their non-human environment.
Environmental ethics, a major component of environmental philosophy, addresses
the normative significance of these relations. The relevance of ecological
relations to human affairs has been recognized at least since Darwin, but the
growing sense of human responsibility for their deterioration, reflected in
books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 2 and Peter Singer’s Animal
Liberation 5, has prompted the recent upsurge of interest. Environmental
philosophers have adduced a wide variety of human attitudes and practices to
account for the perceived deterioration, including religious and scientific
attitudes, social institutions, and industrial technology. Proposed remedies
typically urge a reorientation or new “ethic” that recognizes “intrinsic value”
in the natural world. Examples include the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold 78,
which pictures humans as belonging to, rather than owning, the biotic community
“the land”; deep ecology, a stance articulated by the Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess b.2, which advocates forms of identification with the non-human
world; and ecofeminism, which rejects prevailing attitudes to the natural world
that are perceived as patriarchal. At the heart of environmental ethics lies
the attempt to articulate the basis of concern for the natural world. It
encompasses global as well as local issues, and considers the longer-term
ecological, and even evolutionary, fate of the human and non-human world. Many
of its practitioners question the anthropocentric claim that human beings are
the exclusive or even central focus of envelope paradox environmental
philosophy 268 268 ethical concern. In
thus extending both the scope and the grounds of concern, it presents a
challenge to the stance of conventional interhuman ethics. It debates how to
balance the claims of present and future, human and non-human, sentient and
non-sentient, individuals and wholes. It investigates the prospects for a
sustainable relationship between economic and ecological systems, and pursues
the implications of this relationship with respect to social justice and
political institutions. Besides also engaging metaethical questions about, for
example, the objectivity and commensurability of values, environmental
philosophers are led to consider the nature and significance of environmental
change and the ontological status of collective entities such as species and
ecosystems. In a more traditional vein, environmental philosophy revives
metaphysical debates surrounding the perennial question of “man’s place in
nature,” and finds both precedent and inspiration in earlier philosophies and
cultures.
epistemic
deontologism, a duty-based view of the nature of
epistemic justification. A central concern of epistemology is to account for
the distinction between justified and unjustified beliefs. According to epistemic
deontologism, the concept of justification may be analyzed by using, in a
specific sense relevant to the pursuit of knowledge, terms such as ‘ought’,
‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’. A subject S is justified in
believing that p provided S does not violate any epistemic obligations those that arise from the goal of believing
what is true and not believing what is false. Equivalently, S is justified in
believing that p provided believing p is
from the point of view taken in the pursuit of truth permissible for S. Among contemporary
epistemologists, this view is held by Chisholm, Laurence BonJour, and Carl
Ginet. Its significance is twofold. If justification is a function of meeting
obligations, then it is, contrary to some versions of naturalistic
epistemology, normative. Second, if the normativity of justification is
deontological, the factors that determine whether a belief is justified must be
internal to the subject’s mind. Critics of epistemic deontologism, most
conspicuously Alston, contend that belief is involuntary and thus cannot be a
proper object of obligations. If, e.g., one is looking out the window and
notices that it is raining, one is psychologically forced to believe that it is
raining. Deontologists can reply to this objection by rejecting its underlying
premise: epistemic obligations require that belief be voluntary. Alternatively,
they may insist that belief is voluntary after all, and thus subject to
epistemic obligations, for there is a means by which one can avoid believing
what one ought not to believe: weighing the evidence, or deliberation. -- epistemic logic, the logical investigation
of epistemic concepts and statements. Epistemic concepts include the concepts
of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification, evidence, certainty, and
related notions. Epistemic logic is usually taken to include the logic of
belief or doxastic logic. Much of the recent work on epistemic logic is based
on the view that it is a branch of modal logic. In the early 0s von Wright
observed that the epistemic notions verified known to be true, undecided, and
falsified are related to each other in the same way as the alethic modalities
necessary, contingent, and impossible, and behave logically in analogous ways.
This analogy is not surprising in view of the fact that the meaning of modal
concepts is often explained epistemically. For example, in the 0s Peirce
defined informational possibility as that “which in a given state of
information is not perfectly known not to be true,” and called informationally
necessary “that which is perfectly known to be true.” The modal logic of
epistemic and doxastic concepts was studied systematically by Hintikka in his
pioneering Knowledge and Belief2, which applied to the concepts of knowledge
and belief the semantical method the method of modal sets that he had used
earlier for the investigation of modal logic. In this approach, the truth of
the proposition that a knows that p briefly Kap in a possible world or
situation u is taken to mean that p holds in all epistemic alternatives of u;
these are understood as worlds compatible with what a knows at u. If the
relation of epistemic alternativeness is reflexive, the principle ‘KapPp’ only
what is the case can be known is valid, and the assumption that the alternativeness
relation is transitive validates the so-called KK-thesis, ‘Kap P Ka Ka p’ if a
knows that p, a knows that a knows that p; these two assumptions together make
the logic of knowledge similar to an S4-type modal logic. If the knowledge
operator Ka and the corresponding epistemic possibility operator Pa are added
to quantification theory with identity, it becomes possible to study the
interplay between quantifiers and epistemic operators and the behavior of
individual terms in epistemic contexts, and analyze such locutions as ‘a knows
who what b some F is’. The problems of epistemic logic in this area are part of
the general problem of giving a coherent semantical account of propositional
attitudes. If a proposition p is true in all epistemic alternatives of a given
world, so are all logical consequences of p; thus the possible-worlds semantics
of epistemic concepts outlined above leads to the result that a person knows
all logical consequences of what he knows. This is a paradoxical conclusion; it
is called the problem of logical omniscience. The solution of this problem
requires a distinction between different levels of knowledge for example, between tacit and explicit
knowledge. A more realistic model of knowledge can be obtained by supplementing
the basic possible-worlds account by an analysis of the processes by which the
implicit knowledge can be activated and made explicit. Modal epistemic logics
have found fruitful applications in the recent work on knowledge representation
and in the logic and semantics of questions and answers in which questions are
interpreted as requests for knowledge or “epistemic imperatives.” -- epistemic principle, a principle of
rationality applicable to such concepts as knowledge, justification, and
reasonable belief. Epistemic principles include the principles of epistemic
logic and principles that relate different epistemic concepts to one another,
or epistemic concepts to nonepistemic ones e.g., semantic concepts. Epistemic
concepts include the concepts of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification,
epistemic probability, and other concepts that are used for the purpose of
assessing the reasonableness of beliefs and knowledge claims. Epistemic
principles can be formulated as principles concerning belief systems or information
systems, i.e., systems that characterize a person’s possible doxastic state at
a given time; a belief system may be construed as a set of accepted
propositions or as a system of degrees of belief. It is possible to distinguish
two kinds of epistemic principles: a principles concerning the rationality of a
single belief system, and b principles concerning the rational changes of
belief. The former include the requirements of coherence and consistency for
beliefs and for probabilities; such principles may be said to concern the
statics of belief systems. The latter principles include various principles of
belief revision and adjustment, i.e., principles concerning the dynamics of
belief systems. -- epistemic privacy,
the relation a person has to a proposition when only that person can have
direct or non-inferential knowledge of the proposition. It is widely thought
that people have epistemic privacy with respect to propositions about certain
of their own mental states. According to this view, a person can know directly
that he has certain thoughts or feelings or sensory experiences. Perhaps others
can also know that the person has these thoughts, feelings, or experiences, but
if they can it is only as a result of inference from propositions about the
person’s behavior or physical condition.
-- epistemic regress argument, an argument, originating in Aristotle’s
Posterior Analytics, aiming to show that knowledge and epistemic justification
have a two-tier structure as described by epistemic foundationalism. It lends
itself to the following outline regarding justification. If you have any
justified belief, this belief occurs in an evidential chain including at least
two links: the supporting link i.e., the evidence and the supported link i.e.,
the justified belief. This does not mean, however, that all evidence consists
of beliefs. Evidential chains might come in any of four kinds: circular chains,
endless chains, chains ending in unjustified beliefs, and chains anchored in
foundational beliefs that do not derive their justification from other beliefs.
Only the fourth, foundationalist kind is defensible as grounding knowledge and
epistemic justification. Could all justification be inferential? A belief, B1,
is inferentially justified when it owes its justification, at least in part, to
some other belief, B2. Whence the justification for B2? If B2 owes its
justification to B1, we have a troublesome circle. How can B2 yield
justification or evidence for B1, if B2 owes its evidential status to B1? On
the other hand, if B2 owes its justification to another belief, B3, and B3 owes
its justification to yet another belief, B4, and so on ad infinitum, we have a
troublesome endless regress of justification. Such a regress seems to deliver
not actual justification, but at best merely potential justification, for the
belief at its head. Actual finite humans, furthermore, seem not to be able to
comprehend, or to possess, all the steps of an infinite regress of
justification. Finally, if B2 is itself unjustified, it evidently will be
unable to provide justification for B1. It seems, then, that the structure of
inferential justification does not consist of either circular justification,
endless regresses of justification, or unjustified starter-beliefs. We have
foundationalism, then, as the most viable account of evidential chains, so long
as we understand it as the structural view that some beliefs are justified
non-inferentially i.e., without deriving justification from other beliefs, but
can nonetheless provide justification for other beliefs. More precisely, if we
have any justified beliefs, we have some foundational, non-inferentially
justified beliefs. This regress argument needs some refinement before its full
force can be appreciated. With suitable refinement, however, it can seriously
challenge such alternatives to foundationalism as coherentism and
contextualism. The regress argument has been a key motivation for
foundationalism in the history of epistemology.
-- epistemology from Grecian episteme, ‘knowledge’, and logos, ‘explanation’,
the study of the nature of knowledge and justification; specifically, the study
of a the defining features, b the substantive conditions or sources, and c the
limits of knowledge and justification. The latter three categories are
represented by traditional philosophical controversy over the analysis of
knowledge and justification, the sources of knowledge and justification e.g.,
rationalism versus empiricism, and the viability of skepticism about knowledge
and justification. Kinds of knowledge. Knowledge can be either explicit or
tacit. Explicit knowledge is self-conscious in that the knower is aware of the
relevant state of knowledge, whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, hidden from
self-consciousness. Much of our knowledge is tacit: it is genuine but we are
unaware of the relevant states of knowledge, even if we can achieve awareness
upon suitable reflection. In this regard, knowledge resembles many of our
psychological states. The existence of a psychological state in a person does
not require the person’s awareness of that state, although it may require the
person’s awareness of an object of that state such as what is sensed or
perceived. Philosophers have identified various species of knowledge: for
example, propositional knowledge that something is so, non-propositional
knowledge of something e.g., knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct awareness,
empirical a posteriori propositional knowledge, nonempirical a priori
propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something. Philosophical
controversy has arisen over distinctions between such species, for example,
over i the relations between some of these species e.g., does knowing-how
reduce to knowledge-that?, and ii the viability of some of these species e.g.,
is there really such a thing as, or even a coherent notion of, a priori
knowledge?. A primary concern of classical modern philosophy, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the extent of our a priori knowledge
relative to the extent of our a posteriori knowledge. Such rationalists as
Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza contended that all genuine knowledge of the
real world is a priori, whereas such empiricists as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori. In his Critique of Pure Reason
1781, Kant sought a grand reconciliation, aiming to preserve the key lessons of
both rationalism and empiricism. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a posteriori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that
depends for its supporting ground on some specific sensory or perceptual
experience; and a priori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that
does not depend for its supporting ground on such experience. Kant and others
have held that the supporting ground for a priori knowledge comes solely from
purely intellectual processes called “pure reason” or “pure understanding.”
Knowledge of logical and mathematical truths typically serves as a standard
case of a priori knowledge, whereas knowledge of the existence or presence of
physical objects typically serves as a standard case of a posteriori knowledge.
A major task for an account of a priori knowledge is the explanation of what
the relevant purely intellectual processes are, and of how they contribute to
non-empirical knowledge. An analogous task for an account of a posteriori
knowledge is the explanation of what sensory or perceptual experience is and
how it contributes to empirical knowledge. More fundamentally, epistemologists
have sought an account of propositional knowledge in general, i.e., an account
of what is common to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Ever since Plato’s
Meno and Theaetetus c.400 B.C., epistemologists have tried to identify the
essential, defining components of knowledge. Identifying these components will
yield an analysis of knowledge. A prominent traditional view, suggested by
Plato and Kant among others, is that propositional knowledge that something is
so has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient components:
justification, truth, and belief. On this view, propositional knowledge is, by
definition, justified true belief. This is the tripartite definition that has
come to be called the standard analysis. We can clarify it by attending briefly
to each of its three conditions. The belief condition. This requires that
anyone who knows that p where ‘p’ stands for any proposition or statement must
believe that p. If, therefore, you do not believe that minds are brains say,
because you have not considered the matter at all, then you do not know that minds
are brains. A knower must be psychologically related somehow to a proposition
that is an object of knowledge for that knower. Proponents of the standard
analysis hold that only belief can provide the needed psychological relation.
Philosophers do not share a uniform account of belief, but some considerations
supply common ground. Beliefs are not actions of assenting to a proposition;
they rather are dispositional psychological states that can exist even when
unmanifested. You do not cease believing that 2 ! 2 % 4, for example, whenever
your attention leaves arithmetic. Our believing that p seems to require that we
have a tendency to assent to p in certain situations, but it seems also to be
more than just such a tendency. What else believing requires remains highly
controversial among philosophers. Some philosophers have opposed the belief
condition of the standard analysis on the ground that we can accept, or assent
to, a known proposition without actually believing it. They contend that we can
accept a proposition even if we fail to acquire a tendency, required by
believing, to accept that proposition in certain situations. On this view,
acceptance is a psychological act that does not entail any dispositional
psychological state, and such acceptance is sufficient to relate a knower
psychologically to a known proposition. However this view fares, one underlying
assumption of the standard analysis seems correct: our concept of knowledge
requires that a knower be psychologically related somehow to a known proposition.
Barring that requirement, we shall be hard put to explain how knowers
psychologically possess their knowledge of known propositions. Even if
knowledge requires belief, belief that p does not require knowledge that p,
since belief can typically be false. This observation, familiar from Plato’s
Theaetetus, assumes that knowledge has a truth condition. On the standard
analysis, if you know that p, then it is true that p. If, therefore, it is
false that minds are brains, then you do not know that minds are brains. It is
thus misleading to say, e.g., that astronomers before Copernicus knew that the
earth is flat; at best, they justifiably believed that they knew this. The
truth condition. This condition of the standard analysis has not attracted any
serious challenge. Controversy over it has focused instead on Pilate’s vexing
question: What is truth? This question concerns what truth consists in, not our
ways of finding out what is true. Influential answers come from at least three
approaches: truth as correspondence i.e., agreement, of some specified sort,
between a proposition and an actual situation; truth as coherence i.e.,
interconnectedness of a proposition with a specified system of propositions;
and truth as pragmatic cognitive value i.e., usefulness of a proposition in
achieving certain intellectual goals. Without assessing these prominent
approaches, we should recognize, in accord with the standard analysis, that our
concept of knowledge seems to have a factual requirement: we epistemology epistemology
274 274 genuinely know that p only if
it is the case that p. The pertinent notion of “its being the case” seems
equivalent to the notion of “how reality is” or “how things really are.” The
latter notion seems essential to our notion of knowledge, but is open to
controversy over its explication. The justification condition. Knowledge is not
simply true belief. Some true beliefs are supported only by lucky guesswork and
hence do not qualify as knowledge. Knowledge requires that the satisfaction of
its belief condition be “appropriately related” to the satisfaction of its
truth condition. This is one broad way of understanding the justification
condition of the standard analysis. More specifically, we might say that a
knower must have adequate indication that a known proposition is true. If we
understand such adequate indication as a sort of evidence indicating that a
proposition is true, we have reached the traditional general view of the
justification condition: justification as evidence. Questions about
justification attract the lion’s share of attention in contemporary
epistemology. Controversy focuses on the meaning of ‘justification’ as well as
on the substantive conditions for a belief’s being justified in a way
appropriate to knowledge. Current debates about the meaning of ‘justification’
revolve around the question whether, and if so how, the concept of epistemic
knowledge-relevant justification is normative. Since the 0s Chisholm has
defended the following deontological obligation-oriented notion of
justification: the claim that a proposition, p, is epistemically justified for
you means that it is false that you ought to refrain from accepting p. In other
terms, to say that p is epistemically justified is to say that accepting p is
epistemically permissible at least in
the sense that accepting p is consistent with a certain set of epistemic rules.
This deontological construal enjoys wide representation in contemporary
epistemology. A normative construal of justification need not be deontological;
it need not use the notions of obligation and permission. Alston, for instance,
has introduced a non-deontological normative concept of justification that
relies mainly on the notion of what is epistemically good from the viewpoint of
maximizing truth and minimizing falsity. Alston links epistemic goodness to a
belief’s being based on adequate grounds in the absence of overriding reasons
to the contrary. Some epistemologists shun normative construals of
justification as superfluous. One noteworthy view is that ‘epistemic
justification’ means simply ‘evidential support’ of a certain sort. To say that
p is epistemically justifiable to some extent for you is, on this view, just to
say that p is supportable to some extent by your overall evidential reasons. This
construal will be non-normative so long as the notions of supportability and an
evidential reason are nonnormative. Some philosophers have tried to explicate
the latter notions without relying on talk of epistemic permissibility or
epistemic goodness. We can understand the relevant notion of “support” in terms
of non-normative notions of entailment and explanation or, answering
why-questions. We can understand the notion of an “evidential reason” via the
notion of a psychological state that can stand in a certain truth-indicating
support relation to propositions. For instance, we might regard nondoxastic
states of “seeming to perceive” something e.g., seeming to see a dictionary
here as foundational truth indicators for certain physical-object propositions e.g.,
the proposition that there is a dictionary here, in virtue of those states
being best explained by those propositions. If anything resembling this
approach succeeds, we can get by without the aforementioned normative notions
of epistemic justification. Foundationalism versus coherentism. Talk of
foundational truth indicators brings us to a key controversy over
justification: Does epistemic justification, and thus knowledge, have
foundations, and if so, in what sense? This question can be clarified as the
issue whether some beliefs can not only a have their epistemic justification
non-inferentially i.e., apart from evidential support from any other beliefs,
but also b provide epistemic justification for all justified beliefs that lack
such non-inferential justification. Foundationalism gives an affirmative answer
to this issue, and is represented in varying ways by, e.g., Aristotle,
Descartes, Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Foundationalists do not share a
uniform account of non-inferential justification. Some construe non-inferential
justification as self-justification. Others reject literal self-justification
for beliefs, and argue that foundational beliefs have their non-inferential
justification in virtue of evidential support from the deliverances of
non-belief psychological states, e.g., perception “seem-ing-to-perceive”
states, sensation “seeming-to-sense” states, or memory “seeming-toremember”
states. Still others understand noninferential justification in terms of a
belief’s being “reliably produced,” i.e., caused and sustained by some
non-belief belief-producing process or source e.g., perception, memory,
introspection that tends to produce true rather than false beliefs. This last
view takes the causal source of a belief to be crucial to its justification.
Unlike Descartes, contemporary foundationalists clearly separate claims to
non-inferential, foundational justification from claims to certainty. They
typically settle for a modest foundationalism implying that foundational
beliefs need not be indubitable or infallible. This contrasts with the radical
foundationalism of Descartes. The traditional competitor to foundationalism is
the coherence theory of justification, i.e., epistemic coherentism. This is not
the coherence definition of truth; it rather is the view that the justification
of any belief depends on that belief’s having evidential support from some
other belief via coherence relations such as entailment or explanatory
relations. Notable proponents include Hegel, Bosanquet, and Sellars. A
prominent contemporary version of epistemic coherentism states that evidential
coherence relations among beliefs are typically explanatory relations. The
rough idea is that a belief is justified for you so long as it either best
explains, or is best explained by, some member of the system of beliefs that
has maximal explanatory power for you. Contemporary coherentism is uniformly
systemic or holistic; it finds the ultimate source of justification in a system
of interconnected beliefs or potential beliefs. One problem has troubled all
versions of coherentism that aim to explain empirical justification: the
isolation argument. According to this argument, coherentism entails that you
can be epistemically justified in accepting an empirical proposition that is
incompatible with, or at least improbable given, your total empirical evidence.
The key assumption of this argument is that your total empirical evidence
includes non-belief sensory and perceptual awareness-states, such as your
feeling pain or your seeming to see something. These are not belief-states.
