abélard:
Grice thought there was a good testimony to consider “Abailard” as a
proto-Griceian. pierre abailard, philosopher whose writings, particularly
Theologia Christiana, constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the
medieval period to use logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was
born of a minor noble family in Brittany and studied logic and theology under
some of the most notable teachers of the early twelfth century, including
Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his
teachers in logic and attracted students from all over Europe. His forays into
theology were less enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity
were condemned as heretical. Abelard led a dramatic life punctuated by bitter
disputes with his opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with
Héloïse. Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia
calamitatum. Abelard’s two most important Griceian works in logic are his
“Logica ingredientibus” and his “Dialectica.” In these treatises and others he
is the first medieval Scholastic to make full use of Aristotle’s “De
interpretation” and Boethius’s commentaries on it to produce a sophisticated
theory of the signification of words and sentences. The theory distinguishes
the signification of an expression both from what the expression names and the
idea in the mind of the emissor associated with the expression. Abélard allows
a role for mental images in thinking, but he carefully avoids claiming that
these are what words signify. In this he is very much aware of the pitfalls of
subjectivist theories of meaning. His positive doctrines on what words signify
tie in closely with his views on the signification of propositions and
universals. For Abelard propositions are sentences that are either true or
false; what they say their dicta is what they signify and these dicta are the
primary bearers of truth and falsity. Abelard developed a genuinely
propositional logic, the first since the Stoics. A universal, on the other hand,
is a common noun or adjective, and what it means is what the verb phrase part
of a proposition signifies. This is a sort of truncated dictum, which Abelard
variously called a status, nature, or property. Neither status nor dicta are
things, Abelard said, but they are mind-independent objects of thought. Abelard
was particularly devastating in his attacks on realist theories of universals,
but his view that universals are words was not meant to deny the objectivity of
our knowledge of the world. Abelard’s theories in logic and ontology went far
beyond the traditional ideas that had been handed down from Aristotle through
the mediation of the late ancient commentators, Boethius in particular. They
could have formed the basis of a fundamentally new synthesis in Western logic,
but when more of the Aristotelian corpus became available in Western Europe
during the twelfth century, concentration shifted to assimilating this already
fully elaborated system of ideas. Consequently, Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic
thought, though noticeable, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given
the acuteness and originality of his insights.
absolutum: If we say, emissor E communicates
that p, what is its relatum? Nothing. The theory of communication NEEDS to be
relative. To search for the absolute in the theory of communication is otiose,
for in communication there is an unavoidable relatum, which is the emissor
himself. Now Grice is interested in an emissor that communicates that p is
absolute. So we need absolute and meta-absolute. I.e. if the emissor can
communicate that ‘p’ is absolute, he has more ground to exert his authority
into inducing in his addressee that the addressee believe what he is intended
to believe. The absolutum is one, unlike Grice’s absoluta, or absolutes. Trust
Grice to pluralise Bradley’s absolute. While it is practical to restore the
root of ‘axis’ for Grice’s value (validum, optimum), it is not easy to find a
grecianism for the absolutum absolute. Lewis and Short have “absolvere,” which
they render as ‘to loosen from, to make loose, set free, detach,
untie (usu. trop., the fig. being derived from fetters, qs. a vinculis solvere,
like “vinculis exsolvere,” Plaut. Truc. 3, 4, 10). So that makes sense. Lewis
and Short also have “absolutum,”
which they render as“absolute, unrestricted, unconditional,” – as in Cicero: “hoc
mihi videor videre, esse quasdam cum adjunctione necessitudines, quasdam
simplices et absolutas” (Inv. 2, 57, 170). Grice repatedly uses the plural
‘abosolutes,’ and occasionally the singular. Obviously, Grice has in mind the
absolute-relative distinction, not wanting to be seen as relativist, unless it
is a constructionist relativist. Grice refers to Bradley in ‘Prolegomena,’ and has an essay
on the ‘absolutes.’ It is all back to when German philosopher F. Schiller, of
Corpus, publishes “Mind!” Its frontispiece is a portrait of the absolute, “very
much like the Bellman’s completely blank map in The hunting of the snark.” The
absolutum is the sum of all being, an emblem of idealism. Idealism dominates
Oxford for part of Grice’s career. The realist mission, headed by Wilson, is to
clean up philosophy’s act Bradley’s Appearance and reality, mirrors the point of
the snark. Bradley uses the example of a lump of sugar. It all begins to
crumble, In Oxonian parlance, the absolute is a boo-jum, you see. Bradley is
clear here, to irritate Ayer: the absolutum is, put simply, a higher unity, pure
spirit. “It can never and it enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution
and progress.” Especially at Corpus, tutees are aware of Hartmann’s absolutum.
Barnes thinks he can destroy with his emotivism. Hartmann, otherwise a
naturalist, is claims that this or that value exists, not in the realm (Reich)
of nature, but as an ideal essence of a thing, but in a realm which is not
less, but more real than nature. For Hartmann, if a value exists, it is not
relative, but absolute, objective, and rational, and so is a value judgment. Like
Grice, for Hartmann, the relativity dissolves upon conceiving and constructing
a value as an absolutum, not a relativum. The essence of a thing need not
reduce to a contingence. To conceive the essence of a table is to conceive what
the métier of a table. Like Hartmann, Grice is very ‘systematik’ axiologist, and
uses ‘relative’ variously. Already in the Oxford Philosophical Society, Grice
conceives of an utterer’s meaning and his communicatum is notoriously relative.
It is an act of communication relative to an agent. For Grice, there is hardly
a realm of un-constructed reality, so his construction of value as an absolutum
comes as no surprise. Grice is especially irritated by Julie Andrews in Noël
Coward’s “Relative values” and this Oxonian cavalier attitude he perceives in Barnes
and Hare, a pinko simplistic attitude against any absolute. Unlike
Hartmann, Grice adopts not so much a neo-Kantian as an Ariskantian tenet. The
ratiocinative part of the soul of a personal being is designated the proper
judge in the power structure of the soul. Whatever is relative to this
particular creature successfully attains, ipso facto, absolute value. The
term’The absolute,’ used by idealists to describe the one independent reality
of which all things are an expression. Kant used the adjective ‘absolute’ to
characterize what is unconditionally valid. He claimed that pure reason
searched for absolute grounds of the understanding that were ideals only, but
that practical reason postulated the real existence of such grounds as
necessary for morality. This apparent inconsistency led his successors to
attempt to systematize his view of reason. To do this, Schelling introduced the
term ‘the Absolute’ for the unconditioned ground and hence identity of subject
and object. Schelling was criticized by Hegel, who defined the Absolute as
spirit: the logical necessity that embodies itself in the world in order to
achieve self-knowledge and freedom during the course of history. Many prominent
nineteenthcentury British and idealists,
including Bosanquet, Royce, and Bradley, defended the existence of a
quasi-Hegelian absolute. Refs.: For a good overview of
emotivism in Oxford v. Urmson’s The emotive theory of ethics. Grice, “Values,
morals, absolutes, and the metaphysical,” The H. P. Grice Papers, Series V
(Topical), c 9-f. 24, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
abstractum: In an emissor draws a skull to communicate that there
is danger, the addressee comes to think that there is danger, in the air. Let’s
formalise that proposition as “The air is dangerous.” Is that abstract? It is:
it involves two predicates which may be said to denote two abstracta: the property
of being air, and the property of being dangerous. So abstracta are unavoidable
in a communicatum, that reaches the sophistication of requiring a
‘that’-clause. The usual phrase in Grice
is ‘abstract’ as adjective and applied to ‘entity’ as anything troublesome to
nominalism. At Oxford, Grice belongs to the class for members whose class have
no members. If class C and class C have the same
members, they are the same. A class xx is a set just in case there is a
class yy such that x∈yx∈y. A
class which is not a set is an improper, not a proper class, or a well-ordered
one, as Burali-Forti puts it in ‘Sulle classi ben ordinate.’ Grice reads Cantor's essay and finds an antinomy on the
third page. He mmediately writes his uncle “I am reading Cantor and find an antinomy.”
The antinomy is obvious and concerns the class of all classes that are not
members of themselves. This obviously leads to a pragmatic contradiction, to
echo Moore, since this class must be and not be a member of itself and not a
member of itself. Grice had access to the Correspondence of Zermelo and re-wrote
the antinomy.Which leads Grice to Austin. For Austin thinks he can lead a
class, and that Saturday morning is a good time for a class of members whose
classes have no members, almost an insult. Grice is hardly attached to
canonicals, not even first-order predicate logic with identity and class
theory. Grice sees extensionalism asa a position imbued with the spirit of nominalism
yet dear to the philosopher particularly impressed by the power of class
theory. But Grice is having in mind the concretum-abstractum distinction, and
as an Aristotelian, he wants to defend a category as an abstractum or
universalium. Lewis and Short have ‘concrescere,’ rendered as ‘to grow together;
hence with the prevailing idea of uniting, and generally of soft or liquid
substances which thicken; to harden, condense, curdle, stiffen, congeal, etc.
(very freq., and class. in prose and poetry).’ For ‘abstractum,’ they have
‘abstrăhere, which they render as ‘to draw away from a place or person, to drag
or pull away.’ The ability to see a horse (hippos) without seeing horseness
(hippotes), as Plato remarks, is a matter of stupidity. Yet, perhaps bue to the
commentary by his editors, Grice feels defensive about proposition. Expanding
on an essay on the propositional complexum,’ the idea is that if we construct a
complexum step by step, in class-theoretical terms, one may not committed to an
‘abstract entity.’ But how unabstract is class theory? Grice hardly attaches to
the canonicals of first-order predicate calculus with identity together with
class theory. An item i is a universalium and 'abstractum' iff i fails to
occupy a region in space and time. This raises a few questions. It is
conceivable that an items that is standardly regarded as an 'abstractum' may
nonetheless occupy a volumes of space and time. The school of latter-day
nominalism is for ever criticised at Oxford, and Grice is no exception. The
topic of the abstractum was already present in Grice’s previous generation, as
in the essay by Ryle on the systematically misleading expression, and the
category reprinted in Flew. For it to be, a particular concretum individuum or
prima substantia has to be something, which is what an abstractum universaium
provides. A universal is part of the ‘essentia’ of the particular. Ariskants
motivation for for coining “to katholou” is doxastic. Aristotle claims that to
have a ‘doxa’ requires there to be an abstract universalium, not apart from (“para”),
but holding of (“kata”) a concretum individuum. Within the “this” (“tode”)
there is an aspect of “something” (“ti.”). Aristotle uses the “hêi” (“qua”) locution,
which plays a crucial role in perceiving. Ariskant’s remark that a particular horse
is always a horse (with a species and a genus) may strike the non-philosopher
as trivial. Grice strongly denies that its triviality is unenlightening, and he
loves to quote from Plato. Liddell and Scott have “ἱππότης,” rendered as
“horse-nature, the concept of horse,” Antisth. et Pl. ap. Simp.in Cat.
208.30,32, Sch. Arist Id.p.167F. Then there is the ‘commensurate universal,’ the
major premise is a universal proposition. Grice provides a logical construction
of such lexemes as “abstractum” and “universalium,” and “concretum” and
“individuum,” or “atomon” in terms of two relations, “izzing” and “hazzing.” x
is an individuum or atomon iff nothing other than x izzes x. Austin is Austin,
and Strawson is Strawson. Now, x is a primum individuum, proton atomon, or
prima substantia, iff x is an individuum, and nothing hazzes x. One needs to distinguish between a singular
individuum and a particular (“to kathekaston,” particulare) simpliciter. Short
and Lewis have “partĭcŭlāris, e, adj.” which they render, unhelpfully, as
“particular,” but also as “of or concerning a part, partial, particular.”
“Propositiones aliae universales, aliae particulares, ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 35,
34: partĭcŭlārĭter is particularly,
ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 33, 32; opp. “generaliter,” Firm. Math. 1, 5 fin.; opp.
“universaliter,” Aug. Retract. 1, 5 fin. Cf. Strawson, “Particular and
general,” crediting Grice twice; the second time about a fine point of
denotatum: ‘the tallest man that ever lived, lives, or will live.” To define a
‘particular,’ you need to introduce, as Ariskant does, the idea of predication.
(∀x)(x
is an individuum)≡◻(∀y)(y izzes x)⊃(x izzes y). (∀x)(x izz a particulare(≡◻(∀y)(x
izzes predicable of y)⊃(x
izzes y Λ y izzes x). Once we have defined a ‘particular,’ we can go
and define a ‘singulare,’ a ‘tode ti,’ a ‘this what.” (∀x)(x izzes singulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum). There’s
further implicate to come. (∀x)(x izzes a particulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum)). The concern by Grice
with the abstractum as a “universalium in re” can be traced back to his reading
of Aristotle’s Categoriæ, for his Lit. Hum., and later with Austin and
Strawson. Anything but a ‘prima substantia,’ ‒ viz. essence, accident, attribute,
etc. ‒ may be said to belong in the realm of the abstractum or universalium
qua predicable. As such, an abstractum and univeralium is not a spatio-temporal
continuant. However, a category shift or ‘subjectification,’ by Grice
allows a universalium as subject. The topic is approached formally by means of
the notion of order. First-order predicate calculus ranges over this or that
spatio-temporal continuant individual, in Strawson’s use of the term. A
higher-order predicate calculus ranges over this or that abstractum, a feature,
and beyond. An abstractum universalium is only referred to in a second-order predicate
calculus. This is Grice’s attempt to approach Aristkant in pragmatic key. In
his exploration of the abstractum, Grice is challenging extensionalism, so
fashionable in the New World within The School of Latter-Day Nominalists. Grice
is careful here since he is well aware that Bennett has called him a
meaning-nominalist. Strictly, in Griceian parlance, an ‘abstractum is an entity
object lacking spatiotemporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist,
or in medieval Scholastic terminology to subsist. Abstracta, sometimes
collected under the category of universals, include mathematical objects, such
as numbers, sets, and geometrical figures, propositions, properties, and
relations. Abstract entities are said to be abstracted from particulars. The
abstract triangle has only the properties common to all triangles, and none
peculiar to any particular triangles; it has no definite color, size, or
specific type, such as isosceles or scalene. Abstracta are admitted to an
ontology by Quine’s criterion if they must be supposed to exist or subsist in
order to make the propositions of an accepted theory true. Properties and
relations may be needed to account for resemblances among particulars, such as
the redness shared by all red things. Propositions as the abstract contents or
meanings of thoughts and expressions of thought are sometimes said to be
necessary to explain translation between languages, and other semantic
properties and relations. Historically, abstract entities are associated with
Plato’s realist ontology of Ideas or Forms. For Plato, these are the abstract
and only real entities, instantiated or participated in by spatiotemporal
objects in the world of appearance or empirical phenomena. Aristotle denied the
independent existence of abstract entities, and redefined a diluted sense of
Plato’s Forms as the secondary substances that inhere in primary substances or
spatiotemporal particulars as the only genuine existents. The dispute persisted
in medieval philosophy between realist metaphysicians, including Augustine and
Aquinas, who accepted the existence of abstracta, and nominalists, such as
Ockham, who maintained that similar objects may simply be referred to by the
same name without participating in an abstract form. In modern philosophy, the
problem of abstracta has been a point of contention between rationalism, which
is generally committed to the existence of abstract entities, and empiricism,
which rejects abstracta because they cannot be experienced by the senses.
Berkeley and Hume argued against Locke’s theory of abstract ideas by observing
that introspection shows all ideas to be particular, from which they concluded
that we can have no adequate concept of an abstract entity; instead, when we
reason about what we call abstracta we are actually thinking about particular
ideas delegated by the mind to represent an entire class of resemblant
particulars, from which we may freely substitute others if we mistakenly draw
conclusions peculiar to the example chosen. Abstract propositions were defended
by Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century as the meanings of thought in
language and logic. Dispute persists about the need for and nature of abstract
entities, but many philosophers believe they are indispensable in
metaphysics. Refs.: For pre-play group
reflections see Ryle’s Categories and Systematically misleading expressions.
Explorations by other members of Grice’s playgroup are Strawson, ‘Particular
and general’ and Warnock, ‘Metaphysics in logic,’ The main work by Grice at
Oxford on the ‘abstractum’ is with Austin (f. 15) and later with Strawson (f.23).
Grice, “Aristotle’s Categoriae,” The H. P. Grice Papers, S. II, c. 6-f. 15 and
c. 6, f. 23, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of
California, Berkeley.
acceptum: As
a meta-ethicist, like Hare, Grice is interested in providing criteria for
acceptability. He proposes three formal universalizability, conceptual
universalizability, and applicational universalizability. This is Grice’s
Golden Rule, which is Biblical in nature. Grice needs a past participle for a
‘that’-clause of something ‘thought’. He has ‘creditum’ for what is
believed, and ‘desideratum’ for what is desired. So he uses ‘acceptum’ for
what is accepted, a neutral form to cover both the desideratum and the
creditum. Short and Lewis have ‘accipio,’ f. ‘capio.’ Grice uses the
abbreviation “Acc” for this. As he puts it in the Locke lectures: "An idea I want to explore is that we represent
the sentences ‘Smith should be
recovering his health by now’ and ‘Smith should join the cricket club’ as having the following structures. First, a common
"rationality" operator 'Acc', to be heard as "it is
reasonable that", "it is acceptABLE that", "it
ought to be that", "it should be that", or in some
other similar way.Next, one or other of two mode operators, which in the case
of the first are to be written as
'⊢' and in the case of the second are to be
written as '!.’ Finally a 'radical', to be represented by 'r' or some other
lower-case letter. The structure for the second is ‘Acc + ⊢ +
r. For the second, ‘Acc + ! + r,’ with each symbol falling within the scope of
its predecessor. Grice is not a
psychologist, but he speaks of the ‘soul.’ He was a philosopher engaged in
philosophical psychology. The psychological theory which Grice envisages would
be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision
for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools
for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests e. g. on the part of one
creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to
another creature because of a concern for the other creature. Within such a
theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the
creatures Subjects to the theory against the abandonment of the central
concepts of the theory and so of the theory itself, motivations which the
creatures would or should regard as justified.
Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, I think, can
matters of evaluation, and so, of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be
raised at all. If I conjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the
materials needed to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival system contains
a basis for the justification of anything at all. We should recall that the
first rendering that Liddell and Scott give for “ψυχή” is “life;” the
tripartite division of “ψ., οἱ δὲ περὶ Πλάτωνα καὶ Ἀρχύτας καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ
Πυθαγόρειοι τὴν ψ. τριμερῆ ἀποφαίνονται, διαιροῦντες εἰς λογισμὸν καὶ θυμὸν καὶ
ἐπιθυμίαν,” Pl.R.439e sqq.; in Arist. “ἡ ψ. τούτοις ὥρισται,
θρεπτικῷ, αἰσθητικῷ, διανοητικῷ, κινήσει: πότερον δὲ τοὔτων ἕκαστόν ἐστι ψ. ἢ
ψυχῆς μόριον;” de An.413b11, cf. PA641b4; “ἡ θρεπτικὴ ψ.” Id.de An.434a22,
al.; And Aristotle also has Grice’s favourite, ‘psychic,’ ψυχικός , ή, όν,
“of the soul or life, spiritual, opp. “σωματικός, ἡδοναί” Arist.EN1117b28. The
compound “psichiologia” is first used in "Psichiologia de ratione animae
humanae," (in Bozicevic-Natalis, Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis). A
footnote in “Method,” repr. in “Conception” dates Grice’s lectures at
Princeton. Grice is forever grateful to Carnap for having coined ‘pirot,’ or
having thought to have coined. Apparently, someone had used the expression
before him to mean some sort of exotic fish. He starts by listing this or that
a focal problem. The first problem is circularity. He refers to the
dispositional behaviouristic analysis by Ryle. The second focal problem is the
alleged analytic status of a psychological law. One problem concerns some
respect for Grice’s own privileged access to this or that state and this or
that avowal of this or that state being incorrigible. The fourth problem
concerns the law-selection. He refers to pessimism. He talks of folk-science. D
and C are is each predicate-constant in some law L in some psychological
theory θ. This or that instantiable of D or C may well be a set or a
property or neither. Grices way of Ramseyified naming: There is just one
predicate D, such that nomological generalization L introducing D via implicit
definition in theory θ obtains. Uniqueness is essential since D is
assigned to a names for a particular instantiable (One can dispense with
uniqueness by way of Ramseyified description discussed under ‘ramseyified
description.’) Grice trusts he is not overstretching Ramsey’s original
intention. He applies Ramsey-naming and Ramsey-describing to pain. He who
hollers is in pain. Or rather, He who is in pain hollers. (Sufficient but not
necessary). He rejects disjunctional physicalism on it sounding harsh, as
Berkeley puts it, to say that Smiths brains being in such and such a state is a
case of, say, judging something to be true on insufficient evidence. He
criticises the body-soul identity thesis on dismissing =s main purpose, to
license predicate transfers. Grice wasnt sure what his presidential
address to the American Philosophical Association will be about. He chose
the banal (i.e. the ordinary-language counterpart of something like a need we
ascribe to a squirrel to gobble nuts) and the bizarre: the philosophers
construction of need and other psychological, now theoretical terms. In
the proceedings, Grice creates the discipline of Pology. He cares to
mention philosophers Aristotle, Lewis, Myro, Witters, Ramsey, Ryle, and a few
others. The essay became popular when, of all people, Block, cited it as a
programme in functionalism, which it is Grices method in functionalist
philosophical psychology. Introduces Pology as a creature-construction
discipline. Repr. in “Conception,” it reached a wider audience. The essay
is highly subdivided, and covers a lot of ground. Grice starts by noting that,
contra Ryle, he wants to see psychological predicates as theoretical concepts.
