IMPLICATVRA
H.
P. Grice, St. John’s Oxford
Compiled
by Grice’s Playgroup, The Bodleian
a:
The choice of the “a” here is because of the Latin “affirmo” versus “nego.”
This gives “a” and “i” as ‘affirmatum,’ and ‘e’ and ‘o’ as ‘negatum.’ Grice
knows that his problem with Strawson is the Square of Opposition (Grice 1989:
)So he is well aware of the question about Barbara and Celarent. So this is the
‘universalis dedicativa.’ Vide below entries for “E” (universalis abdicative),
“I” (particularis dedicativa) and “O”
(particularis abdicative). The square (figura quadrata) is generated by
criss-crossing the two categories, aptly sub-divided, -- ‘quantitas’ into
universalis and particularis, and qualitaas into dedicativa and the
abdicative.What is “to affirm”? And what does “to affirm” have in common with
“to negate”? These are deep questions that Grice tries to answer in “Negation
and privation” and “Lectures on negation.” – The distinction between
‘affirmatum” and “negatum” is not clear – Etymologically, the roots are
diverse. To affirm derives from ad-firmare – to make firm. To negate, rather,
derives from the mere negative particle turned into a verb, “ne-gare.” It’s
even more complicated in Griceain! Grice would never have given attention to
this had it not be for “affirmo”and “nego” and for a little treatise he enjoyed
reading, “Barbara, Celarent” af-firmo (better adf- ), āvi, ātum, 1, v. a.
I. To present a thing in words, as fixed, firm, i. e. certain, true; to assert,
maintain, aver, declare, asseverate, affirm: “dicendum est mihi, sed ita, nihil
ut adfirmem, quaeram omnia,” Cic. Div. 2, 3; so id. Att. 13, 23; id. Brut. 1,
1: “jure jurando,” Liv. 29, 23: “quidam plures Deo ortos adfirmant,” Tac. G. 2;
cf. id. Agr. 10: “adfirmavit non daturum se,” he protested that he would give
nothing, Suet. Aug. 42.—Impers.: “atque affirmatur,” Tac. H. 2, 49.—Hence, II.
To give confirmation of the truth of a thing, to strengthen, to confirm,
corroborate, sanction: “adfirmare spem alicui,” Liv. 1, 1: “opinionem,” id. 32,
35: “dicta alicujus,” id. 28, 2: “aliquid auctoritate sua,” id. 26, 24: “populi
Romani virtutem armis,” Tac. H. 4, 73: “secuta anceps valetudo iram Deūm
adfirmavit,” id. A. 14, 22.—Hence, * affirmanter (adf- ), adv. (of the absol.
P. a. affirmans), with assurance or certainty, assuredly: “praedicere aliquid,”
Gell. 14, 1, 24; and: af-firmātē (adf- ), adv. (of the absol. P. a.
affirmatus), with asseveration, with assurance, certainly, assuredly,
positively: “quod adfirmate, quasi Deo teste promiserit, id tenendum est,” Cic.
Off. 3, 29.—Sup.: “adfirmatissime scribere aliquid,” Gell. 10, 12, 9. Refs.: Grice
1989, H. P. Grice, “The implicaturums of the Square of Opposition, as dismissed
by P. F. Strawson.”
∀: rendered by Grice as “all,” borrowed from Gentzen’s
“All-Zeichen.” (Peano did not use it). Grice is a stickler, and uses the
brackets, (∀x) – Grice thinks
that Whitehead and Russell did perfectly well with their substitutional account
to ‘all,’ “even it that displeased my tutee P. F. Strawson.” Parsons, who Grice
admires, suggests that one treat quantification over predicative classes
substitutionally, and capture “the idea that classes are not“real”
independently of the expression forthem. Grice perceives a difficulty relating to the allegedly dubious admissibility
of propositions as entities. A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat
superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any
definition of “Emissor E communicates that p” iff “Emissor E desires that p.”
which Grice would be willing to countenance,
'p' operates simply as a ‘gap sign.’ ‘p’ does appear in the analysandum,
and re-appears in the corresponding analysans. 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 criticize 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. There should be an entry for the inverted E, the first entry under
the E.
aaron, r. philosopher of
Jewish descent born in Seven Sisters, Sussex. Grice enjoyed reading him. “Aaron
can be fun.”
abderite: Grice was something of a logical atomist, so he used to
refer to himself as a neo-Abderite. The reference being to Democritus and
Leucippus, from Abdera. The Grecian
philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of atomism,
later revived by Baron Russell as “logical” atomism, calling himself a
neo-abderite. Even though Abdera, in Thrace in northern Greece, is home to
three pre-Socratics Leucippus,
Democritus, and Protagoras ‘Abderite’
and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus.