Epistemic coherentism, by definition, makes justification a function solely of
coherence relations between propositions, such as propositions one believes or
accepts. Thus, such coherentism seems to isolate justification from the
evidential import of non-belief awareness-states. Coherentists have tried to
handle this problem, but no resolution enjoys wide acceptance. Causal and
contextualist theories. Some contemporary epistemologists endorse contextualism
regarding epistemic justification, a view suggested by Dewey, Vitters, and
Kuhn, among others. On this view, all justified beliefs depend for their
evidential support on some unjustified beliefs that need no justification. In
any context of inquiry, people simply assume the acceptability of some
propositions as starting points for inquiry, and these “contextually basic”
propositions, though lacking evidential support, can serve as evidential
support for other propositions. Contextualists stress that contextually basic
propositions can vary from context to context e.g., from theological inquiry to
biological inquiry and from social group to social group. The main problem for
contextualists comes from their view that unjustified assumptions can provide
epistemic justification for other propositions. We need a precise explanation
of how an unjustified assumption can yield evidential support, how a
non-probable belief can make another belief probable. Contextualists have not
given a uniform explanation here. Recently some epistemologists have
recommended that we give up the traditional evidence condition for knowledge.
They recommend that we construe the justification condition as a causal
condition. Roughly, the idea is that you know that p if and only if a you believe
that p, b p is true, and c your believing that p is causally produced and
sustained by the fact that makes p true. This is the basis of the causal theory
of knowing, which comes with varying details. Any such causal theory faces
serious problems from our knowledge of universal propositions. Evidently, we
know, for instance, that all dictionaries are produced by people, but our
believing that this is so seems not to be causally supported by the fact that
all dictionaries are humanly produced. It is not clear that the latter fact
causally produces any beliefs. Another problem is that causal theories
typically neglect what seems to be crucial to any account of the justification
condition: the requirement that justificational support for a belief be accessible,
in some sense, to the believer. The rough idea is that one must be able to
access, or bring to awareness, the justification underlying one’s beliefs. The
causal origins of a belief are, of course, often very complex and inaccessible
to a believer. Causal theories thus face problems from an accessibility
requirement on justification. Internalism regarding justification preserves an
accessibility requirement on what confers justification, whereas epistemic
externalism rejects this requirement. Debates over internalism and externalism
abound in current epistemology, but internalists do not yet share a uniform
detailed account of accessibility. The Gettier problem. The standard analysis
of knowledge, however elaborated, faces a devastating challenge that initially
gave rise to causal theories of knowledge: the Gettier problem. In 3 Edmund
Gettier published a highly influential challenge to the view that if you have a
justified true belief that p, then you know that p. Here is one of Gettier’s
counterexamples to this view: Smith is justified in believing the false
proposition that i Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of i, Smith infers, and thus
is justified in believing, that ii either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in
Barcelona. As it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, and so ii is true. So,
although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition ii, Smith does
not know ii. Gettier-style counterexamples are cases where a person has
justified true belief that p but lacks knowledge that p. The Gettier problem is
the problem of finding a modification of, or an alternative to, the standard
analysis that avoids difficulties from Gettier-style counterexamples. The
controversy over the Gettier problem is highly complex and still unsettled.
Many epistemologists take the lesson of Gettier-style counterexamples to be
that propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the
justification, truth, and belief conditions. No specific fourth condition has
received overwhelming acceptance, but some proposals have become prominent. The
so-called defeasibility condition, e.g., requires that the justification
appropriate to knowledge be “undefeated” in the general sense that some
appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning defeaters of justification be
true of that justification. For instance, one simple defeasibility fourth
condition requires of Smith’s knowing that p that there be no true proposition,
q, such that if q became justified for Smith, p would no longer be justified
for Smith. So if Smith knows, on the basis of his visual perception, that Mary
removed books from the library, then Smith’s coming to believe the true
proposition that Mary’s identical twin removed books from the library would not
undermine the justification for Smith’s belief concerning Mary herself. A
different approach shuns subjunctive conditionals of that sort, and contends
that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained
by the collective totality of actual truths. This approach requires a detailed
account of when justification is undermined and restored. The Gettier problem
is epistemologically important. One branch of epistemology seeks a precise
understanding of the nature e.g., the essential components of propositional
knowledge. Our having a precise understanding of propositional knowledge
requires our having a Gettier-proof analysis of such knowledge. Epistemologists
thus need a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however complex that
solution is. Skepticism. Epistemologists debate the limits, or scope, of
knowledge. The more restricted we take the limits of knowledge to be, the more
skeptical we are. Two influential types of skepticism are knowledge skepticism
and justification skepticism. Unrestricted knowledge skepticism implies that no
one knows anything, whereas unrestricted justification skepticism implies the
more extreme view that no one is even justified in believing anything. Some
forms of skepticism are stronger than others. Knowledge skepticism in its
strongest form implies that it is impossible for anyone to know anything. A
weaker form would deny the actuality of our having knowledge, but leave open
its possibility. Many skeptics have restricted their skepticism to a particular
domain of supposed knowledge: e.g., knowledge of the external world, knowledge
of other minds, knowledge of the past or the future, or knowledge of
unperceived items. Such limited skepticism is more common than unrestricted
skepticism in the history of epistemology. Arguments supporting skepticism come
in many forms. One of the most difficult is the problem of the criterion, a
version of which has been stated by the sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne:
“To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of
things, we need to have a distinguishing method; to validate this method, we
need to have a justifying argument; but to validate this justifying argument,
we need the very method at issue. And there we are, going round on the wheel.”
This line of skeptical argument originated in ancient Greece, with epistemology
itself. It forces us to face this question: How can we specify what we know
without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know
without having specified what we know? Is there any reasonable way out of this
threatening circle? This is one of the most difficult epistemological problems,
and a cogent epistemology must offer a defensible solution to epistemology
epistemology 277 277 it. Contemporary
epistemology still lacks a widely accepted reply to this urgent problem
erfahrung: Grice
used the German, ‘since I find it difficult to translate.” G. term tr. into
English, especially since Kant, as ‘experience’. Kant does not use it as a
technical term; rather, it indicates that which requires explanation through
more precisely drawn technical distinctions such as those among ‘sensibility’,
‘understanding’, and ‘reason’. In the early twentieth century, Husserl
sometimes distinguishes between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the former indicating
experience as capable of being thematized and methodically described or
analyzed, the latter experience as “lived through” and never fully available to
analysis. Such a distinction occasionally reappears in later texts of
phenomenology and existentialism.
erigena:
j. s. – a Mediaeval Griceian -- also called John the Scot, Eriugena, and
Scottigena, Irish-born scholar and theologian. He taught grammar and dialectics
at the court of Charles the Bald near Laon from 845 on. In a controversy in
851, John argued that there was only one predestination, to good, since evil
was strictly nothing. Thus no one is compelled to evil by God’s foreknowledge,
since, strictly speaking, God has no foreknowledge of what is not. But his
reliance on dialectic, his Origenist conception of the world as a place of education
repairing the damage done by sin, his interest in cosmology, and his perceived
Pelagian tendencies excited opposition. Attacked by Prudentius of Troyes and
Flores of Lyons, he was condemned at the councils of Valencia 855 and Langres
859. Charles commissioned him to translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and
the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor from the Grecian. These works opened up a
new world, and John followed his translations with commentaries on the Gospel
of John and Pseudo-Dionysius, and then his chief work, the Division of Nature
or Periphyseon 82666, in the Neoplatonic tradition. He treats the universe as a
procession from God, everything real in nature being a trace of God, and then a
return to God through the presence of nature in human reason and man’s union
with God. John held that the nature of man is not destroyed by union with God,
though it is deified. He was condemned for pantheism at Paris in 1210. J.Lo.
eristic, the art of controversy, often involving fallacious but persuasive reasoning.
The ancient Sophists brought this art to a high level to achieve their personal
goal. They may have found their material in the “encounters” in the Erfahrung
eristic 279 279 law courts as well as
in daily life. To enhance persuasion they endorsed the use of unsound
principles such as hasty generalizations, faulty analogies, illegitimate appeal
to authority, the post hoc ergo propter hoc i.e., “after this, therefore
because of this” and other presumed principles. Aristotle exposed eristic
argumentation in his Sophistical Refutations, which itself draws examples from
Plato’s Euthydemus. From this latter work comes the famous example: ‘That dog
is a father and that dog is his, therefore that dog is his father’. What is
perhaps worse than its obvious invalidity is that the argument is superficially
similar to a sound argument such as ‘This is a table and this is brown,
therefore this is a brown table’. In the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle
undertakes to find procedures for detection of bad arguments and to propose
rules for constructing sound arguments.
erlebnis: G.
Grice used the German term, “since I find it difficult to translate” -- term
for experience used in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century G.
philosophy. Erlebnis denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived
fullness. It contrasts with the more typical G. word Erfahrung, denoting
ordinary experience as mediated through intellectual and constructive elements.
As immediate, Erlebnis eludes conceptualization, in both the lived present and
the interiority of experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and
extraordinary: it reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking.
Typical examples include art, religion, and love, all of which also show the
anti-rationalist and polemical uses of the concept. It is especially popular
among the Romantic mystics like Novalis and the anti-rationalists Nietzsche and
Bergson, as well as in phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism. As
used in post-Hegelian G. philosophy, the term describes two aspects of
subjectivity. The first concerns the epistemology of the human sciences and of
phenomenology. Against naturalism and objectivism, philosophers appeal to the
ineliminable, subjective qualities of experience to argue that interpreters
must understand “what it is like to be” some experiencing subject, from the
inside. The second use of the term is to denote extraordinary and interior
experiences like art, religion, freedom, and vital energy. In both cases, it is
unclear how such experience could be identified or known in its immediacy, and
much recent G. thought, such as Heidegger and hermeneutics, rejects the
concept.
erotetic: in
the strict sense, pertaining to questions. Erotetic logic is the logic of
questions. Different conceptions of questions yield different kinds of erotetic
logic. A Platonistic approach holds that questions exist independently of
interrogatives. For P. Tichý, a question is a function on possible worlds, the
right answer being the value of the function at the actual world. Erotetic
logic is the logic of such functions. In the epistemic-imperative approach of
L. Bqvist, Hintikka, et al., one begins with a system for epistemic sentences
and embeds this in a system for imperative sentences, thus obtaining sentences
of the form ‘make it the case that I know . . .’ and complex compounds of such
sentences. Certain ones of these are defined to be interrogatives. Then
erotetic logic is the logic of epistemic imperatives and the conditions for
satisfaction of these imperatives. In the abstract interrogative approach of N.
Belnap, T. Kubigski, and many others, one chooses certain types of expression
to serve as interrogatives, and, for each type, specifies what expressions
count as answers of various kinds direct, partial, . . .. On this approach we
may say that interrogatives express questions, or we may identify questions
with interrogatives, in which case the only meaning that an interrogative has
is that it has the answers that it does. Either way, the emphasis is on
interrogatives, and erotetic logic is the logic of systems that provide
interrogatives and specify answers to them. In the broad sense, ‘erotetic’
designates what pertains to utterance-and-response. In this sense erotetic
logic is the logic of the relations between 1 sentences of many kinds and 2 the
expressions that count as appropriate replies to them. This includes not only
the relations between question and answer but also, e.g., between assertion and
agreement or denial, command and report of compliance or refusal, and for many
types of sentence S between S and various corrective replies to S e.g., denial
of the presupposition of S. Erotetic logics may differ in the class of
sentences treated, the types of response counted as appropriate, the assignment
of other content presupposition, projection, etc., and other details.
eschatologicum: Possibly related to Latin ‘summum,
‘as in ‘summum genus,’ and ‘summun bonum. From Greek, 5. in the Logic of
Arist., τὰ ἔ. are the last or lowest species, Metaph.1059b26, or individuals,
ib.998b16, cf. AP0.96b12, al.; “τὸ ἔ. ἄτομον” Metaph.1058b10. b. ὁ ἔ. ὅρος the
minor term of a syllogism, EN1147b14. c. last step in geom. analysis or
ultimate condition of action, “τὸ ἔ. ἀρχὴ τῆς πράξεως” de An.433a16. II. Adv.
-τως to the uttermost, exceedingly, “πῦρ ἐ. καίει” Hp.de Arte8; “ἐ.
διαμάχεσθαι” Arist.HA613a11 ; “ἐ. φιλοπόλεμος” X.An.2.6.1 ; “φοβοῦμαί σ᾽ ἐ.”
Men.912, cf. Epicur.Ep. 1p.31U. b. -τως διακεῖσθαι to be at the last extremity,
Plb.1.24.2, D.S.18.48 ; “ἔχειν” Ev.Marc.5.23 ; “ἀπορεῖν” Phld.Oec.p.72J. 2. so
ἐς τὸ ἔ.,=ἐσχάτως, Hdt.7.229; “εἰς τὰ ἔ.” X.HG5.4.33 ; “εἰς τὰ ἔ. μάλα”
Id.Lac.1.2 ; “τὸ ἔ.” finally, in the end, Pl.Grg.473c ; but, τὸ ἔ. what is
worst of all, ib.508d. Why ontology is not enough. The philosopher needs to
PLAY with cross-categorial barriers. He is an eschatologist. Socrates was. being
and good, for Aristotle and Grice cover all. Good was a favourite of Moore and
Hare, as Barnes was well aware! Like Barnes, Grice dislikes Prichards analysis
of good. He leans towards the emotion-based approach by Ogden. If Grice, like
Humpty Dumpty, opposes the Establishment with his meaning liberalism (what a
word means is what I mean by uttering it), he certainly should be concerned
with category shifts. Plus, Grice was a closet Platonist. As Plato once
remarked, having the ability to see horses but not horsehood (ἱππότης) is a
mark of stupidity – rendered by Liddell and Scott as “horse-nature, the concept
of horse” (Antisth. et Pl. ap. Simp.in Cat.208.30,32, Sch.AristId.p.167F).
Grice would endure the flinty experience of giving joint seminars at Oxford
with Austin on the first two books of Aristotles Organon, Categoriae, and De
Int. Grice finds the use of a category, κατηγορία, by Aristotle a bit of a
geniality. Aristotle is using legalese, from kata, against, on, and
agoreuô [ἀγορεύω], speak in public), and uses it to designate both the
prosecution in a trial and the attribution in a logical proposition, i.
e., the questions that must be asked with regard to a Subjects, and the answers
that can be given. As a representative of the linguistic turn in philosophy,
Grice is attracted to the idea that a category can thus be understood
variously, as applying to the realm of reality (ontology), but also to the
philosophy of language (category of expression) and to philosophical psychology
(category of representation). Grice kept his explorations on categories
under two very separate, shall we say, categories: his explorations with Austin
(very serious), and those with Strawson (more congenial). Where is Smiths
altruism? Nowhere to be seen. Should we say it is idle (otiose) to speak of
altruism? No, it is just an attribute, which, via category shift, can be made
the Subjects of your sentence, Strawson. It is not spatio-temporal, though,
right. Not really. ‒ I do not particularly like your trouser words.
The essay is easy to date since Grice notes that Strawson reproduced some of
the details in his Individuals, which we can very well date. Grice thought
Aristotle was the best! Or at any rate almost as good as Kantotle! Aristotle
saw Categoriæ, along with De Int. as part of his Organon. However,
philosophers of language tend to explore these topics without a consideration
of the later parts of the Organon dealing with the syllogism, the tropes, and
the topics ‒ the boring bits! The reason Grice is attracted to the Aristotelian
category (as Austin and Strawson equally were) is that category allows for a
linguistic-turn reading. Plus, its a nice, pretentious (in the Oxonian way)
piece of philosophical jargon! Aristotle couldnt find category in the koine, so
he had to coin it. While meant by Aristotle in a primarily ontological way,
Oxonian philosophers hasten to add that a category of expression, as Grice puts
it, is just as valid a topic for philosophical exploration. His tutee Strawson
will actually publish a book on Subjects and predicate in grammar! (Trivial,
Strawson!). Grice will later add an intermediary category, which is the
Subjects of his philosophical psychology. As such, a category can be construed
ontologically, or representationally: the latter involving philosophical
psychological concepts, and expressions themselves. For Aristotle, as Grice and
Austin, and Grice and Strawson, were well aware as they educated some of the
poor at Oxford (Only the poor learn at Oxford ‒ Arnold), there are (at
least ‒ at most?) ten categories. Grice doesnt (really) care about the
number. But the first are important. Actually the very first: theres substantia
prima, such as Grice. And then theres substantia secunda, such as Grices
rationality. The essentia. Then there are various types of attributes. But, as
Grice sharply notes, even substantia secunda may be regarded as an attribute.
Grices favourite game with Strawson was indeed Category Shift, or
Subjects-ification, as Strawson preferred. Essence may be introduced as a
sub-type of an attribute. We would have substantia prima AND attribute, which
in turn gets divided into essential, the izzing, and non-essential, the
hazzing. While Austin is not so fun to play with, Strawson is. Smith is a very
altruist person. Where is his altruism? Nowhere to be seen, really. Yet we may
sensically speak of Smiths altruism. It is just a matter of a category shift.
Grice scores. Grice is slightly disappointed, but he perfectly understands,
that Strawson, who footnotes Grice as the tutor from whom I never ceased
to learn about logic in Introduction to logical lheory, fails to acknowledge
that most of the research in Strawsons Individuals: an essay in descriptive
(not revisionary) metaphysics derives from the conclusions reached at his joint
philosophical investigations at joint seminars with Grice. Grice later
elaborates on this with Code, who is keen on Grices other game, the hazz and
the hazz not, the izz. But then tutor from whom I never ceased to learn about
metaphysics sounds slightlier clumsier, as far as the implicaturum goes. Categories,
the Grice-Myro theory of identity, Relative identity, Grice on =, identity,
notes, with Myro, metaphysics, philosophy, with Code, Grice izz Grice – or izz
he? The idea that = is unqualified requires qualification. Whitehead and
Russell ignored this. Grice and Myro didnt. Grice wants to allow for It is the
case that a = b /t1 and it is not the case that a = b /t2. The idea is
intuitive, but philosophers of a Leibnizian bent are too accustomed to deal
with = as an absolute. Grice applies this to human vs. person. A human may be
identical to a person, but cease to be so. Indeed, Grices earlier attempt to
produce a reductive analsysis of I may be seen as remedying a circularity he
detected in Locke about same. Cf. Wiggins, Sameness and substance. Grice makes
Peano feel deeply Griceian, as Grice lists his = postulates, here for
consideration. And if you wondered why Grice prefers Latinate individuum to the
Grecian. The Grecian is “ἄτομον,” in logic, rendered by L and S as ‘individual,
of terms,’ Pl. Sph. 229d; of the εἶδος or forma, Arist. Metaph.1034a8, de An.
414b27.2. individual, Id. APo. 96b11, al.: as a subst., τό ἄτομον, Id.
Cat. 1b6, 3a38, Metaph.1058a18 (pl.), Plot. 6.2.2, al. subst.; latinised from
Grecian. Lewis and Short have “indīvĭdŭum,” an atom, indivisible particle: ex
illis individuis, unde omnia Democritus gigni affirmat, Cic. Ac. 2, 17 fin.: ne
individuum quidem, nec quod dirimi distrahive non possit, id. N. D. 3, 12,
29. Note the use of individuum in alethic modalities for necessity and
possibility, starting with (11). ⊢ (α izzes α). This would be the principle of
non-contradiction or identity. Grice applies it to war: War is war, as yielding
a most peculiar implicaturum. (α izzes β ∧ β izzes γ) ⊃ α izzes γ. This above is
transitivity, which is crucial for Grices tackling of Reids counterexample to
Locke (and which according to Flew in Locke on personal identity was predated
by Berkeley. α hazzes β ⊃ ~(α izzes β). Or, what is accidental is not essential.