The kind of theory he is having in mind is folksy. The first creature he
introduces to apply his method is Toby, a squarrel, that is a reconstructed
squirrel. Grice gives some principles of Pirotology. Maxims of rational
behaviour compound to form what he calls an immanuel, of which The
Conversational Immanuel is a part. Grice concludes with a warning against the
Devil of Scientism, but acknowledges perhaps he was giving much too credit to
Myros influence on this! “Method” in “Conception,” philosophical
psychology, Pirotology. The Immanuel section is perhaps the most important from
the point of view of conversation as rational cooperation. For he identifies
three types of generality: formal, applicational, and content-based. Also, he
allows for there being different types of imannuels. Surely one should be the
conversational immanuel. Ryle would say that one can have a manual, yet now
know how to use it! And theres also the Witters-type problem. How do we say
that the conversationalist is following the immanuel? Perhaps the statement is
too strong – cf. following a rule – and Grices problems with resultant and
basic procedures, and how the former derive from the latter! This connects with
Chomsky, and in general with Grices antipathy towards constitutive rules! In
“Uncertainty,” Grice warns that his interpretation of Prichards willing that as
a state should not preclude a physicalist analysis, but in Method it is all
against physicalism. In Method, from the
mundane to the recondite, he is playful enough to say that primacy is no big
deal, and that, if properly motivated, he might give a reductive analysis of
the buletic in terms of the doxastic. But his reductive analysis of the
doxastic in terms of the buletic runs as follows: P judges that p iff P wills
as follows: given any situation in which P wills some end E and here are two
non-empty classes K1 and K2 of action types,
such that: the performance by P of an action-type belonging to K1 realises
E1 just in case p obtains, and the performance by the P of an
action type belonging to of K2 will realise E just in case p
does not obtain, and here is no third non-empty class K3 of
action types such that the performance by the P of an action type belonging
to will realise E whether p is true or p is false, in such situation, the
P is to will that the P performs some action type belonging to K1.
Creature construction allows for an account of freedom that will metaphysically
justify absolute value. Frankfurt has become famous for his
second-order and higher-order desires. Grice is exploring similar grounds in
what comes out as his “Method” (originally APA presidential address, now repr.
in “Conception”). acceptabilitias. Grice generalizes his desirability and
credibility functions into a single acceptability. Acceptability has obviously
degrees. Grice is thinking of ‘scales’ alla: must, optimal acceptability (for
both modalities), should (medium acceptability), and ought (defeasible
acceptability). He develops the views in The John Locke lectures, having
introduced ‘accept,’ in his BA lecture on ‘Intention and Uncertainty.’ In fact,
much as in “Causal Theory” he has an excursus on ‘Implication,’ here he has,
also in italics, an excursus on “acceptance.” It seems that a degree of analogy
between intending and believing has to be admitted; likewise the presence of a
factual commitment in the case of an expression of intention. We can now use
the term ‘acceptance’ to express a generic concept applying both to cases of
intention and to cases of belief. He who intends to do A and he who believes that
he will do A can both be said to accept (or to accept it as being the case)
that he will do A. We could now attempt to renovate the three-pronged analysis
discussed in Section I, replacing references in that analysis to being sure or
certain that one will do A by references to accepting that one will do A. We
might reasonably hope thereby to escape the objections raised in Section I,
since these objections seemingly centred on special features of the notion of
certainty which would NOT attach to the generic notion of acceptance. Hope that
the renovated analysis will enable us to meet the sceptic will not immediately
be realised, for the sceptic can still as (a) why some cases of acceptance
should be specially dispensed from the need for evidential backing, and (b) if
certain cases are exempt from evidential justification but not from
justification, what sort of justification is here required. Some progress might
be achieved by adopting a different analysis of intention in terms of
acceptance. We might suggest that ‘Grice intends to go to Harborne’ is very
roughly equivalent to the conjunction of ‘Grice accepts-1 that he will go to
Harborne’ and ‘Grice accepts-2 that his going to Harborne will result from the
effect of his acceptance-1 that he will go to Harborne. The idea is that when a
case of acceptance is also a case of belief, the accepter does NOT regard his
acceptance as contributing towards the realisation of the state of affairs the
future the existence of which he accepts; whereas when a case of acceptance is
not a case of belief but a case of intention, he does regard the acceptance as
so contributing. Such an analysis clearly enables us to deal with the sceptic
with regard to this question (a), viz. why some cases of acceptance (those
which are cases of intention) should be specially exempt from the need of
evidential backing. For if my going to Harborne is to depend causally on my
acceptance that I shall-c go, the possession of satisfactory evidence that I
shall-c go will involve possession of the information that I accept that I
shall-c go. Obviously, then, I cannot (though others can) come to accept that I
shall-c go on the basis of satisfactory evidence, for to have such evidence I
should have already to have accepted that I shall-c go. I cannot decide whether
or not to accept-1 that I shall-c go on the strength of evidence which includes
as a datum that I do accept-1 that I shall-c go. Grice grants that we are still
unable to deal with the sceptic as regards question (b), viz. what sort of
justification is available for those cases of acceptance which require
non-evidential justification even though they involve a factual commitment.
Though it is clear that, on this analysis, one must not expect the intender to
rely on evidence for his statements of what he will in fact do, we have not
provided any account of the nature of the non-evidential considerations which
may be adduced to justify such a statement, nor (a fortiori) of the reasons why
such considerations might legitimately thought to succeed in justifying such a
statement. Refs.: Grice, “Intention and uncertainty,” The British Academy, and
BANC, MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library. Refs.: The obvious source is his
“Method,” repr. in “Conception,” but the keyword: “philosophical psychology” is
useful in the Grice papers. There is a specific essay on the power structure of
the soul, The H. P. Grice Collection, BANC.
accidens: accidentia, if there is accidentia, there is
‘essentia.’ If the Grecians felt like using the prefix ‘syn-‘ for this, why
didn’t the Romans use the affix ‘cum-’? There are two: coincidentia, and
concomitantia. For Grice, even English is vague here – to the point like he
felt that ‘have,’ as in ‘have a property’ seems more of a proper translation of
Aristotle’s ‘accidentia.’ Anything else falls under the ‘izz,’ not the ‘hazz.’
Because if the property is not accidental, the subject-item would just cease to
exist, so the essential property is something the subject item IZZ, not HAZZ. One
philosophical mistake: what is essential is not also accidental. Grice follows
Kripke in the account of existence and essence. If Grice’s essence is his
rational nature, if Grice becomes irrational, he ceases to exist. Not so for
any property that Grice has which is NOT essential. An essential property is
the first predicable, in that it is not one of this or that genus that is
redundant. So Grice applies ‘accidental,’ like ‘essential’ to ‘attribute,’ and
to attribute is to predicate. An essential attribute is manifested by an
essential predicate. A non-essential predicate is an accidental attribute.
There is the ‘idea’ of the ‘proprium,’ idion, with which Grice has to struggle
a little. For what is the implicaturum of a ‘proprium’ ascripition? “Man is a
laughing animal.” Why would someone say such an idiocy in the first place?!
Strictly, from a Griceian point of view, an ‘accidens’ is feature or property
of a substance e.g., an organism or an artifact without which the substance
could still exist. According to a common essentialist view of persons,
Socrates’ size, color, and integrity are among his accidents, while his
humanity is not. For Descartes, thinking is the essence of the soul, while any
particular thought a soul entertains is an accident. According to a common
theology, God has no accidents, since all truths about him flow by necessity
from his nature. These examples suggest the diversity of traditional uses of
the notion of accident. There is no uniform conception; but the Cartesian view,
according to which the accidents are modes of ways of specifying the essence of
a substance, is representative. An important ambiguity concerns the identity of
accidents: if Plato and Aristotle have the same weight, is that weight one
accident say, the property of weighing precisely 70 kilograms or two one
accident for Plato, one for Aristotle? Different theorists give different
answers and some have changed their minds. Issues about accidents have become
peripheral in this century because of the decline of traditional concerns about
substance. But the more general questions about necessity and contingency are
very much alive. While not one of the labours of Grice, Accidentailism is
regarded by Grice as the metaphysical thesis that the occurrence of some events
is either not necessitated or not causally determined or not predictable. Many
determinists have maintained that although all events are caused, some
nevertheless occur accidentally, if only because the causal laws determining
them might have been different. Some philosophers have argued that even if
determinism is true, some events, such as a discovery, could not have been
predicted, on grounds that to predict a discovery is to make the discovery. The
term may also designate a theory of individuation: that individuals of the same
kind or species are numerically distinct in virtue of possessing some different
accidental properties. Two horses are the same in essence but numerically
distinct because one of them is black, e.g., while the other is white.
Accidentalism presupposes the identity of indiscernibles but goes beyond it by
claiming that accidental properties account for numerical diversity within a
species. Peter Abelard criticized a version of accidentalism espoused by his
teacher, William of Champeaux, on the ground that accidental properties depend
for their existence on the distinct individuals in which they inhere, and so
the properties cannot account for the distinctness of the individuals.
accidie
also acedia, apathy, listlessness, or ennui. This condition is problematic for
the internalist thesis that, necessarily, any belief that one morally ought to
do something is conceptually sufficient for having motivation to do it. Grice
gives the example of Ann. Ann has long believed that she ought, morally, to
assist her ailing mother, and she has dutifully acted accordingly. Seemingly,
she may continue to believe this, even though, owing to a recent personal
tragedy, she now suffers from accidie and is wholly lacking in motivation to
assist her mother. acedia, Fr. acédie,
tristesse, Gr. “ἀϰήδεια,” “ἀϰηδία,” Lat. taedium v. malaise, melancholy,
spleen, dasein, desengano, oikeiosis, sorge, verguenza. Through the
intermediary of monastic Lat., “acedia,” “weariness, indifference” (Cassian, De
institutis coenobiorum, 10.2.3; RT: PL, vol. 49, cols. 363–69), the rich Greek
concept of “akêdeia,” a privative formed on “kêdos” [ϰῆδоς], “care,” and
bearing the twofold meaning of lacking care (negligence) and absence of care
(from lassitude or from serenity), established well in the language —a concept
that belongs simultaneously to the communal and the moral registers. The Greek
was originally associated with social rituals; in philosophical Latin from
Seneca on, it was related to the moral virtue of intimacy, but its contemporary
usage has returned it to a collective dimension. Gr. “akêdeia” is
simultaneously part of the register of the obligations owed to others and part
of the register of self-esteem: this breadth of meaning determines the later
variations. On the social level, the substantive kêdos, “care, concern,” is
specialized as early as Homer in two particular uses: mourning, the honors
rendered to the dead, and union, family relationship through marriage or
through alliance; “ϰήδεια” (adj. “ϰῆδεоς”) is the attention that must be paid
to the dead, as well as the concern and care for allies, characteristic of this
relationship of alliance, which is distinct from that of blood and also
contributes to philia [φιλία], to the well-being of the city-state (Aristotle,
Politics, 9.1280b 36; see love and polis); “ὁ ϰηδεμών” refers to all those who
protect, for example, tutelary gods (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 3.3.21). Akêdês [ἀϰηδής]
qualifies in an active sense, in a positive way, someone who is exempt from
care and anxiety (Hesiod, Theogony, 5.489, apropos of the “invincible and
impassive” Zeus, but also, negatively, the serving woman or negligent man;
Homer, Odyssey, 17.319; Plato, Laws, 913c); in the passive sense, it designates
a person who is neglected (Odyssey, 20.130) or abandoned without burial (like
Hector, Iliad, 24.554). How can the lack of care, “akêdeia,” become a virtue of
the reflexive type? There is a twofold
sense of the term (transitive: care for others; reflexive: care for oneself).
The first movement toward the ethics of intimacy is determined by practical
philosophy’s reflection on the finitude of human life. The event represented by
death produces a sadness that seems to have no consolation. The moral reaction
to situations in which one finds oneself fearing such a finitude is presented
in an active and critical way in the ethics developed by Seneca in the
Consolations. Grace and purity can temper sadness (“Marcum blandissimum puerum,
ad cujus conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia” [Marcus, this boy, so
gentle, before whom no sadness can last]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 18.4).
But above all, it is the effort of reason and study that can overcome any
sadness (“liberalia studia: illa sanabunt vulnus tuum, illa omnem tristitiam
tibi evellent” [these studies will heal your wound, will free you from any
sadness]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 17.3). This view of internal control is
foundational for a style rooted in the culture of the South: the sober
acceptance of death, and more generally, of finitude. Acedia is conceived as
having a twofold psychological and theological meaning. First of all, it is a
passion of the animus and is therefore one of the four kinds of sadness, the
other three being pigritia, “laziness,” tristitia, “sadness” properly so
called, and taedium, “boredom.” In Christian monasticism of the fourth and
fifth centuries, especially in Cassian and the eastern desert fathers, acedia
is one of the seven or eight temptations with which the monks might have to
struggle at one time or another. Usually mentioned between sadness and
vainglory in a list that was to become that of the “seven deadly sins,” it is
characterized by a pronounced distaste for spiritual life and the eremitic
ideal, a discouragement and profound boredom that lead to a state of lethargy
or to the abandonment of monastic life. It was designated by the expression
“noonday demon,” which is supposed to come from verse 6 of Psalm 91. Thomas
Aquinas opposes acedia to the joy that is inherent in the virtue of charity and
makes it a specific sin, as a sadness with regard to spiritual goods (Summa
theologica, IIa, IIae, q. 35). Some place acedia among the seven deadly sins.
If it is equivalent to the more widespread terms “taedium” and “pigritia”, that
is because it is the result of an excess of dispersion or idle chatter, and of
the sadness and indifference (incuria) produced by the difficulty of obtaining
spiritual goods. Thus “desolation” is supposed also to be a term related to
acedia, and is often employed in spiritual and mystical literature——and it
subsists in the vocabulary of moral sentiments. The secular sense that the word
has acquired can make “acedia” the result of a situation of crisis and social
conflict. Acedia (derivedfrom the adjective “acedo,” from Lat. “acidus,” “acid,”
bitter) may be connected with the deprivation and need to which the poor are
subject. It involves the naturalization or loss of aura discussed by Walter
Benjamin, who draws on Baudelaire’s notion of “spleen” and on the phenomenology
of the consciousness of loss or collective distress that follows the great
upheavals of modernization (Das Passagen-Werk).Refs.: Benjamin, Walter. Das
Passagen-Werk. Vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by R. Tiedemann.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin: The
Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Meltzer,
Françoise. “Acedia and Melancholia.” In Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
ackrillism –
after J. L. Ackrill, London-born, Oxford-educated tutee of Grice’s. Grice cites
him in “Some reflections on ends and happiness.” The reference is to Ackrill’s
exploration on Aristotle on happiness. Ackrill was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s
where he read, as he should, for the Lit. Hum. (Phil.). Grice instilled on him
a love for Aristotle, which had been instilled on Grice by Scots philosopher
Hardie, Grice’s tutee at THE place to study Lit. Hum., Corpus. Grice regretted
that Ackrill had to *translate* Aristotle. “Of course at Clifton and Corpus,
Hardie never asked me so!” Grice thought that Aristotle was almost being
‘murdered,’ literally, by Ackrill. That’s why Grice would always quote
Aristotle in the Grecian vernacular. An “ackrillism,” then, as Grice used it,
is a way to turn Aristotle from one vernacular to another, “usually with an
Ackrillian effect.” Griceians usually pay respect to Ackrill’s grave, which
reads, in a pretty Griceian way, “Aristotelian.”
actum.
Grice’s theory is action-oriented. He often used ‘pragmatic’ to that effect.
This is most evident in his account of meaning. In the phrastic, “The door is
closed, please,” the ultimate intention is that the recipient performs the
action of closing the door. Grice saw action theory as the study of the
ontological structure of human action, the process by which it originates, and
the ways in which it is explained. Most human actions are acts of commission:
they constitute a class of events in which a subject the agent brings about
some change or changes. Thus, in moving one’s finger, one brings it about that
one’s finger moves. When the change brought about is an ongoing process e.g.,
the continuing appearance of words on a , the behavior is called an activity
writing. An action of omission occurs when an agent refrains from performing an
action of commission. Since actions of commission are events, the question of
their ontology is in part a matter of the general ontology of change. An
important issue here is whether what occurs when an action is performed should
be viewed as abstract or concrete. On the first approach, actions are
understood either as proposition-like entities e.g., Booth’s moving a finger,
or as a species of universal namely, an
act-type moving a finger. What “occurred” when Booth moved his finger in Ford’sTheater
on April 14, 1865, is held to be the abstract entity in question, and the
entity is viewed as repeatable: that is, precisely the same entity is held to
have occurred on every other occasion of Booth’s moving his finger. When
actions are viewed as concrete, on the other hand, Booth’s moving his finger in
Ford’s Theater is understood to be a non-repeatable particular, accidental
property action theory 6 4065A- 6 and
the movement of the finger counts as an acttoken, which instantiates the
corresponding acttype. Concrete actions are time-bound: each belongs to a
single behavioral episode, and other instantiations of the same act-type count
as distinct events. A second important ontological issue concerns the fact that
by moving his finger, Booth also fired a gun, and killed Lincoln. It is common
for more than one thing to be accomplished in a single exercise of agency, and
how such doings are related is a matter of debate. If actions are understood as
abstract entities, the answer is essentially foregone: there must be as many
different actions on Booth’s part as there are types exemplified. But if
actions are viewed as particulars the same token can count as an instance of
more than one type, and identity claims become possible. Here there is
disagreement. Fine-grained theories of act individuation tend to confine
identity claims to actions that differ only in ways describable through
different modifications of the same main verb
e.g., where Placido both sings and sings loudly. Otherwise, different
types are held to require different tokens: Booth’s action of moving his finger
is held to have generated or given rise to distinct actions of firing the gun
and killing Lincoln, by virtue of having had as causal consequences the gun’s
discharge and Lincoln’s death. The opposite, coarse-grained theory, however,
views these causal relations as grounds for claiming Booth’s acts were
precisely identical. On this view, for Booth to kill Lincoln was simply for him
to do something that caused Lincoln’s death
which was in fact nothing more than to move his finger and similarly for his firing the gun. There
is also a compromise account, on which Booth’s actions are related as part to
whole, each consisting in a longer segment of the causal chain that terminates
with Lincoln’s death. The action of killing Lincoln consisted, on this view, in
the entire sequence; but that of firing the gun terminated with the gun’s
discharge, and that of moving the finger with the finger’s motion. When, as in
Booth’s case, more than one thing is accomplished in a single exercise of
agency, some are done by doing others. But if all actions were performed by
performing others, an infinite regress would result. There must, then, be a
class of basic actions i.e., actions
fundamental to the performance of all others, but not themselves done by doing
something else. There is disagreement, however, on which actions are basic.