We can thus distinguish between early Grecian atomism and Epicureanism, which
is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This usage is
in one respect inapt: the corresponding Grecian “abderite” is used by some
snobs in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton,’ not in disparagement of any of
the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur, the three philosophers
but not Russell included.
abdicatum: Apuleius makes an analogy that Grice (and the Grecians
before) finds interesting. It is the ‘propositio dedicative’ apophatike’/’propositio
abdicativa’ kataphatike distinction. The ‘abdicatum’ would be the ‘negatum.’ The
‘dedicatum’ would be the ‘affirmatum.’ Apuleius’s terms make the correlation
evident and Grice preferred it to that of ‘affirmatum’ and ‘negatum,’ – “where
the correlation is not that obvious.” So there is the abdicatum, the negatum,
and the negation. ‘Negatum’ and ‘affirmatum’ are actually used when translating
Husserl from the vernacular! For Husserl, Negation negation a noetic modification of
a positing, noematic cancellation every ‘negatum’
an Object posited as existing, reiterated negation; a ‘negatum’ not a
determination produced by reflection; non-being equivalent to being validly
negated. Grice’s interest in ‘not’ as a
unary functor is central. Grice was ablet to tutor Strawson in philosophy in
that famous term. In his “Introduction to logical theory,” Strawson alleges to
show that some logical
‘laws,’ taken together, show that any truth-functional sentence or formula in
which the main constant is “~ “ is the contradictory of the sentence or formula
which results from omitting that sign.” Strawson goes on to say: “A standard
and primary use of “not” in a sentence is to assert the contradictory of the
statement which would be made by the use, in the same context, of the same
sentence without “not.” Of course we must not suppose that the insertion of
“not” anywhere in any sentence always has this effect. “Some bulls are not
dangerous” is not the contradictory of “Some bulls are dangerous.” This is why
the identification of “~” with “it is not the case that” is to be preferred to
its identification with “not” simpliciter. This identification, then, involves
only those minimum departures from the logic of ordinary language which must
always result from the formal logician's activity of codifying rules with the
help of verbal patterns : viz., (i) the adoption of a rigid rule when ordinary
language permits variations and deviations from the standard use (cf. rules “
~(p Λ ~p)”
and “ ~~p ≡ p” and the discussions in
1-8, and 2-9); (ii) that stretching of the sense of ‘exemplify’ which allows,
us, e.g., to regard ‘Tom is not mad’ as well as ‘Not all bulls are dangerous’
as 'exemplifications’ of not-p.’”
Strawson goes on: “So we shall call ‘~’ the negation sign, and read ‘~’as
‘not.’ One might be tempted to suppose that declaring formulae “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p”
laws of the system was the same as saying that, as regards this system, a
statement cannot be both true and false and must be either true or false. But
it is not. The rules that “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p”
are analytic are not rules about ‘true’ and ‘false;’ they are rules about ‘~.;
They say that, given that a statement has one of the two truth-values, then it
is logically impossible for both that statement and the corresponding statement
of the form ‘ ~p’ to be true, and for
both that statement and the corresponding statement of the form ‘~p’ to be false.”
A bit of palæo-Griceian history is
in order. Sheffer, defines ‘not’ and negation in terms of incompatibility in ‘A
set of five independent postulates for Boolean algebras, with application to
logical constants,’ Trans. American Mathematical Society. Grice does refers to
‘the strokes.’ His use of the plural is interesting as a nod to Peirce’s minute
logic in his ‘Boolian [sic] algebra with one constant.’ There is indeed
Peirce’s stroke, or ampheck (↓), Sheffer’s stroke (|, /, ↑), and and Quine’s
stroke (†, strictly Quine’s dagger). Some philosophers prefer to refer to
Peirces Stroke as Peirce’s arrow, or strictly stressed double-edged sword. His
editors disambiguate his ampheck, distinguishing between the dyadic
functor or connective equivalent to Sheffer’s stroke and ‘nor.’ While
Whitehead, Russell, and Witters love Sheffer’s stroke, Hilbert does not: ‘‘p/p’
ist dann gleichbedeutend mit ‘X̄.’ Grice explores primitiveness. It is
possible, to some extent, to qualify this or that device in terms of primitiveness.