Grice allows that what is essential is accidental is, while misleading,
true. ⊢ α
hazzes β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(α hazzes x ∧ x izzes β) ⊢ (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes a forma). This above
defines a universalium as a forma, or eidos. (α hazzes β ∧ α izzes a particular) ⊃ (∃γ).(γ≠α ∧ α izzes β) ⊢ α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ ((β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) ⊢ α izzes essentially predicable
of β ⊃⊂ β
izzes α ⊢ α
izzes non-essentially/accidentally predicable of β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) α = β ⊃⊂ α izzes β ∧ β izzes α ⊢ α izzes an individuum ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(β izzes α ⊃ α izzes β) ⊢ α izzes a particular ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(α izzes predicable of β ⊃ (α izzes β ∧ β izzes α)); α izzes a
universalium ⊃⊂ ◊(∃β)(α izzes predicable of α ∧ ~(α izzes β ∧ β izzes α) ⊢ α izzes some-thing ⊃ α izzes an individuum. ⊢ α izzes a forma ⊃ (α izzes some-thing ∧ α izzes a universalium)
16. ⊢ α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ (β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) ⊢ α izzes essentially predicable
of α ⊢ α
izzes accidentally predicable of β ⊃ α ≠ β; ~(α izzes accidentally predicable of β) ⊃ α ≠ β 20. α izzes a
particular ⊃ α izzes an individuum. ⊢ α izzes a particular ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α) 22. ⊢~ (∃x).(x izzes a particular ∧ x izzes a forma) α izzes a
forma ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α) x izzes a particular ⊃ ~(∃β)(α izz β) ⊢ α izzes a forma ⊃ ((α izzes predicable of
β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ β hazz α); α izzes a
forma ∧ β
izzes a particular ⊃ (α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ β hazz A) ⊢ (α izzes a particular ∧ β izzes a universalium ∧ β izzes predicable of α) ⊃ (∃γ)(α ≠ γ ∧ γ izzes essentially predicable
of α) ⊢ (∃x) (∃y)(x izzes a particular ∧ y izzes a universalium ∧ y izzes predicable of x ⊃ ~(∀x)(x izzes a universalium ∧ x izzes some-thing); (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes some-thing) ⊢ α izzes a particular) ⊃ ~∃β.(α ≠ β ∧ β izzes essentially predicable
of α); (α izzes predicable of β ∧ α ≠ β)⊃ α izzes non-essentially or accidentally predicable of
β. The use of this or that doxastic modality, necessity and possibility,
starting above, make this a good place to consider one philosophical mistake
Grice mentions in “Causal theory.” What is actual is not also possible. Cf.
What is essential is also accidental. He is criticising a contemporary, if
possible considered dated in the New World, form of ordinary-language
philosophy, where the philosopher detects a nuance, and embarks risking
colliding with the facts, rushing ahead to exploit it before he can clarify it!
Grice liked to see his explorations on = as belonging to metaphysics, as the
s. on his Doctrines at the Grice
Collection testifies. While Grice presupposes the use of = in his treatment of
the king of France, he also explores a relativisation of =. His motivation was
an essay by Wiggins, almost Aristotelian in spirit, against Strawsons criterion
of space-time continuancy for the identification of the substantia prima. Grice
wants to apply = to cases were the time continuancy is made explicit. This
yields that a=b in scenario S, but that it may not be the case that a = b in a
second scenario S. Myro had an occasion to expand on Grices views in his
contribution on the topic for PGRICE. Myro mentions his System Ghp, a highly
powerful/hopefully plausible version of Grices System Q, in gratitude to to
Grice. Grice explored also the logic of izzing and hazzing with Code. Grice and
Myro developed a Geach-type of qualified identity. The formal aspects were
developed by Myro, and also by Code. Grice discussed Wigginss Sameness and
substance, rather than Geach. Cf. Wiggins and Strawson on Grice for the BA. At
Oxford, Grice was more or less given free rein to teach what he wanted. He
found the New World slightly disconcerting at first. At Oxford, he expected his
tutees to be willing to read the classics in the vernacular Greek. His approach
to teaching was diagogic, as Socratess! Even in his details of izzing and
hazzing. Greek enough to me!, as a student recalled! correspondence with Code,
Grice sees in Code an excellent Aristotelian. They collaborated on an
exploration of Aristotles underlying logic of essential and non-essential
predication, for which they would freely use such verbal forms as izzing and
hazing, izzing and hazzing, Code on the significance of the middle book in
Aristotles Met. , Aristotle, metaphysics, the middle book. Very middle.
Grice never knew what was middle for Aristotle, but admired Code too much to
air this! The organisation of Aristotle’s metaphysics was a topic of much
concern for Grice. With Code, Grice coined izzing and hazzing to refer to
essential and non-essential attribution. Izzing and hazzing, “Aristotle on the
multiplicity of being” (henceforth, “Aristotle”) PPQ, Aristotle on
multiplicity, “The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly” (henceforth,
“PPQ,” posthumously ed. by Loar, Aristotle, multiplicity, izzing, hazzing,
being, good, Code. Grice offers a thorough discussion of Owens treatment of
Aristotle as leading us to the snares of ontology. Grice distinguishes between
izzing and hazzing, which he thinks help in clarifying, more axiomatico, what
Aristotle is getting at with his remarks on essential versus non-essential
predication. Surely, for Grice, being, nor indeed good, should not
be multiplied beyond necessity, but izzing and hazzing are already
multiplied. The Grice Papers contains drafts of the essay eventually
submitted for publication by Loar in memoriam Grice. Note that the Grice Papers
contains a typically Griceian un-publication, entitled Aristotle and
multiplicity simpliciter. Rather than Aristotle on, as the title for the
PPQ piece goes. Note also that, since its multiplicity simpliciter, it
refers to Aristotle on two key ideas: being and the good. As Code notes in
his contribution to PGRICE, Grice first presents his thoughts on izzing and hazzing
publicly at Vancouver. Jones has developed the axiomatic treatment favoured by
Grice. For Grice there is multiplicity in both being and good (ton
agathon), both accountable in terms of conversational implicatura, of course.
If in Prolegomena, Grice was interested in criticising himself, in essays of
historical nature like these, Grice is seeing Aristotles Athenian dialectic as
a foreshadow of the Oxonian dialectic, and treating him as an equal. Grice is
yielding his razor: senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.
But then Aristotle is talking about the multiplicity of is and is
good. Surely, there are ways to turn Aristotle into the monoguist
he has to be! There is a further item in the Grice collection that
combines Aristotle on being with Aristotle on good, which is relevant in
connection with this. Aristotle on being and good
(ἀγαθόν). Aristotle, being, good (agathon), ἀγαθός. As from this f.,
the essays are ordered alphabetically, starting with Aristotle, Grice will
explore Aristotle on being or is and good (ἀγαθός) in explorations with Code.
Grice comes up with izzing and hazzing as the two counterparts to Aristotles
views on, respectively, essential and non-essential predication. Grices views
on Aristotle on the good (strictly, there is no need to restrict Arisstotles
use to the neuter form, since he employs ἀγαθός) connect with Grices
Aristotelian idea of eudaemonia, that he explores elsewhere. Strictly:
Aristotle on being and the good. If that had been Grices case, he would have
used the definite article. Otherwise, good may well translate as masculine,
ἀγαθός ‒the agathetic implicaturum. He plays with Dodgson, cabbages and
kings. For what is a good cabbage as opposed to a cabbage? It does not
require very sharp eyes, but only our willingness to use the eyes one has, to
see that speech is permeated with the notion of purpose. To say what a
certain kind of thing is is only too frequently partly to say that it is
for. This feature applies to talk of, e. g., ships, shoes, sailing wax,
and kings; and, possibly and perhaps most excitingly, it extends even to
cabbages! Although Grice suspects Urmson might disagree. v. Grice on
Urmsons apples. Grice at his jocular best. If he is going to be a Kantian,
he will. He uses Kantian jargon to present his theory of conversation. This he
does only at Harvard. The implicaturum being that talking of vaguer assumptions
of helpfulness would not sound too convincing. So he has the maxim, the
super-maxim, and the sub-maxim. A principle and a maxim is Kantian enough. But
when he actually echoes Kant, is when he introduces what he later calls the
conversational categories – the keyword here is conversational category, as
categoria is used by Aristotle and Kant ‒ or Kantotle. Grice surely
knew that, say, his Category of Conversational Modality had nothing to do with
the Kantian Category of Modality. Still, he stuck with the idea of four
categories (versus Aristotles ten, eight or seven, as the text you consult may
tell you): category of conversational quantity (which at Oxford he had
formulated in much vaguer terms like strength and informativeness and
entailment), the category of conversational quality (keyword: principle of
conversational trust), and the category of conversational relation, where again
Kants relation has nothing to do with the maxim Grice associates with this
category. In any case, his Kantian joke may be helpful when considering the
centrality of the concept category simpliciter that Grice had to fight with
with his pupils at Oxford – he was lucky to have Austin and Strawson as
co-lecturers! Grice was irritated by L and S defining kategoria as category. I
guess I knew that. He agreed with their second shot, predicable. Ultimately,
Grices concern with category is his concern with person, or prote ousia, as
used by Aristotle, and as giving a rationale to Grices agency-based approach to
the philosophical enterprise. Aristotle used kategorein in the sense
of to predicate, assert something of something, and kategoria. The prote
ousia is exemplified by o tis anthropos. It is obvious that Grice wants to
approach Aristotles semantics and Aristotles metaphysics at one fell swoop.
Grice reads Aristotles Met. , and finds it understandable. Consider the
adjective French (which Aristotle does NOT consider) ‒ as it occurs in phrases
such as Michel Foucault is a French citizen. Grice is not a French
citizen. Michel Foucault once wrote a nice French poem. Urmson once wrote
a nice French essay on pragmatics. Michel Foucault was a French
professor. Michel Foucault is a French professor. Michel Foucault
is a French professor of philosophy. The following features are perhaps
significant. The appearance of the adjective French, or Byzantine, as the
case might be ‒ cf. I’m feeling French tonight. In these phrases is what
Grice has as adjunctive rather than conjunctive, or attributive. A French poem
is not necessarily something which combines the separate features of being a
poem and being French, as a tall philosopher would simply combine the features
of being tall and of being a philosopher. French in French poem,
occurs adverbially. French citizen standardly means citizen of
France. French poem standardly means poem in French. But it is a mistake to
suppose that this fact implies that there is this or that meaning, or, worse,
this or that Fregeian sense, of the expression French. In any case, only
metaphorically or metabolically can we say that French means this or that or
has sense. An utterer means. An utterer makes sense. Cf. R. Pauls doubts about
capitalizing major. French means, and figuratively at that, only one thing,
viz. of or pertaining to France. And English only means of or
pertaining to England. French may be what Grice (unfollowing his remarks
on The general theory of context) call context-sensitive. One might indeed
say, if you like, that while French means ‒ or means only this or that, or that
its only sense is this or that, French still means, again figuratively, a
variety of things. French means-in-context of or pertaining to
France. Symbolise that as expression E means-in-context that p.
Expression E means-in-context C2 that p2. Relative
to Context C1 French means of France; as in the phrase French
citizen. Relative to context C2, French means in the French language, as in the phrase,
French poem ‒ whereas history does not behave, like this. Whether the
focal item is a universal or a particular is, contra Aristotle, quite
irrelevant to the question of what this or that related adjective means, or
what its sense is. The medical art is no more what an utterer means when he
utters the adjective medical, as is France what an utterer means by the
adjective French. While the attachment of this or that context may suggest an
interpretation in context of this or that expression as uttered by the utterer
U, it need not be the case that such a suggestion is indefeasible. It
might be e.g. that French poem would have to mean, poem composed in French,
unless there were counter indications, that brings the utterer and the
addressee to a different context C3. In which case, perhaps
what the utterer means by French poem is poem composed by a French competitor
in this or that competition. For French professor there would be two
obvious things an utterer might mean. Disambiguation will depend on the
wider expression-context or in the situational context attaching to
the this or that circumstance of utterance. Eschatology. Some like Hegel, but
Collingwoods *my* man! ‒ Grice. Grice participated in two
consecutive evenings of the s. of programmes on metaphysics organised by Pears.
Actually, charming Pears felt pretentious enough to label the meetings to be
about the nature of metaphysics! Grice ends up discussing, as he should,
Collingwood on presupposition. Met.
remained a favourite topic for Grices philosophical explorations, as it
is evident from his essay on Met. , Philosophical Eschatology, and Platos Republic,
repr. in his WOW . Possibly Hardie is to blame, since he hardly tutored Grice
on metaphysics! Grices two BBC lectures are typically dated in tone. It was the
(good ole) days when philosophers thought they could educate the non-elite by
dropping Namess like Collingwood and stuff! The Third Programme was extremely
popular, especially among the uneducated ones at London, as Pears almost put
it, as it was a way for Londoners to get to know what is going on down at
Oxford, the only place an uneducated (or educated, for that matter) Londoner at
the time was interested in displaying some interest about! I mean, Johnson is
right: if a man is tired of the nature of metaphysics, he is tired of life!
Since the authorship is Grice, Strawson, and Pears, Met. , in Pears, The Nature
of Met., The BBC Third Programme, it is somewhat difficult to identify what
paragraphs were actually read by Grice (and which ones by Pears and which ones
by Strawson). But trust the sharp Griceian to detect the correct implicaturum!
There are many (too many) other items covered by these two lectures: Kant,
Aristotle, in no particular order. And in The Grice Collection, for that
matter, that cover the field of metaphysics. In the New World, as a sort of
tutor in the graduate programme, Grice was expected to cover the discipline at
various seminars. Only I dislike discipline! Perhaps his clearest exposition is
in the opening section of his Met. , philosophical eschatology, and Platos
Republic, repr. in his WOW , where he states, bluntly that all you need is metaphysics! metaphysics, Miscellaneous,
metaphysics notes, Grice would possible see metaphysics as a class – category
figuring large. He was concerned with the methodological aspects of the
metaphysical enterprise, since he was enough of a relativist to allow for one
metaphysical scheme to apply to one area of discourse (one of Eddingtons
tables) and another metaphysical scheme to apply to another (Eddingtons other
table). In the third programme for the BBC Grice especially enjoyed criticising
John Wisdoms innovative look at metaphysics as a bunch of self-evident
falsehoods (Were all alone). Grice focuses on Wisdom on the knowledge of other
minds. He also discusses Collingwoods presuppositions, and Bradley on the
reality-appearance distinction. Grices reference to Wisdom was due to Ewings
treatment of Wisdom on metaphysics. Grices main motivation here is defending
metaphysics against Ayer. Ayer thought to win more Oxonian philosophers than he
did at Oxford, but he was soon back in London. Post-war Oxford had become
conservative and would not stand to the nonsense of Ayers claiming that
metaphysics is nonsense, especially, as Ayers implicaturum also was, that
philosophy is nonsense! Perhaps the best summary of Griceian metaphysics is his
From Genesis to Revelations: a new discourse on metaphysics. It’s an
ontological answer that one must give to Grices metabolic operation from
utterers meaning to expression meaning, Grice had been interested in the
methodology of metaphysics since his Oxford days. He counts as one
memorable experience in the area his participation in two episodes for the BBC
Third Programme on The nature of metaphysics with the organiser, Pears, and his
former tutee, Strawson on the panel. Grice was particularly keen on Collingwoods
views on metaphysical presuppositions, both absolute and relative! Grice
also considers John Wisdoms view of the metaphysical proposition as a blatant
falsehood. Grice considers Bradleys Hegelian metaphysics of the absolute, in
Appearance and reality. Refs.: While Grice’s choice was ‘eschatology,’ as per
WoW, Essay, other keywords are useful, notably “metaphysics,” “ontology,”
“theorizing,” and “theory-theory,” in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
essentia:
Explored
byy Grice in “Aristotle on the multiplicity of being”. To avoid equivocation,
Grice distinguishes between the ‘izz’ of essentia, and the ‘hazz’ of
accidentia. ssentialism, a metaphysical theory that objects have essences and
that there is a distinction between essential and non-essential or accidental
predications. Different issues have, however, been central in debates about
essences and essential predication in different periods in the history of
philosophy. In our own day, it is commitment to the notion of de re modality
that is generally taken to render a theory essentialist; but in the
essentialist tradition stemming from Aristotle, discussions of essence and
essential predication focus on the distinction between what an object is and
how it is. According to Aristotle, the universals that an ordinary object
instantiates include some that mark it out as what it is and others that
characterize it in some way but do not figure in an account of what it is. In
the Categories, he tells us that while the former are said of the object, the
latter are merely present in it; and in other writings, he distinguishes
between what he calls kath hauto or per se predications where these include the
predication of what-universals and kata sumbebekos or per accidens predications
where these include the predication of how-universals. He concedes that
universals predicated of an object kath hauto are necessary to that object; but
he construes the necessity here as derivative. It is because a universal marks
out an entity, x, as what x is and hence underlies its being the thing that it
is that the universal is necessarily predicated of x. The concept of definition
is critically involved in Aristotle’s essentialism. First, it is the kind infima species under which an object falls or one of the
items genus or differentia included in the definition of that kind that is
predicated of the object kath hauto. But, second, Aristotle’s notion of an
essence just is the notion of the ontological correlate of a definition. The
term in his writings we translate as ‘essence’ is the expression to ti ein
einai the what it is to be. Typically, the expression is followed by a
substantival expression in the dative case, so that the expressions denoting
essences are phrases like ‘the what it is to be for a horse’ and ‘the what it
is to be for an oak tree’; and Aristotle tells us that, for any kind, K, the
what it is to be for a K just is that which we identify when we provide a
complete and accurate definition of K. Now, Aristotle holds that there is
definition only of universals; and this commits him to the view that there are
no individual essences. Although he concedes that we can provide definitions of
universals from any of his list of ten categories, he gives pride of place to
the essences of universals from the category of substance. Substance-universals
can be identified without reference to essences from other categories, but the
essences of qualities, quantities, and other non-substances can be defined only
by reference to the essences of substances. In his early writings, Aristotle
took the familiar particulars of common sense things like the individual man
and horse of Categories V to be the primary substances; and in these writings
it is the essences we isolate by defining the kinds or species under which
familiar particulars fall that are construed as the basic or paradigmatic
essences. However, in later writings, where ordinary particulars are taken to
be complexes of matter and form, it is the substantial forms of familiar
particulars that are the primary substances, so their essences are the primary
or basic essences; and a central theme in Aristotle’s most mature writings is
the idea that the primary substances and their essences are necessarily one and
the same in number. error theory essentialism 281 281 The conception of essence as the
ontological correlate of a definition
often called quiddity persists
throughout the medieval tradition; and in early modern philosophy, the idea
that the identity of an object is constituted by what it is plays an important
role in Continental rationalist thinkers. Indeed, in the writings of Leibniz,
we find the most extreme version of traditional essentialism. Whereas Aristotle
had held that essences are invariably general, Leibniz insisted that each
individual has an essence peculiar to it. He called the essence associated with
an entity its complete individual concept; and he maintained that the
individual concept somehow entails all the properties exemplified by the
relevant individual. Accordingly, Leibniz believed that an omniscient being
could, for each possible world and each possible individual, infer from the
individual concept of that individual the whole range of properties exemplified
by that individual in that possible world. But, then, from the perspective of
an omniscient being, all of the propositions identifying the properties the
individual actually exhibits would express what Aristotle called kath hauto
predications. Leibniz, of course, denied that our perspective is that of an
omniscient being; we fail to grasp individual essences in their fullness, so
from our perspective, the distinction between essential and accidental
predications holds. While classical rationalists espoused a thoroughgoing
essentialism, the Aristotlelian conceptions of essence and definition were the repeated
targets of attacks by classical British empiricists. Hobbes, e.g., found the
notion of essence philosophically useless and insisted that definition merely
displays the meanings conventionally associated with linguistic expressions.
Locke, on the other hand, continued to speak of essences; but he distinguished
between real and nominal essences. As he saw it, the familiar objects of common
sense are collections of copresent sensible ideas to which we attach a single
name like ‘man’ or ‘horse’. Identifying the ideas constitutive of the relevant
collection gives us the nominal essence of a man or a horse. Locke did not deny
that real essences might underlie such collections, but he insisted that it is
nominal rather than real essences to which we have epistemic access. Hume, in
turn, endorsed the idea that familiar objects are collections of sensible
ideas, but rejected the idea of some underlying real essence to which we have
no access; and he implicitly reinforced the Hobbesian critique of Aristotelian
essences with his attack on the idea of de re necessities. So definition merely
expresses the meanings we conventionally associate with words, and the only
necessity associated with definition is linguistic or verbal necessity. From
its origins, the twentieth-century analytic tradition endorsed the classical
empiricist critique of essences and the Humean view that necessity is merely
linguistic. Indeed, even the Humean concession that there is a special class of
statements true in virtue of their meanings came into question in the forties
and fifties, when philosophers like Quine argued that it is impossible to
provide a noncircular criterion for distinguishing analytic and synthetic
statements. So by the late 0s, it had become the conventional wisdom of philosophers
in the Anglo- tradition that both the notion of a real essence and the
derivative idea that some among the properties true of an object are essential
to that object are philosophical dead ends. But over the past three decades,
developments in the semantics of modal logic have called into question
traditional empiricist skepticism about essence and modality and have given
rise to a rebirth of essentialism. In the late fifties and early sixties,
logicians like Kripke, Hintikka, and Richard Montague showed how formal
techniques that have as their intuitive core the Leibnizian idea that necessity
is truth in all possible worlds enable us to provide completeness proofs for a
whole range of nonequivalent modal logics. Metaphysicians seized on the intuitions
underlying these formal methods. They proposed that we take the picture of
alternative possible worlds seriously and claimed that attributions of de dicto
modality necessity and possibility as they apply to propositions can be
understood to involve quantification over possible worlds. Thus, to say that a
proposition, p, is necessary is to say that for every possible world, W, p is
true in W; and to say that p is possible is to say that there is at least one
possible world, W, such that p is true in W. These metaphysicians went on to
claim that the framework of possible worlds enables us to make sense of de re
modality. Whereas de dicto modality attaches to propositions taken as a whole,
an ascription of de re modality identifies the modal status of an object’s
exemplification of an attribute. Thus, we speak of Socrates as being
necessarily or essentially rational, but only contingently snub-nosed.