Some theories treat bodily movements, such as Booth’s moving his finger, as
basic. Others point out that it is possible to engage in action but to
accomplish less than a bodily movement, as when one tries to move a limb that
is restrained or paralyzed, and fails. According to these accounts, bodily
actions arise out of a still more basic mental activity, usually called
volition or willing, which is held to constitute the standard means for
performing all overt actions. The question of how bodily actions originate is
closely associated with that of what distinguishes them from involuntary and
reflex bodily events, as well as from events in the inanimate world. There is
general agreement that the crucial difference concerns the mental states that
attend action, and in particular the fact that voluntary actions typically
arise out of states of intending on the part of the agent. But the nature of
the relation is difficult, and there is the complicating factor that intention
is sometimes held to reduce to other mental states, such as the agent’s desires
and beliefs. That issue aside, it would appear that unintentional actions arise
out of more basic actions that are intentional, as when one unintentionally
breaks a shoelace by intentionally tugging on it. But how intention is first
tr. into action is much more problematic, especially when bodily movements are
viewed as basic actions. One cannot, e.g., count Booth’s moving his finger as
an intentional action simply because he intended to do so, or even on the
ground if it is true that his intention caused his finger to move. The latter
might have occurred through a strictly autonomic response had Booth been
nervous enough, and then the moving of the finger would not have counted as an
action at all, much less as intentional. Avoiding such “wayward causal chains”
requires accounting for the agent’s voluntary control over what occurs in
genuinely intentional action a difficult
task when bodily actions are held to be basic. Volitional accounts have greater
success here, since they can hold that movements are intentional only when the
agent’s intention is executed through volitional activity. But they must
sidestep another threatened regress: if we call for an activity of willing to
explain why Booth’s moving his finger counts as intentional action, we cannot
do the same for willing itself. Yet on most accounts volition does have the
characteristics of intentional behavior. Volitional theories of action must,
then, provide an alternative account of how mental activity can be intentional.
Actions are explained by invoking the agent’s reasons for performing them.
Characteristically, a reason may be understood to consist in a positive
attitude of the agent toward one or another action theory action theory 7
4065A- 7 outcome, and a belief to the
effect that the outcome may be achieved by performing the action in question.
Thus Emily might spend the summer in France out of a desire to learn , and a
belief that spending time in France is the best way to do so. Disputed
questions about reasons include how confident the agent must be that the action
selected will in fact lead to the envisioned outcome, and whether obligation
represents a source of motivation that can operate independently of the agent’s
desires. Frequently, more than one course of action is available to an agent.
Deliberation is the process of searching out and weighing the reasons for and
against such alternatives. When successfully concluded, deliberation usually
issues in a decision, by which an intention to undertake one of the
contemplated actions is formed. The intention is then carried out when the time
for action comes. Much debate has centered on the question of how reasons are
related to decisions and actions. As with intention, an agent’s simply having a
reason is not enough for the reason to explain her behavior: her desire to
learn notwithstanding, Emily might have
gone to France simply because she was transferred there. Only when an agent does
something for a reason does the reason explain what is done. It is frequently
claimed that this bespeaks a causal relation between the agent’s strongest
reason and her decision or action. This, however, suggests a determinist stance
on the free will problem, leading some philosophers to balk. An alternative is
to treat reason explanations as teleological explanations, wherein an action is
held to be reasonable or justified in virtue of the goals toward which it was
directed. But positions that treat reason explanations as non-causal require an
alternative account of what it is to decide or act for one reason rather than
another. Grice would often wonder about
the pervasiveness of the intentiona idiom in the description of action. He
would use the phrase ‘action verb,’ i. e. a verb applied to an agent and
describing an activity, an action, or an attempt at or a culmination of an
action. Verbs applying to agents may be distinguished in two basic ways: by
whether they can take the progressive continuous form and by whether or not
there is a specific moment of occurrence/completion of the action named by the
verb. An activity verb is one describing something that goes on for a time but
with no inherent endpoint, such as ‘drive’, ‘laugh’, or ‘meditate’. One can
stop doing such a thing but one cannot complete doing it. Indeed, one can be
said to have done it as soon as one has begun doing it. An accomplishment verb
is one describing something that goes on for a time toward an inherent
endpoint, such as ‘paint’ a fence, ‘solve’ a problem, or ‘climb’ a mountain.
Such a thing takes a certain time to do, and one cannot be said to have done it
until it has been completed. An achievement verb is one describing either the
culmination of an activity, such as ‘finish’ a job or ‘reach’ a goal; the
effecting of a change, such as ‘fire’ an employee or ‘drop’ an egg; or
undergoing a change, such as ‘hear’ an explosion or ‘forget’ a name. An
achievement does not go on for a period of time but may be the culmination of
something that does. Ryle singled out achievement verbs and state verbs see
below partly in order to disabuse philosophers of the idea that what
psychological verbs name must invariably be inner acts or activities modeled on
bodily actions or activities. A task verb is an activity verb that implies attempting
to do something named by an achievement verb. For example, to seek is to
attempt to find, to sniff is to attempt to smell, and to treat is to attempt to
cure. A state verb is a verb not an action verb describing a condition,
disposition, or habit rather than something that goes on or takes place.
Examples include ‘own’, ‘weigh’, ‘want’, ‘hate’, ‘frequent’, and ‘teetotal’.
These differences were articulated by Zeno Vendler in Linguistics and
Philosophy 7. Taking them into account, linguists have classified verbs and
verb phrases into four main aspectual classes, which they distinguish in
respect to the availability and interpretation of the simple present tense, of
the perfect tenses, of the progressive construction, and of various temporal
adverbials, such as adverbs like ‘yesterday’, ‘finally’, and ‘often’, and
prepositional phrases like ‘for a long time’ and ‘in a while’. Many verbs
belong to more than one category by virtue of having several related uses. For
example, ‘run’ is both an activity and an accomplishment verb, and ‘weigh’ is
both a state and an accomplishment verb. Linguists single out a class of
causative verbs, such as ‘force’, ‘inspire’, and ‘persuade’, some of which are
achievement and some accomplishment verbs. Such causative verbs as ‘break’,
‘burn’, and ‘improve’ have a correlative intransitive use, so that, e.g., to
break something is to cause it to break. Grice denies the idea of an ‘act’ of
the soul. In this way, it is interesting to contrast his views to those
philosophers, even at Oxford, like Occam or Geach, who speak of an act of the
soul. And then there’s act-content-object psychology, or ‘act-object
psychology,’ for short, a philosophical theory that identifies in every
psychological state a mental act, a lived-through phenomenological content,
such as a mental image or description of properties, and an intended object
that the mental act is about or toward which it is directed by virtue of its
content. The distinction between the act, content, and object of thought
originated with Alois Höfler’s Logik 0, written in collaboration with Meinong.
But the theory is historically most often associated with its development in
Kazimierz Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung “On
the Content and Object of Presentations,” 4, despite Twardowski’s
acknowledgment of his debt to Höfler. Act-object psychology arose as a reaction
to Franz Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis in his influential
Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt “Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint,” 1874, in which Brentano maintains that intentionality is “the mark
of the mental,” by contrast with purely physical phenomena. Brentano requires
that intended objects belong immanently to the mental acts that intend
them a philosophical commitment that
laid Brentano open to charges of epistemological idealism and psychologism. Yet
Brentano’s followers, who accepted the intentionality of thought but resisted
what they came to see as its detachable idealism and psychologism, responded by
distinguishing the act-immanent phenomenological content of a psychological
state from its act-transcendent intended object, arguing that Brentano had
wrongly and unnecessarily conflated mental content with the external objects of
thought. Twardowski goes so far as to claim that content and object can never
be identical, an exclusion in turn that is vigorously challenged by Husserl in
his Logische Untersuchungen “Logical Investigations,” 3, 2, and by others in
the phenomenological tradition who acknowledge the possibility that a
self-reflexive thought can sometimes be about its own content as intended
object, in which content and object are indistinguishable. Act-object
psychology continues to be of interest to contemporary philosophy because of
its relation to ongoing projects in phenomenology, and as a result of a
resurgence of study of the concept of intentionality and qualia in philosophy
of mind, cognitive psychology, and Gegenstandstheorie, or existent and
non-existent intended object theory, in philosophical logic and semantics. Grice was fascinated by the metaphysically
wrong theory of agent-causation. He would make fun of it. His example, “The
cause of the death of Charles I is decapitation; therefore, decapitation willed
the death of Charles I. Grice would refer to transeunt causation in “Actions
and events.” In Grice’s terms, agent causation is the convoluted idea that the
primary cause of an event is a substance; more specifically, causation by a
substance, as opposed to an event. Thus a brick a substance may be said to be
the cause of the breaking of the glass. The expression is also used more
narrowly by Reid and others for the view that an action or event is caused by
an exertion of power by some agent endowed with will and understanding. Thus, a
person may be said to be the cause of her action of opening the door. In this
restricted sense Reid called it “the strict and proper sense”, an agent-cause
must have the power to cause the action or event and the power not to cause it.
Moreover, it must be “up to” the agent whether to cause the event or not to
cause it. It is not “up to” the brick whether to cause or not to cause the
breaking of the glass. The restricted sense of agent causation developed by
Reid is closely tied to the view that the agent possesses free will. Medieval
philosophers distinguished the internal activity of the agent from the external
event produced by that activity. The former was called “immanent causation” and
the latter “transeunt causation.” These terms have been adapted by Chisholm and
others to mark the difference between agent causation and event causation. The
idea is that the internal activity is agentcaused by the person whose activity
it is; whereas the external event is event-caused by the internal activity of
the agent. His “Death of Charles I”
example is meant as a reductio ad sbsurdum of ‘agent causation.’ The
philosopher cannot possibly be meaning to communicate such absurdity. The
‘actus’ is less obviously related to the actum, but it should. When Grice says,
“What is actual is not also possible” as a mistake – he is not thinking of
HUMAN rational agency – but some kind of agency, though. It may be thought that
‘actum’ is still phrased after a ‘that’-clause, even if what is reported is
something that is actual, e. g. It is actually raining (versus It is possibly
raining in Cambridge). – potentia -- energeia, Grecian term coined by Aristotle
and often tr. as ‘activity’, ‘actuality’, and even ‘act’, but more literally
rendered ‘a state of functioning’. Since for Aristotle the function of an
object is its telos or aim, energeia can also be described as an entelecheia or
realization another coined term he uses interchangeably with energeia. So
understood, it can denote either a something’s being functional, though not in
use at the moment, and b something’s actually functioning, which Aristotle
describes as a “first realization” and “second realization” respectively On the
Soul II.5. In general, every energeia is correlative to some dunamis, a
capability or power to function in a certain way, and in the central books of
the Metaphysics Aristotle uses the linkage between these two concepts to
explain the relation of form to matter. He also distinguishes between energeia
and kinesis change or motion Metaphysics IX.6; Nicomachean Ethics X.4. A
kinesis is defined by reference to its terminus e.g., learning how to multiply
and is thus incomplete at any point before reaching its conclusion. An
energeia, in contrast, is a state complete in itself e.g., seeing. Thus,
Aristotle says that at any time that I am seeing, it is also true that I have
seen; but it is not true that at any time I am learning that I have learned. In
Grecian, this difference is not so much one of tense as of encrateia energeia
264 264 aspect: the perfect tense marks
a “perfect” or complete state, and not necessarily prior activity. energeticism, also called energetism or
energism, the doctrine that energy is the fundamental substance underlying all
change. Its most prominent champion was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald
18532. In his address “Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus”
“The Conquest of Scientific Materialism”, delivered at Lübeck in 5, Ostwald
chastised the atomic-kinetic theory as lacking progress and claimed that a
unified science, energetics, could be based solely on the concept of energy.
Many of Ostwald’s criticisms of materialism and mechanistic reductionism
derived from Mach. Ostwald’s attempts to deduce the fundamental equations of
thermodynamics and mechanics from the principles of energy conservation and
transformation were indebted to the writings of Georg Helm 18749, especially
Die Lehre von Energie “The Laws of Energy,” 7 and Die Energetik “Energetics,”
8. Ostwald defended Helm’s factorization thesis that all changes in energy can
be analyzed as a product of intensity and capacity factors. The factorization
thesis and the attempt to derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the
principles of energetics were subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann
and Max Planck. Boltzmann also criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection
of the atomickinetic theory. Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the
banner of energetics withered in
additum: f. addo ,
dĭdi, dĭtum, 3, v. a. 2. do (addues for addideris, Paul. ex Fest. p. 27 Müll.),addition.
Strawson Wiggins p. 520. The utterer implies something more or different from
what he explicitly conveys. Cfr. Disimplicaturum, ‘less’ under ‘different from’
How seriously are we taking the ‘more.’ Not used by Grice. They seem
cross-categorial. If emissor draws a skull and then a cross he means that there
is danger and death in the offing. He crosses the cross, so it means death is
avoidable. Urmson says that Warnock went to bed and took off his boots. He
implicates in that order. So he means MORE than the ‘ampersand.” The “and” is
expanded into “and then.” But in not every case things are so easy that it’s a
matter of adding stuff. Cf. summatum, conjunctum. And then there’s the
‘additive implicaturum.’ By uttering
‘and,’ Russell means the Boolean adition. Whitehead means ‘and then’.
Whithead’s implicaturum is ADDITIVE, as opposed to diaphoron. Grice considers
the conceptual possibilities here: One may explicitly convey that p, and
implicitly convey q, where q ADDS to p (e. g. ‘and’ implicates ‘and then’).
Sometimes it does not, “He is a fine fine,” (or a ‘nice fellow,’ Lecture IV)
implying, “He is a scoundrel.” Sometimes it has nothing to do with it, “The
weather has been nice” implying, “you committed a gaffe.” With disimplicaturum,
you implicate LESS than you explicitly convey. When did you last see your
father? “Yesterday night, in my drams.” Grice sums this up with the phrase,
“more or other.” By explicitly conveying that p, the emissor implicates MORE OR
OTHER than he explicitly conveys.
adornoian implicaturum. Grice enjoyed
Adorno’s explorations on the natural/non-natural distinction; adorno, t. w. a
philosopher of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
With Horkheimer, Adorno gave philosophical direction to the Frankfurt School
and its research projects in its Institute for Social Research. An accomplished
musician and composer, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art,
working to develop a non-reductionist but materialist theory of art and music
in many essays. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, he turned toward
developing a “micrological” account of cultural artifacts, viewing them as
“constellations” of social and historical forces. As his collaboration with
Horkheimer increased, Adorno turned to the problem of a self-defeating
dialectic of modern reason and freedom. Under the influence of the seemingly
imminent victory of the Nazis in Europe, this analysis focused on the
“entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment argues
that instrumental reason promises the subject autonomy from the forces of
nature only to enslave it again by its own repression of its impulses and
inclinations. The only way around this self-domination is “non-identity
thinking,” found in the unifying tendencies of a non-repressive reason. This
self-defeating dialectic is represented by the striking image of Ulysses tied
to the mast to survive his encounter with the Sirens. Adorno initially hoped
for a positive analysis of the Enlightenment to overcome this genealogy of modern
reason, but it is never developed. Instead, he turned to an increasingly
pessimistic analysis of the growing reification of modern life and of the
possibility of a “totally administered society.” Adorno held that “autonomous
art” can open up established reality and negate the experience of reification.
Aesthetic Theory develops this idea of autonomous art in terms of aesthetic
form, or the capacity of the internal organization of art to restructure
existing patterns of meaning. Authentic works of art have a “truth-value” in
their capacity to bring to awareness social contradictions and antinomies. In
Negative Dialectics 6 Adorno provides a more general account of social
criticism under the “fragmenting” conditions of modern rationalization and
domination. These and other writings have had a large impact on cultural
criticism, particularly through Adorno’s analysis of popular culture and the
“culture industry.”
æqui-pollence:
term used by Grice, après Sextus Empiricus, to express the view that there are
arguments of equal strength on all sides of any question and that therefore we
should suspend judgment on every question that can be raised.
æqui-probable: having
the same probability. Sometimes used in the same way as ‘equipossible’, the
term is associated with Laplace’s the “classical” interpretation of
probability, where the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of
equipossibilities favorable to the event to the total number of
equipossibilities. For example, the probability of rolling an even number with
a “fair” six-sided die is ½ there being
three equipossibilities 2, 4, 6 favorable to even, and six equipossibilities 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in all and 3 /6 % ½. The concept is now generally thought not to
be widely applicable to the interpretation of probability, since natural
equipossibilities are not always at hand as in assessing the probability of a
thermonuclear war tomorrow.
æqui-valence: mutual
inferability. The following are main kinds: two statements are materially
equivalent provided they have the same truthvalue, and logically equivalent
provided each can be deduced from the other; two sentences or words are
equivalent in meaning provided they can be substituted for each other in any
context without altering the meaning of that context. In truth-functional
logic, two statements are logically equivalent if they can never have
truthvalues different from each other. In this sense of ‘logically equivalent’
all tautologies are equivalent to each other and all contradictions are
equivalent to each other. Similarly, in extensional set theory, two classes are
equivalent provided they have the same numbers, so that all empty classes are
regarded as equivalent. In a non-extensional set theory, classes would be equivalent
only if their conditions of membership were logically equivalent or equivalent
in meaning.
Grice’s
æqui-vocality thesis -- aequivocation, the use of an
expression in two or more different senses in a single context. For example, in
‘The end of anything is its perfection. But the end of life is death; so death
is the perfection of life’, the expression ‘end’ is first used in the sense of
‘goal or purpose,’ but in its second occurrence ‘end’ means ‘termination.’ The
use of the two senses in this context is an equivocation. Where the context in
which the expression used is an argument, the fallacy of equivocation may be
committed.
æstheticum:
Grice is well aware that ‘aesthetica,’ qua discipline, was meant to refer to
the ‘sensibile,’ as opposed to the ‘intellectus.’ With F. N. Sibley (who
credits Grice profusely), Grice explored the ‘second-order’ quality of the
so-called ‘aesthetic properties.’ It influenced Scruton. The aesthetic attitude
is the appropriate attitude or frame of mind for approaching art or nature or
other objects or events so that one might both appreciate its intrinsic
perceptual qualities, and as a result have an aesthetic experience. The
aesthetic attitude has been construed in many ways: 1 as disinterested, so that
one’s experience of the work is not affected by any interest in its possible
practical uses, 2 as a “distancing” of oneself from one’s own personal
concerns, 3 as the contemplation of an object, purely as an object of
sensation, as it is in itself, for its own sake, in a way unaffected by any
cognition or knowledge one may have of it. These different notions of aesthetic
attitude have at times been combined within a single theory. There is
considerable doubt about whether there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude.
There is neither any special kind of action nor any special way of performing
an ordinary action that ensures that we see a work as it “really is,” and that
results in our having an aesthetic experience. Furthermore, there are no purely
sensory experiences, divorced from any cognitive content whatsoever. Criticisms
of the notion of aesthetic attitude have reinforced attacks on aesthetics as a
separate field of study within philosophy. On the other hand, there’s aesthetic
formalism, non-iconic, the view that in our interactions with works of art,
form should be given primacy. Rather than taking ‘formalism’ as the name of one
specific theory in the arts, it is better and more typical to take it to name
that type of theory which emphasizes the form of the artwork. Or, since
emphasis on form is something that comes in degrees, it is best to think of
theories of art as ranged on a continuum of more formalist and less formalist.