As regards ‘not,’ if a communication-system did not contain a unitary negative
device, there would be many things that communicators can now communicate that
they would be then unable to communicate. He has two important caveats.
That would be the case unless, first, the communication-system contained some
very artificial-seeming connective like one or other of the strokes, and,
second, communicators put themselves to a good deal of trouble, as Plato does
in ‘The Sophist’ with ‘diaphoron,’ that Wiggins symbolises with ‘Δ,’ to find,
more or less case by case, complicated forms of expression, not
necessarily featuring a connective, but involving such expressions as ‘other
than’or ‘incompatible with.’ Grice further refers to Aristotle’s ‘apophasis’
in De Int.17a25. Grice, always lured by the potentiality of a joint
philosophical endeavour, treasures his collaboration with Strawson that is
followed by one with Austin on Cat. and De Int. So what does Aristotle say in
De Int.? Surely Aristotle could have started by referring to Plato’s
Parmenides, aptly analysed by Wiggins. Since Aristotle is more of a don than a
poet, he has to give ‘not’ a name: ‘ἀπόφασις ἐστιν ἀπόφανσίς τινος ἀπό τινος,’a
predication of one thing away from another,
i.e. negation of it. This is Grice’s reflection, in a
verificationist vein, of two types of this or that negative utterance. His
immediate trigger is Ryle’s contribution on a symposium on Bradley’s idea of an
internal relation, where Grice appeals to Peirce’s incompatibility. ‘The
proposition ‘This is red’ is imcompatible with the proposition, ‘This is not coloured.’
While he uses a souly verb or predicate for one of them, Grice will go back to
the primacy of ‘potching’ at a later stage. A P potches that the obble is not
fang, but feng. It is convenient to introduce this or that soul-state, ψ,
sensing that …, or perceiving that … Grice works mainly with two scenarios,
both involved with the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’ with which he is
obsessed. Grice’s first scenario concerns a proposition that implies another
proposition featuring ‘someone, viz. I,’ the first-person singular pronoun as
subject, a sensory modal verb, and an object, the proposition, it is not the
case that ‘the α is φ1.’ The denotatum of the
first-person pronoun perceives that a thing displays this or the visual
sense-datum of a colour, and the corresponding sensory modal predicate. Via a
reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get that, by uttering ‘It is not
the case that I see that the pillar box is blue,’ the utterer U means, i. e.
m-intends his addressee A to believe, U he sees that the pillar box is red. U’s
source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his uttering
his utterance is U’s *indirect* mediated actual experience, belief, or
knowledge, linked to a sense-datum φ2 (red) other than φ1
(blue). Grice’s second scenario concerns a proposition explicitly featuring the
first-person singular pronoun, an introspection, involving an auditory
sense-datum of a noise. Via reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get
that, by uttering ‘It is not the case that I hear that the bell tolls in Gb,’ U
means that he lacks the experience of hearing that the bell tolls simpliciter.
U’s source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his
uttering his utterance is the *direct* unmediated felt absence, or absentia, or
privatio or privation, or apophasis, verified by introspection, of the
co-relative ψ, which Grice links to the absence of the experience, belief,
or knowledge, of the sense-datum, the apophasis of the experience, which is
thereby negated. In either case, Grice’s analysans do not feature ‘not.’ Grice
turns back to the topic in seminars later at Oxford in connection with
Strawson’s cursory treatment of ‘not’ in “Logical Theory.”‘Not’ (and ~.) is the
first pair, qua unary satisfactory-value-functor (unlike this or that dyadic
co-ordinate, and, or, or the dyadic sub-ordinate if) in Grice’s list of this or
that vernacular counterpart attached to this or that formal device. Cf. ‘Smith
has not ceased from eating iron,’ in ‘Causal theory.’ In the fourth James
lecture, Grice explores a role for negation along the lines of Wilson’s
Statement and Inference.’ Grice’s ‘Vacuous Names’ contains Gentzen-type
syntactic inference rules for both ‘not’’s introduction (+, ~) and the
elimination (-, ~) and the correlative value assignation. Note that there are
correlative rules for Peirce’s arrow. Grice’s motivation is to qualify ‘not’
with a subscript scope-indicating device on ~ for a tricky case like ‘The
climber of Mt. Everest on hands and knees is not to atttend the party in his
honour.’ The logical form becomes qualified: ‘~2(Marmaduke Bloggs is
coming)1’, or ‘~2(Pegasus flies)1.’ generic
formula is ~2p1, which indicates that p is introduced
prior to ~. In the earlier James lectures he used the square bracket device.