Intuitively, the essential properties of an object are those it could not have
lacked; whereas its contingent properties are properties it exemplifies but
could have failed to exemplify. The “friends of possible worlds” insisted that
we can make perfectly good sense of this intuitive distinction if we say that
an object, x, exhibits a property, P, essentially just in case x exhibits P in
the actual world and in every possible world in which x exists and that x
exhibits P merely contingently just in case x exhibits P in the actual world,
but there is at least one possible world, W, such that x exists in W and fails
to exhibit P in W. Not only have these neo-essentialists invoked the Leibnizian
conception of alternative possible worlds in characterizing the de re
modalities, many have endorsed Leibniz’s idea that each object has an
individual essence or what is sometimes called a haecceity. As we have seen,
the intuitive idea of an individual essence is the idea of a property an object
exhibits essentially and that no other object could possibly exhibit; and
contemporary essentialists have fleshed out this intuitive notion by saying
that a property, P, is the haecceity or individual essence of an object, x,
just in case 1 x exhibits P in the actual world and in all worlds in which x
exists and 2 there is no possible world where an object distinct from x
exhibits P. And some defenders of individual essences like Plantinga have
followed Leibniz in holding that the haecceity of an object provides a complete
concept of that object, a property such that it entails, for every possible
world, W, and every property, P, either the proposition that the object in
question has P in W or the proposition that it fails to have P in W.
Accordingly, they agree that an omniscient being could infer from the
individual essence of an object a complete account of the history of that
object in each possible world in which it exists.
ethos:
philosophical ethology – phrase used by Grice for his creature construction
routine. ethical constructivism, a form of anti-realism about ethics which
holds that there are moral facts and truths, but insists that these facts and
truths are in some way constituted by or dependent on our moral beliefs,
reactions, or attitudes. For instance, an ideal observer theory that represents
the moral rightness and wrongness of an act in terms of the moral approval and disapproval
that an appraiser would have under suitably idealized conditions can be
understood as a form of ethical constructivism. Another form of constructivism
identifies the truth of a moral belief with its being part of the appropriate
system of beliefs, e.g., of a system of moral and nonmoral beliefs that is
internally coherent. Such a view would maintain a coherence theory of moral
truth. Moral relativism is a constructivist view that allows for a plurality of
moral facts and truths. Thus, if the idealizing conditions appealed to in an
ideal observer theory allow that different appraisers can have different
reactions to the same actions under ideal conditions, then that ideal observer
theory will be a version of moral relativism as well as of ethical constructivism.
Or, if different systems of moral beliefs satisfy the appropriate epistemic
conditions e.g. are equally coherent, then the truth or falsity of particular
moral beliefs will have to be relativized to different moral systems or codes.
-- ethical objectivism, the view that the objects of the most basic concepts of
ethics which may be supposed to be values, obligations, duties, oughts, rights,
or what not exist, or that facts about them hold, objectively and that
similarly worded ethical statements by different persons make the same factual
claims and thus do not concern merely the speaker’s feelings. To say that a
fact is objective, or that something has objective existence, is usually to say
that its holding or existence is not derivative from its being thought to hold
or exist. In the Scholastic terminology still current in the seventeenth
century ‘objective’ had the more or less contrary meaning of having status only
as an object of thought. In contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is subjective
if it holds or exists only in the sense that it is thought to hold or exist, or
that it is merely a convenient human posit for practical purposes. A fact
holds, or an object exists, intersubjectively if somehow its acknowledgment is
binding on all thinking subjects or all subjects in some specified group,
although it does not hold or exist independently of their thinking about it.
Some thinkers suppose that intersubjectivity is all that can ever properly be
meant by objectivity. Objectivism may be naturalist or non-naturalist. The
naturalist objectivist believes that values, duties, or whatever are natural
phenomena detectable by introspection, perception, or scientific inference.
Thus values may be identified with certain empirical qualities of anybody’s
experience, or duties with empirical facts about the effects of action, e.g. as
promoting or hindering social cohesion. The non-naturalist objectivist
eschewing what Moore called the naturalistic fallacy believes that values or
obligations or whatever items he thinks most basic in ethics exist
independently of any belief about them, but that their existence is not a
matter of any ordinary fact detectable in the above ways but can be revealed to
ethical intuition as standing in a necessary but not analytic relation to
natural phenomena. ‘Ethical subjectivism’ usually means the doctrine that
ethical statements are simply reports on the speaker’s feelings though,
confusingly enough, such statements may be objectively true or false. Perhaps
it ought to mean the doctrine that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it
so. Attitude theories of morality, for which such statements express, rather
than report upon, the speaker’s feelings, are also, despite the objections of
their proponents, sometimes called subjectivist. In a more popular usage an
objective matter of fact is one on which all reasonable persons can be expected
to agree, while a matter is subjective if various alternative opinions can be
accepted as reasonable. What is subjective in this sense may be quite objective
in the more philosophical sense in question above. -- ethics, the philosophical study of
morality. The word is also commonly used interchangeably with ‘morality’ to
mean the subject matter of this study; and sometimes it is used more narrowly
to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group, or individual.
Christian ethics and Albert Schweitzer’s ethics are examples. In this article
the word will be used exclusively to mean the philosophical study. Ethics,
along with logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, is one of the main branches of
philosophy. It corresponds, in the traditional division of the field into
formal, natural, and moral philosophy, to the last of these disciplines. It can
in turn be divided into the general study of goodness, the general study of
right action, applied ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, and the metaphysics
of moral responsibility. These divisions are not sharp, and many important
studies in ethics, particularly those that examine or develop whole systems of
ethics, are interdivisional. Nonetheless, they facilitate the identification of
different problems, movements, and schools within the discipline. The first
two, the general study of goodness and the general study of right action,
constitute the main business of ethics. Correlatively, its principal
substantive questions are what ends we ought, as fully rational human beings,
to choose and pursue and what moral principles should govern our choices and
pursuits. How these questions are related is the discipline’s principal
structural question, and structural differences among systems of ethics reflect
different answers to this question. In contemporary ethics, the study of
structure has come increasingly to the fore, especially as a preliminary to the
general study of right action. In the natural order of exposition, however, the
substantive questions come first. Goodness and the question of ends.
Philosophers have typically treated the question of the ends we ought to pursue
in one of two ways: either as a question about the components of a good life or
as a question about what sorts of things are good in themselves. On the first
way of treating the question, it is assumed that we naturally seek a good life;
hence, determining its components amounts to determining, relative to our
desire for such a life, what ends we ought to pursue. On the second way, no
such assumption about human nature is made; rather it is assumed that whatever
is good in itself is worth choosing or pursuing. The first way of treating the
question leads directly to the theory of human well-being. The second way leads
directly to the theory of intrinsic value. The first theory originated in
ancient ethics, and eudaimonia was the Grecian word for its subject, a word
usually tr. ‘happiness,’ but sometimes tr. ‘flourishing’ in order to make the
question of human well-being seem more a matter of how well a person is doing
than how good he is feeling. These alternatives reflect the different
conceptions of human well-being that inform the two major views within the
theory: the view that feeling good or pleasure is the essence of human
well-being and the view that doing well or excelling at things worth doing is
its essence. The first view is hedonism in its classical form. Its most famous
exponent among the ancients was Epicurus. The second view is perfectionism, a
view that is common to several schools of ancient ethics. Its adherents include
Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Among the moderns, the best-known defenders
of classical hedonism and perfectionism are respectively J. S. Mill and
Nietzsche. Although these two views differ on the question of what human
well-being essentially consists in, neither thereby denies that the other’s
answer has a place in a good human life. Indeed, mature statements of each
typically assign the other’s answer an ancillary place. Thus, hedonism, as
expounded by Epicurus, takes excelling at things worth doing exercising one’s intellectual powers and
moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, e.g. as the tried and true means to experiencing
life’s most satisfying pleasures. And perfectionism, as developed in
Aristotle’s ethics, underscores the importance of pleasure the deep satisfaction that comes from doing
an important job well, e.g. as a natural
concomitant of achieving excellence in things that matter. The two views, as
expressed in these mature statements, differ not so much in the kinds of
activities they take to be central to a good life as in the ways they explain
the goodness of such a life. The chief difference between them, then, is
philosophical rather than prescriptive. The second theory, the theory of
intrinsic value, also has roots in ancient ethics, specifically, Plato’s theory
of Forms. But unlike Plato’s theory, the basic tenets of which include certain
doctrines about the reality and transcendence of value, the theory of intrinsic
value neither contains nor presupposes any metaphysical theses. At issue in the
theory is what things are good in themselves, and one can take a position on
this issue without committing oneself to any thesis about the reality or
unreality of goodness or about its transcendence or immanence. A list of the
different things philosophers have considered good in themselves would include
life, happiness, pleasure, knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty, and harmony.
The list could easily be extended. An interest in what constitutes the goodness
of the various items on the list has brought philosophers to focus primarily on
the question of whether something unites them. The opposing views on this
question are monism and pluralism. Monists affirm the list’s unity; pluralists
deny it. Plato, for instance, was a monist. He held that the goodness of
everything good in itself consisted in harmony and therefore each such thing
owed its goodness to its being harmonious. Alternatively, some philosophers
have proposed pleasure as the sole constituent of goodness. Indeed, conceiving
of pleasure as a particular kind of experience or state of consciousness, they
have proposed this kind of experience as the only thing good in itself and
characterized all other good things as instrumentally good, as owing their
goodness to their being sources of pleasure. Thus, hedonism too can be a
species of monism. In this case, though, one must distinguish between the view
that it is one’s own experiences of pleasure that are intrinsically good and
the view that anyone’s experiences of pleasure, indeed, any sentient being’s
experiences of pleasure, are intrinsically good. The former is called by Sidgwick
egoistic hedonism, the latter universal hedonism. This distinction can be made
general, as a distinction between egoistic and universal views of what is good
in itself or, as philosophers now commonly say, between agent-relative and
agent-neutral value. As such, it indicates a significant point of disagreement
in the theory of intrinsic value, a disagreement in which the seeming
arbitrariness and blindness of egoism make it harder to defend. In drawing this
conclusion, however, one must be careful not to mistake these egoistic views
for views in the theory of human well-being, for each set of views represents a
set of alternative answers to a different question. One must be careful, in
other words, not to infer from the greater defensibility of universalism
vis-à-vis egoism that universalism is the predominant view in the general study
of goodness. Right action. The general study of right action concerns the
principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and pursuits. In modern
ethics these principles are typically given a jural conception. Accordingly,
they are understood to constitute a moral code that defines the duties of men
and women who live together in fellowship. This conception of moral principles
is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity in the West, though some of its
elements were already present in Stoic ethics. Its ascendancy in the general
study of right action puts the theory of duty at the center of that study. The
theory has two parts: the systematic exposition of the moral code that defines
our duties; and its justification. The first part, when fully developed,
presents complete formulations of the fundamental principles of right and wrong
and shows how they yield all moral duties. The standard model is an axiomatic system
in mathematics, though some philosophers have proposed a technical system of an
applied science, such as medicine or strategy, as an alternative. The second
part, if successful, establishes the authority of the principles and so
validates the code. Various methods and criteria of justification are commonly
used; no single one is canonical. Success in establishing the principles’
authority depends on the soundness of the argument that proceeds from whatever
method or criterion is used. One traditional criterion is implicit in the idea
of an axiomatic system. On this criterion, the fundamental principles of right
and wrong are authoritative in virtue of being self-evident truths. That is,
they are regarded as comparable to axioms not only in being the first
principles of a deductive system but also in being principles whose truth can
be seen immediately upon reflection. Use of this criterion to establish the
principles’ authority is the hallmark of intuitionism. Once one of the dominant
views in ethics, its position in the discipline has now been seriously eroded
by a strong, twentieth-century tide of skepticism about all claims of
self-evidence. Currently, the most influential method of justification
consistent with using the model of an axiomatic system to expound the morality
of right and wrong draws on the jural conception of its principles. On this
method, the principles are interpreted as expressions of a legislative will,
and accordingly their authority derives from the sovereignty of the person or collective
whose will they are taken to express. The oldest example of the method’s use is
the divine command theory. On this theory, moral principles are taken to be
laws issued by God to humanity, and their authority thus derives from God’s
supremacy. The theory is the original Christian source of the principles’ jural
conception. The rise of secular thought since the Enlightenment has, however,
limited its appeal. Later examples, which continue to attract broad interest
and discussion, are formalism and contractarianism. Formalism is best
exemplified in Kant’s ethics. It takes a moral principle to be a precept that
satisfies the formal criteria of a universal law, and it takes formal criteria
to be the marks of pure reason. Consequently, moral principles are laws that
issue from reason. As Kant puts it, they are laws that we, as rational beings,
give to ourselves and that regulate our conduct insofar as we engage each
other’s rational nature. They are laws for a republic of reason or, as Kant
says, a kingdom of ends whose legislature comprises all rational beings.
Through this ideal, Kant makes intelligible and forceful the otherwise obscure
notion that moral principles derive their authority from the sovereignty of
reason. Contractarianism also draws inspiration from Kant’s ethics as well as
from the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau. Its fullest and most
influential statement appears in the work of Rawls. On this view, moral
principles represent the ideal terms of social cooperation for people who live
together in fellowship and regard each other as equals. Specifically, they are
taken to be the conditions of an ideal agreement among such people, an
agreement that they would adopt if they met as an assembly of equals to decide
collectively on the social arrangements governing their relations and reached
their decision as a result of open debate and rational deliberation. The
authority of moral principles derives, then, from the fairness of the
procedures by which the terms of social cooperation would be arrived at in this
hypothetical constitutional convention and the assumption that any rational
individual who wanted to live peaceably with others and who imagined himself a
party to this convention would, in view of the fairness of its procedures, assent
to its results. It derives, that is, from the hypothetical consent of the
governed. Philosophers who think of a moral code on the model of a technical
system of an applied science use an entirely different method of justification.
In their view, just as the principles of medicine represent knowledge about how
best to promote health, so the principles of right and wrong represent
knowledge about how best to promote the ends of morality. These philosophers,
then, have a teleological conception of the code. Our fundamental duty is to
promote certain ends, and the principles of right and wrong organize and direct
our efforts in this regard. What justifies the principles, on this view, is
that the ends they serve are the right ones to promote and the actions they
prescribe are the best ways to promote them. The principles are authoritative,
in other words, in virtue of the wisdom of their prescriptions. Different
teleological views in the theory of duty correspond to different answers to the
question of what the right ends to promote are. The most common answer is
happiness; and the main division among the corresponding views mirrors the
distinction in the theory of intrinsic value between egoism and universalism.
Thus, egoism and universalism in the theory of duty hold, respectively, that
the fundamental duty of morality is to promote, as best as one can, one’s own
happiness and that it is to promote, as best as one can, the happiness of
humanity. The former is ethical egoism and is based on the ideal of rational
self-love. The latter is utilitarianism and is based on the ideal of rational
benevolence. Ethical egoism’s most famous exponents in modern philosophy are
Hobbes and Spinoza. It has had few distinguished defenders since their time.
Bentham and J. S. Mill head the list of distinguished defenders of
utilitarianism. The view continues to be enormously influential. On these
teleological views, answers to questions about the ends we ought to pursue
determine the principles of right and wrong. Put differently, the general study
of right action, on these views, is subordinate to the general study of
goodness. This is one of the two leading answers to the structural question
about how the two studies are related. The other is that the general study of
right action is to some extent independent of the general study of goodness. On
views that represent this answer, some principles of right and wrong, notably
principles of justice and honesty, prescribe actions even though more evil than
good would result from doing them. These views are deontological. Fiat justitia
ruat coelum captures their spirit. The opposition between teleology and
deontology in ethics underlies many of the disputes in the general study of
right action. The principal substantive and structural questions of ethics
arise not only with respect to the conduct of human life generally but also
with respect to specific walks of life such as medicine, law, journalism,
engineering, and business. The examination of these questions in relation to
the common practices and traditional codes of such professions and occupations
has resulted in the special studies of applied ethics. In these studies, ideas
and theories from the general studies of goodness and right action are applied
to particular circumstances and problems of some profession or occupation, and
standard philosophical techniques are used to define, clarify, and organize the
ethical issues found in its domain. In medicine, in particular, where rapid
advances in technology create, overnight, novel ethical problems on matters of
life and death, the study of biomedical ethics has generated substantial
interest among practitioners and scholars alike. Metaethics. To a large extent,
the general studies of goodness and right action and the special studies of
applied ethics consist in systematizing, deepening, and revising our beliefs
about how we ought to conduct our lives. At the same time, it is characteristic
of philosophers, when reflecting on such systems of belief, to examine the
nature and grounds of these beliefs. These questions, when asked about ethical
beliefs, define the field of metaethics. The relation of this field to the
other studies is commonly represented by taking the other studies to constitute
the field of ethics proper and then taking metaethics to be the study of the
concepts, methods of justification, and ontological assumptions of the field of
ethics proper. Accordingly, metaethics can proceed from either an interest in
the epistemology of ethics or an interest in its metaphysics. On the first
approach, the study focuses on questions about the character of ethical
knowledge. Typically, it concentrates on the simplest ethical beliefs, such as
‘Stealing is wrong’ and ‘It is better to give than to receive’, and proceeds by
analyzing the concepts in virtue of which these beliefs are ethical and
examining their logical basis. On the second approach, the study focuses on
questions about the existence and character of ethical properties. Typically,
it concentrates on the most general ethical predicates such as goodness and
wrongfulness and considers whether there truly are ethical properties
represented by these predicates and, if so, whether and how they are interwoven
into the natural world. The two approaches are complementary. Neither dominates
the other. The epistemological approach is comparative. It looks to the most
successful branches of knowledge, the natural sciences and pure mathematics,
for paradigms. The former supplies the paradigm of knowledge that is based on
observation of natural phenomena; the latter supplies the paradigm of knowledge
that seemingly results from the sheer exercise of reason. Under the influence
of these paradigms, three distinct views have emerged: naturalism, rationalism,
and noncognitivism. Naturalism takes ethical knowledge to be empirical and
accordingly models it on the paradigm of the natural sciences. Ethical
concepts, on this view, concern natural phenomena. Rationalism takes ethical
knowledge to be a priori and accordingly models it on the paradigm of pure
mathematics. Ethical concepts, on this view, concern morality understood as
something completely distinct from, though applicable to, natural phenomena,
something whose content and structure can be apprehended by reason
independently of sensory inputs. Noncognitivism, in opposition to these other
views, denies that ethics is a genuine branch of knowledge or takes it to be a
branch of knowledge only in a qualified sense. In either case, it denies that
ethics is properly modeled on science or mathematics. On the most extreme form
of noncognitivism, there are no genuine ethical concepts; words like ‘right’,
‘wrong’, ‘good’, and ‘evil’ have no cognitive meaning but rather serve to vent
feelings and emotions, to express decisions and commitments, or to influence
attitudes and dispositions. On less extreme forms, these words are taken to
have some cognitive meaning, but conveying that meaning is held to be decidedly
secondary to the purposes of venting feelings, expressing decisions, or
influencing attitudes. Naturalism is well represented in the work of Mill;
rationalism in the works of Kant and the intuitionists. And noncognitivism,
which did not emerge as a distinctive view until the twentieth century, is most
powerfully expounded in the works of C. L. Stevenson and Hare. Its central
tenets, however, were anticipated by Hume, whose skeptical attacks on
rationalism set the agenda for subsequent work in metaethics. The metaphysical
approach is centered on the question of objectivity, the question of whether ethical
predicates represent real properties of an external world or merely apparent or
invented properties, properties that owe their existence to the perception,
feeling, or thought of those who ascribe them. Two views dominate this
approach. The first, moral realism, affirms the real existence of ethical
properties. It takes them to inhere in the external world and thus to exist
independently of their being perceived. For moral realism, ethics is an
objective discipline, a discipline that promises discovery and confirmation of
objective truths. At the same time, moral realists differ fundamentally on the
question of the character of ethical properties. Some, such as Plato and Moore,
regard them as purely intellective and thus irreducibly distinct from empirical
properties. Others, such as Aristotle and Mill, regard them as empirical and
either reducible to or at least supervenient on other empirical properties. The
second view, moral subjectivism, denies the real existence of ethical
properties. On this view, to predicate, say, goodness of a person is to impose
some feeling, impulse, or other state of mind onto the world, much as one
projects an emotion onto one’s circumstances when one describes them as
delightful or sad. On the assumption of moral subjectivism, ethics is not a
source of objective truth. In ancient philosophy, moral subjectivism was
advanced by some of the Sophists, notably Protagoras. In modern philosophy,
Hume expounded it in the eighteenth century and Sartre in the twentieth
century. Regardless of approach, one and perhaps the central problem of
metaethics is how value is related to fact. On the epistemological approach,
this problem is commonly posed as the question of whether judgments of value
are derivable from statements of fact. Or, to be more exact, can there be a
logically valid argument whose conclusion is a judgment of value and all of
whose premises are statements of fact? On the metaphysical approach, the
problem is commonly posed as the question of whether moral predicates represent
properties that are explicable as complexes of empirical properties. At issue,
in either case, is whether ethics is an autonomous discipline, whether the
study of moral values and principles is to some degree independent of the study
of observable properties and events. A negative answer to these questions
affirms the autonomy of ethics; a positive answer denies ethics’ autonomy and
implies that it is a branch of the natural sciences. Moral psychology. Even
those who affirm the autonomy of ethics recognize that some facts, particularly
facts of human psychology, bear on the general studies of goodness and right
action. No one maintains that these studies float free of all conception of
human appetite and passion or that they presuppose no account of the human
capacity for voluntary action. It is generally recognized that an adequate
understanding of desire, emotion, deliberation, choice, volition, character,
and personality is indispensable to the theoretical treatment of human
well-being, intrinsic value, and duty. Investigations into the nature of these
psychological phenomena are therefore an essential, though auxiliary, part of
ethics. They constitute the adjunct field of moral psychology. One area of
particular interest within this field is the study of those capacities by
virtue of which men and women qualify as moral agents, beings who are
responsible for their actions. This study is especially important to the theory
of duty since that theory, in modern philosophy, characteristically assumes a
strong doctrine of individual responsibility. That is, it assumes principles of
culpability for wrongdoing that require, as conditions of justified blame, that
the act of wrongdoing be one’s own and that it not be done innocently. Only
moral agents are capable of meeting these conditions. And the presumption is
that normal, adult human beings qualify as moral agents whereas small children
and nonhuman animals do not. The study then focuses on those capacities that
distinguish the former from the latter as responsible beings. The main issue is
whether the power of reason alone accounts for these capacities. On one side of
the issue are philosophers like Kant who hold that it does. Reason, in their
view, is both the pilot and the engine of moral agency. It not only guides one
toward actions in conformity with one’s duty, but it also produces the desire
to do one’s duty and can invest that desire with enough strength to overrule
conflicting impulses of appetite and passion. On the other side are
philosophers, such as Hume and Mill, who take reason to be one of several
capacities that constitute moral agency. On their view, reason works strictly
in the service of natural and sublimated desires, fears, and aversions to
produce intelligent action, to guide its possessor toward the objects of those
desires and away from the objects of those fears. It cannot, however, by itself
originate any desire or fear. Thus, the desire to act rightly, the aversion to
acting wrongly, which are constituents of moral agency, are not products of
reason but are instead acquired through some mechanical process of
socialization by which their objects become associated with the objects of
natural desires and aversions. On one view, then, moral agency consists in the
power of reason to govern behavior, and being rational is thus sufficient for
being responsible for one’s actions. On the other view, moral agency consists
in several things including reason, but also including a desire to act rightly
and an aversion to acting wrongly that originate in natural desires and
aversions. On this view, to be responsible for one’s actions, one must not only
be rational but also have certain desires and aversions whose acquisition is
not guaranteed by the maturation of reason. Within moral psychology, one cardinal
test of these views is how well they can accommodate and explain such common
experiences of moral agency as conscience, weakness, and moral dilemma. At some
point, however, the views must be tested by questions about freedom. For one
cannot be responsible for one’s actions if one is incapable of acting freely,
which is to say, of one’s own free will. The capacity for free action is thus
essential to moral agency, and how this capacity is to be explained, whether it
fits within a deterministic universe, and if not, whether the notion of moral
responsibility should be jettisoned, are among the deepest questions that the
student of moral agency must face. What is more, they are not questions to
which moral psychology can furnish answers. At this point, ethics descends into
metaphysics. ethnography, an open-ended
family of techniques through which anthropologists investigate cultures; also,
the organized descriptions of other cultures that result from this method. Cultural
anthropology ethnology is based primarily on fieldwork through which
anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a local culture village,
neighborhood and attempt to describe and interpret aspects of the culture.