It should be added that theories of art are typically complex, including definitions
of art, recommendations concerning what we should attend to in art, analyses of
the nature of the aesthetic, recommendations concerning the making of aesthetic
evaluations, etc.; and each of these components may be more formalist or less
so. Those who use the concept of form mainly wish to contrast the artifact
itself with its relations to entities outside itself with its representing various things, its
symbolizing various things, its being expressive of various things, its being
the product of various intentions of the artist, its evoking various states in
beholders, its standing in various relations of influence and similarity to
preceding, succeeding, and contemporary works, etc. There have been some,
however, who in emphasizing form have meant to emphasize not just the artifact
but the perceptible form or design of the artifact. Kant, e.g., in his theory
of aesthetic excellence, not only insisted that the only thing relevant to
determining the beauty of an object is its appearance, but within the
appearance, the form, the design: in visual art, not the colors but the design
that the colors compose; in music, not the timbre of the individual sounds but
the formal relationships among them. It comes as no surprise that theories of
music have tended to be much more formalist than theories of literature and
drama, with theories of the visual arts located in between. While Austin’s
favourite aesthetic property is ‘dumpty,’ Grice is more open minded, and allows
for more of a property or quality such as being dainty, garish, graceful,
balanced, charming, majestic, trite, elegant, lifeless, ugly, or beautiful. By
contrast, non-aesthetic properties are properties that require no special
sensitivity or perceptiveness to perceive
such as a painting’s being predominantly blue, its having a small red
square in a corner or a kneeling figure in the foreground, or that the music
becomes louder at a given point. Sometimes it is argued that a special
perceptiveness or taste is needed to perceive a work’s aesthetic qualities, and
that this is a defining feature of a property’s being aesthetic. A corollary of
this view is that aesthetic qualities cannot be defined in terms of
non-aesthetic qualities, though some have held that aesthetic qualities supervene
on non-aesthetic qualities. As a systematic philosopher, Grice goes back to the
etymological root of the aesthetic as the philosophy of the sensible. He would
make fun of the specialization. “If at the philosophy department I am
introduced to Mr. Puddle, our man in nineteenth-century continental aesthetics,
I can grasp he is either underdescribed or not good at nineteenth-century
continental aesthetics!’ The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of
art and the character of our adventitious ideas and experience of art and of
the natural environment. It emerged as a separate field of philosophical
inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent.
Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the
development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry,
sculpture, music, and dance and often landscape gardening as the same kind of
thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts. Baumgarten coined the term
‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry 1735 as the name for one of the two
branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for the study of sensory experience
coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge
from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the ancient
Grecian aisthanomai ‘to perceive’, and “the aesthetic” has always been
intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it
arouses. Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are: Is there a special
attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and
the natural environment, and what is it like? Is there a distinctive type of
experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it? Is there a special object
of attention that we can call the aesthetic object? Finally, is there a
distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and
religious values? Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art,
such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of
taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural
objects or works of art. Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The
most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’. Not
all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one
that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other
cultures have produced? There are also many pictures including paintings,
songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are not art. What distinguishes
those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not?
Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of
art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles
or uses of the object. Since the eighteenth century there have been debates
about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that architecture
and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and
novels were for a long time not listed among the “fine arts” because they are
not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and
what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art,
found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art.
Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and
mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit
rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject
matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely
mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these
developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of “fine” or
“high” art. Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks
are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that
artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be
understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others
see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of
the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the
producer. Still others see meaning as established by the practices of the
users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced. Are there
objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks? There has
been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or
whether there can be no disputing about taste, if value judgments are relative
to the tastes and interests of each individual or to some group of individuals
who share the same tastes and interests. A judgment such as “This is good”
certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is
often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has
obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally
distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sorts
of knowledge or experiences any given work should provide to any suitably
prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter
of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of
its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also
dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity,
repreaesthetics aesthetics 12 4065A- 12
sentation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey
knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of
genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional
responses to art. Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical
theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and
continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory,
including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology,
feminism, and Marxism. Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied
that the aesthetic and the “fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and
understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that
these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of
cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that
aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that
“the aesthetic” should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor
instead a critique of the roles that images not only painting, but film,
photography, and advertising, sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional
constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and
experiences.
a
fortiori argument: According to Grice, an argument that
moves from the premises that everything which possesses a certain
characteristics will possess some further characteristics and that certain
things possess the relevant characteristics to an eminent degree to the
conclusion that a fortiori even more so these things will possess the further
characteristics. The second premise is often left implicit – or implicated, as
Grice prefers, so a fortiori arguments are often enthymemes. A favourite
illustration by Grice of an a fortiori argument can be found in Plato’s Crito. We
owe gratitude and respect to our parents and so should do nothing to harm them.
However, athenians owe even greater gratitude and respect to the laws of Athens.
Therefore, a fortiori, Athenians should do nothing to harm those laws.
agape:
Grice would often contrast ‘self-love’ with ‘agape’ and ‘benevolence.’
Strictly, agape, “a lovely Grecian word,” is best rendered as the unselfish
love for all persons. An ethical theory according to which such love is the
chief virtue, and actions are good to the extent that they express it, is
sometimes called agapism. Agape is the Grecian word most often used for love in
the New Testament, and is often used in modern languages to signify whatever
sort of love the writer takes to be idealized there. In New Testament Grecian,
however, it was probably a quite general word for love, so that any ethical
ideal must be found in the text’s substantive claims, rather than in the linguistic
meaning of the word. R.M.A. agathon, Grecian word meaning ‘a good’ or ‘the
good’. From Socrates onward, agathon was taken to be a central object of
philosophical inquiry; it has frequently been assumed to be the goal of all
rational action. Plato in the simile of the sun in the Republic identified it
with the Form of the Good, the source of reality, truth, and intelligibility.
Aristotle saw it as eudaimonia, intellectual or practical virtue, a view that
found its way, via Stoicism and Neoplatonism, into Christianity. Modern
theories of utility can be seen as concerned with essentially the same Socratic
question.
agitation: a Byzantine feeling is a Ryleian
agitation. If Grice were to advance the not
wholly plausible thesis that ‘to feel Byzantine’ is just to have a an
anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might
*be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticise Grice on the grounds
that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes
of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly
involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as
this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of
quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way
different. In
the idiolect of Ryle, “a serious student of Grecian philosophy,” as Grice puts
it, ‘emotion’ designates at least three or four different kinds of things,
which Ryle calls an ‘inclination, or ‘motive,’ a ‘mood’, an ‘agitation,’ or a ‘commotion,’
and a ‘feeling.’ An inclination or a mood, including an agitation, is not
occurrences and doest not therefore take place either publicly or privately. It
is a propensity, not an act or state. An inclination is, however, a propensity
of this or that kind, and the kind is important. A feeling, on the other hand,
IS an occurrence, but the place that mention of it should take in a description
of human behaviour is very different from that which the standard theories
accord to it. A susceptibility to a specific agitation is on the same general
footing with an inclination, viz. that each is a general propensity and not an
occurrence. An agitation is not a motive. But an agitation does presuppose a
motive, or rather an agitataion presupposes a behaviour trend of which a motive
is for us the most interesting sort.
There
is however a matter of expression which is the source of some confusion, even
among Oxonian Wilde readers, and that did confuse philosophical psychologists
of the ability of G. F. Stout. An expression may signify both an inclination
and an agitation. But an expression may signify anything but an agitations.
Again, some other expression may signify anything but an inclination. An
expression like ‘uneasy’, ‘anxious’, ‘distressed’, ‘excited’, ‘startled’ always
signifies an agitations. An expression like ‘fond of fishing’, ‘keen on
gardening’, ‘bent on becoming a bishop’ never signifies an agitation. But an
expression like ‘love’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘proud’, ‘eager,’ or many others, stands
sometimes for a simple inclination and sometimes for an agitations which is
resultant upon the inclinations and interferences with the exercise of it. Thus
‘hungry’ for ‘having a good appetite’ means roughly ‘is eating or would eat
heartily and without sauces, etc..’ This is different from ‘hungry’ in which a
person might be said to be ‘too hungry to concentrate on his work’. Hunger in
this second expression is a distress, and requires for its existence the
conjunction of an appetite with the inability to eat. Similarly the way in
which a boy is proud of his school is different from the way in which he is
speechless with pride on being unexpectedly given a place in a school team. To
remove a possible misapprehension, it must be pointed out that an agitation may
be quite agreeable. A man may voluntarily subject himself to suspense, fatigue,
uncertainty, perplexity, fear and surprise in such practices as angling,
rowing, travelling, crossword puzzles, rock-climbing and joking. That a thing
like a thrill, a rapture, a surprise, an amusement and an relief is an
agitation is shown by the fact that we can say that someone is too much
thrilled, amused or relieved to act, think or talk coherently. It
is helpful to notice that, anyhow commonly, the expression which completes ‘pang of . . .’ or ‘chill of . . .’ denotes an
agitation. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, is intrinsically
connected with an agitation. But a feeling, e. g. of a man who is feeling
Byzantine, is not intrinsically connected with an inclination, save in so far
as the inclination is a factor in the agitation. This is no novel psychological
hypothesis; It is part of the logic of our descriptions of a feeling that a
feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation and is not
an exercise of an inclination. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, in
other words, is not a thing of which it makes sense to ask from what motive it
issues. The same is true, for the same reasons, of any sign of any agitation. This
point shows why we were right to suggest above that a feeling (like a man
feeling Byzantine) does not belong directly to a simple inclination. An
inclination is a certain sort of proneness or readiness to do certain sorts of
things on purpose. These things are therefore describable as being done from
that motive. They are the exercises of the disposition that we call ‘a motive’.
A feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is not from a motive and is
therefore not among the possible exercise of such a propensiy. The widespread
theory that a motive such as vanity, or affection, is in the first instance a
disposition to experience certain specific feeling is therefore absurd. There
may be, of course, a tendency to have a feeling, such as feeling Byzantine;
being vertiginous and rheumatic are such tendencies. But we do not try to
modify a tendency of these kinds by a sermon. What a feeling, such as being
Byzantine, does causally belong to is the agitation. A feeling (such as feeling
Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation in the same sort of way as a stomach-ache
is a sign of indigestion. Roughly, we do not, as the prevalent theory holds,
act purposively because we experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine); we
experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine), as we wince and shudder,
because we are inhibited from acting purposively.
A
sentimentalist is a man who indulges in this or that induced feeling (such as
feeling Byzantine) without acknowledging the fictitiousness of his agitation.
It seems to be generally supposed that ‘pleasure’ or ‘desire’ is always used to
signify a feeling. And there certainly are feelings which can be described as a
feeling of pleasure or desire. Some thrills, shocks, glows and ticklings are
feelings of delight, surprise, relief and amusement; and things like a
hankering, an itche, a gnawing and a yearning is a sign that something is both
wanted and missed. But the transports, surprises, reliefs and distresses of
which such a feeling is diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed, as a sign is not itself a
feeling. It is an agitation or a mood, just as are the transports and
distresses which a child betrays by his skips and his whimpers. Nostalgia is an
agitation and one which can be called a ‘desire’; but it is not merely a
feeling or series of feelings. There is the sense of ‘pleasure’ in which it is
commonly replaced by such expressions as ‘delight’, ‘transport’, ‘rapture’,
‘exultation’ and ‘joy’. These are expressions of this or that mood signifying this
or that agitation. There are two quite different usages of ‘emotion’, in which
we explain people’s behaviour by reference to emotions. In the first usage of
‘emotion,’ we are referring to the motives or inclinations from which more or
less intelligent actions are done. In a second usage we are referring to a
mood, including the agitation or perturbation of which some aimless movement
may be a sign. In neither of these usages are we asserting or implicating that
the overt behaviour is the effect of a felt turbulence in the agent’s stream of
consciousness. In a third usage of ‘emotion’, pangs and twinges are feelings or
emotions, but they are not, save per accidens, things by reference to which we
explain behaviour. They are things for which diagnoses are required, not things
required for the diagnoses of behaviour. Since a convulsion of merriment is not
the state of mind of the sober experimentalist, the enjoyment of a joke is also
not an introspectible happening. States of mind such as these more or less
violent agitations can be examined only in retrospect. Yet nothing disastrous
follows from this restriction. We are not shorter of information about panic or
amusement than about other states of mind. If retrospection can give us the
data we need for our knowledge of some states of mind, there is no reason why
it should not do so for all. And this is just what seems to be suggested by the
popular phrase ‘to catch oneself doing so and so’. We catch, as we pursue and
overtake, what is already running away from us. I catch myself daydreaming
about a mountain walk after, perhaps very shortly after, I have begun the
daydream; or I catch myself humming a particular air only when the first few
notes have already been hummed. Retrospection, prompt or delayed, is a genuine
process and one which is exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption
of multiply divided attention; it is also exempt from the troubles ensuing from
the assumption that violent agitations could be the objects of cool,
contemporary scrutiny. One may be aware that he is whistling ‘Tipperary’ and
not know that he is whistling it in order to give tte appearance of a
sang-froid which he does not feel. Or, again, he may be aware that he is
shamming sang-froid without knowing that the tremors which he is trying to hide
derive from the agitation of a guilty conscience.
agnoiologicum:
Grice loved a negative prefix. He was proud that he was never vulgar in
publishing, like some of his tutees – and that the number of his unpublications
by far exceed the number of his publications. To refute Hampshire with this
intention and certainty, he regaled the British Academy with the annual
philosophical lecture on intention and Uncertainty. While Grice thought that
‘knowledge’ was overreated at Oxford (“Surely an examinee can be said to know
that date of the battle of Waterloo”) he could be agnoiological at times. From
Grecian agnoia, ‘ignorance’, the study of ignorance, its quality, and its
conditions. And then there’s ‘agnosticism,’ from Grecian a-, ‘not’, and
gnastos, ‘known’, term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 to denote the
philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that metaphysical ideas
can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I neither affirm nor deny
the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but on the other
hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objection to the
doctrine.” Agnosticism is a form of skepticism applied to metaphysics,
especially theism. The position is sometimes attributed to Kant, who held that
we cannot have knowledge of God or immortality but must be content with faith.
Agnosticism should not be confused with atheism, the belief that no god exists.
causatum: aetiologicum: from aitia:
while Grice would prefer ‘cause,’ he thought that the etymology of Grecian
‘aitia,’ in a legal context, was interesting. On top, he was dissatisfied that
Foucault never realised that ‘les mots et les choses,’ etymologically, means,
‘motus et causae.’ Grecian, cause. Originally referring to responsibility for a
crime, this Grecian term came to be used by philosophers to signify causality
in a somewhat broader sense than the English ‘cause’ the traditional rendering of aitia can convey. An aitia is any answer to a
why-question. According to Aristotle, how such questions ought to be answered
is a philosophical issue addressed differently by different philosophers. He
himself distinguishes four types of answers, and thus four aitiai, by
distinguishing different types of questions: 1 Why is the statue heavy? Because
it is made of bronze material aitia. 2 Why did Persians invade Athens? Because
the Athenians had raided their territory moving or efficient aitia. 3 Why are
the angles of a triangle equal to two right angles? Because of the triangle’s
nature formal aitia. 4 Why did someone walk after dinner? Because or for the
sake of his health final aitia. Only the second of these would typically be
called a cause in English. Though some render aitia as ‘explanatory principle’
or ‘reason’, these expressions inaptly suggest a merely mental existence;
instead, an aitia is a thing or aspect of a thing. The study of the causatum in
Grice is key. It appears in “Meaning,” because he starts discussing Stevenson
whom Grice dubs a ‘causalist.’ It continues with Grice on ‘knowledge,’ and
‘willing’ in “Intention and Uncertainty.” Also in “Aspects of reasoning.”
albertus
de saxonia: “Saxonia sounds like a large place – but we do not
know where in Saxony came from – I often wonder if Albertus of Saxony is not
underinformative.” – Grice. Like Grice, a terminist logician, from lower Saxony
who taught in the arts faculty at Paris. Under the influence of Buridan and
Nicholas of Oresme, he turned to playful dialectics. He was a founder of the
“Universitas Vienna” and was bishop of Halberstadt. His works on logic include
Logic, Questions on the Posterior Analytics, Sophismata, Treatise on
Obligations, and Insolubilia. He also wrote questions on Aristotle’s physical
works and on John of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, and short treatises on squaring
the circle and on the ratio of the diameter to the side of a square. His work is
competent but rarely original. Grice read most of them, and was surprised that
Albertus never coined ‘implicaturum’!
albertus
magnus: Dominican Griceian philosopher. As a Parisian master
of theology, he served on a commission that condemned the Talmud. He left Paris
to found the first Dominican studium generale at Cologne. Albert was repeatedly
asked to be an arbiter and peacemaker. After serving briefly as bishop of
Regensburg, he was ordered to preach the crusade. He spent his last years
writing in Cologne. Albert contributed to philosophy chiefly as a commentator
on Aristotle, although he occasionally reached different conclusions from
Aristotle. Primarily, Albert was a theologian, as is evident from his extensive
commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and his commentaries on the Old and New
Testaments. As a theologian, he customarily developed his thought by commenting
on traditional texts. For Albert, Aristotle offered knowledge ascertainable
using reason, just as Scripture, based on God’s word, tells of the
supernatural. Albert saw Aristotle’s works, many newly available, as an
encyclopedic compendium of information on the natural universe; included here
is the study of social and political conditions and ethical obligations, for
Aristotelian “natural knowledge” deals with human nature as well as natural
history. Aristotle is the Philosopher; however, unlike Holy Scripture, he must
be corrected in places. Like Holy Scripture, though, Aristotle is occasionally
obscure. To rectify these shortcomings one must rely on other authorities: in
the case of Holy Scripture, reference is to the church fathers and established
interpreters; in the case of Aristotle, to the Peripatetics. The term
‘Peripatetics’ extends to modern as well as ancient authors al-Farabi, Avicenna Ibn-Sina, and Averroes
Ibn-Rushd, as well as Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; even Seneca,
Maimonides, and “our” Boethius are included. For the most part, Albert saw
Plato through the eyes of Aristotle and Averroes, since apart from the Timaeus
very little of Plato’s work was available in Latin. Albert considered the Liber
de causis a work of Aristotle, supplemented by alFarabi, Avicenna, and
al-Ghazali and tr. into Latin. When he commented on the Liber de causis, Albert
was not aware that this Neoplatonic work
which speaks of the world emanating from the One as from a first
cause was based on Proclus and
ultimately on Plotinus. But Albert’s student, Aquinas, who had better
translations of Aristotle, recognized that the Liber de causis was not an
Aristotelian work. Albert’s metaphysics, which is expounded in his commentaries
on Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the Liber de causis, contains profoundly
contradictory elements. His inclination to synthesis led him to attempt to
reconcile these elements as on social
and ecclesiastical questions he often sought peace through compromise. In his
Metaphysics and Physics and in his On the Heavens and On Generation and
Corruption, Aristotle presented the world as ever-changing and taught that an
unmoved mover “thought thinking itself” maintained everything in movement and
animation by allowing its spiritual nature to be seen in all its cold,
unapproachable beauty. The Liber de causis, on the other hand, develops the
theory that the world emanates from the One, causing everything in the world in
its pantheistic creativity, so that the caused world returns in mystic harmony
to the One. Thus Albert’s Aristotelian commentaries culminated with his
commentary on a work whose pseudo-Aristotelian character he was unable to
recognize. Nevertheless, the Christian Neoplatonism that Albert placed on an
Aristotelian basis was to exert an influence for centuries. In natural
philosophy, Albert often arrived at views independent of Aristotle. According
to Aristotle’s Physics, motion belongs to no single category; it is incomplete
being. Following Avicenna and Averroes, Albert asks whether “becoming black,”
e.g. which ceases when change ceases and
blackness is finally achieved differs
from blackness essentially essentia or only in its being esse. Albert
establishes, contrary to Avicenna, that the distinction is only one of being.
In his discussions of place and space, stimulated by Avicenna, Albert also
makes an original contribution. Only two dimensions width and breadth are essential to place, so that a fluid in a
bottle is framed by the inner surface of the bottle. According to Albert, the
significance of the third dimension, depth, is more modest, but nonetheless
important. Consider a bucket of water: its base is the essential part, but its
round walls maintain the cohesion of the water. For Aristotle, time’s material
foundation is distinct from its formal definition. Materially, the movement of
the fixed stars is basic, although time itself is neither movement nor change. Rather,
just as before and after are continuous in space and there are earlier and
later moments in movement as it proceeds through space, so time being the number of motion has earlier and later moments or “nows.” The
material of time consists of the uninterrupted flow of the indivisible nows,
while time’s form and essential expression is number. Following al-Farabi and
Avicenna, Albert’s interpretation of these doctrines emphasizes not only the
uninterrupted continuity of the flow of “nows,” but also the quantity of time,
i.e., the series of discrete, separate, and clearly distinct numbers. Albert’s
treatment of time did not lend itself well to later consideration of time as a
dimension; his concept of time is therefore not well suited to accommodate our
unified concept of space-time. The use of the pseudo-Aristotelian De
proprietatibus elementorum in De causis proprietatum elementorum gave Albert’s
worldview a strong astrological flavor. At issue here is how the planets
influence the earth and mankind. Particularly important is the influence of
Jupiter and Saturn on fire and the seas; when increased, it could produce fiery
conflagrations, and when circumscribed, floods. Albert was encyclopedic: a
scientist and scholar as well as a philosopher and theologian. In addition to
the works mentioned, he produced commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius, a Summa de
creaturis, a Summa Theologica, and many other treatises. Unlike other
commentators, his exposition was continuous, an extensive paraphrase; he
provided a complete Latin and Christian philosophy. Even in his lifetime, he
was a named authority; according to Roger Bacon, his views were often given as
much weight as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. His students or
followers include Aquinas, Ulrich of Strassburg, Theodoric of Freiberg, Giles
of Lessines, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck,
and H. P. Grice.
alethic:
Grice
could not find a good word for ‘verum,’ and so he borrowed ‘alethic’ from, but
never returned it to, von Wright. Under the alethic modalities, Grice, as
historically, included the four central ways or modes in which a given
proposition might be true or false: necessity, contingency, possibility, and
impossibility. The term ‘alethic’ derives from Grecian aletheia, ‘truth’. These
modalities, and their logical interconnectedness, can be characterized as
follows. A proposition that is true but possibly false is contingently true
e.g., that Aristotle taught Alexander; one that is true and not-possibly i.e.,
“impossibly” false is necessarily true e.g., that red things are colored.