The generic formula being ‘~[p],’ where [p] reads that p is assigned
common-ground status. Cancelling the implicatura may be trickier. ‘It is not
the case that I hear that the bell tolls because it is under reparation.’ ‘That
is not blue; it’s an optical illusion.’ Cf. Grice on ‘It is an illusion. What
is it?’ Cf. The king of France is not bald because there is no king of France.
In Presupposition, the fourth Urbana lecture, Grice uses square brackets for
the subscript scope indicating device. ‘Do not arrest [the intruder]!,’ the
device meant to assign common-ground status. In ‘Method” Grice plays with the
internalisation of a pre-theoretical concept of not within the scope of ‘ψ.’
In the Kant lectures on “Aspects,” Grice explores ‘not’ within the scope of
this or that mode operator, as in the buletic utterance, ‘Do not arrest the
intruder!’ Is that internal narrow scope, ‘!~p,’ or external wide scope, ‘~!p’?
Grice also touches on this or that mixed-mode utterance, and in connection with
the minor problem of presupposition within the scope of an operator other than
the indicative-mode operator. ‘Smith has not ceased from eating iron, because
Smith does not exist ‒ cf. Hamlet sees that his father is on the rampants, but
the sight is not reciprocated ‒ Macbeth sees that Banquo is near him, but his
vision is not reciprocated. Grice is having in mind Hare’s defense of a
non-doxastic utterance. In his commentary in PGRICE, Grice expands on this
metaphysical construction routine of Humeian projection with the pre-intuitive
concept of ‘not,’ specifying the
different stages the intuitive concept undergoes until it becomes
fully rationally recostructed, as something like a Fregeian sense. In the
centerpiece lecture of the William James set, Grice explores Wilson’s Statement
and inference to assign a métier to ‘not,’ and succeeds in finding one. The
conversational métier of ‘not’ is explained in terms of the conversational implicaturum.
By uttering ‘Smith has not been to prison yet,’ U implies that some utterer
has, somewhere, sometime, expressed an opinion to the contrary. This is
connected by Grice with the ability a rational creature has to possess to
survive. The creature has to be able, as Sheffer notes, to deny this or that.
Grices notable case is the negation of a conjunction. So it may well be that
the most rational role for ‘not’ is not primary in that it is realised once
less primitive operators are introduced. Is there a strict conceptual
distinction, as Grice suggests, between negation and privation? If privation
involves or presupposes negation, one might appeal to something like Modified
Occam’s Razor (M. O. R.), do not multiply negations beyond necessity. In his
choice of examples, Grice seems to be implicating negation for an empirically
verifiable, observational utterance, such as U does not see that the pillar box
is blue not because U does not exist, but on the basis of U’s experiencing,
knowing, believing and indeed seeing that the pillar box is red. This is a
negation, proper, or simpliciter (even if it involves a sense-datum phi2
incompatible with sense-datum phi1. Privation, on the other hand, would be
involved in an utterance arrived via introspection, such as U does not hear
that the bell is ringing on the basis of his knowing that he is aware of the
absence, simpliciter, of an experience to that effect. Aristotle, or some later
Aristotelian, may have made the same distinction, within apophasis between
negation or negatio and privation or privatio. Or not. Of course, Grice is
ultimately looking for the rationale behind the conversational implicaturum in
terms of a principle of conversational helpfulness underlying his picture of
conversation as rational co-operation. To use his Pological jargon in Method,
in Pirotese and Griceish There is the P1, who potches that the obble
is not fang, but feng. P1 utters p explicitly conveying that p.