Careful observation is one central tool of investigation. Through it the
anthropologist can observe and record various features of social life, e.g.
trading practices, farming techniques, or marriage arrangements. A second
central tool is the interview, through which the researcher explores the
beliefs and values of members of the local culture. Tools of historical
research, including particularly oral history, are also of use in ethnography,
since the cultural practices of interest often derive from a remote point in
time. ethnology, the comparative and
analytical study of cultures; cultural anthroplogy. Anthropologists aim to
describe and interpret aspects of the culture of various social groups e.g., the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari,
rice villages of the Chin. Canton Delta, or a community of physicists at
Livermore Laboratory. Topics of particular interest include religious beliefs,
linguistic practices, kinship arrangements, marriage patterns, farming
technology, dietary practices, gender relations, and power relations. Cultural
anthropology is generally conceived as an empirical science, and this raises
several methodological and conceptual difficulties. First is the role of the
observer. The injection of an alien observer into the local culture unavoidably
disturbs that culture. Second, there is the problem of intelligibility across
cultural systems radical translation.
One goal of ethnographic research is to arrive at an interpretation of a set of
beliefs and values that are thought to be radically different from the researcher’s
own beliefs and values; but if this is so, then it is questionable whether they
can be accurately tr. into the researcher’s conceptual scheme. Third, there is
the problem of empirical testing of ethnographic interpretations. To what
extent do empirical procedures constrain the construction of an interpretation
of a given cultural milieu? Finally, there is the problem of generalizability.
To what extent does fieldwork in one location permit anthropologists to
generalize to a larger context other
villages, the dispersed ethnic group represented by this village, or this
village at other times?
ethnomethodology, a phenomenological approach to interpreting everyday
action and speech in various social contexts. Derived from phenomenological
sociology and introduced by Harold Garfinkel, the method aims to guide research
into meaningful social practices as experienced by participants. A major
objective of the method is to interpret the rules that underlie everyday
activity and thus constitute part of the normative basis of a given social
order. Research from this perspective generally focuses on mundane social
activities e.g., psychiatrists
evaluating patients’ files, jurors deliberating on defendants’ culpability, or
coroners judging causes of death. The investigator then attempts to reconstruct
an underlying set of rules and ad hoc procedures that may be taken to have
guided the observed activity. The approach emphasizes the contextuality of
social practice the richness of unspoken
shared understandings that guide and orient participants’ actions in a given
practice or activity.
eudaemonia:
from Grecian eudaimonia, and then there’s eudaemonism --‘happiness’,
‘flourishing’, the ethical doctrine that happiness is the ultimate
justification for morality. The ancient Grecian philosophers typically begin
their ethical treatises with an account of happiness, and then argue that the
best way to achieve a happy life is through the cultivation and exercise of
virtue. Most of them make virtue or virtuous activity a constituent of the
happy life; the Epicureans, however, construe happiness in terms of pleasure,
and treat virtue as a means to the end of pleasant living. Ethical eudaimonism
is sometimes combined with psychological eudaimonism i.e., the view that all free, intentional
action is aimed ultimately at the agent’s happiness. A common feature of
ancient discussions of ethics, and one distinguishing them from most modern
discussions, is the view that an agent would not be rationally justified in a
course of action that promised less happiness than some alternative open to
him. Hence it seems that most of the ancient theories are forms of egosim. But
the ancient theories differ from modern versions of egoism since, according to
the ancients, at least some of the virtues are dispositions to act from primarily
other-regarding motives: although the agent’s happiness is the ultimate
justification of virtuous action, it is not necessarily what motivates such
action. Since happiness is regarded by most of the ancients as the ultimate end
that justifies our actions, their ethical theories seem teleological; i.e.,
right or virtuous action is construed as action that contributes to or
maximizes the good. But appearances are again misleading, for the ancients
typically regard virtuous action as also valuable for its own sake and hence
constitutive of the agent’s happiness.
event: used
by Grice in “Actions and Events,” -- anything that happens; an occurrence. Two
fundamental questions about events, which philosophers have usually treated
together, are: 1 Are there events?, and 2 If so, what is their nature? Some
philosophers simply assume that there are events. Others argue for that,
typically through finding semantic theories for ordinary claims that apparently
concern the fact that some agent has done something or that some thing has
changed. Most philosophers presume that the events whose existence is proved by
such arguments are abstract particulars, “particulars” in the sense that they
are non-repeatable and spatially locatable, “abstract” in the sense that more
than one event can occur simultaneously in the same place. The theories of
events espoused by Davidson in his causal view, Kim though his view may be
unstable in this respect, Jonathan Bennett, and Lawrence Lombard take them to
be abstract particulars. However, Chisholm takes Euler diagram event 292 292 events to be abstract universals; and
Quine and Davidson in his later view take them to be concrete particulars. Some
philosophers who think of events as abstract particulars tend to associate the
concept of an event with the concept of change; an event is a change in some
object or other though some philosophers have doubts about this and others have
denied it outright. The time at which an event, construed as a particular,
occurs can be associated with the shortest time at which the object, which is
the subject of that event, changes from the having of one property to the
having of another, contrary property. Events inherit whatever spatial locations
they have from the spatial locations, if any, of the things that those events
are changes in. Thus, an event that is a change in an object, x, from being F
to being G, is located wherever x is at the time it changes from being F to
being G. Some events are those of which another event is composed e.g., the sinking
of a ship seems composed of the sinkings of its parts. However, it also seems
clear that not every group of events comprises another; there just is no event
composed of a certain explosion on Venus and my birth. Any adequate theory
about the nature of events must address the question of what properties, if
any, such things have essentially. One issue is whether the causes or effects
of events are essential to those events. A second is whether it is essential to
each event that it be a change in the entity it is in fact a change in. A third
is whether it is essential to each event that it occur at the time at which it
in fact occurs. A chief component of a theory of events is a criterion of
identity, a principle giving conditions necessary and sufficient for an event e
and an event eH to be one and the same event. Quine holds that events may be
identified with the temporal parts of physical objects, and that events and
physical objects would thus share the same condition of identity: sameness of
spatiotemporal location. Davidson once proposed that events are identical
provided they have the same causes and effects. More recently, Davidson
abandoned this position in favor of Quine’s. Kim takes an event to be the
exemplification of a property or relation by an object or objects at a time.
This idea has led to his view that an event e is the same as an event eH if and
only if e and eH are the exemplifications of the same property by the same
objects at the same time. Lombard’s view is a variation on this account, and is
derived from the idea of events as the changes that physical objects undergo
when they alter.
evolutum: evolutionary
Grice -- Darwinism, the view that biological species evolve primarily by means
of chance variation and natural selection. Although several important
scientists prior to Charles Darwin 180982 had suggested that species evolve and
had provided mechanisms for that evolution, Darwin was the first to set out his
mechanism in sufficient detail and provide adequate empirical grounding. Even
though Darwin preferred to talk about descent with modification, the term that
rapidly came to characterize his theory was evolution. According to Darwin,
organisms vary with respect to their characteristics. In a litter of puppies,
some will be bigger, some will have longer hair, some will be more resistant to
disease, etc. Darwin termed these variations chance, not because he thought
that they were in any sense “uncaused,” but to reject any general correlation
between the variations that an organism might need and those it gets, as
Lamarck had proposed. Instead, successive generations of organisms become
adapted to their environments in a more roundabout way. Variations occur in all
directions. The organisms that happen to possess the characteristics necessary
to survive and reproduce proliferate. Those that do not either die or leave
fewer offspring. Before Darwin, an adaptation was any trait that fits an
organism to its environment. After Darwin, the term came to be limited to just
those useful traits that arose through natural selection. For example, the
sutures in the skulls of mammals make parturition easier, but they are not
adaptations in an evolutionary sense because Danto, Arthur Coleman Darwinism
204 204 they arose in ancestors that
did not give birth to live young, as is indicated by these same sutures
appearing in the skulls of egg-laying birds. Because organisms are integrated
systems, Darwin thought that adaptations had to arise through the accumulation
of numerous, small variations. As a result, evolution is gradual. Darwin
himself was unsure about how progressive biological evolution is. Organisms
certainly become better adapted to their environments through successive
generations, but as fast as organisms adapt to their environments, their
environments are likely to change. Thus, Darwinian evolution may be
goal-directed, but different species pursue different goals, and these goals
keep changing. Because heredity was so important to his theory of evolution,
Darwin supplemented it with a theory of heredity pangenesis. According to this theory, the
cells throughout the body of an organism produce numerous tiny gemmules that
find their way to the reproductive organs of the organism to be transmitted in
reproduction. An offspring receives variable numbers of gemmules from each of
its parents for each of its characteristics. For instance, the male parent
might contribute 214 gemmules for length of hair to one offspring, 121 to
another, etc., while the female parent might contribute 54 gemmules for length
of hair to the first offspring and 89 to the second. As a result, characters
tend to blend. Darwin even thought that gemmules themselves might merge, but he
did not think that the merging of gemmules was an important factor in the
blending of characters. Numerous objections were raised to Darwin’s theory in
his day, and one of the most telling stemmed from his adopting a blending
theory of inheritance. As fast as natural selection biases evolution in a
particular direction, blending inheritance neutralizes its effects. Darwin’s
opponents argued that each species had its own range of variation. Natural
selection might bias the organisms belonging to a species in a particular
direction, but as a species approached its limits of variation, additional
change would become more difficult. Some special mechanism was needed to leap
over the deep, though possibly narrow, chasms that separate species. Because a
belief in biological evolution became widespread within a decade or so after
the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the tendency is to think
that it was Darwin’s view of evolution that became popular. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Darwin’s contemporaries found his theory too
materialistic and haphazard because no supernatural or teleological force
influenced evolutionary development. Darwin’s contemporaries were willing to
accept evolution, but not the sort advocated by Darwin. Although Darwin viewed
the evolution of species on the model of individual development, he did not
think that it was directed by some internal force or induced in a Lamarckian
fashion by the environment. Most Darwinians adopted just such a position. They
also argued that species arise in the space of a single generation so that the
boundaries between species remained as discrete as the creationists had
maintained. Ideal morphologists even eliminated any genuine temporal dimension
to evolution. Instead they viewed the evolution of species in the same
atemporal way that mathematicians view the transformation of an ellipse into a
circle. The revolution that Darwin instigated was in most respects
non-Darwinian. By the turn of the century, Darwinism had gone into a decided
eclipse. Darwin himself remained fairly open with respect to the mechanisms of
evolution. For example, he was willing to accept a minor role for Lamarckian
forms of inheritance, and he acknowledged that on occasion a new species might
arise quite rapidly on the model of the Ancon sheep. Several of his followers
were less flexible, rejecting all forms of Lamarckian inheritance and insisting
that evolutionary change is always gradual. Eventually Darwinism became
identified with the views of these neo-Darwinians. Thus, when Mendelian
genetics burst on the scene at the turn of the century, opponents of Darwinism
interpreted this new particulate theory of inheritance as being incompatible
with Darwin’s blending theory. The difference between Darwin’s theory of
pangenesis and Mendelian genetics, however, did not concern the existence of
hereditary particles. Gemmules were as particulate as genes. The difference lay
in numbers. According to early Mendelians, each character is controlled by a
single pair of genes. Instead of receiving a variable number of gemmules from
each parent for each character, each offspring gets a single gene from each
parent, and these genes do not in any sense blend with each other. Blue eyes
remain as blue as ever from generation to generation, even when the gene for
blue eyes resides opposite the gene for brown eyes. As the nature of heredity
was gradually worked out, biologists began to realize that a Darwinian view of
evolution could be combined with Mendelian genetics. Initially, the founders of
this later stage in the development of neoDarwinism exhibited considerable variation
in Darwinism Darwinism 205 205 their
beliefs about the evolutionary process, but as they strove to produce a single,
synthetic theory, they tended to become more Darwinian than Darwin had been.
Although they acknowledged that other factors, such as the effects of small
numbers, might influence evolution, they emphasized that natural selection is
the sole directive force in evolution. It alone could explain the complex
adaptations exhibited by organisms. New species might arise through the isolation
of a few founder organisms, but from a populational perspective, evolution was
still gradual. New species do not arise in the space of a single generation by
means of “hopeful monsters” or any other developmental means. Nor was evolution
in any sense directional or progressive. Certain lineages might become more
complex for a while, but at this same time, others would become simpler.
Because biological evolution is so opportunistic, the tree of life is highly
irregular. But the united front presented by the neo-Darwinians was in part an
illusion. Differences of opinion persisted, for instance over how heterogeneous
species should be. No sooner did neo-Darwinism become the dominant view among
evolutionary biologists than voices of dissent were raised. Currently, almost
every aspect of the neo-Darwinian paradigm is being challenged. No one proposes
to reject naturalism, but those who view themselves as opponents of
neo-Darwinism urge more important roles for factors treated as only minor by
the neo-Darwinians. For example, neoDarwinians view selection as being
extremely sharp-sighted. Any inferior organism, no matter how slightly
inferior, is sure to be eliminated. Nearly all variations are deleterious.
Currently evolutionists, even those who consider themselves Darwinians,
acknowledge that a high percentage of changes at the molecular level may be
neutral with respect to survival or reproduction. On current estimates, over 95
percent of an organism’s genes may have no function at all. Disagreement also
exists about the level of organization at which selection can operate. Some
evolutionary biologists insist that selection occurs primarily at the level of
single genes, while others think that it can have effects at higher levels of
organization, certainly at the organismic level, possibly at the level of
entire species. Some biologists emphasize the effects of developmental
constraints on the evolutionary process, while others have discovered
unexpected mechanisms such as molecular drive. How much of this conceptual
variation will become incorporated into Darwinism remains to be seen. Evolutionary griceianism -- evolutionary
epistemology, a theory of knowledge inspired by and derived from the fact and
processes of organic evolution the term was coined by the social psychologist
Donald Campbell. Most evolutionary epistemologists subscribe to the theory of
evolution through natural selection, as presented by Darwin in the Origin of
Species 1859. However, one does find variants, especially one based on some
kind of neoLamarckism, where the inheritance of acquired characters is central
Spencer endorsed this view and another based on some kind of jerky or
“saltationary” evolutionism Thomas Kuhn, at the end of The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, accepts this idea. There are two approaches to
evolutionary epistemology. First, one can think of the transformation of
organisms and the processes driving such change as an analogy for the growth of
knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. “Darwin’s bulldog,” T. H. Huxley,
was one of the first to propose this idea. He argued that just as between
organisms we have a struggle for existence, leading to the selection of the
fittest, so between scientific ideas we have a struggle leading to a selection
of the fittest. Notable exponents of this view today include Stephen Toulmin,
who has worked through the analogy in some detail, and David Hull, who brings a
sensitive sociological perspective to bear on the position. Karl Popper
identifies with this form of evolutionary epistemology, arguing that the
selection of ideas is his view of science as bold conjecture and rigorous
attempt at refutation by another name. The problem with this analogical type of
evolutionary epistemology lies in the disanalogy between the raw variants of biology
mutations, which are random, and the raw variants of science new hypotheses,
which are very rarely random. This difference probably accounts for the fact
that whereas Darwinian evolution is not genuinely progressive, science is or
seems to be the paradigm of a progressive enterprise. Because of this problem,
a second set of epistemologists inspired by evolution insist that one must take
the biology literally. This evidence of the senses evolutionary epistemology
294 294 group, which includes Darwin,
who speculated in this way even in his earliest notebooks, claims that
evolution predisposes us to think in certain fixed adaptive patterns. The laws
of logic, e.g., as well as mathematics and the methodological dictates of
science, have their foundations in the fact that those of our would-be
ancestors who took them seriously survived and reproduced, and those that did
not did not. No one claims that we have innate knowledge of the kind demolished
by Locke. Rather, our thinking is channeled in certain directions by our
biology. In an update of the biogenetic law, therefore, one might say that
whereas a claim like 5 ! 7 % 12 is phylogenetically a posteriori, it is
ontogenetically a priori. A major division in this school is between the
continental evolutionists, most notably the late Konrad Lorenz, and the
Anglo-Saxon supporters, e.g. Michael Ruse. The former think that their
evolutionary epistemology simply updates the critical philosophy of Kant, and
that biology both explains the necessity of the synthetic a priori and makes
reasonable belief in the thing-in-itself. The latter deny that one can ever get
that necessity, certainly not from biology, or that evolution makes reasonable
a belief in an objectively real world, independent of our knowing. Historically,
these epistemologists look to Hume and in some respects to the pragmatists, especially William James. Today,
they acknowledge a strong family resemblance to such naturalized
epistemologists as Quine, who has endorsed a kind of evolutionary epistemology.