Likewise, a proposition that is false but possibly true is contingently false
e.g., that there are no tigers; and one that is false and not-possibly true is
necessarily false e.g., that seven and five are fourteen. Though any one of the
four modalities can be defined in terms of any other, necessity and possibility
are generally taken to be the more fundamental notions, and most systems of
alethic modal logic take one or the other as basic. Distinct modal systems
differ chiefly in regard to their treatment of iterated modalities, as in the
proposition It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that it is possibly
true that there are no tigers. In the weakest of the most common systems, usually
called T, every iterated modality is distinct from every other. In the stronger
system S4, iterations of any given modality are redundant. So, e.g., the above
proposition is equivalent to It is necessarily true that it is possibly true
that there are no tigers. In the strongest and most widely accepted system S5,
all iteration is redundant. Thus, the two propositions above are both
equivalent simply to It is possibly true that there are no tigers.
alexanderian:
samuel
– what Grice called “A Balliol hegelian,” philosopher, tuteed at Balliol by A.
C. Bradley, Oxford, and taught for most of his career at the of Manchester. His aim, which he most fully
realized in Space, Time, and Deity 0, was to provide a realistic account of the
place of mind in nature. He described nature as a series of levels of existence
where irreducible higher-level qualities emerge inexplicably when lower levels
become sufficiently complex. At its lowest level reality consists of
space-time, a process wherein points of space are redistributed at instants of
time and which might also be called pure motion. From complexities in
space-time matter arises, followed by secondary qualities, life, and mind.
Alexander thought that the still-higher quality of deity, which characterizes
the whole universe while satisfying religious sentiments, is now in the process
of emerging from mind.
alexanderian:
related
to Alexander de Aphrodisias: ““Alexander of Aphrodisias” should not be confused
with Samuel Alexander, a fellow of Bradley, even if they are next in your
philosophical dictionary!” – Grice. Grecian philosopher, one of the foremost
commentators on Aristotle in late antiquity. He exercised considerable
influence on later Grecian and Roman philosophy through to the Renaissance. On
the problem of universals, Alexander endorses a brand of conceptualism:
although several particulars may share a single, common nature, this nature
does not exist as a universal except while abstracted in thought from the circumstances
that accompany its particular instantiations. Regarding Aristotle’s notorious
distinction between the “agent” and “patient” intellects in On the Soul III.5,
Alexander identifies the agent intellect with God, who, as the most
intelligible entity, makes everything else intelligible. As its own
self-subsistent object, this intellect alone is imperishable; the human
intellect, in contrast, perishes at death. Of Alexander’s many commentaries,
only those on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ad, Prior Analytics I, Topics, On the
Senses, and Meterologics are extant. We also have two polemical treatises, On
Fate and On Mixture, directed against the Stoics; a psychological treatise, the
De anima based on Aristotle’s; as well as an assortment of essays including the
De intellectu and his Problems and Solutions. Nothing is known of Alexander’s
life apart from his appointment by the emperor Severus to a chair in
Aristotelian philosophy between and
209.
hales: from
Alexander of Hales. Grice called William of Occam “Occam,” William of Sherwood,
“Shyrewood,” and Alexander of Hales “Hales,” – why, I wish people would call me
“Harborne,” and not Grice!” – Grice. English Franciscan theologian, known as
the Doctor Irrefragabilis. The first to teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences
of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the
golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the
Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum,
Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales.
Alexander did not complete the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV
ordered the Franciscans to complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of
theology in 1222, Alexander played an important role in the history of Paris,
writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate
the peace between England and France. He gave up his position as canon of
Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first
Franciscan master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair of
theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include
St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he
resigned his chair in theology near the end of his life.
algorithm:
Grice’s term for ‘decision procedure,’ a clerical or effective procedure that
can be applied to any of a class of certain symbolic inputs and that will in a
finite time and number of steps eventuate in a result in a corresponding
symbolic output. A function for which an algorithm sometimes more than one can
be given is an algorithmic function. The following are common examples: a given
n, finding the nth prime number; b differentiating a polynomial; c finding the
greatest common divisor of x and y the Euclidean algorithm; and d given two
numbers x, y, deciding whether x is a multiple of y. When an algorithm is used
to calculate values of a numerical function, as in a, b, and c, the function
can also be described as algorithmically computable, effectively computable, or
just computable. Algorithms are generally agreed to have the following
properties which made them essential to
the theory of computation and the development of the Church-Turing thesis i an algorithm can be given by a finite
string of instructions, ii a computation device or agent can carry out or
compute in accordance with the instructions, iii there will be provisions for
computing, storing, and recalling steps in a computation, iv computations can
be carried out in a discrete and stepwise fashion in, say, a digital computer,
and v computations can be carried out in a deterministic fashion in, say, a
deterministic version of a Turing machine.
allais’s
paradox: a puzzle about rationality, discussed by H. P.
Grice, “Aspects of reason,” devised by Maurice Allais b. 1. Leonard Savage advanced the sure-thing principle, which
states that a rational agent’s ranking of a pair of gambles having the same
consequence in a state S agrees with her ranking of any other pair of gambles
the same as the first pair except for having some other common consequence in
S. Allais devised an apparent counterexample with four gambles involving a
100-ticket lottery. The table lists prizes in units of $100,000. Ticket Numbers
Gambles 1 2 11 12 100 A 5 5 5 B 0 25 5 C 5 5 0 D 0 25 0
Changing A’s and B’s common consequence for tickets 12100 from 5 to 0 yields C
and D respectively. Hence the sure-thing principle prohibits simultaneously
preferring A to B, and D to C. Yet most people have these preferences, which
seem coherent. This conflict generates the paradox. Savage presented the
sure-thing principle in The Foundations of Statistics 4. Responding to
preliminary drafts of that work, Allais formulated his counterexample in “The
Foundations of a Positive Theory of Choice Involving Risk and a Criticism of
the Postulates and Axioms of the School”
2.
alnwick: English Franciscan theologian. William
studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a
central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching. In his own works, William opposed
Scotus on the univocity of being and haecceitas. Some of his views were
attacked by Ockham.
alstonian:
w.
p. cites H. P. Grice as ideationist. Philosopher widely acknowledged as one of
the most important contemporary epistemologists and one of the most important
philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He is particularly known for
his argument that putative perception of God is epistemologically on all fours
with putative perception of everyday material objects. Alston graduated from
Centenary and the U.S. Army. A fine musician, he had to choose between
philosophy and music. Philosophy won out; he received his Ph.D. from the of Chicago and began his philosophical career
at the of Michigan, where he taught for
twenty-two years. Since 0 he has taught at Syracuse. Although his dissertation
and some of his early work were on Whitehead, he soon turned to philosophy of
language Philosophy of Language, 4. Since the early 0s Alston has concentrated
on epistemology and philosophy of religion. In epistemology he has defended
foundationalism although not classical foundationalism, investigated epistemic
justification with unusual depth and penetration, and called attention to
important levels distinctions. His chief works here are Epistemic
Justification, a collection of essays; and The Reliability of Sense Perception.
His chief work in philosophy of religion is Divine Nature and Human Language, a
collection of essays on metaphysical and epistemological topics; and Perceiving
God. The latter is a magisterial argument for the conclusion that experiential
awareness of God, more specifically perception of God, makes an important
contribution to the grounds of religious belief. In addition to this scholarly
work, Alston was a founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, a
professional society with more than 1,100 members, and the founding editor of
Faith and Philosophy.
althusserian:
a philosopher Grice called a ‘hegelian’. LouisL Marxist philosopher whose
publication in 5 of two collections of essays, Pour Marx “For Marx” and Lire le
Capital “Reading Capital”, made him a sensation in intellectual circles and attracted a large
international readership. The English translations of these texts in 9 and 0,
respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the
English-speaking world throughout the 0s. Drawing on the work of
non-positivist historians and
philosophers of science, especially Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the existence
of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, occurring in the mid-1840s. What
preceded this break was, in Althusser’s view, a prescientific theoretical
humanism derived from Feuerbach and ultimately from Hegel. What followed it,
Althusser maintained, was a science of history a all-things-considered reason
Althusser, Louis 23 4065A- 23
development as monumental, potentially, as the rise of the new sciences of
nature in the seventh century. Althusser argued that the nature and even the
existence of this new kind of science had yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx
himself. It therefore had to be reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital
especially, and also discerned in the political practice of Lenin and other
like-minded revolutionaries who implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser
did little, however, to elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he
tirelessly defended it programmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In
so doing, he took particular aim at neo-Hegelian and “humanistic” currents in
the larger Marxist culture and implicitly in the Communist Party, to which he belonged
throughout his adult life. After 8, Althusser’s influence in France faded. But
he continued to teach at l’École Normale Superieure and to write, making
important contributions to political theory and to understandings of “ideology”
and related concepts. He also faced increasingly severe bouts of mania and
depression. In 0, in what the courts
deemed an episode of “temporary insanity,” he strangled his wife. Althusser
avoided prison, but spent much of the 0s in mental institutions. During this
period he wrote two extraordinary memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps “The Future
Lasts Forever” and Les faits “The Facts”, published posthumously in 2.
altogether nice girl: Or Grice’s altogether nice girl. Grice
quotes from the music-hall ditty, “Every [sic] nice girl loves a sailor”
(WoW:33). He uses this for his account of multiple quantification. There is a
reading where the emissor may implicate that every nice girl is such that he
loves one sailor, viz. Grice. But if the existential quantifier is not made
dominant, the uniqueness is disimplicated. Grice admits that not every
nominalist will be contented with the ‘metaphysical’ status of ‘the altogether
nice girl.’ The ‘one-at-a-time sailor’ is her counterpart. And they inhabit the
class of LOVE.
ambrosius:
saint – on altruism. known as Ambrose of Milan c.33997, Roman church leader and
theologian. While bishop of Milan, he not only led the struggle against the
Arian heresy and its political manifestations, but offered new models for
preaching, for Scriptural exegesis, and for hymnody. His works also contributed
to medieval Latin philosophy. Ambrose’s appropriation of Neoplatonic doctrines
was noteworthy in itself, and it worked powerfully on and through Augustine.
Ambrose’s commentary on the account of creation in Genesis, his Hexaemeron,
preserved for medieval readers many pieces of ancient natural history and even
some altruism Ambrose, Saint 24 4065A- 24
elements of physical explanation. Perhaps most importantly, Ambrose engaged
ancient philosophical ethics in the search for moral lessons that marks his
exegesis of Scripture; he also reworked Cicero’s De officiis as a treatise on
the virtues and duties of Christian living.
amicus: philia
and eros – Grice on Aristotle’s aporia of friendship -- Eros, the Grecian god
of erotic love. Eros came to be symbolic of various aspects of love, first
appearing in Hesiod in opposition to reason. In general, however, Eros was seen
by Grecians e.g., Parmenides as a unifying force. In Empedocles, it is one of
two external forces explaining the history of the cosmos, the other being
Strife. These forces resemble the “hidden harmony” of Heraclitus. The Symposium
of Plato is the best-known ancient discussion of Eros, containing speeches from
various standpoints mythical, sophistic,
etc. Socrates says he has learned from the priestess Diotima of a nobler form
of Eros in which sexual desire can be developed into the pursuit of
understanding the Form of beauty. The contrast between agape and Eros is found
first in Democritus. This became important in Christian accounts of love. In
Neoplatonism, Eros referred to the mystical union with Being sought by
philosophers. Eros has become important recently in the work of Continental
writers.
ammonius: saccas
early third century A.D., Platonist philosopher. He apparently served early in
the century as the teacher of the philosopher Origen. He attracted the
attention of Plotinus, who came to the city in 232 in search of philosophical
enlightenment Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3. Ammonius the epithet ‘Saccas’ seems
to mean ‘the bagman’ was undoubtedly a charismatic figure, but it is not at all
clear what, if any, were his distinctive doctrines, though he seems to have
been influenced by Numenius. He wrote nothing, and may be thought of, in E. R.
Dodds’s words, as the Socrates of Neoplatonism.
analyticum:
Porphyry couldn’t find a Latinate for ‘analyticum’ – ‘analyisis’ is like
‘se-paratio.’ But even in Grecian, ‘analysis’ and synthesis are not real
opposite – since ‘synthesis’ neatly comes as ‘compositio’ -- analysis, the
process of breaking up a concept, proposition, linguistic complex, or fact into
its simple or ultimate constituents. That on which the analysis is done is
called the analysandum, and that which does the analysis is called the
analysans. A number of the most important philosophers of the twentieth
century, including Russell, Moore, and the early Vitters, have argued that
philosophical analysis is the proper method of philosophy. But the practitioners
of analytic philosophy have disagreed about what kind of thing is to be
analyzed. For example, Moore tried to analyze sense-data into their constituent
parts. Here the analysandum is a complex psychological fact, the having of a
sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers have tried to analyze
concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis. Still others have seen
it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of sentences e.g., those involving proper names or
definite descriptions. This is linguistic analysis. Each of these kinds of
analysis faces a version of a puzzle that has come to be called the paradox of
analysis. For linguistic analyses, the paradox can be expressed as follows: for
an analysis to be adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with the
analysandum; e.g., if ‘male sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must mean
the same; but if they are synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is
synonymous with ‘a brother is a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem
synonymous. Expressed as a dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis
would seem to be either inadequate because the analysans and the analysandum
are not synonymous or uninformative because they are synonymous. Analytic philosophy is an umbrella term
currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical techniques and
tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively easy to identify
analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say with any
precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes called Oxford
philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at least,
misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a
school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. At Cambridge, analytic
philosophers are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Vitters,
philosophers who self-consciously pursued “philosophical analysis” in the early
part of the twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore,
concerned not language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes,
while it did not exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital
tool for laying bare the logical form of reality. Vitters, in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, contended, though obliquely, that the structure of
language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful sentence is
analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the finegrained constituents
of reality. This “Tractarian” view was one Vitters was to renounce in his later
work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna Circle in the 0s, and
in the subsequent development of logical positivism in the 0s and 0s. Carnap
and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that the task of philosophy was
not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to provide analyses of
scientific sentences. Other sentences, those in ethics, for instance, were
thought to lack “cognitive significance.” Their model was Russell’s theory of
descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away apparent
commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former proponents of
analysis, influenced by Vitters, had taken up what came to be called ordinary
language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on the role of
words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape long-standing
philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from a natural
tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the grammatical
form of sentences in which those questions were posed. A classic illustration
might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate something,
though a very peculiar something. Today, it is difficult to find much unanimity
in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an implicit respect
for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal agreement as to what
problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that philosophy is in some
sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic philosophers to address
one another rather than the broader public has led some to decry philosophy’s
“professionalization” and to call for a return to a pluralistic,
community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers respond by
pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well represented
in the history of philosophy. Analyticity. H. P. Grice, “In defence of a
dogma,” in Studies in the way of words. the analyticsynthetic distinction, the
distinction, made famous by Kant, according to which an affirmative
subject-predicate statement proposition, judgment is called analytic if the
predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic otherwise.
The statement ‘All red roses are red’ is analytic, since the concept ‘red’ is
contained in the concept ‘red roses’. ‘All roses are red’ is synthetic, since
the concept ‘red’ is not contained in the concept ‘roses’. The denial of an
affirmative subject-predicate statement entails a contradiction if it is
analytic. E.g., ‘Not all red roses are red’ entails ‘Some roses are both red
and not red’. One concept may be contained in another, in Kant’s sense, even
though the terms used to express them are not related as part to whole. Since
‘biped’ means ‘two-footed animal’, the concept ‘two-footed’ is contained in the
concept ‘biped’. It is accordingly analytic that all bipeds are two-footed. The
same analytic statement is expressed by the synonymous sentences ‘All bipeds
are two-footed’ and ‘All two-footed animals are two-footed’. Unlike statements,
sentences cannot be classified as analytic or synthetic except relative to an
interpretation. analytical jurisprudence analyticsynthetic distinction 26
4065A- 26 Witness ‘All Russian teachers
are Russian’, which in one sense expresses the analytic statement ‘All teachers
that are Russian are Russian’, and in another the synthetic statement ‘All
teachers of Russian are Russian’. Kant’s innovation over Leibniz and Hume lay
in separating the logicosemantic analyticsynthetic distinction from the epistemological
a prioria posteriori distinction and from the modalmetaphysical
necessarycontingent distinction. It seems evident that any analytic statement
is a priori knowable without empirical evidence and necessary something that
could not be false. The converse is highly controversial. Kant and his
rationalist followers maintain that some a priori and necessary statements are
synthetic, citing examples from logic ‘Contradictions are impossible’, ‘The
identity relation is transitive’, mathematics ‘The sum of 7 and 5 is 12’, ‘The
straight line between two points is the shortest’, and metaphysics ‘Every event
is caused’. Empiricists like J. S. Mill, Carnap, Ayer, and C. I. Lewis argue
that such examples are either synthetic a posteriori or analytic a priori.
Philosophers since Kant have tried to clarify the analyticsynthetic
distinction, and generalize it to all statements. On one definition, a sentence
is analytic on a given interpretation provided it is “true solely in virtue of
the meaning or definition of its terms.” The truth of any sentence depends in
part on the meanings of its terms. `All emeralds are green’ would be false,
e.g., if ‘emerald’ meant ‘ruby’. What makes the sentence synthetic, it is
claimed, is that its truth also depends on the properties of emeralds, namely,
their being green. But the same holds for analytic sentences: the truth of ‘All
red roses are red’ depends on the properties of red roses, namely, their being
red. Neither is true solely in virtue of meaning. A more adequate generalization
defines an analytic statement as a formal logical truth: one “true in virtue of
its logical form,” so that all statements with the same form are true. In terms
of sentences under an interpretation, an analytic truth is an explicit logical
truth one whose surface structure represents its logical form or one that
becomes an explicit logical truth when synonyms are substituted. The negative
statement that tomorrow is not both Sunday and not Sunday is analytic by this
definition, because all statements of the form : p & - p are true. Kant’s
definition is obtained as a special case by stipulating that the predicate of
an affirmative subjectpredicate statement is contained in the subject provided
the statement is logically true. On a third generalization, ‘analytic’ denotes
any statement whose denial entails a contradiction. Subject S contains
predicate P provided being S entails being P. Whether this is broader or
narrower than the second generalization depends on how ‘entailment’, ‘logical
form’, and ‘contradiction’ are defined. On some construals, ‘Red is a color’
counts as analytic on the third generalization its denial entails ‘Something is
and is not a color’ but not on the second ‘red’ and ‘colored’ are logically
unstructured, while the rulings are reversed for a counterfactual conditional
like ‘If this were a red rose it would be red’. Following Quine, many have
denied any distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Some
arguments presume the problematic “true by meaning” definition. Others are
that: 1 the distinction cannot be defined without using related notions like
‘meaning’, ‘concept’, and ‘statement’, which are neither extensional nor
definable in terms of behavior; 2 some statements like ‘All cats are animals’
are hard to classify as analytic or synthetic; and 3 no statement allegedly is
immune from rejection in the face of new empirical evidence. If these arguments
were sound, however, the distinction between logical truths and others would
seem equally dubious, a conclusion seldom embraced. Some describe a priori
truths, both synthetic and analytic, as conceptual truths, on the theory that
they are all true in virtue of the nature of the concepts they contain.
Conceptual truths are said to have no “factual content” because they are about
concepts rather than things in the actual world. While it is natural to
classify a priori truths together, the proffered theory is questionable. As
indicated above, all truths hold in part because of the identity of their
concepts, and in part because of the nature of the objects they are about. It
is a fact that all emeralds are emeralds, and this proposition is about
emeralds, not concepts.
analyticum-a-priori: For
Grice, an oxymoron, since surely ‘analyticum-a-posteriori’ is an oxymoron. R.
A. Wollheim. London-born philosopher, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and
All Souls. Examined by H. P. Grice.
“What’s two times two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the
context of a discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and
multiplication are ‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill.
Grice was trying to provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes
via deduction or induction.
necessitatum:
ananke,
when feeling very Grecian, Grice would use ‘ananke,’ instead of ‘must,’ which
he thought too English! Grecian, necessity. The term was used by early Grecian
philosophers for a constraining or moving natural force. In Parmenides frg. 8,
line 30 ananke encompasses reality in limiting bonds; according to Diogenes
Laertius, Democrianamnesis ananke 27 4065A-
27 tus calls the vortex that generates the cosmos ananke; Plato Timaeus
47e ff. refers to ananke as the irrational element in nature, which reason
orders in creating the physical world. As used by Aristotle Metaphysics V.5,
the basic meaning of ‘necessary’ is ‘that which cannot be otherwise’, a sense
that includes logical necessity. He also distinguishes Physics II.9 between
simple and hypothetical necessity conditions that must hold if something is to
occur.
anaxagoras: Grecian and
pre-Griceian philosopher who was the first of the pre-Socratics to teach in
Athens c.480450, where he influenced leading intellectuals such as Pericles and
Euripides. He left Athens when he was prosecuted for impiety. Writing in
response to Parmenides, he elaborated a theory of matter according to which
nothing comes into being or perishes. The ultimate realities are stuffs such as
water and earth, flesh and bone, but so are contraries such as hot and cold,
likewise treated as stuffs. Every phenomenal substance has a portion of every
elemental stuff, and there are no minimal parts of anything, but matter takes
on the phenomenal properties of whatever predominates in the mixture. Anaxagoras
posits an indefinite number of elemental stuffs, in contrast to his
contemporary Empedocles, who requires only four elements; but Anaxagoras
follows Parmenides more rigorously, allowing no properties or substances to
emerge that were not already present in the cosmos as its constituents. Thus
there is no ultimate gap between appearance and reality: everything we perceive
is real. In Anaxagoras’s cosmogony, an initial chaos of complete mixture gives
way to an ordered world when noûs mind begins a vortex motion that separates
cosmic masses of ether the bright upper air, air, water, and earth. Mind is
finer than the stuffs and is found in living things, but it does not mix with
stuffs. Anaxagoras’s theory of mind provides the first hint of a mindmatter
dualism. Plato and Aristotle thought his assigning a cosmic role to mind made
him sound like “a sober man” among his contemporaries, but they were
disappointed that he did not exploit his idea to provide teleological
explanations of natural phenomena.
anaximander: Grecian and
pre-Griceian philosopher and cosmologist, reputedly the student and successor
of Thales in the Milesian school. He described the cosmos as originating from
apeiron the boundless by a process of separating off; a disk-shaped earth was
formed, surrounded by concentric heavenly rings of fire enclosed in air. At
“breathing holes” in the air we see jets of fire, which are the stars, moon,
and sun. The earth stays in place because there is no reason for it to tend one
way or another. The seasons arise from alternating periods where hot and dry or
wet and anaphor Anaximander 28 4065A-
28 cold powers predominate, governed by a temporal process figuratively
portrayed as the judgment of Time. Anaximander drew a map of the world and
explained winds, rain, and lightning by naturalistic hypotheses. He also
described the emergence of life in a way that prefigures the theory of
evolution. Anaximander’s interest in cosmology and cosmogony and his brilliant
conjectures set the major questions for later preSocratics.
anaximenes: of Miletus:
Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher, a
pre-Socratic who, following in the tradition of the Milesians Thales and
Anaximander, speculated about cosmology and meteorology. The source arche of
the cosmos is air aer, originally mist, which by a process of rarefaction
becomes fire, and by a process of condensation becomes wind, clouds, water,
earth, and stones. Air is divine and causes life. The earth is flat and rides
on a cushion of air, while a heavenly firmament revolves about it like a felt cap.
Anaximenes also explained meteorological phenomena and earthquakes. Although
less innovative than his predecessor Anaximander, he made progress in
naturalistic explanations by appealing to a quantitative process of rarefaction
and condensation rather than to mythical processes involving quasi-personal
agents.
ancestry: Studied by H.
P. Grice. Of a given relation R, the relation also called the transitive
closure of R that relates one given individual to a second if and only if the
first can be “reached” from the second by repeated “applications” of the given
relation R. The “ancestor” relation is the ancestral of the parent relation
since one person is an ancestor of a second if the first is a parent of the
second or the first is a parent of a parent of the second or the first is a
parent of a parent of a parent of the second, and so on. Frege discovered a
simple method of giving a materially adequate and formally correct definition
of the ancestral of a given relation in terms of the relation itself plus logical
concepts. This method is informally illustrated as follows. In order for one
person A to be an ancestor of a second person B it is necessary and sufficient
for A to have every property that belongs to every parent of B and that belongs
to every parent of any person to whom it belongs. This and other similar
methods made possible the reduction of all numerical concepts to those of zero
and successor, which Frege then attempted to reduce to concepts of pure logic.
Frege’s definition of the ancestral has become a paradigm in modern analytic
philosophy as well as a historical benchmark of the watershed between
traditional logic and modern logic. It demonstrates the exactness of modern
logical analysis and, in comparison, the narrowness of traditional logic.
andronicus: Grecian
philosopher, a leading member of the Lyceum who was largely responsible for
establishing the canon of Aristotle’s works still read today. He also edited
the works of Theophrastus. At the time, Aristotle was known primarily for his
philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which now survive; his more
methodical treatises had stopped circulating soon after his death. By producing
the first systematic edition of Aristotle’s corpus, Andronicus revived study of
the treatises, and the resulting critical debates dramatically affected the
course of philosophy. Little is recorded about Andronicus’s labors; but besides
editing the texts and discussing titles, arrangement, and authenticity, he
sought to explicate and assess Aristotle’s thought. In so doing, he and his
colleagues initiated the exegetical tradition of Aristotelian commentaries.
Nothing he wrote survives; a summary account of emotions formerly ascribed to
him is spurious.
angst:
Grice discusses this as an ‘implicatural emotion.’ G. term for a special form
of anxiety, an emotion seen by existentialists as both constituting and
revealing the human condition. Angst plays a key role in the writings of
Heidegger, whose concept is closely related to Kierkegaard’s angest and Sartre’s
angoisse. The concept is first treated in this distinctive way in Kierkegaard’s
The Concept of Anxiety 1844, where anxiety is described as “the dizziness of
freedom.” Anxiety here represents freedom’s self-awareness; it is the
psychological precondition for the individual’s attempt to become autonomous, a
possibility that is seen as both alluring and disturbing.
animal:
pirotese. Durrell’s Family Conversations. Durrelly’s family conversation. When H. P. Grice was presented with
an ‘overview’ of his oeuvre for PGRICE (Grandy and Warner, 1986), he soon found
out. “There’s something missing.” Indeed, there is a very infamous objection,
Grice thought, which is not mentioned by ‘Richards,’ as he abbreviates Richard
Grandy and Richard Warner’s majestically plural ‘overview,’ which seems to
Grice to be one to which Grice must respond. And he shall! The objection Grice
states as follows. One of the leading strands in Grice’s reductive analysis of
the circumstances or scenario in which an emissor (E) communicates that p is
that the scenario, call it “C,” is not to be regarded exclusively, “or even
primarily,” as a ‘feature’ of an E that is using what philosophers of language (since
Plato’s “Cratylus”) have been calling ‘language’ (glossa, la lingua latina, la
lingua italiana, la langue française, the English tongue, de nederlands taal,
die Deutsche Sprache, etc.). The emissum (e) may be an ‘utterance’ which is not
‘linguistic.’ Grice finds the issue crucial after discussing the topic with his
colleague at Berkeley, Davidson. For Davidson reminds Grice: “[t]here
is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many
philosophers […] have supposed” (Davidson, 1986: 174). “I’m happy you say
‘many,’ Davidson,” Grice commented. Grice continues formulating what he obviously found to be an
insidious, fastidious, objection. There are many instances of “NOTABLY NON-‘linguistic’”
vehicles or devices of communication, within a communication-system, even a
one-off system, which fulfil this or that communication-function. I am using
‘communication-function’ alla Grice (1961:138, repr. 1989:235). These vehicles or devices are mostly
syntactically un-structured or amorphous – Grice’s favourite example being a
‘sort of hand-wave’ meaning that it is not the case that the emissor knows the
route or that the emissor is about to leave his addressee (1967:VI, repr. 1989:126).
Sometimes, a device may exhibit at least “some rudimentary
syntactic” structure – as Grice puts it, giving a nod to Morris’s tripartite
semiotics -- in that we may perhaps distinguish and identify a ‘totum’ or
complexum (say, Plato’s ‘logos’) from a pars or simplex (say, Plato’s ‘onoma’
and ‘rhema’). Grice’s intention-based reductive analysis of a communicatum,
based on Aristotle, Locke, and Peirce, is designed, indeed its very raison d'être being, to
allow for the possibility that a non-“linguistic,” and, further, indeed a
non-“conventional” 'utterance,’ perhaps unrepeatable token, not even
manifesting any degree of syntactic structure, but a block of an amorphous
signal, be within the ‘repertoire’ of ‘procedures,’ perhaps unrepeatable ones, of
this or that organism, or creature, or agent, even if not relying on any
apparatus for communication of the kind that that we may label ‘linguistic’ or
otherwise ‘conventional,’ will count as an emissor E ‘doing’ this or that
‘thing,’ thereby ‘communicating’ that p. To provide for this conceptual scenario,
it is plainly necessary, Grice grants, that the key ingredient in any
representation or conceptualization, or reductive analysis of ‘communicating,’
viz. intending that p, for Grice, should be a ‘state’ of the emissor’s “soul”
(Grice is translating Grecian ψυχή the capacity for which does not
require what we may label the ‘possession’ of, shall we say, ‘faculty,’ of what
philosophers since Cratylus have been calling ‘γλῶσσα Ἑλληνίδα,’
‘lingua latina,’ ‘lingua italiana,’ ‘langue française,’ ‘English tongue,’
‘Nederlands taal,’ ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ (Grice always congratulated Kant for never distinguishing
between ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ and ‘Sprache’ as ‘eine Fakultät.’). Now a philosopher, relying on this
or that neo-Prichardian reductive analysis of ‘intending that p,’ (Oxonian
Grice will quote Oxonian if he can) may not be willing to allow the possibility
of such, shall we grant, pre-linguistic intending that p, or non-linguistic
intending that p. Surely, if the emissor E realizes that his addressee or
recipient R does not ‘share’ say, what the Germans call ‘die Deutsche Sprache,”
E may still communicate, by doing so-and-so, that such-and-such, viz. p. E may
make this sort of hand wave communicating that E knows the route or that E is
about to leave R. Against that objection, Grice surely wins the day. There’s
nothing in Prichard account of ‘willing that p,’ itself a borrowing from
William James (“I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me.
It does not.”) which is about ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ But Grice hastens to declare that
winning ‘the’ day may not be winning ‘all’ day. And that is because of Oxonian
philosophy being what it is. Because, as far as Grice’s Oxonian explorations on
communication go, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves – ending with
a a clause which closes the succession o-- designed to thwart this or that
scenario, later deemed illegitimate, involving two rational agents where the
emissor E relies on an ‘inference-element’ that it is not the case that E
intends his recipient R will recogise – Grice is led to narrow the ‘intending’ the
reductive analysis of ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ to C-intending. Grice expects that whatever may be the case in general with
regard to ‘intending,’ C-intending seems for some reason to Grice to be
unsophisticatedly, viz. plainly, too sophisticated a ‘state’ of a soul (or ψυχή)
to be found in an organism, ‘pirot,’ creature, that we may not want to deem
‘rational,’ or as the Germans would say, a creature that is plainly destitute
of “Die Deutsche Sprache.” We seem to be needing a pirot to be “very
intelligent, indeed rational.” (Who other than Grice would genially combine
Locke with Carnap?). Some may regret, Grice admits, that his unavoidable rear-guard
action just undermines the raison d'etre of his campaign. However, Grice goes on to provide an
admittedly brief reply which will have to suffice under the circumstances.
There is SOME limit for Oxonian debate! A full treatment that would satisfy
Grice requires delving deep into crucial problems about the boundary between vicious
and virtuous conceptual circularity. Which is promising. It is not something
UNATTAINABLE a priori – and there is nothing wrong with leaving it for the
morrow. It reduces to the philosopher trying to show himself virtuously
circular, if not, like Lear, spherical. But why need the circle be virtuous.
Well, as August would put it, unless a ‘circulus’ is not ‘virtuosus,’ one would
hardly deem it a ‘circulus’ in the first place. A circle is virtuous
if it is not a bad circle. One may even say, with The Carpenter, that, like a
cabbage or a king, if a circle is not virtuous is not even a circle! (Grice
2001:35). In this case, to borrow from former Oxonian student S. R. Schiffer, we
need the ‘virtuous circle’ because we are dealing with ‘a loop’ (Schiffer, 1988:v)
-- a ‘conceptual loop,’ that is. Schiffer is not interested in ‘communicating;’
only ‘meaning,’ but his point can be easily transliterated. Schiffer is saying
that ‘U,’ or utterer, our ‘E,’ means that p’ surely relies on ‘U intends that
p,’ but mind the loop: ‘U intends that p’ may rely on ‘U means that p.’In
Grice’s most generic, third-person terms, we have a creature, call it a pirot,
P1, that, by doing thing D1, communicates that p. We are talking of Grice qua
ethologist, who OBSERVES the scenario. As it happens, Grice’s favourite pirot
is the parrot, and call Grice a snob, but his favourite parrot was Prince
Maurice’s Parrot. Prince Maurice’s Parrot. Grice reads Locke, and adapts it
slightly. “Since I think I may be confident,
that, whoever should see a CREATURE of his own shape or make, though it had no
more reason all its life than a PARROT, would call him still A MAN; or whoever
should hear a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophise, would call or think
it nothing but a PARROT; and say, the one was A DULL IRRATIONAL MAN, and the
other A VERY INTELLIGENT RATIONAL PARROT. “A relation we have in an author of
great note, is sufficient to countenance the supposition of A RATIONAL PARROT. “The
author’s words are as follows.”““I had a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's
own mouth, the account of a common, but much credited story, that I had heard
so often from many others, of a parrot he has, that speaks, and asks, and
answers common questions, like A REASONABLE CREATURE.””““So that those of his
train there generally conclude it to be witchery or possession; and one of his
chaplains, would never from that time endure A PARROT, but says all PARROTS
have a devil in them.””““I had heard many particulars of this story, and as
severed by people hard to be discredited, which made me ask Prince Maurice what
there is of it.””““Prince Maurice says, with his usual plainness and dryness in
talk, there is something true, but a great deal false of what is reported.””““I
desired to know of him what there was of the first. Prince Maurice tells me
short and coldly, that he had HEARD of such A PARROT; and though he believes
nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to
send for the parrot: that it was a very great parrot; and when the parrot comes
first into the room where Prince Maurice is, with a great many men about him,
the parrot says presently, ‘What a nice company is here.’”” ““ One of the men
asks the parrot, ‘What thinkest thou that man is?,’ ostending his finger, and
pointing to Prince Maurice.”“The parrot answers, ‘Some general -- or other.’
When the man brings the parrot close to Prince Maurice, Prince Maurice asks the
parrot, ‘D'ou venez-vous?’”““The parrot answers, ‘De Marinnan.’ Then Prince
Maurice goes on, and poses a second question to the parrot.””““‘A qui
estes-vous?’ The Parrot answers: ‘A un Portugais.’”““Prince Maurice then asks a
third question: ‘Que fais-tu la?’““The parrot answers: “Je garde les poulles.’ Prince
Maurice smiles, which pleases the Parrot.”““Prince Maurice, violating a
Griceian maxim, and being just informed that p, asks whether p. This is
incidentally the Prince’s fourth question to the parrot – the first idiotic
one. ‘Vous gardez les poulles?’”” ““The Parrot answers, ‘Oui, moi; et
je scai bien faire.’ Then the parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and
makes the chuck four or five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a
man calls them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as
Prince Maurice said them to me. I ask Prince Maurice in what ‘tongue’ the
parrot speaks.””““Prince Maurice says that the parrot speaks in the Brazilian
tongue.””““ I ask Prince William whether he understands the Brazilian tongue.””
““Prince Maurice says: No, but he has taken care to have TWO interpreters by
him, the one a Dutchman that spoke the Brazilian tongue, and the other a
Brazilian that spoke the Dutch tongue; that Prince Maurice asked them
separately and privately, and both of them AGREED in telling Prince Maurice
just the same thing that the parrot had said.””““I could not but tell this ODD
story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what
may pass for a good one; for I dare say Prince Maurice at least believed
himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious
man.””““I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe, as
they please upon it. However, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a
busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or no.””Locke
takes care “that the reader should have the story at large in the author's own
words, because he seems to me not to have thought it incredible.”“For it cannot
be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough to warrant all
the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in a place
where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he mentions
as his friend, but on a prince in whom he acknowledges very great honesty and
piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could not but also
think RIDICULOUS.”“Prince Maurice, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our
author, who relates it from him, both of them call this talker A PARROT.”Locke
asks “any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this
PARROT, and all of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for
it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed for a race of
RATIONAL ANIMALS; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed
to be MEN, and not PARROTS?”“For I presume it is not the idea of A THINKING OR
RATIONAL BEING alone that makes the idea of A MAN in most people's sense: but
of A BODY, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a MAN,
the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as THE SAME
IMMATERIAL SPIRIT, go to the making of the same MAN.”So back to Grice’s pirotology, or Pirotologia. But first a
precis Grice needs a dossier with a précis, so that he can insert the parrot’s
conversational implicatura – and Prince Maurice’s. PARROT: What a nice company
is here.MAN (pointing to Prince Maurice): What thinkest thou that man
is?PARROT: Some general -- or other. Grice’s gloss: The he parrot displays what
Grice calls ‘up-take.’ The parrot recognizes the man’s c-intention. So far is
ability to display uptake.PRINCE MAURICE: D'ou venez-vous?PARROT: De
Marinnan.PRINCE MAURICE: A qui estes-vous?PARROT: A un Portugais.PRINCE
MAURICE: Que fais-tu la?PARROT: Je garde les poulles.PRINCE MAURICE SMILES and
flouts a Griceian maxim: Vous gardez les poulles?PARROT (losing patience, and
grasping the Prince’s implicaturum that he doubts it): Oui, moi. Et je scai
bien faire.Grice’s gloss: The Parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and
makes the chuck five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a man calls
them.According to his “most recent speculations” about communication, Grice
goes on in his ‘Reply to Richards,’ one should distinguish, as he engages in a
bit of legalese, between two sides of the scenario under conceptual reduction,
E communicates that p. One side is the ‘de facto’ side, a side which, as in
name implies, in fact contains any communication-relevant feature which obtains
or is present in the circumstances. But then there is a ‘de jure’ side to the
scenario, viz. the nested C-intending which is only deemed to be present, as a
vicious circle with good intentions may become a virtuous one. By the ‘nesting,’
Grice means the three sub-intentions, involved in a scenario where Emissor E
communicates that (psi*) p, reducible to the Emissor E c-intending that A recognises
that E psi-s that p.First, there is the ‘exhibitive’ intention, C1. Emissor E
intends A to recognise that A psi-s that p.Second, there is the ‘reflexive’
intention, C2.Emissor intends that A recognise C1 by A recognising C2Third,
there is the ‘openness’ intention, C3. There is no inference-element which is
C-constitutive such that Emissor relies on it and yet does not intend A to
recognise.The “de jure” side to the state of affairs involves self-reference But
since this self-referential circle, a mere ‘loop,’ is meant to BLOCK an utterly
vicious circle of a regressus ad infinitum (or ‘ho eis apeiron ekballon,’ if you
must), the self-referential circle may well be deemed virtuous. The ‘de jure’
side to the scenario is trying to save state of affairs which in, in Grice’s
words, “infinitely complex,” and such that no reasonable philosopher should
expect to be realised ‘de facto.’ “In which case,” Grice remarks, “it seems to
serve little, if any, purpose” to assume that this very INCONCEIVABLE ‘de
facto’ instantiation of a ‘de jure’ ascription of an emissor communicating that
p would only be detectable, as it isn’t, by appeal to something like ‘die
Deutsche Sprache’!“At its most meagre,” to use Grice’s idiom, the ‘de facto’
side should consist, merely, in any pre-rational ‘counterpart’ to the state of
affairs describable by having an Emissor E communicating that p,This might
amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance – our doing D1 -- in
order thereby to get some recipient creature R, our second pirot, P2, to think
or want some particular thing, our p. This meagre condition hardly involves
reference to anything like ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’Let’s reformulate the
condition.It’s just a pirot, at a ‘pre-rational’ level. The pirot does a thing
T IN ORDER THEREBY to get some other pirot to think or do some particular
thing. To echo Hare,Die Tur ist geschlossen, ja.Die Tur ist geschlossen,
bitte.Grice continues as a corollary: “Maybe in a less straightforward instance
of “Emissor E communicates that p” there is actually present the C-intention
whose feasibility as an ‘intention’ suggests some ability to use ‘die Deutsche
Sprache.’And if it does, Grice adds, it looks like anything like ‘die Deutsche
Sprache’ ends up being an aid to the conceptualizing about communication, not
communication itself! ReferencesDavidson, Donald
1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs, in Grandy and Warner, pp. 157-74.Durrell,
My family and other animals. Grandy, R. E. and R. O. Warner. 1986.
Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Oxford, at
the Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1986. Reply to Richards, in Grandy and Warner,
pp. 45-106Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. London and Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.Grice, H. P. 2001. Aspects of reason. Oxford,
at the Clarendon Press. Locke, J. 1690. An essay concerning humane [sic]
understanding. Oxford: The Bodleian. Schiffer, S. R. 1988. Meaning. Oxford, at
the Clarendon Press.
animatum: Grice thinks of communication as what he
calls ‘soul-to-soul transfer.’ Very Aristotelian. Grice was interested in what he called the
‘rational soul’ (psyche logike). In an act of communication, Emissor
communicates that p, there is a psi involved, therefore a soul, therefore what
the Romans called an ‘anima,’ and the Greeks called the ‘psyche.’ For surely
there can be no psi-transmission without a psi. Grice loved to abbreviate this
as the psi, since Lady Asquith, who was a soul, would not have desired any less
from Grice. Grice, like Plato and Aristotle, holds a tripartite theory of the
soul. Where, ‘part’ (Aristotelian ‘meros’) is taken very seriously. Anything
thought. From ‘psyche,’ anima. Grice uses the symbol of the letter psi here
which he renders as ‘animatum.’ Why Grice prefers ‘soul’ to mind. The
immortality of a the chicken soul. By Shropshire. Shropshire claims that the immortality of the soul is proved by
the fact that, if you cut off a chicken's head, the chicken will run round the
yard for a quarter of an hour before dropping. Grice has an an 'expansion' of
Shropshire's ingenious argument.If the soul is not dependent on the body, it is
immortal. If the soul is dependent on the body, it is dependent on that part of
the body in which it is located. If the soul is located in the body, it is
located in the head. If the chicken's soul were located in its head, the
chicken's soul would be destroyed if the head were rendered inoperative by
removal from the body. The chicken runs round the yard after head-removal. It
could do this only if animated, and controlled by its soul. So the chicken's
soul is not located in, and not dependent on, the chicken's head. So the
chicken's soul is not dependent on the chicken's body. So the chicken's soul is
immortal. end p.11 If the chicken's soul is immortal, a fortiori the human soul
is immortal. So the soul is immortal. The question I now ask myself is this:
why is it that I should be quite prepared to believe that the Harvard students
ascribed their expansion of Botvinnik's proof, or at least some part of it, to
Botvinnik (as what he had in mind), whereas I have no inclination at all to
ascribe any part of my expansion to Shropshire? Considerations which at once
strike me as being likely to be relevant are: (1) that Botvinnik's proof
without doubt contained more steps than Shropshire's claim; (2) that the
expansion of Botvinnik's proof probably imported, as extra premisses, only
propositions which are true, and indeed certain; whereas my expansion imports
premisses which are false or dubious; (3) that Botvinnik was highly intelligent
and an accomplished logician; whereas Shropshire was neither very intelligent
nor very accomplished as a philosopher. No doubt these considerations are
relevant, though one wonders whether one would be much readier to accord
Shropshire's production the title of 'reasoning' if it had contained some
further striking 'deductions', such as that since the soul is immortal moral
principles have absolute validity; and one might also ask whether the effect of
(3) does not nullify that of (2), since, if Shropshire was stupid, why should
not one ascribe to him a reconstructed argument containing plainly unacceptable
premisses? But, mainly, I would like some further light on the following
question: if such considerations as those which I have just mentioned are
relevant, why are they relevant? I should say a word about avowals. The
following contention might be advanced. If you want to know whether someone R,
who has produced what may be an incomplete piece of reasoning, has a particular
completion in mind, the direct way to find out is to ask him. That would settle
the matter. If, however, you are unable to ask him, then indirect methods will
have to be used, which may well be indecisive. Indeterminacy springs merely
from having to rely on indirect methods. I have two comments to make. First: it
end p.12 is far from clear to what extent avowals do settle the matter. Anyone
who has taught philosophy is familiar with the situation in which, under
pressure to expand an argument they have advanced, students, particularly
beginners, make statements which, one is inclined to say, misrepresent their
position. This phenomenon is perhaps accounted for by my much more important
second point: that avowals in this kind of context generally do not have the
character which one might without reflection suppose them to have; they are not
so much reportive as constructive. If I ask someone if he thinks that so-and-so
is a consequence of such-and-such, what I shall receive will be primarily a
defence of this supposition, not a report on what, historically, he had in mind
in making it. We are in general much more interested in whether an inferential
step is a good one to make than we are in what a particular person had in mind
at the actual moment at which he made the step. One might perhaps see an
analogy between avowals in this area and the specification of plans. If someone
has propounded a plan for achieving a certain objective, and I ask him what he
proposes to do in such-and-such a contingency, I expect him to do the best he
can to specify for me a way of meeting that contingency, rather than to give a
historically correct account of what thoughts he had been entertaining. This
feature of what I might call inferential avowals is one for which we shall have
to account.Let us take stock. The thesis which we proposed for examination has
needed emendation twice, once in the face of the possibility of bad reasoning,
and once to allow for informal and incomplete reasoning. The reformulation
needed to accommodate the latter is proving difficult to reach. Let us take s
and s′ to be sequences consisting of a set of premisses and a conclusion (or,
perhaps it would be better to say, a set of propositions and a further
proposition), or a sequence (sorites) of such sequences. (This is not fully
accurate, but will serve.) Let us suppose that x has produced s (in speech or
in thought). Let "formally cogent" mean "having true premisses,
and being such that steps from premisses to conclusions are formally
valid". (1) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x" as
"x thinks s to be formally cogent", because if s is an incomplete
piece of reasoning s is not, and could not reasonably be thought by x to be,
formally cogent. end p.13 (2) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning
by x" as "(∃s′)
(s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)" because (a) it does
not get in the idea that x thinks s′ formally cogent and (b) it would exclude
bad reasoning. (3) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x"
as "x thinks that (∃s′)
(s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)", for this is too
weak, and would allow as reasoning any case in which x believed (for whatever
reason, or lack of reason) that an informal sequence had some formally cogent
expansion or other. (Compare perhaps Shropshire.).” In Latin indeed, ‘animus’
and ‘anima’ make a world of a difference, as Shropshire well knows. Psyche
transliterates as ‘anima’ only; ‘animus’ the Greeks never felt the need for. Of
course a chicken is an animal, as in man. “Homo animalis rationalis.” Grice
prefers ‘human,’ but sometimes he uses ‘animal,’ as opposed to ‘vegetal,
sometimes, when considering stages of freedom. A stone (mineral) displays a
‘free’ fall, which is metabolical. And then, a vegetable is less free than an
animal, which can move, and a non-human animal (that Grice calls ‘a beast’) is
less free than man, who is a rational animal. Grice notes that back in the day,
when the prince came from a hunt, “I brought some animals,” since these were
‘deer,’ ‘deer’ was taken as meaning ‘animal,’ when the implicaturum was very
much cancellable. The Anglo-Saxons soon dropped the ‘deer’ and adopted the
Latinate ‘animal.’ They narrowed the use of ‘deer’ for the ‘cervus cervus.’ But
not across the North Sea where the zoo is still called a ‘deer-garden.’ When
Aelfric studied philosophy he once thought man was a rational deer.
annullatum
-- annullability: a synonym for ‘cancellability,’ used in “Causal.” Perhaps
clear than ‘cancel.’ The etymology seems clear, because it involves the
negative – “Cancel” seems like a soft sophisticated way of annulling, render
something nix. Short and Lewis has ‘nullus’ as ne-ullus, not any, none, no. which is indeed a diminutive
for ‘unus,’ [for unulus, dim. of unus], any, any one (usu.
in neg. sentences; corresp. with aliquis in affirmations).
anniceris:
Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher, vide. H. P. Grice, “Pleasure.” A pupil of
Antipater, he established a separate branch of the Cyrenaic school known as the
Anniceraioi. He subscribed to typical Cyrenaic hedonism, arguing that the end
of each action should be one’s own pleasure, since we can know nothing of
others’ experiences. He tempered the implications of hedonism with the claim
that a wise man attaches weight to respect for parents, patriotism, gratitude,
and friendship, perhaps influencing Epicurus in this regard. Anniceris also
played down the Cyrenaic stress on the intellect’s role in hedonistic practical
rationality, taking the Aristotelian view that cultivation of the right habits
is indispensable.
anscombe: H. P. Grice, “Reply to G. E. M. Anscombe.”
Anscombe:
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, Irish philosopher who has held positions at Oxford
and Cambridge, best known for her work in the philosophy of mind and for her
editions and translations of Vitters’s later writings. Anscombe studied
philosophy with Vitters and became closely associated with him, writing An
Introduction to Vitters’s Tractatus 9. She is married to Peter Geach.
Anscombe’s first major work was Intention 7. She argues that the concept of
intention is central to our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. The
basic case is that of the intentions with which we act. These are identified by
the reasons we give in answer to why-questions concerning our actions. Such
reasons usually form a hierarchy that constitutes a practical syllogism of
which action itself is the conclusion. Hence our intentions are a form of
active practical knowledge that normally leads to action. Anscombe compares the
direction of fit of this kind of knowledge with a shopping list’s relation to
one’s purchases, and contrasts it with the direction of fit characteristic of a
list of these purchases drawn up by an observer of the shopper. She maintains
that the deep mistake of modern i.e., post-medieval philosophy has been to
think that all knowledge is of this latter, observational, type. This
conception of active knowledge expressed through an agent’s intentions
conflicts with the passive conception of rationality characteristic of Hume and
his followers, and Anscombe develops this challenge in papers critical of the
isought distinction of Hume and his modern successors. In a famous paper,
“Modern Moral Philosophy” 8, she also argues that ought-statements make sense
only in the context of a moral theology that grounds morality in divine
commands. Since our culture rejects this theology, it is no surprise that
“modern moral philosophers” cannot find much sense in them. We should therefore
abandon them and return to the older conceptions of practical rationality and
virtue. These conceptions, and the associated conception of natural law,
provide the background to an uncompromising defense of traditional Catholic
morality concerning sexuality, war, and the importance of the distinction
between intention and foresight. Anscombe has never been afraid of unpopular
positions philosophical and ethical. Her
three volumes of Collected Papers 1 include a defense of singular causation, an
attack on the very idea of a subject of thought, and a critique of pacifism.
She is one of the most original and distinctive English philosophers of her
generation.
anselmus: “I would call him ‘Canterbury,’ only he was an
Italian!” – H. P. Grice. Saint, called Anselm of Canterbury, philosopher
theologian. A Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury,
he is best known for his distinctive method
fides quaerens intellectum; his “ontological” argument for the existence
of God in his treatise Proslogion; and his classic formulation of the
satisfaction theory of the Atonement in the Cur Deus homo. Like Augustine
before him, Anselm is a Christian Platonist in metaphysics. He argues that the
most accessible proofs of the existence of God are through value theory: in his
treatise Monologion, he deploys a cosmological argument, showing the existence
of a source of all goods, which is the Good per se and hence supremely good;
that same thing exists per se and is the Supreme Being. In the Proslogion,
Anselm begins with his conception of a being a greater than which cannot be
conceived, and mounts his ontological argument that a being a greater than
which cannot be conceived exists in the intellect, because even the fool
understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect
alone, a greater could be conceived that existed in reality. This supremely
valuable object is essentially whatever it is
other things being equal that is
better to be than not to be, and hence living, wise, powerful, true, just,
blessed, immaterial, immutable, and eternal per se; even the paradigm of
sensory goods Beauty, Harmony,
Sweetness, and Pleasant Texture, in its own ineffable manner. Nevertheless, God
is supremely simple, not compounded of a plurality of excellences, but “omne et
unum, totum et solum bonum,” a being a more delectable than which cannot be
conceived. Everything other than God has its being and its well-being through
God as efficient cause. Moreover, God is the paradigm of all created natures,
the latter ranking as better to the extent that they more perfectly resemble
God. Thus, it is better to be human than to be horse, to be horse than to be
wood, even though in comparison with God everything else is “almost nothing.”
For every created nature, there is a that-for-which-it-ismade ad quod factum
est. On the one hand, Anselm thinks of such teleology as part of the internal
structure of the natures themselves: a creature of type F is a true F only
insofar as it is/does/exemplifies that for which F’s were made; a defective F,
to the extent that it does not. On the other hand, for Anselm, the telos of a
created nature is that-for-which-God-made-it. Because God is personal and acts
through reason and will, Anselm infers that prior in the order of explanation
to creation, there was, in the reason of the maker, an exemplar, form,
likeness, or rule of what he was going to make. In De veritate Anselm maintains
that such teleology gives rise to obligation: since creatures owe their being and
well-being to God as their cause, so they owe their being and well-being to God
in the sense of having an obligation to praise him by being the best beings
they can. Since every creature is of some nature or other, each can be its best
by being that-for-which-God-made-it. Abstracting from impediments, non-rational
natures fulfill this obligation and “act rightly” by natural necessity;
rational creatures, when they exercise their powers of reason and will to
fulfill God’s purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of a creature how
good a being it is is a function of twin factors: its natural telos i.e., what
sort of imitation of divine nature it aims for, and its rightness in exercising
its natural powers to fulfill its telos. By contrast, God as absolutely
independent owes no one anything and so has no obligations to creatures. In De
casu diaboli, Anselm underlines the optimism of his ontology, reasoning that
since the Supreme Good and the Supreme Being are identical, every being is good
and every good a being. Two further conclusions follow. First, evil is a
privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to
have it e.g., blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or
angels. Second, since all genuine powers are given to enable a being to fulfill
its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine
metaphysically basic powers are optimific and essentially aim at goods, so that
evils are merely incidental side effects of their operation, involving some lack
of coordination among powers or between their exercise and the surrounding
context. Thus, divine omnipotence does not, properly speaking, include
corruptibility, passibility, or the ability to lie, because the latter are
defects and/or powers in other things whose exercise obstructs the flourishing
of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Anselm’s distinctive action
theory begins teleologically with the observation that humans and angels were
made for a happy immortality enjoying God, and to that end were given the
powers of reason to make accurate value assessments and will to love
accordingly. Anselm regards freedom and imputability of choice as essential and
permanent features of all rational beings. But freedom cannot be defined as a
power for opposites the power to sin and the power not to sin, both because
neither God nor the good angels have any power to sin, and because sin is an
evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, freedom is the
power to preserve justice for its own sake. Choices and actions are imputable
to an agent only if they are spontaneous, from the agent itself. Creatures
cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures, because they do not
have their natures from themselves but receive them from God. To give them the
opportunity to become just of themselves, God furnishes them with two
motivaAnselm Anselm 31 31 tional drives
toward the good: an affection for the advantageous affectio commodi or a
tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and
an affection for justice affectio justitiae or a tendency to will things
because of their own intrinsic value. Creatures are able to align these drives
by letting the latter temper the former or not. The good angels, who preserved
justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God
for that time, can no longer will more advantage than God wills for them,
because he wills their maximum as a reward. By contrast, creatures, who sin by
refusing to delay gratification in accordance with God’s will, lose both
uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to
temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Justice will never
be restored to angels who desert it. But if animality makes human nature
weaker, it also opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the
necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy so
characteristic of his prayers. He begins with the demands of justice: humans
owe it to God to make all of their choices and actions conform to his will;
failure to render what was owed insults God’s honor and makes the offender
liable to make satisfaction; because it is worse to dishonor God than for
countless worlds to be destroyed, the satisfaction owed for any small sin is
incommensurate with any created good; it would be maximally indecent for God to
overlook such a great offense. Such calculations threaten certain ruin for the
sinner, because God alone can do/be immeasurably deserving, and depriving the
creature of its honor through the eternal frustration of its telos seems the
only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes
be thwarted through created resistance, and it was divine mercy that made
humans for a beatific immortality with him. Likewise, humans come in families
by virtue of their biological nature which angels do not share, and justice
allows an offense by one family member to be compensated by another. Assuming
that all actual humans are descended from common first parents, Anselm claims
that the human race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes human and
renders to God what Adam’s family owes. When Anselm insists that humans were
made for beatific intimacy with God and therefore are obliged to strive into
God with all of their powers, he emphatically includes reason or intellect
along with emotion and will. God, the controlling subject matter, is in part
permanently inaccessible to us because of the ontological incommensuration
between God and creatures and our progress is further hampered by the
consequences of sin. Our powers will function best, and hence we have a duty to
follow right order in their use: by submitting first to the holistic discipline
of faith, which will focus our souls and point us in the right direction. Yet
it is also a duty not to remain passive in our appreciation of authority, but
rather for faith to seek to understand what it has believed. Anselm’s works
display a dialectical structure, full of questions, objections, and contrasting
opinions, designed to stir up the mind. His quartet of teaching dialogues De grammatico, De veritate, De libertate
arbitrii, and De casu diaboli as well as his last philosophical treatise, De
concordia, anticipate the genre of the Scholastic question quaestio so dominant
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His discussions are likewise
remarkable for their attention to modalities and proper-versus-improper
linguistic usage.
antilogismus:
an inconsistent triad of propositions, two of which are the premises of a valid
categorical syllogism and the third of which is the contradictory of the
conclusion of this valid categorical syllogism. An antilogism is a special form
of antilogy or self-contradiction.
antinomianism: as
a Kantian, Grice overused the idea of a nomos or law, and then there’s
antinominaism, the view that one is not bound by moral law; specifically, the
view that Christians are by grace set free from the need to observe moral laws.
During the Reformation, antinomianism was believed by some but not Martin
Luther to follow from the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith
alone.
antiochus: Grecian
philosopher and the last prominent member of the New Academy. He played the
major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and helped revive interest
in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato, Aristotle, and their
associates. The impulse for this decisive shift came in epistemology, where the
Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that knowledge requires an
infallible “criterion of truth” but disputed the Stoic claim to find this
criterion in “cognitive perception.” Antiochus’s teacher, Philo of Larissa,
broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need not be cognitive to
qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus offered new
arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive, and hence
knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where he agreed
with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but insisted with
Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar attempts to
mediate fundamental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an eclectic or
syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the Old
Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile
Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included
many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s
epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV,
and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V.
anti-realism:
If Grice was a realist, he hated anti-realism, the rejection, in one or another
form or area of inquiry, of realism, the view that there are knowable
mind-independent facts, objects, or properties. Metaphysical realists make the
general claim that there is a world of mind-independent objects. Realists in
particular areas make more specific or limited claims. Thus moral realists hold
that there are mind-independent moral properties, mathematical realists that
there are mind-independent mathematical facts, scientific realists that
scientific inquiry reveals the existence of previously unknown and unobservable
mind-independent entities and properties. Antirealists deny either that facts
of the relevant sort are mind-independent or that knowledge of such facts is
possible. Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which claims that the world consists
only of minds and their contents, is a metaphysical anti-realism.