Critics of this position, e.g. Philip Kitcher, usually strike at what they see
as the soft scientific underbelly. They argue that the belief that the mind is
constructed according to various innate adaptive channels is without warrant.
It is but one more manifestation of today’s Darwinians illicitly seeing
adaptation everywhere. It is better and more reasonable to think knowledge is
rooted in culture, if it is person-dependent at all. A mark of a good
philosophy, like a good science, is that it opens up new avenues for research.
Although evolutionary epistemology is not favored by conventional philosophers,
who sneer at the crudities of its frequently nonphilosophically trained
proselytizers, its supporters feel convinced that they are contributing to a forward-moving
philosophical research program. As evolutionists, they are used to things
taking time to succeed. -- evolutionary psychology, the subfield of psychology
that explains human behavior and cultural arrangements by employing
evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to discover, catalog, and analyze
psychological mechanisms. Human minds allegedly possess many innate,
special-purpose, domain-specific psychological mechanisms modules whose
development requires minimal input and whose operations are context-sensitive,
mostly automatic, and independent of one another and of general intelligence.
Disagreements persist about the functional isolation and innateness of these
modules. Some evolutionary psychologists compare the mind with its specialized modules to a Swiss army knife. Different modules
substantially constrain behavior and cognition associated with language,
sociality, face recognition, and so on. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize
that psychological phenomena reflect the influence of biological evolution.
These modules and associated behavior patterns assumed their forms during the
Pleistocene. An evolutionary perspective identifies adaptive problems and
features of the Pleistocene environment that constrained possible solutions. Adaptive
problems often have cognitive dimensions. For example, an evolutionary
imperative to aid kin presumes the ability to detect kin. Evolutionary
psychologists propose models to meet the requisite cognitive demands. Plausible
models should produce adaptive behaviors and avoid maladaptive ones e.g., generating too many false positives
when identifying kin. Experimental psychological evidence and social scientific
field observations aid assessment of these proposals. These modules have
changed little. Modern humans manage with primitive hunter-gatherers’ cognitive
equipment amid the rapid cultural change that equipment produces. The pace of
that change outstrips the ability of biological evolution to keep up.
Evolutionary psychologists hold, consequently, that: 1 contrary to
sociobiology, which appeals to biological evolution directly, exclusively
evolutionary explanations of human behavior will not suffice; 2 contrary to
theories of cultural evolution, which appeal to biological evolution
analogically, it is at least possible that no cultural arrangement has ever
been adaptive; and 3 contrary to social scientists, who appeal to some general
conception of learning or socialization to explain cultural transmission,
specialized psychological evolutionary ethics evolutionary psychology 295 295 mechanisms contribute substantially to
that process.
existentia:
Grice learned to use \/x for the existential quantifier, since “it shows the
analogy with ‘or’ and avoids you fall into any ontological trap, of existential
generalization, a rule of inference admissible in classical quantification
theory. It allows one to infer an existentially quantified statement DxA from
any instance A a/x of it. Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘There exists a
liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar’. It is equivalent to universal
instantiation the rule that allows one
to infer any instance A a/x of a universally quantified statement ExA from ExA.
Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘My car is valuable’ from ‘Everything is
valuable’. Both rules can also have equivalent formulations as axioms; then
they are called specification ExA / A a/x and particularization Aa/x / DxA. All
of these equivalent principles are denied by free logic, which only admits
weakened versions of them. In the case of existential generalization, the
weakened version is: infer DxA from Aa/x & E!a. Intuitively: infer ‘There
exists a liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar and Epimenides exists’. existential import, a commitment to the
existence of something implied by a sentence, statement, or proposition. For
example, in Aristotelian logic though not in modern quantification theory, any
sentence of the form ‘All F’s are G’s’ implies ‘There is an F that is a G’ and
is thus said to have as existential import a commitment to the existence of an
F that is a G. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, sentences
containing definite descriptions can likewise have existential import since
‘The F is a G’ implies ‘There is an F’. The presence of singular terms is also
often claimed to give rise to existential commitment. Underlying this notion of
existential import is the idea long
stressed by W. V. Quine that ontological
commitment is measured by existential sentences statements, propositions of the
form Dv f. existential instantiation, a
rule of inference admissible in classical quantification theory. It allows one
to infer a statement A from an existentially quantified statement DxB if A can
be inferred from an instance Ba/x of DxB, provided that a does not occur in
either A or B or any other premise of the argument if there are any.
Intuitively, it allows one to infer a contradiction C from ‘There exists a
highest prime’ if C can be inferred from ‘a is a highest prime’ and a does not
occur in C. Free logic allows for a stronger form of this rule: with the same
provisions as above, A can be inferred from DxB if it can be inferred from Ba/x
& E!a. Intuitively, it is enough to infer ‘There is a highest natural
number’ from ‘a is a highest prime and a exists’. existentialism, a philosophical and literary
movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately
after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual
as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities. Historians differ as
to antecedents. Some see an existentialist precursor in Pascal, whose
aphoristically expressed Catholic fideism questioned the power of rationalist
thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the abstract “God of the
philosophers.” Many agree that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar but
Protestant fideism was based on a profound unwillingness to situate either God
or any individual’s relationship with God within a systematic philosophy, as
Hegel had done, should be exact similarity existentialism 296 296 considered the first modern
existentialist, though he too lived long before the term emerged. Others find a
proto-existentialist in Nietzsche, because of the aphoristic and
anti-systematic nature of his writings, and on the literary side, in Dostoevsky.
A number of twentiethcentury novelists, such as Franz Kafka, have been labeled
existentialists. A strong existentialist strain is to be found in certain other
theist philosophers who have written since Kierkegaard, such as Lequier,
Berdyaev, Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, but Marcel later decided to reject the
label ‘existentialist’, which he had previously employed. This reflects its
increasing identification with the atheistic existentialism of Sartre, whose
successes, as in the novel Nausea, and the philosophical work Being and
Nothingness, did most to popularize the word. A mass-audience lecture,
“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which Sartre to his later regret allowed to be
published, provided the occasion for Heidegger, whose early thought had greatly
influenced Sartre’s evolution, to take his distance from Sartre’s
existentialism, in particular for its self-conscious concentration on human
reality over Being. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, written in reply to a admirer, signals an important turn in his
thinking. Nevertheless, many historians continue to classify Heidegger as an
existentialist quite reasonably, given
his early emphasis on existential categories and ideas such as anxiety in the
presence of death, our sense of being “thrown” into existence, and our
temptation to choose anonymity over authenticity in our conduct. This
illustrates the difficulty of fixing the term ‘existentialism’. Other thinkers of the time, all acquaintances of
Sartre’s, who are often classified as existentialists, are Camus, Simone de
Beauvoir, and, though with less reason, Merleau-Ponty. Camus’s novels, such as
The Stranger and The Plague, are cited along with Nausea as epitomizing the
uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who acts out of authenticity, i.e.,
in freedom from any conventional expectations about what so-called human nature
a concept rejected by Sartre supposedly requires in a given situation, and with
a sense of personal responsibility and absolute lucidity that precludes the
“bad faith” or lying to oneself that characterizes most conventional human
behavior. Good scholarship prescribes caution, however, about superimposing too
many Sartrean categories on Camus. In fact the latter, in his brief
philosophical essays, notably The Myth of Sisyphus, distinguishes
existentialist writers and philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, from absurdist
thinkers and heroes, whom he regards more highly, and of whom the mythical
Sisyphus condemned eternally by the gods to roll a huge boulder up a hill
before being forced, just before reaching the summit, to start anew is the
epitome. Camus focuses on the concept of the absurd, which Kierkegaard had used
to characterize the object of his religious faith an incarnate God. But for
Camus existential absurdity lies in the fact, as he sees it, that there is
always at best an imperfect fit between human reasoning and its intended
objects, hence an impossibility of achieving certitude. Kierkegaard’s leap of
faith is, for Camus, one more pseudo-solution to this hard, absurdist reality.
Almost alone among those named besides Sartre who himself concentrated more on
social and political thought and became indebted to Marxism in his later years,
Simone de Beauvoir 886 unqualifiedly accepted the existentialist label. In The
Ethics of Ambiguity, she attempted, using categories familiar in Sartre, to
produce an existentialist ethics based on the recognition of radical human
freedom as “projected” toward an open future, the rejection of inauthenticity,
and a condemnation of the “spirit of seriousness” akin to the “spirit of
gravity” criticized by Nietzsche whereby individuals identify themselves wholly
with certain fixed qualities, values, tenets, or prejudices. Her feminist
masterpiece, The Second Sex, relies heavily on the distinction, part
existentialist and part Hegelian in inspiration, between a life of immanence,
or passive acceptance of the role into which one has been socialized, and one
of transcendence, actively and freely testing one’s possibilities with a view
to redefining one’s future. Historically, women have been consigned to the
sphere of immanence, says de Beauvoir, but in fact a woman in the traditional
sense is not something that one is made, without appeal, but rather something
that one becomes. The Sartrean ontology of Being and Nothingness, according to
which there are two fundamental asymmetrical “regions of being,”
being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the latter having no definable essence
and hence, as “nothing” in itself, serving as the ground for freedom, creativity,
and action, serves well as a theoretical framework for an existentialist
approach to human existence. Being and Nothingness also names a third
ontological region, being-for-others, but that may be disregarded here.
However, it would be a mistake to treat even Sartre’s existentialist insights,
much less those of others, as dependent on this ontology, to which he himself
made little direct existentialism existentialism 297 297 reference in his later works. Rather, it
is the implications of the common central claim that we human beings exist
without justification hence “absurdly” in a world into which we are “thrown,”
condemned to assume full responsibility for our free actions and for the very
values according to which we act, that make existentialism a continuing
philosophical challenge, particularly to ethicists who believe right choices to
be dictated by our alleged human essence or nature.
explanatum:
cf. iustificatum – That the distinction is not absolute shows in that
explanatum cannot be non-iustificatum or vice versa. To explain is in part to
justify – but Grice was in a hurry, and relying on an upublication not meant
for publication! Grice on explanatory versus justificatory reasons -- early
15c., explanen, "make
(something) clear in the mind, to make intelligible," from Latin explanare "to explain, make
clear, make plain," literally "make level, flatten," from ex "out" (see ex-) + planus "flat" (from PIE root *pele- (2) "flat; to
spread"). The spelling was altered by influence of plain. Also see plane (v.2). In 17c.,
occasionally used more literally, of the unfolding of material things: Evelyn
has buds that "explain into leaves" ["Sylva, or, A discourse of
forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesties dominions,"
1664]. Related: Explained; explaining; explains. To explain
(something) away "to deprive of significance by explanation,
nullify or get rid of the apparent import of," generally with an adverse
implication, is from 1709. I
think we may find, in our talk about reasons, three main kinds of case. (1) The
first is that class of cases exemplified by the use of such a sentence as
"The reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of
cellophane". Variant forms would be exemplified in "The (one) reason
for the collapse of the bridge was that . . ." and "The fact that the
girders were made of cellophane was the (one) reason for the collapse of the
bridge (why the bridge collapsed)", and so on. This type of case includes
cases in which that for which the (a) reason is being given is an action. We
can legitimately use such a sentence form as "The reason why he resigned
his office (for his resigning his office) was that p"; and, so far as I
can see, the same range of variant forms will be available. I shall take as
canonical (paradigmatic) for this type of case (type (1)) the form "The
(a) reason why A was (is) that B". The significant features of a type (1)
case seem to me to include the following. (a) The canonical form is 'factive'
both with respect to A and to B. If I use it, I imply both that it is true that
A and that it is true that B. (b) If the reason why A was that B, then B is the
explanation of its being the case that A; and if one reason why A was (that) B,
then B is one explanation of its being the case that A, and if there are other
explanations (as it is implicated that there are, or may be) then A is
overdetermined; and (finally) if a part of the reason why A was that B, then B
is a part of the explanation of A's being so. This feature is not unconnected with
the previous one; if B is the explanation of A, then both B and A must be
facts; and if one fact is a reason for another fact, then it looks as if the
connection between them must be that the first explains the second. (c) In
some, but not all, cases in which the reason why A was that B, we can speak of
B as causing, or being the cause of, A (A's being the case). If the reason why
the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane, then we can
say that the girders' being made of cellophane caused the bridge to collapse
(or, at least, caused it to collapse when the bus drove onto it). But not end
p.37 in all cases; it might be true that the reason why X took offence was that
all Tibetans are specially sensitive to comments on their appearance, though it
is very dubious whether it would be proper to describe the fact, or
circumstance, that all Tibetans have this particular sensitivity as the cause
of, or as causing, X to take offence. However, it may well be true that if B
does cause A, then the (or a) reason why A is that B. (d) The canonical form
employs 'reason' as a count-noun; it allows us to speak (for example) of the
reason why A, of there being more than one reason why A, and so on. But for
type (1) cases we have, at best, restricted licence to use variants in which
'reason' is used as a massnoun. "There was considerable reason why the
bridge collapsed (for the bridge collapsing)" and "The weakness of
the girders was some reason why the bridge collapsed" are oddities; so is
"There was good reason why the bridge collapsed", though "There
was a good reason why the bridge collapsed" is better; but "There was
(a) bad reason why the bridge collapsed" is terrible. The discomforts
engendered by attempts to treat 'reason' as a mass-noun persist even when A specifies an
action; "There was considerable reason why he resigned his office" is
unhappy, though one would not object to, for example, "There was
considerable reason for him to resign his office", which is not a type (1)
case. (e) Relativization to a person is, I think, excluded, unless (say) the
relativizing 'for X' means "in X's opinion", as in "for me, the
reason why the bridge collapsed was . . .". Again, this feature persists
even when A specifies an action: "For him, the reason why he resigned was
. . ." and "The reason for him why he resigned was . . ." are
both unnatural (for different reasons). I shall call type (1) cases
"reasons why" or "explanatory reasons" – for
etymologically, they make something ‘plain’ – out of nothing, almost – vide
Latin explanare – but never IM-planare – and in any case, not to be confused
with what Carnap calls an ‘explication’! (2) The cases which I am allocating to
type (2) are a slightly less tidy family than those of type (1). Examples are:
"The fact that they were a day late was some (a)reason for thinking that
the bridge had collapsed." "The fact that they were a day late was a
reason for postponing the conference." We should particularly notice the
following variants and allied examples (among others): end p.38 That they were
a day late was reason to think that the bridge had collapsed. There was no
reason why the bridge should have collapsed. The fact that they were so late
was a (gave) good reason for us to think that . . . He had reason to think that
. . . (to postpone . . .) but he seemed unaware of the fact. The fact that they
were so late was a reason for wanting (for us to want) to postpone the meeting.
I shall take as the paradigmatic form for type (2) "That B was (a) reason
(for X) to A", where "A" may conceal a psychological verb like
"think", "want", or "decide", or may specify an
action. Salient features seem to me to include the following. (a) Unlike type
(1), where there is double factivity, the paradigmatic form is non-factive with
respect to A, but factive with respect to B; with regard to B, however,
modifications are available which will cancel factivity; for example, "If
it were (is) the case that B, that would be a reason to A." (b) In
consonance with the preceding feature, it is not claimed that B explains A
(since A may not be the case), nor even that if A were the case B would explain
it (since someone who actually does the action or thinks the thought specified
by A may not do so because of B). It is, however, in my view (though some might
question my view) claimed that B is a justification (final or provisional) for
doing, wanting, or thinking whatever is specified in A. The fact that B goes at
least some way towards making it the case that an appropriate person or persons
should (or should have) fulfil (fulfilled) A. (c) The word "cause" is
still appropriate, but in a different grammatical construction from that used
for type (1). In Example (1), the fact that they were so late is not claimed to
cause anyone to think that the bridge had collapsed, but it is claimed to be
(or to give) cause to think just that. (d) Within type (2), 'reason' may be
treated either as a count-noun or as a mass-noun. Indeed, the kinds of case
which form type (2) seem to be the natural habitat of 'reason' as a mass-noun.
A short version of an explanation of this fact (to which I was helped end p.39
by George Myro) seems to me to be that (i) there are no degrees of explanation:
there may be more than one explanation, and something may be a part (but only a
part) of the explanation, but a set of facts either does explain something or
it does not. There are, however, degrees of justification (justifiability); one
action or belief may be more justifiable, in a given situation, than another
(there may be a better case for it). (ii) Justifiability is not just a matter
of the number of supporting considerations, but rather of their combined weight
(together with their outweighing the considerations which favour a rival action
or belief). So a mass-term is needed, together with specifications of degree or
magnitude. (e) That B may plainly be a reason for a person or people to A;
indeed, when no person is mentioned or implicitly referred to, it is very
tempting to suppose that it is being claimed that the fact that B would be a
reason for anyone, or any normal person, to A. One might call type (2) cases "justificatory reasons" or
"reasons for (to)". (3) Examples: John's reason for thinking Samantha
to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog. John's reason for wanting
Samantha to be thrown into the pond was that (he thought that) she was a witch.
John's reason for denouncing Samantha was that she kept turning him into a
frog. John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself against
recurrent metamorphosis. If X's reason for doing (thinking) A was that B, it
follows that X A-ed because B (because X knew (thought) that B). If X's reason
for doing (wanting, etc.) A was to B, it follows that X A-ed in order to (so as
to) B. The sentence form "X had several reasons for A-ing, such as that
(to) B" falls, in my scheme, under type (3), unlike the seemingly similar
sentence "X had reason to A, since B", which I locate under type (2).
The paradigmatic form I take as being "X's reason(s) for A-ing was that B
(to B)". Salient features of type (3) cases should be fairly obvious. end
p.40 (a) In type (3) cases reasons may be either of the form that B or of the
form to B. If they are of the former sort, then the paradigmatic form is doubly
factive, factive with respect both to A and to B. It is always factive with
respect to A (A-ing). When it is factive with respect to B, factivity may be
cancelled by inserting "X thought that" before B. (b) Type (3)
reasons are "in effect explanatory". If X's reason for A-ing was that
(to) B, X's thinking that B (or wanting to B) explains his A-ing. The
connection between type (3) reasons being, in effect, explanatory, and their
factivity is no doubt parallel to the connection which obtains for type (1)
reasons. I reserve the question of the applicability of "cause" to a
special concluding comment. (c) So far as I can see, "reason" cannot,
in type (3) cases, be treated as a mass-noun. This may be accounted for by the
explanatory character of reasons of this type. We can, however, here talk of
reasons as being bad; X's reasons for A-ing may be weak or appalling. In type
(2) cases, we speak of there being little reason, or even no reason, to A. But
in type (3) cases, since X's reasons are explanatory of his actions or
thoughts, they have to exist. (I doubt if this is the full story, but it will
have to do for the moment.) (d) Of their very nature, type (3) reasons are
relative to persons. Because of their hybrid nature (they seem, as will in a
moment, I hope, emerge, in a way to partake of the character both of type (1)
and of type (2)) one might call them "Justificatory-Explanatory"
reasons. Strawson said my explanation required an explanation. ex-plāno , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. * I. Lit., to flatten or
spread out: “suberi cortex in denos pedes undique explanatus,” Plin. 16, 8, 13,
§ 34.— II. Trop., of speech, to make plain or clear, to explain (class.: “syn.:
explico, expono, interpretor): qualis differentia sit honesti et decori,
facilius intelligi quam explanari potest,” Cic. Off. 1, 27, 94; cf. Quint. 5,
10, 4: “rem latentem explicare definiendo, obscuram explanare interpretando,
etc.,” Cic. Brut. 42, 152: “explanare apertiusque dicere aliquid,” id. Fin. 2,
19, 60: “docere et explanare,” id. Off. 1, 28, 101: “aliquid conjecturā,” id.
de Or. 2, 69, 280: “rem,” id. Or. 24, 80: “quem amicum tuum ais fuisse istum,
explana mihi,” Ter. Ph. 2, 3, 33: “de cujus hominis moribus pauca prius
explananda sunt, quam initium narrandi faciam,” Sall. C. 4, 5.—Pass. impers.:
“juxta quod flumen, aut ubi fuerit, non satis explanatur,” Plin. 6, 23, 26, §
97.— 2. To utter distinctly: “et ille juravit, expressit, explanavitque verba,
quibus, etc.,” Plin. Pan. 64, 3.—Hence, explānātus , a, um, P. a. (acc. to
II.), plain, distinct (rare): “claritas in voce, in lingua etiam explanata
vocum impressio,” i. e. an articulate pronunciation, Cic. Ac. 1, 5, 19: parum
explanatis vocibus sermo praeruptus, Sen. de Ira, 1, 1, 4.—Adv. ex-plānāte ,
plainly, clearly, distinctly: “scriptum,” Gell. 16, 8, 3.—Comp.: “ut definire
rem cum explanatius, tum etiam uberius (opp. presse et anguste),” Cic. Or. 33,
117.
heteroclitical
implicaturum:-- Greek
κλιτικός (klitikós, “inflexional”, but transliterated as ‘heterocliticum’) -- signifying
a stem which alternates between more than one form when declined for
grammatical case. Examples of heteroclitic noun stems in Proto-Indo-European
include *wod-r/n- "water" (nominoaccusative *wódr; genitive *udnés;
locative *udén) and *yékw-r/n- "liver" (nominoaccusative *yékwr,
genitive *ikwnés). In Proto-Indo-European, heteroclitic stems tend to be noun
stems with grammatically inanimate gender. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The
heteroclitical implicaturum: implicaturum, implicitum, explicatum, explicitum:
what I learned at Clifton, and why.”
explicatum: Grice is clear here. There is
explicat- and explicit-. Both yield different fields. The explicit- has to do
with what is shown. The explicat- does not. But both are cognate. And of
course, the ambiguity replicates in implicit- and implicat- Short and Lewis
have both ‘explicatus’ and ‘explicitus’ as Part. and P.
a., from explico. “I wonder why they had to have TWO!” – Grice.He once asked this to his master at
Clifton. And he said, “because this is a participium heteroclitum.” Grice never
forgot that! An Heteroclite Participle. R E D U N
D A N S abounding. Art'cipium the Participle faepe o/?em redundat
abounds, ut as Perfe&tum the perfe&? ter/? [aid] priùs before ; ut as
explico to unfold conduplicat doubles [its Participle] explicitus explicatufque,
making both explicitus and explicatus. Et and fic /3 fevi I have plantea folet
is wont dare to give fatus planted, & and ferui I have put fertus placed.