Constructivist anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that the world consists
only of mental phenomena, but claim that it is constituted by, or constructed
from, our evidence or beliefs. Many philosophers find constructivism
implausible or even incoherent as a metaphysical doctrine, but much more
plausible when restricted to a particular domain, such as ethics or
mathematics. Debates between realists and anti-realists have been particularly
intense in philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been rejected both by
constructivists such as Kuhn, who hold that scientific facts are constructed by
the scientific community, and by empiricists who hold that knowledge is limited
to what can be observed. A sophisticated version of the latter doctrine is Bas
van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which allows scientists free rein in
constructing scientific models, but claims that evidence for such models
confirms only their observable implications.
apagoge: distinguished by
Grice from both ‘epagoge,’ and his favoured ‘diagoge.’ A shifting
of the basis of argument: hence of argument based on a probable or agreed assumption,
Arist.APr.69a20, cf. Anon.in SE65.35; reduction, “ἡ εἰς τὸ ἀδύνατον ἀ.”
reductio per impossibile, APr. 29b6; “ἡ ἀ. μετάβασίς ἐστιν ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου
προβλήματος ἢ θεωρήματος ἐπ᾽ ἄλλο, οὗ γνωσθέντος ἢ πορισθέντος καὶ τὸ
προκείμενον ἔσται καταφανές” Procl. in Euc.p.212F.; τῶν ἀπορουμένων
διαγραμμάτων τὴν ἀ. ποιήσασθαι ib. p.213F. b. reduction of a disputant (cf. ἀπάγω
v. 1c), “ἡ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄδηλον ἀ.” S.E.P.2.234.
apocatastasis:
a branch of Grice’s eschatology -- from Grecian, ‘reestablishment’, the
restoration of all souls, including Satan’s and his minions’, in the kingdom of
God. God’s goodness will triumph over evil, and through a process of spiritual
education souls will be brought to repentance and made fit for divine life. The
theory originates with Origen but was also held by Gregory of Nyssa. In modern
times F. D. Maurice 180572 and Karl Barth 6 8 held this position.
aporia: cf. aporetic, cognate with porosity. No
porosity, and you get an impasse. While aware of Baker’s and Deutsch’s
treatment of the ‘aporia’ in Aristotle’s account of ‘philos,’ Grice explores
‘aporia’ in Plato in the Thrasymachus on ‘legal justice’ prior to ‘moral
justice’ in Republic. in Dialectic, question for discussion, difficulty,
puzzle, “ἀπορίᾳ σχόμενος” Pl.Prt.321c; ἀ. ἣν ἀπορεῖς ib.324d; “ἡ ἀ. ἰσότης ἐναντίων
λογισμῶν” Arist. Top.145b1, al.; “ἔχει ἀπορίαν περί τινος” Id.Pol.1285b28; “αἱ
μὲν οὖν ἀ. τοιαῦταί τινες συμβαίνουσιν” Id.EN1146b6; “οὐδεμίαν ποιήσει ἀ.”
Id.Metaph.1085a27; ἀ. λύειν, διαλύειν, Id.MM 1201b1, Metaph.1062b31; “ἀπορίᾳ ἀπορίαν
λύειν” D.S.1.37.Discussion with the
Sophist Thrasymachus can
only lead to aporia.
And the more I trust you, the more I sink into an aporia of sorts. —Aha!
roared Thrasymachus to
everyone's surprise. There it is! Socratic aporia is back! Charge! neither Socrates' company nor
Socrates himself gives any convincing answer. So, he says, finding himself in a
real aporia, he
visits Thrasymachus as
well, and ... I argue that a combination of these means in form
that I call “provocative-aporetic” better accounts for the means that Plato
uses to exert a protreptic effect on readers. Aporia is a simultaneously
intellectual and affective experience, and the way that readers choose to
respond to aporia has a greater protreptic effect than either affective or
intellectual means alone. When Socrates says he can 'transfer' the use of
"just" to things related to the 'soul,' what kind of conversational
game is that? Grice took Socrates's manoeuvre very
seriously.Socrates relies on the tripartite theory of the soul. Plato, actually -- since Socrates is a drammatis persona! In "Philosophical Eschatology, Metaphysics, and Plato's
Republic," H. P. Grice's purpose is to carry out a provocative-aporetic
reading Book I Grice argues that it is a dispute between two ways of
understanding 'just' which causes the aporia when Socrates tries to analyse
'just.' Although Socrates will not argue for the complexity and
tripartition of the soul until Bk. IV, we can at least note the contrast with
Thrasymachus' “idealize user” theory.For Socrates, agents are complex, and
justice coordinates the parts of the agent.For Thrasymachus, agents are simple
“users,” and justice is a tool for use. (2 - 3) Justice makes its possessor
happy; the function (telos, metier) argument. To make the argument that
justice is an excellence (virtus, arete) of soul (psyche) that makes its
possessor happy, Socrates relies on a method for discovering the function
(ἔργον, ergon, 352e1, cf. telos, metier, causa finalis) of any object
whatsoever. Socrates begins by differentiating between an exclusive
functions and an optimal function, so that we may discover the functions in
different types of objects, i.e., natural and artificial objects. We can
say an object performs some function (ergon) if one of the following conditions
holds.If the object is the only one that can do the work in
question, or If it is the object that does that work best.Socrates
then provides examples from different part-whole complexes to make his
point. The eye's exclusive function is to see, because no other organ is
specialized so as to perform just that function. A horse's work is to
carry riders into battle. Even though this might not be a horse's
EXCLUSIVE function, it may be its “optimal” function in that the horse is best
suited or designed by God to the task. Finally, the pruning knife is best
for tending to vines, not because it cannot cut anything else, but because it
is optimally suited for that task. Socrates' use of the pruning knife of
as an example of a thing's function resembles a return to the technē model,
since a craftsman must make the knife for a gardener to Socrates asks,
“Would you define this as the function of a horse and of anything else, as that
which someone does either through that thing alone, or best?” (...τοῦτο ἄν
θείης καὶ ἵππου καὶ ἄλλου ὁτουοῦν ἔργον, ὅ ἄν ἤ μόνῳ ἐκείνῳ ποιῇ τις ἤ ἄριστα;
352e1-2) Thrasymachus agrees to this definition of function. 91 use.But his use
of the eye — a bodily organ — should dissuade us from this view. One may
use these examples to argue that Socrates is in fact offering a new method to
investigate the nature of justice: 1) Find out what the functions of such
objects are2) determine (by observation, experiment, or even thought
experiment) cases where objects of such a kind perform their functions well and
cases where they perform them poorly; and 3) finally find out the
qualities that enable them to perform such functions well (and in the absence
of which they perform poorly), and these are their virtues.A crucial difference
between this method and technē model of justice lies in the interpretation that
each assigns to the realm of human artifacts. Polemarchus and Thrasymachus
both assume that the technē is unique as a form of knowledge for the power and
control that it offers users. In Polemarchus' case, the technē of justice,
“helping friends and harming enemies,” may be interpreted as a description of a
method for gaining political power within a traditional framework of communal
life, which assumes the oikos as the basic unit of power. Those families
that help their friends and harm their enemies thrive. Thrasymachus, on
the other hand, emphasizes the ways that technai grant users the power to
exploit nature to further their own, distinctively individual ends. Thus,
the shepherd exploits the sheep to make a livelihood for himself. Socrates'
approach differs from these by re-casting “mastery” over nature as submission
to norms that structure the natural world. For example, many factors contribute
to making This points to a distinction Socrates draws in Book X between
producers and users of artifacts. He uses the example of the blacksmith
who makes a bridle and the horseman who uses the bridle to argue that
production and use correspond to two gradations of knowledge (601c). The
ultimate purpose of the example is to provide a metaphor — using the craft
analogy — for identifying gradations of knowledge on a copy-original paradigm
of the form-participant relation. the pruning knife the optimal tool for
cutting vines: the shape of the human hand, the thickness and shape of the
vines, and the metal of the blade. Likewise, in order for horses to
optimally perform their “work,” they must be "healthy" and
strong. The conditions that bring about their "health" and
strength are not up to us, however."Control” only comes about through the
recognition of natural norms. Thus technē is a type of knowledge that
coordinates structures in nature.It is not an unlimited source of
power. Socrates' inclusion of the human soul (psyche) among those things
that have a function is the more controversial aspect of function
argument.Socrates says that the functions (erga) of the soul (psyche)
are “to engage in care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” and, later,
simply that the ergon (or function) of the soul (or psyche) is “to live”
(τὸ ζῆν, "to zen," 353d6). But the difficulty seems to be this:
the functions of pruning knives, horses, and bodily organs are determined with
respect to a limited and fairly unambiguous context that is already defined for
them. But what is this context with respect to the soul (psyche) of a
human individual? One answer might be that the social world — politics —
provides the context that defines the soul's function, just as the needs of the
human organism define the context in which the eye can perform a
function. But here a challenger might reply that in aristocracies,
oligarchies, and democracies, “care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” are
utilized for different ends.In these contexts, individual souls might have
different functions, according to the “needs” that these different regimes
have. Alternatively, one might deny altogether that the human soul has a
function: the distinctive feature of human beings might be their position “outside”
of nature. Thus, even if Socrates' description of the soul's function is
accurate, it is too general to be really informative.Socrates must offer more
details for the function argument to be convincing. Nonetheless, the idea
that justice is a condition that lets the soul perform its functions is
a significant departure from the technē model of justice, and one that
will remain throughout the argument of the Republic. […] τὸ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι
καὶ ἄρχειν καὶ βουλεύεσθαι (353d3). As far as Bk. I is concerned,
“justice” functions as a place-holder for that condition of the soul which
permits the soul to perform its functions well. What that condition is,
however, remains unknown.For this reason, Plato has Socrates concludes Bk. I by
likening himself to a “glutton” (ὥσπερ οἱ λίχνοι, 354b1), who takes another
dish before “moderately enjoying the previous” serving (πρὶν τοῦ προτέρου
μετρίως ἀπολαύσαι, 354b2-3). For Socrates wants to know what effects the
optimal condition of soul brings about before knowing what the condition itself
is. Thus Bk. I concludes in "aporia," but not in a way that
betrays the dialogue's lack of unity.The “separatist” thesis concerning Bk. I
goes back to Hermann in "Geschichte und System der Platonischen Philosophie." One
can argue on behalf of the “separatist” view as well. One can argue
against the separatist thesis, even granting some evidence in favour of the
separatist thesis. To the contrary, the "aporia" clearly
foreshadows the argument that Socrates makes about the soul in Bk. IV, viz.
that the soul (psyche) is a complex whole of parts -- an implicaturum in the
“justice is stronger” argument -- and that 'just' is the condition that allows
this complex whole be integrated to an optimal degree. Thus, Bk. I does
not conclude negatively, but rather provides the resources for going beyond the
"technē" model of justice, which is the primary cause of
Polemarchus's and Thrasymachus's encounter with "aporia" in Bk.
I. Throughout conversation of "The Republic," Socrates does not
really alter the argument he gives for justice in Bk. I, but rather states the
same argument in a different way. My gratitude to P. N.
Moore. Refs: Wise guys and smart alecks in Republic 1 and 2; Proleptic
composition in the Republic, or why Bk. 1 was never a separate dialogue, The
Classical Quarterly; "Socrates: ironist and moral philosopher."
Strictly an ‘aporia’ in Griceian, is a ‘puzzle’, ‘question for discussion’,
‘state of perplexity’. The aporetic method
the raising of puzzles without offering solutions is typical of the elenchus in the early
Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist in the testing of definitions and
often end with an aporia, e.g., that piety is both what is and what is not
loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno, e.g., that motion is both
possible and impossible. In Aristotle’s dialectic, the resolution of aporiai
discovered in the views on a subject is an important source of philosophical
understanding. The beliefs that one should love oneself most of all and that
self-love is shameful, e.g., can be resolved with the right understanding of
‘self’. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent positions was an
important factor in the development of Skepticism. In modern philosophy, the
antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in attempting to prove the
existence of objects corresponding to transcendental ideas may be seen as
aporiai.
applicatum. While Bennett uses the rather ‘abusive’ “nominalist” to
refer to Grice, Grice isn’t. It’s all about the ‘applied.’ Grice thinks a
rational creature – not a parrot, but a rational intelligent pirot – can have
an abstract idea. So there is this “Communication Device,” with capital C and
capital D. The emissor APPLIES it to a given occasion. Cf. complete and
incomplete. What’s the antonym of applied? Plato’s idea! applied – grice
used ‘applied’ for ‘meaning’ – but ‘applied’ can be used in other contxts too.
In ethics, the domain of ethics that includes professional ethics, such as
business ethics, engineering ethics, and medical ethics, as well as practical
ethics such as environmental ethics, which is applied, and thus practical as
opposed to theoretical, but not focused on any one discipline. One of the major
disputes among those who work in applied ethics is whether or not there is a
general and universal account of morality applicable both to the ethical issues
in the professions and to various practical problems. Some philosophers believe
that each of the professions or each field of activity develops an ethical code
for itself and that there need be no apellatio applied ethics 34 34 close relationship between e.g. business
ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Others hold that the same
moral system applies to all professions and fields. They claim that the
appearance of different moral systems is simply due to certain problems being
more salient for some professions and fields than for others. The former
position accepts the consequence that the ethical codes of different
professions might conflict with one another, so that a physician in business
might find that business ethics would require one action but medical ethics
another. Engineers who have been promoted to management positions sometimes
express concern over the tension between what they perceive to be their
responsibility as engineers and their responsibility as managers in a business.
Many lawyers seem to hold that there is similar tension between what common
morality requires and what they must do as lawyers. Those who accept a
universal morality hold that these tensions are all resolvable because there is
only one common morality. Underlying both positions is the pervasive but false
view of common morality as providing a unique right answer to every moral
problem. Those who hold that each profession or field has its own moral code do
not realize that common morality allows for conflicts of duties. Most of those
who put forward moral theories, e.g., utilitarians, Kantians, and
contractarians, attempt to generate a universal moral system that solves all
moral problems. This creates a situation that leads many in applied ethics to
dismiss theoretical ethics as irrelevant to their concerns. An alternative view
of a moral theory is to think of it on the model of a scientific theory,
primarily concerned to describe common morality rather than generate a new
improved version. On this model, it is clear that although morality rules out
many alternatives as unacceptable, it does not provide unique right answers to
every controversial moral question. On this model, different fields and
different professions may interpret the common moral system in somewhat
different ways. For example, although deception is always immoral if not
justified, what counts as deception is not the same in all professions. Not
informing a patient of an alternative treatment counts as deceptive for a
physician, but not telling a customer of an alternative to what she is about to
buy does not count as deceptive for a salesperson. The professions also have
considerable input into what special duties are incurred by becoming a member
of their profession. Applied ethics is thus not the mechanical application of a
common morality to a particular profession or field, but an independent
discipline that clarifies and analyzes the practices in a field or profession
so that common morality can be applied.
a priori: Obviously contrasted to ‘a posteriori,’
but not necessarily in termporal terms -- Grice was fascinated by the apriori,
both analytic but more so the synthetic. He would question his children’s
playmates with things like, “Can a sweater be green and red all over? No
striped allowed.” a priori, prior to or independent of experience; contrasted
with ‘a posteriori’ empirical. These two terms are primarily used to mark a
distinction between 1 two modes of epistemic justification, together with
derivative distinctions between 2 kinds of propositions, 3 kinds of knowledge,
and 4 kinds of argument. They are also used to indicate a distinction between 5
two ways in which a concept or idea may be acquired. 1 A belief or claim is
said to be justified a priori if its epistemic justification, the reason or
warrant for thinking it to be true, does not depend at all on sensory or
introspective or other sorts of experience; whereas if its justification does
depend at least in part on such experience, it is said to be justified a
posteriori or empirically. This specific distinction has to do only with the
justification of the belief, and not at all with how the constituent concepts
are acquired; thus it is no objection to a claim of a priori justificatory
status for a particular belief that experience is required for the acquisition
of some of the constituent concepts. It is clear that the relevant notion of
experience includes sensory and introspective experience, as well as such
things as kinesthetic experience. Equally clearly, to construe experience in
the broadest possible sense of, roughly, a conscious undergoing of any sort
would be to destroy the point of the distinction, since even a priori
justification presumably involves some sort of conscious process of awareness.
The construal that is perhaps most faithful to the traditional usage is that
which construes experience as any sort of cognitive input that derives,
presumably causally, from features of the actual world that may not hold in
other possible worlds. Thus, e.g., such things as clairvoyance or telepathy, if
they were to exist, would count as forms of experience and any knowledge
resulting therefrom as a posteriori; but the intuitive apprehension of
properties or numbers or other sorts of abstract entities that are the same in
all possible worlds, would not. Understood in this way, the concept of a priori
justification is an essentially negative concept, specifying as it does what
the justification of the belief does not depend on, but saying nothing a priori
a priori 35 35 about what it does
depend on. Historically, the main positive conception was that offered by
proponents of rationalism such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,
according to which a priori justification derives from the intuitive
apprehension of necessary facts pertaining to universals and other abstract
entities. Although Kant is often regarded as a rationalist, his restriction of
substantive a priori knowledge to the world of appearances represents a major
departure from the main rationalist tradition. In contrast, proponents of
traditional empiricism, if they do not repudiate the concept of a priori
justification altogether as does Quine, typically attempt to account for such
justification by appeal to linguistic or conceptual conventions. The most
standard formulation of this empiricist view a development of the view of Hume
that all a priori knowledge pertains to “relations of ideas” is the claim
typical of logical positivism that all a priori knowable claims or propositions
are analytic. A rationalist would claim in opposition that at least some a
priori claims or propositions are synthetic. 2 A proposition that is the
content of an a priori justified belief is often referred to as an a priori
proposition or an a priori truth. This usage is also often extended to include
any proposition that is capable of being the content of such a belief, whether
it actually has this status or not. 3 If, in addition to being justified a
priori or a posteriori, a belief is also true and satisfies whatever further
conditions may be required for it to constitute knowledge, that knowledge is
derivatively characterized as a priori or a posteriori empirical, respectively.
Though a priori justification is often regarded as by itself guaranteeing
truth, this should be regarded as a further substantive thesis, not as part of
the very concept of a priori justification. Examples of knowledge that have
been classically regarded as a priori in this sense are mathematical knowledge,
knowledge of logical truths, and knowledge of necessary entailments and
exclusions of commonsense concepts ‘Nothing can be red and green all over at
the same time’, ‘If A is later than B and B is later than C, then A is later
than C’; but many claims of metaphysics, ethics, and even theology have also
been claimed to have this status. 4 A deductively valid argument that also
satisfies the further condition that each of the premises or sometimes one or
more particularly central premises are justified a priori is referred to as an
a priori argument. This label is also sometimes applied to arguments that are
claimed to have this status, even if the correctness of this claim is in
question. 5 In addition to the uses just catalogued that derive from the
distinction between modes of justification, the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘a
posteriori’ are also employed to distinguish two ways in which a concept or
idea might be acquired by an individual person. An a posteriori or empirical
concept or idea is one that is derived from experience, via a process of
abstraction or ostensive definition. In contrast, an a priori concept or idea
is one that is not derived from experience in this way and thus presumably does
not require any particular experience to be realized though the explicit
realization of such a concept might still require experience as a “trigger”.
The main historical account of such concepts, again held mainly by
rationalists, construes them as innate, either implanted in the mind by God or,
in the more contemporary version of the claim held by Chomsky, Fodor, and
others, resulting from evolutionary development. Concepts typically regarded as
having this sort of status include the concepts of substance, causation, God,
necessity, infinity, and many others. Empiricists, in contrast, typically hold
that all concepts are derived from experience. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The
synthetic a priori.”
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