Cello to bcat vult will mittere produce -celfus ab -ui from [the perfe&*
tenfe in] -ui ; fed but -culfus ab -i -cu!fus from [its perfr&7 in] -i.
Compofitum à fto the Compound offlo to /fand [ makes] - ftaturus, pariterque
amd aff? -ftiturus [in the future Participle.] Etiam alfo duplex two
Participles fit are made à fimplice perfeéto from one perfe&i tenfe ; tendo
to/lretch habet hath tentus, and tenfus; pando to opem takes fibi to itfejf
paffus, and panfus : Item affo mifcui I have mixed miftus, vel or mixtus ; alo
to breed up, altus and alitus ; Poto to drink makes potatus & and potus ;
lavo to wa/h, lautus and lotus. A tundo from [tundo] to knock down -tufus is
made ; retundo to blunt [makes] both -tufus and -tunfus. Pinfo to bake effert
makes triplex three Participles piftus, pinfufque, & pinfitus, piftus, and
pinfus, and pinfitus. Civi, the perfe&? tenfe à cieo ofcieo to provoke
makes the participle citus [with the i. -- Vult tendo tenfus, tentus , vult
flectere pando - Panfus Panfus paffus 5 pinfo vult piftus dare
pinfus Pinfitus ; & fevi fatus, & ferui dare
fertus. Compofitum à fto-ftaturus meliufque-ftiturus.
* Conftaturus Lucan. Mart. Obftaturus Quint. _ Tundo
in compofitis -tufus ; -tunfufque retundo Congeminat ; plico &
explicitus facit, éx-que-plicatus. Verba in-uo &-vo-ütus tendunt
; ruo fed breve-ütus dat. A cieo pariter manat citus , à cio citus.
- Cello ab -ui celfus , fed ab-i vult mittere -culfus. At Oxford, nobody was interested in
the explication. That’s too explicit. It was, being English, all about the
‘innuendo,’ the ‘understatement,’ the implication. The first Oxonian was C. K.
Grant, with his ‘pragmatic implication.’ Then came Nowell-Smith with his
‘contextual implication.’ Urmson was there with his ‘implied’ claims. And
Strawson was saying that ‘the king of France is not bald’ implies that thereis
a king of France. So, it was enough, Grice thought! We have to analyse what we
imply by imply, or at least what _I_ do. He thought publishing was always
vulgar. But when he was invited for one of those popularisations, when he was
invited to contribute to a symposium on a topic of his choice – he chose “The
causal theory of perception” and dedicates an ‘extensum excursus’ on
‘implication.’ The conclusion is simple: “The pillar box seems red” implies.
And implies a LOT. So much so that neo-Wittgensteinians were saying that what
Grice implies is part of what Grice is committed in terms of ‘satisfactoriness’
of what he is expressing. Not so! What Grice implies is, surely, that the
pillar box may not be red. But surely he can cancel that EXPLICITLY “The pillar
box seems red and is red.” So, what he implies is not part of what he
explicitly commits in terms of value satisfactoriness. In terms of value
satisfactoriness, Grice distinguishes between the subperceptual (“The pillar
box seems red”) and the perceptual proper (“Grice perceives that the pillar box
is red”). The causal theory merely states that “Grice perceives that the pillar
box is red” (a perceptum for the subperceptum, “the pillar box seems red”) if
and only if, first, the pillar box is red;
second, the subperceptum: the pillar box seems red; and third and last, the
fact that the pillar box is red CAUSES the pillar box seeming red. None of that
is explicit, but none of it is implicit. It is merely a philosophical reductive
analysis which has cleared away an unnecessary implication out of the picture.
The philosopher, involved in conceptual analysis, has freed from the ‘pragmatic
implication’ and can provide, for his clearly stated ‘analysans,’ three
different prongs which together constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions
– the analysandum. And his problem is resolved. Grice’s cavalier attitude
towards the explicit is obvious in the way he treats “Wilson is a great man,”
versus “the prime minister is a great man” “I don’t care if I’m not sure if I
want to say that an emissor of (i) and an emissor of (ii) have put forward, in
an explicit fashion, the same proposition. His account of ‘disambiguation’ is
meant even more jocularly. He knows that in the New World, they spell ‘vice’
as ‘vyse’ – So Wilson being in the grip
of a vyse is possibly the same thing put forward as the prime minister being
caught in the grip of either a carpenter’s tool or a sort of something like a
sin – if not both. (Etymologically, ‘vice’ and ‘vice’ are cognate, since they
are ‘violent’ things – cf. violence. While ‘implicare’ developed into vulgar
Engish as ‘employ,’ “it’s funny explicature did not develop into ‘exploy.’”A
logical construction is an explication. A reductive analysis is an explication.
Cf. Grice on Reductionism as a bete noire, sometimes misquoted as Reductivism.
Grice used both ‘explanation’ and ‘explication’, so one has to be careful. When
he said that he looked for a theory that would explain conversation or the implicaturum,
he did not mean explication. What is the difference, etymologically,
between explicate and explain? Well,
explain is from ‘explanare,’ which gives ‘explanatum.’Trop., of speech, to make
plain or clear, to explain (class.:“syn.: explico, expono, interpretor): qualis
differentia sit honesti et decori, facilius intelligi quam explanari potest,”
Cic.Off. 1, 27, 94; cf. Quint. 5, 10, 4: “rem latentem explicare definiendo,
obscuram explanare interpretando, etc.,” Cic. Brut. 42, 152: “explanare
apertiusque dicere aliquid,” id. Fin. 2, 19, 60: “docere et explanare,” id. Off.
1, 28, 101: “aliquid conjecturā,” id. de Or. 2, 69, 280: “rem,” id. Or. 24, 80:
“quem amicum tuum ais fuisse istum, explana mihi,” Ter. Ph. 2, 3, 33: “de cujus
hominis moribus pauca prius explananda sunt, quam initium narrandi faciam,”
Sall. C. 4, 5.—Pass.impers.: “juxta quod flumen, aut ubi fuerit, non satis
explanatur,” Plin. 6, 23, 26, § 97.—2. To utter distinctly: “et ille juravit,
expressit, explanavitque verba, quibus, etc.,” Plin. Pan. 64, 3.Hence,
explānātus , a, um, P. a. (acc. to II.), plain, distinct (rare): “claritas in
voce, in lingua etiam explanata vocum impressio,” i. e. an articulate
pronunciation, Cic. Ac. 1, 5, 19: parum explanatis vocibus sermo praeruptus,
Sen. de Ira, 1, 1, 4. Adv. ex-plānāte , plainly, clearly, distinctly: “scriptum,”
Gell. 16, 8, 3.—Comp.: “ut definire rem cum explanatius, tum etiam uberius
(opp. presse et anguste),” Cic. Or. 33, 117.Cr. Occam. M. O. R. the necessity
is explanatory necessity. Senses or conventional implicaturata (not reachable
by ‘argument’) and Strawson do not explain. G. A. Paul does not explain. Unlike
Austin, who was in love with a taxonomy, Grice loved an explanation. “Ἀρχὴν δὲ
τῶν πάντων ὕδωρ ὑπεστήσατο, καὶ τὸν κόσμον ἔμψυχον καὶ δαιμόνων πλήρη. “Arkhen
de ton panton hudor hupestesato.” Thales’s doctrine is that water is the
universal primary substance, and that the world is animate and full of
divinities. “Ἀλλὰ Θαλῆς μὲν ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας ὕδωρ φησὶν εἶναι
(διὸ καὶ τὴν γῆν ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος ἀπεφήνατο εἶναι), λαβὼν ἴσως τὴν ὑπόληψιν ταύτην ἐκ
τοῦ πάντων ὁρᾶν τὴν τροφὴν ὑγρὰν οὖσαν καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ θερμὸν ἐκ τούτου γιγνόμενον
καὶ τούτῳ ζῶν (τὸ δ᾽ ἐξ οὗ γίγνεται, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶν ἀρχὴ πάντων) – διά τε δὴ τοῦτο
τὴν ὑπόληψιν λαβὼν ταύτην καὶ διὰ τὸ πάντων τὰ σπέρματα τὴν φύσιν ὑγρὰν ἔχειν,
τὸ δ᾽ ὕδωρ ἀρχὴν τῆς φύσεως εἶναι τοῖς ὑγροῖς. εἰσὶ δέ τινες οἳ καὶ τοὺς
παμπαλαίους καὶ πολὺ πρὸ τῆς νῦν γενέσεως καὶ πρώτους θεολογήσαντας οὕτως
οἴονται περὶ τῆς φύσεως ὑπολαβεῖν‧ Ὠκεανόν τε γὰρ καὶ Τηθὺν ἐποίησαν
τῆς γενέσεως πατέρας [Hom. Ξ 201], καὶ τὸν ὅρκον τῶν θεῶν ὕδωρ, τὴν καλουμένην
ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν Στύγα τῶν ποιητῶν‧ τιμιώτατον μὲν γὰρ τὸ πρεσβύτατον,
ὅρκος δὲ τὸ τιμιώτατόν ἐστιν. εἰ μὲν οὖν [984a] ἀρχαία τις αὕτη καὶ παλαιὰ
τετύχηκεν οὖσα περὶ τῆς φύσεως ἡ δόξα, τάχ᾽ ἂν ἄδηλον εἴη, Θαλῆς μέντοι λέγεται
οὕτως ἀποφήνασθαι περὶ τῆς πρώτης αἰτίας. (Ἵππωνα γὰρ οὐκ ἄν τις ἀξιώσειε
θεῖναι μετὰ τούτων διὰ τὴν εὐτέλειαν αὐτοῦ τῆς διανοίας)‧ Ἀναξιμένης
δὲ ἀέρα καὶ Διογένης πρότερον ὕδατος καὶ μάλιστ᾽ ἀρχὴν τιθέασι τῶν ἁπλῶν
σωμάτων.” De caelo: “Οἱ δ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος κεῖσθαι [sc. τὴν γὴν]. τοῦτον γὰρ
ἀρχαιότατον παρειλήφαμεν τὸν λόγον, ὅν φασιν εἰπεῖν Θαλῆν τὸν Μιλήσιον, ὡς διὰ
τὸ πλωτὴν εἶναι μένουσαν ὥσπερ ξύλον ἤ τι τοιοῦτον ἕτερον (καὶ γὰρ τούτων ἐπ᾽
ἀέρος μὲν οὐθὲν πέφυκε μένειν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος), ὥσπερ οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ὄντα
περὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ τοῦ ὕδατος τοῦ ὀχοῦντος τὴν γῆν‧ οὐδὲ γὰρ τὸ ὕδωρ πέφυκε μένειν
μετέωρον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπί τινός [294b] ἐστιν. ἔτι δ᾽ ὥσπερ ἀὴρ ὕδατος κουφότερον, καὶ
γῆς ὕδωρ‧ ὥστε πῶς οἷόν τε τὸ κουφότερον κατωτέρω κεῖσθαι τοῦ
βαρυτέρου τὴν φύσιν; ἔτι δ᾽ εἴπερ ὅλη πέφυκε μένειν ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος, δῆλον ὅτι καὶ
τῶν μορίων ἕκαστον [αὐτῆς]‧ νῦν δ᾽ οὐ φαίνεται τοῦτο
γιγνόμενον, ἀλλὰ τὸ τυχὸν μόριον φέρεται εἰς βυθόν, καὶ θᾶττον τὸ μεῖζον. The
problem of the nature of matter, and its transformation into the myriad things
of which the universe is made, engaged the natural philosophers, commencing
with Thales. For his hypothesis to be credible, it was essential that he could
explain how all things could come into being from water, and return ultimately
to the originating material. It is inherent in Thaless hypotheses that water
had the potentiality to change to the myriad things of which the universe is
made, the botanical, physiological, meteorological and geological states. In
Timaeus, 49B-C, Plato had Timaeus relate a cyclic process. The passage
commences with that which we now call “water” and describes a theory which was
possibly that of Thales. Thales would have recognized evaporation, and have
been familiar with traditional views, such as the nutritive capacity of mist
and ancient theories about spontaneous generation, phenomena which he may have
observed, just as Aristotle believed he, himself had, and about which Diodorus
Siculus, Epicurus (ap. Censorinus, D.N. IV.9), Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) and
Ovid (Met. I.416-437) wrote. When Aristotle reported Thales’s pronouncement
that the primary principle is water, he made a precise statement: Thales says
that it [the nature of things] is water, but he became tentative when he
proposed reasons which might have justified Thaless decision. Thales’s
supposition may have arisen from observation. It is Aristotle’s opinion that
Thales may have observed, that the nurture of all creatures is moist, and that
warmth itself is generated from moisture and lives by it; and that from which
all things come to be is their first principle. Then, Aristotles tone changed
towards greater confidence. He declared: Besides this, another reason for the
supposition would be that the semina of all things have a moist nature. In
continuing the criticism of Thales, Aristotle wrote: That from which all things
come to be is their first principle (Metaph. 983 b25). Simple metallurgy had been practised long
before Thales presented his hypotheses, so Thales knew that heat could return
metals to a liquid state. Water exhibits sensible changes more obviously than
any of the other so-called elements, and can readily be observed in the three
states of liquid, vapour and ice. The understanding that water could generate
into earth is basic to Thaless watery thesis. At Miletus it could readily be
observed that water had the capacity to thicken into earth. Miletus stood on
the Gulf of Lade through which the Maeander river emptied its waters. Within
living memory, older Milesians had witnessed the island of Lade increasing in
size within the Gulf, and the river banks encroaching into the river to such an
extent that at Priene, across the gulf from Miletus the warehouses had to be
rebuilt closer to the waters edge. The ruins of the once prosperous city-port
of Miletus are now ten kilometres distant from the coast and the Island of Lade
now forms part of a rich agricultural plain. There would have been opportunity
to observe other areas where earth generated from water, for example, the
deltas of the Halys, the Ister, about which Hesiod wrote (Theogony, 341), now
called the Danube, the Tigris-Euphrates, and almost certainly the Nile. This
coming-into-being of land would have provided substantiation of Thaless
doctrine. To Thales water held the potentialities for the nourishment and
generation of the entire cosmos. Aëtius attributed to Thales the concept that
even the very fire of the sun and the stars, and indeed the cosmos itself is
nourished by evaporation of the waters (Aëtius, Placita). It is not known how Thales explained his
watery thesis, but Aristotle believed that the reasons he proposed were
probably the persuasive factors in Thaless considerations. Thales gave no role
to the Olympian gods. Belief in generation of earth from water was not proven
to be wrong until A.D. 1769 following experiments of Antoine Lavoisier, and
spontaneous generation was not disproved until the nineteenth century as a
result of the work of Louis Pasteur.The first philosophical explanation of the
world was speculative not practical. has its intelligibility in being
identified with one of its parts (the world is water). First philosophical
explanation for Universe human is rational and the world in independent; He
said the arché is water; Monist: He believed reality is one Thales of Miletus, first philosophical
explanation of the origin and nature of justice (and Why after all, did a Thales is Water.” Without the millions of species
that make up the biosphere, and the billions of interactions between them that
go on day by day,.Oddly, Grice had spent some time on x-questions in the Kant
lectures. And why is an x-question. A philosophical explanation of
conversation. A philosophical explanation of implicaturum. Description vs.
explanation. Grice quotes from Fisher, Never contradict. Never explain.
Taxonomy, is worse than explanation, always. Grice is exploring the
taxonomy-description vs. explanation dichotomy. He would often criticise
ordinary-language philosopher Austin for spending too much valuable time on
linguistic botany, without an aim in his head. Instead, his inclination, a
dissenting one, is to look for the big picture of it all, and disregard a
piece-meal analysis. Conversation is a good example. While Austin would
Subjectsify Language (Linguistic Nature), Grice rather places rationality
squarely on the behaviour displayed by utterers as they make conversational
moves that their addressees will judge as rational along specific
lines. Observation of the principle of conversational helpfulness is
rational (reasonable) along the following lines: anyone who cares about the two
goals which are central to conversation, viz. giving and receiving information,
and influencing and being influenced by others, is expected to have an interest
in taking part in a conversation which will only be profitable (if not
possible) under the assumption that it is conducted along the lines of the
principle of conversational helpfulness. Grice is not interested in
conversation per se, but as a basis for a theory that explains the mistakes
ordinary-language philosophers are making. The case of What is known to be the
case is not believed to be the case. EXPLICATUM -- “to
understand” – to explain -- Dilthey, W. philosopher and historian whose main
project was to establish the conditions of historical knowledge, much as Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason had for our knowledge of nature. He studied theology,
history, and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 2 accepted the chair
earlier held by Hegel at the of Berlin.
Dilthey’s first attempt at a critique of historical reason is found in the
Introduction to the Human Sciences 3, the last in the Formation of the
Historical World in the Human Sciences 0. He is also a recognized contributor
to hermeneutics, literary criticism, and worldview theory. His Life of Schleiermacher
and essays on the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Hegel are model works of
Geistesgeschichte, in which philosophical ideas are analyzed in relation to
their social and cultural milieu. Dilthey holds that life is the ultimate nexus
of reality behind which we cannot go. Life is viewed, not primarily in
biological terms as in Nietzsche and Bergson, but as the historical totality of
human experience. The basic categories whereby we reflect on life provide the
background for the epistemological categories of the sciences. According to
Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and suffering is rooted in
prescientific experience, which is then explicated as the category of efficacy
or influence Wirkung in the human sciences and as the category of cause Ursache
in the natural sciences. Our understanding of influence in the human sciences
is less removed from the full reality of life than are the causal explanations
arrived at in the natural sciences. To this extent the human sciences can claim
a priority over the natural sciences. Whereas we have direct access to the real
elements of the historical world psychophysical human beings, the elements of
the natural world are merely hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural
sciences deal with outer experiences, while the human sciences are based on
inner experience. Inner experience is reflexive and implicitly self-aware, but
need not be introspective or explicitly self-conscious. In fact, we often have
inner experiences of the same objects that outer experience is about. An outer
experience of an object focuses on its physical properties; an inner experience
of it on our felt responses to it. A lived experience Erlebnis of it includes
both. The distinction between the natural and the human sciences is also related
to the methodological difference between explanation and understanding. The
natural sciences seek causal explanations of nature connecting the discrete representations of
outer experience through hypothetical generalizations. The human sciences aim
at an understanding Verstehen that articulates the typical structures of life
given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected
and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist
psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that Husserl recognized as
anticipating phenomenological psychology. In Ideas 4 Dilthey argued that
descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human
sciences, but in his later hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger
and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he rejected the possibility of a foundational
discipline or method. In the Formation, he asserted that all the human sciences
are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived,
understanding is a process of interpreting the “objectifications of life,” the
external expressions of human experience and activity. The understanding of
others is mediated by these common objectifications and not immediately
available through empathy Einfühlung. Moreover, to fully understand myself I
must interpret the expressions of my life just as I interpret the expressions
of others. Whereas the natural sciences aim at ever broader generalizations,
the human sciences place equal weight on understanding individuality and
universality. Dilthey regarded individuals as points of intersection of the
social and cultural systems in which they participate. Any psychological
contribution to understanding human life must be integrated into this more
public framework. Although universal laws of history are rejected, particular
human sciences can establish uniformities limited to specific social and
cultural systems. In a set of sketches 1 supplementing the Formation, Dilthey
further developed the categories of life in relation to the human sciences.
After analyzing formal categories such as the partwhole relation shared by all
the sciences, he distinguished the real categories of the human sciences from
those of the natural sciences. The most important human science categories are
value, purpose, and meaning, but they by no means exhaust the concepts needed
to reflect on the ultimate sense of our existence. Such reflection receives its
fullest expression in a worldview Weltanschauung, such as the worldviews
developed in religion, art, and philosophy. A worldview constitutes an overall
perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate
it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally. Since Dilthey
distinguished three exclusive and recurrent types of worldview naturalism e.g.,
Democritus, Hume, the idealism of freedom e.g., Socrates, Kant, and objective
idealism e.g., Parmenides, Hegel he is
often regarded as a relativist. But Dilthey thought that both the natural and
the human sciences could in their separate ways attain objective truth through
a proper sense of method. Metaphysical formulations of worldviews are relative
only because they attempt an impossible synthesis of all truth. Explicatum --
explanation, an act of making something intelligible or understandable, as when
we explain an event by showing why or how it occurred. Just about anything can
be the object of explanation: a concept, a rule, the meaning of a word, the
point of a chess move, the structure of a novel. However, there are two sorts
of things whose explanation has been intensively discussed in philosophy:
events and human actions. Individual events, say the collapse of a bridge, are
usually explained by specifying their cause: the bridge collapsed because of
the pressure of the flood water and its weakened structure. This is an example
of causal explanation. There usually are indefinitely many causal factors
responsible for the occurrence of an event, and the choice of a particular
factor as “the cause” appears to depend primarily on contextual considerations.
Thus, one explanation of an automobile accident may cite the icy road
condition; another the inexperienced driver; and still another the defective
brakes. Context may determine which of these and other possible explanations is
the appropriate one. These explanations of why an event occurred are sometimes
contrasted with explanations of how an event occurred. A “how” explanation of
an event consists in an informative description of the process that has led to
the occurrence of the event, and such descriptions are likely to involve
descriptions of causal processes. The covering law model is an influential
attempt to represent the general form of such explanations: an explanation of
an event consists in “subsuming,” or “covering,” it under a law. When the
covering law is deterministic, the explanation is thought to take the form of a
deductive argument: a statement the
explanandum describing the event to be
explained is logically derived from the explanans the law together with statements of
antecedent conditions. Thus, we might explain why a given rod expanded by
offering this argument: ‘All metals expand when heated; this rod is metallic
and it was heated; therefore, it expanded’. Such an explanation is called a
deductive-nomological explanation. On the other hand, probabilistic or
statistical laws are thought to yield statistical explanations of individual
events. Thus, the explanation of the contraction of a contagious disease on the
basis of exposure to a patient with the disease may take the form of a
statistical explanation. Details of the statistical model have been a matter of
much controversy. It is sometimes claimed that although explanations, whether
in ordinary life or in the sciences, seldom conform fully to the covering law
model, the model nevertheless represents an ideal that all explanations must
strive to attain. The covering law model, though influential, is not
universally accepted. Human actions are often explained by being “rationalized’ i.e., by citing the agent’s beliefs and
desires and other “intentional” mental states such as emotions, hopes, and
expectations that constitute a reason for doing what was done. You opened the
window because you wanted some fresh air and believed that by opening the
window you could secure this result. It has been a controversial issue whether
such rationalizing explanations are causal; i.e., whether they invoke beliefs
and desires as a cause of the action. Another issue is whether existential
polarity explanation 298 298 these
“rationalizing” explanations must conform to the covering law model, and if so,
what laws might underwrite such explanations.
Refs.: One good source is the
“Prejudices and predilections.” Also the first set of ‘Logic and conversation.”
There is also an essay on the ‘that’ versus the ‘why.’ The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
exportatum –
exportation: in classical logic, the principle that A 8 B / C is logically
equivalent to A / B / C. 2 The principle A 8 B P C P A P B P C, which relevance
logicians hold to be fallacious when ‘P’ is read as ‘entails’. 3 In discussions
of propositional attitude verbs, the principle that from ‘a Vs that b is an f’
one may infer ‘a Vs f-hood of b’, where V has its relational transparent sense.
For example, exportation in sense 3 takes one from ‘Ralph believes that Ortcutt
is a spy’ to ‘Ralph believes spyhood of Ortcutt’, wherein ‘Ortcutt’ can now be
replaced by a bound variable to yield ‘Dx Ralph believes spyhood of x’.
exhibitum – Grice
contrasts this with the protrepticum – A piece of a communicatum is an
exhitibum if it is a communication-device for the emisor to display his
psychological attitude. It is protrepticum if the emisor intends the sendee to
entertain a state other than the uptake – i. e. form a volition to close the
door, for how else will he comply with the order in the imperative mode?
protrepticum: the
opposite of the exhibitium.
expositum
-- exponible. In dialectica, an exponible proposition is that which needs to be
expounded, i.e., elaborated or explicated in order to make clear their true
‘form,’ as opposed to its mere ‘matter.’ ‘Giorgione is so called because of his
size.’ ‘Giorgione is so called because of his size’ has a misleading ‘matter’
(implicating at least two forms). It may suggestin a simple predication. In
fact, it means, ‘Giorgione is called ‘Giorgione’ because of his size’. Grice’s
examples: “An English pillar box is called ‘red’ because it is red,” “Grice is
called ‘Grice’ because he is Grice.” “Grice is called ‘Grice’ because his
Anglo-Norman ancestors had ‘grey’ in their coat of arms.” “Grice is called
‘Grice’ because his ancestor kept grice, i. e. pigs.” Another example by Grice:
‘Every man except Strawson is running’, expounded as ‘Strawson is not running
and every man other than Strawson is running (for Prime Minister)’; and ‘Only
Strawson says something true’, uttered by Grice. Grice claims ‘Only Strawson
says something true’ should be expounded (or explicated, or explciited, or
exposed, or provided ‘what is expositum, or the expositum provided: not only as
‘Strawson says something true and no one other than Strawson says something
true’, but needs an implicated third clause, ‘Grice says something false’ for
surely Grice is being self-referentially ironic. If only Strawson says
something true – that proposition can only be uttered by Strawson. Grice
borrowed it from Descartes: “Only Descarets says something ture.” This last
example brings out an important aspect of exponible propositions, viz., their
use in a sophisma. Sophismatic treatises are a common genre at Oxford in which
this or that semantic issue is approached dialectically (what Grice calls “the
Oxonian dialectic”) by its application in solving a puzzle case. Another
important ingredient of an exponible proposition is its containing a particular
term, sometimes called the exponible term (terminus exponibilis in Occam). Attention
on such a term is focused in the study of the implicaturum of a
syncategorematic expression, Note that such an exponible term could only be
expounded in context, not by an explicit definition. A syncategorematic term
that generates an exponible proposition is one such as: ‘twice’, ‘except’,
‘begins’ and ‘ceases [to eat iron, or ‘beat your wife,’ to use Grice’s example
in “Causal Theory of Perception”]’, and ‘insofar as’ e.g. ‘Strawson insofar as
he is rational is risible’.
expressum: At one time,
Oxford was all about the Croceans! It all changed! The oppositum is the
impressum, or sense-datum. In a functionalist model, you have perceptual INPUT
and behavioural OUTPUT, the expressum. In between, the black box of the soul. Darwin,
Eckman. Drawing a skull meaning there is
danger. cf. impressum. Inside out. Expression of Impressions. As an empiricist,
Grice was into ‘impress.’ But it’s always good to have a correlatum. Grice
liked an abbreviation, especially because he loved subscripts. So, he starts to
analyse the ‘ordinary-language’ philosohper’s mistake by using a few symbols:
there’s the phrase, or utterance, and there’s the expression, for which Grice
uses ‘e’ for a ‘token,’ and ‘E’ for a type. So, suppose we are considering
Hart’s use of ‘carefully.’ ‘Carefully’ would be the ‘expression,’ occurring
within an utterance. Surely, since Grice uses ‘expression’ in that way, he also
uses to say what Hart is doing, Hart is expressing. Grice notes that
‘expressing’ may be too strong. Hart is expressing the belief THAT if you utter
an utterance containing the ‘expression’ ‘carefully,’ there is an implicaturum
to the effect that the agent referred to is taking RATIONAL steps towards
something. IRRATIONAL behaviour does not count as ‘careful’ behaviour. Grice
uses the same abbreviations in discussing philosophy as the ‘conceptual
analysis’ of this or that expression. It is all different with Ogden,
Collingwood, and Croce, that Collingwood loved! "Ideas, we may say generally, are
symbols, as serving to express some actual moment or phase of experience and
guiding towards fuller actualization of what is, or seems to be, involved in
its existence or MEANING . That no idea is ever wholly adequate MEANS that the
suggestiveness of experience is inexhaustible" Forsyth, English
Philosophy, 1910, . Thus the significance of sound, the meaning of an utterance
is here identical with the active response to surroundings and with the natural
expression of emotions According to Husserl, the function of expression is only
directly and immediately adapted to what is usually described as the meaning
(Bedeutung) or the sense (Sinn) of the speech or parts of speech. Only because
the meaning associated with a wordsowid expresses something, is that word-sound
called 'expres- sion' (Ideen, p. 256 f). "Between the ,nearnng and the
what is meant, or what it expresses, there exists an essential relation,
because the meaning is the expression of the meant through its own content
(Gehalt) What is meant (dieses Bedeutete) lies in the 'object' of the thought
or speech. We must therefore distinguish these three-Word, Meaning, Object
"1 Geyser, Gp cit p z8 PDF compression, OCR, web optimization using a
watermarked evaluation copy of CVISION PDFCompresso These complexities are
mentioned here to show how vague are most of the terms which are commonly
thought satisfactory in this topic. Such a word as 'understand' is, unless
specially treated, far too vague to serve except provisionally or at levels of
discourse where a real understanding of the matter (in the reference sense) is
not possible. The multiple functions of speech will be classified and discussed
in the following chapter. There it will be seen that the expression of the
speaker's intention is one of the five regular language functions. Grice hated
Austin’s joke, the utteratum, “I use ‘utterance’ only as equivalent to
'utteratum;' for 'utteratio' I use ‘the issue of an utterance,’” so he needed
something for ‘what is said’ in general, not just linguistic, ‘what is
expressed,’ what is explicitly conveyed,’ ex-prĭmo , pressi, pressum, 3, v. a.
premo. express (mostly poet. and in postAug. prose; “freq. in the elder Pliny):
(faber) et ungues exprimet et molles imitabitur aere capillos,” Hor. A. P. 33;
cf.: “alicujus furorem ... verecundiae ruborem,” Plin. 34, 14, 40, § 140:
“expressa in cera ex anulo imago,” Plaut. Ps. 1, 1, 54: “imaginem hominis gypso
e facie ipsa,” Plin. 35, 12, 44, § 153; cf.: “effigiem de signis,” id. ib.:
“optime Herculem Delphis et Alexandrum, etc.,” id. 34, 8, 19, § 66 et saep.:
“vestis stricta et singulos artus exprimens,” exhibiting, showing, Tac. G. 17:
“pulcher aspectu sit athleta, cujus lacertos exercitatio expressit,” has well
developed, made muscular, Quint. 8, 3, 10.
extensionalism:
one of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice -- a family of ontologies and semantic
theories restricted to existent entities. Extensionalist ontology denies that
the domain of any true theory needs to include non-existents, such as
fictional, imaginary, and impossible objects like Pegasus the winged horse or
round squares. Extensionalist semantics reduces meaning and truth to
set-theoretical relations between terms in a language and the existent objects,
standardly spatiotemporal and abstract entities, that belong to the term’s
extension. The extension of a name is the particular existent denoted by the
name; the extension of a predicate is the set of existent objects that have the
property represented by the predicate. The sentence ‘All whales are mammals’ is
true in extensionalist semantics provided there are no whales that are not
mammals, no existent objects in the extension of the predicate ‘whale’ that are
not also in the extension of ‘mammal’. Linguistic contexts are extensional if:
i they make reference only to existent objects; ii they support substitution of
codesignative terms referring to the same thing, or of logically equivalent
propositions, salva veritate without loss of truthvalue; and iii it is
logically valid to existentially quantify conclude that There exists an object
such that . . . etc. objects referred to within the context. Contexts that do
not meet these requirements are intensional, non-extensional, or referentially
opaque. The implications of extensionalism, associated with the work of Frege,
Russell, Quine, and mainstream analytic philosophy, are to limit its
explanations of mind and meaning to existent objects and material-mechanical
properties and relations describable in an exclusively extensional idiom.
Extensionalist semantics must try to analyze away apparent references to nonexistent
objects, or, as in Russell’s extensionalist theory of definite descriptions, to
classify all such predications as false. Extensionalist ontology in the
philosophy of mind must eliminate or reduce propositional attitudes or de dicto
mental states, expressed in an intensional idiom, such as ‘believes that ————’,
‘fears that ————’, and the like, usually in favor of extensional
characterizations of neurophysiological states. Whether extensionalist
philosophy can satisfy these explanatory obligations, as the thesis of
extensionality maintains, is controversial.
stabilitatum – stabilire -- Establishment
– Grice speaks of the Establishment twice. Once re: Gellner: non-Establishment
criticizing the English Establishment. Second: to refute Lewis. Something can
be ‘established’ and not be conventional. “Surely Lewis should know the
Graeco-Roman root of establish to figure that out!” stăbĭlĭo , īvi, ītum (sync.
I.imperf. stabilibat, Enn. Ann. 44), 4, v. a. stabilis, to make firm,
steadfast, or stable; to fix, stay, establish (class.; esp. in the trop.
sense). I. Lit.: semita nulla pedem stabilibat, Enn. ap. Cic. Div. 1, 20, 40
(Ann. v. 44 Vahl.): “eo stabilita magis sunt,” Lucr. 3, 202; cf.: confirmandi
et stabiliendi causā singuli ab infimo solo pedes terrā exculcabantur, * Caes.
B. G. 7, 73: “vineas,” Col. 4, 33, 1: “loligini pedes duo, quibus se velut
ancoris stabiliunt,” Plin. 9, 28, 44, § 83.— II. Trop.: regni stabilita scamna
solumque, Enn. ap. Cic. Div. 1, 48 fin. (Ann. v. 99 Vahl.): “alicui regnum
suom,” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 39; cf.: libertatem civibus, Att. ap. Cic. Sest. 58,
123: “rem publicam (opp. evertere),” Cic. Fin. 4, 24, 65; so, “rem publicam,”
id. Sest. 68, 143: “leges,” id. Leg. 1, 23, 62: “nisi haec urbs stabilita tuis
consiliis erit,” id. Marcell. 9, 29: “matrimonia firmiter,” id. Rep. 6, 2, 2:
pacem, concordiam, Pseud.-Sall. Rep. Ordin. 1 fin. (p. 267 Gerl.): “res Capuae
stabilitas Romana disciplina,” Liv. 9, 20: “nomen equestre in consulatu
(Cicero),” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 34: “(aegrum) ad retinendam patientiam,” to
strengthen, fortify him, Gell. 12, 5, 3. While Grice’s play with ‘estaablished’
is in the second metabolical stage of his programme – where ‘means’ applies to
things other than the emissor, surely metaphorically – he is allowing that
‘estabalish’ may be used in the one-off predicament. By drawing a skull, U is
establishing a procedure. Grice notably wants to make ‘established’ a weaker
variant of ‘conventional.’ So that x, whatever, may be ‘established’ but not
‘conventional.’ In fact, it can be argued that to establish you have to do it
at least once. Cfr. ‘settled. ‘Greenwich, Conn., settled in 1639.’
‘Established’ Surely it would be obtuse to say that Greenwich, Conn. Was
“conventionalized”.
farquharsonism – Grice enjoyed reading Cook Wilson, and was grateful to A
S L Farquharson for making that possible.
fechner: as
a philosophical psychologist, Grice had to read the boring Fechner! Gustav
Theodor 180187, G. physicist and philosopher whose Elemente der Psychophysik
1860; English translation, 6 inaugurated experimental psychology. Obsessed with
the mindbody problem, Fechner advanced an identity theory in which every object
is both mental and physical, and in support invented psychophysics the “exact science of the functional
relations . . . between mind and body.” Fechner began with the concept of the
limen, or sensory threshold. The absolute threshold is the stimulus strength R,
Reiz needed to create a conscious sensation S, and the relative threshold is
the strength that must be added to a stimulus for a just noticeable difference
jnd to be perceived. E. H. Weber 17951878 had shown that a constant ratio held
between relative threshold and false cause, fallacy of Fechner, Gustav Theodor
304 304 stimulus magnitude, Weber’s
law: DR/R % k. By experimentally determining jnd’s for pairs of stimulus
magnitudes such as weights, Fechner formulated his “functional relation,” S % k
log R, Fechner’s law, an identity equation of mind and matter. Later
psychophysicists replaced it with a power law, R % kSn, where n depends on the
kind of stimulus. The importance of psychophysics to psychology consisted in
its showing that quantification of experience was possible, and its providing a
general paradigm for psychological experimentation in which controlled stimulus
conditions are systematically varied and effects observed. In his later years,
Fechner brought the experimental method to bear on aesthetics Vorschule der
Aesthetik, 1876.
ferguson:
a. philosopher. His main theme was the rise and fall of virtue in individuals
and societies. In his most important work, An Essay on the History of Civil
Society Ferguson argues that human happiness of which virtue is a constituent
is found in pursuing social goods rather than private ends. Ferguson thought
that ignoring social goods not only prevented social progress but led to moral
corruption and political despotism. To support this he used classical texts and
travelers’ writings to reconstruct the history of society from “rude nations”
through barbarism to civilization. This allowed him to express his concern for
the danger of corruption inherent in the increasing selfinterest manifested in
the incipient commercial civilization of his day. He attempted to systematize
his moral philosophy in The Principles of Moral and Social Science 1792. J.W.A.
Fermat’s last theorem.
feuerbach:
-- G. materialist philosopher and critic of religion. He provided the major
link between Hegel’s absolute idealism and such later theories of historical
materialism as those of Marx and other “young or new Hegelians.” Feuerbach was
born in Bavaria and studied theology, first at Heidelberg and then Berlin,
where he came under the philosophical influence of Hegel. He received his
doctorate in 1828 and, after an early publication severely critical of
Christianity, retired from official G. academic life. In the years between 1836
and 1846, he produced some of his most influential works, which include
“Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” 1839, The Essence of Christianity
1841, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future 1843, and The Essence of
Religion 1846. After a brief collaboration with Marx, he emerged as a popular
champion of political liberalism in the revolutionary period of 1848. During
the reaction that followed, he again left public life and died dependent upon
the support of friends. Feuerbach was pivotal in the intellectual history of
the nineteenth century in several respects. First, after a half-century of
metaphysical system construction by the G. idealists, Feuerbach revived, in a
new form, the original Kantian project of philosophical critique. However,
whereas Kant had tried “to limit reason in order to make room for faith,”
Feuerbach sought to demystify both faith and reason in favor of the concrete
and situated existence of embodied human consciousness. Second, his “method” of
“transformatory criticism” directed, in
the first instance, at Hegel’s philosophical pronouncements was adopted by Marx and has retained its
philosophical appeal. Briefly, it suggested that “Hegel be stood on his feet”
by “inverting” the subject and predicate in Hegel’s idealistic pronouncements.
One should, e.g., rewrite “The individual is a function of the Absolute” as
“The Absolute is a function of the individual.” Third, Feuerbach asserted that the
philosophy of G. idealism was ultimately an extenuation of theology, and that
theology was merely religious consciousness systematized. But since religion
itself proves to be merely a “dream of the human mind,” metaphysics, theology,
and religion can be reduced to “anthropology,” the study of concrete embodied
human consciousness and its cultural products. The philosophical influence of
Feuerbach flows through Marx into virtually all later historical materialist
positions; anticipates the existentialist concern with concrete embodied human
existence; and serves as a paradigm for all later approaches to religion on the
part of the social sciences.
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