P2 alternatively feels like negating that. By uttering ~p, P2 explicitly
conveys that ~p. P1 volunteers to P2, ~p, explicitly
conveying that ~p. Not raining! Or No bull. You are safe. Surely a rational
creature should be capable to deny this or that, as Grice puts it in Indicative
conditionals. Interestingly, Grice does not consider, as Gazdar does, under
Palmer), he other possible unitary functors (three in a standard binary
assignation of values) – just negation, which reverses the satisfactory-value
of the radix or neustic. In terms of systematics, thus, it is convenient
to regard Grices view on negation and privation as his outlook on the operators
as this or that procedure by the utterer that endows him with this or that
basic expressive, operative power. In this case, the expressive power is
specifically related to his proficiency with not. The proficiency is co-related
with this or that device in general, whose vernacular expression will bear a
formal counterpart. Many of Grices comments addressed to this more general
topic of this or that satisfactoriness-preserving operator apply to not, and
thus raise the question about the explicitum or explicatum of not. A Griceian
should not be confused. The fact that Grice does not explicitly mention not or
negation when exploring the concept of a generic formal device does not mean
that what he says about formal device may not be particularised to apply to not
or negation. His big concession is that Whitehead and Russell (and Peano before
them) are right about the explicitum or explicatum of not being ~, even if
Grice follows Hilbert and Ackermann in dismissing Peirces arrow for pragmatic
reasons. This is what Grice calls the identity thesis to oppose to Strawsons
divergence thesis between not and ~. More formally, by uttering Not-p, U
explicitly conveys that ~p. Any divergence is explained via the implicaturum. A
not utterance is horribly uninformative, and not each of them is of
philosophical interest. Grice joked with Bradley and Searles The man in the
next table is not lighting the cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill, the
denotatum of the Subjects being a Texas oilman in his country club. The odd implicaturum
is usually to the effect that someone thought otherwise. In terms of Cook
Wilson, the role of not has more to do with the expressive power of a rational
creature to deny a molecular or composite utterance such as p and q Grice
comments that in the case of or, the not may be addressed, conversationally, to
the utterability of the disjunction. His example involves the logical form Not
(p or q). It is not the case that Wilson or Heath will be prime minister.
Theres always hope for Nabarro or Thorpe. The utterer is, at the
level of the implicaturum, not now contradicting what his co-conversationalist
has utterered. The utterer is certainly not denying that Wilson will be Prime
Minister. It is, rather, that the utterer U wishes not to assert or state, say,
what his co-conversant has asserted, but, instead, to substitute a different
statement or claim which the utterer U regards as preferable under the
circumstances. Grice calls this substitutive disagreement. This was a
long-standing interest of Grices: an earlier manuscript reads Wilson or MacMillan
will be prime minister. Let us take a closer look at the way Grice
initially rephrases his two scenarios involving not as attached to an auditory
and a visual sense datum. I do not hear that the bell is ringing is rationally
justified by the absence or absentia of the experience of hearing it. I do not
see that the pillar box is blue is rationally justified by U’s sensing that the
pillar box is red. The latter depends on Kant’s concept of the synthetic a
priori with which Grice tests with his childrens playmates. Can a sweater be
red and green all over? No stripes allowed! Can a pillar box be blue and red
all over? Cf. Ryles’ssymposium on negation with Mabbott, for the Aristotelian
Society, a source for Grices reflexion. Ryle later discussing Bradleys internal
relations, reflects that that the proposition, ‘This pillar box is only red’ is
incompatible with ‘This pillar box is only blue.’ As bearing this or that
conversational implicatura, Grices two scenarios can be re-phrased,
unhelpfully, as I am unhearing a noise and That is unred. The
apparently unhelpful point bears however some importance. It shows that
negation and not are not co-extensive. The variants also demonstrate that the implicaturum,
qua conversational, rather than conventional, is non-detachable. Not is hardly
primtive pure Anglo-Saxon. It is the rather convoluted abbreviation of
ne-aught. Its ne that counts as the proper, pure, amorphous Anglo-Saxon
negation, as in a member of parliament (if not a horse) uttering
nay. Grices view of conversation as rational co-operation, as
displayed in this or that conversational implicaturum necessitates that the implicaturum
is never attached to this or that expression. Here the favoured, but not
exclusive expression, is not, since Strawson uses it. But the vernacular
provides a wealth of expressive ways to be negative! Grice possibly chose
negation not because, as with this or that nihilistic philosopher, such as
Schopenhauer, or indeed Parmenides, he finds the concept a key one. But one may
well say that this is the Schopenhauerian or the Parmenidesian in Griceian.
Grice is approaching not in linguistic, empiricist, or conceptual key. He is
applying the new Oxonian methodology: the reductive analysis alla Russell in
terms of logical construction. Grices implies priority is with by uttering x,
by which U explicitly conveys that ~p, U implicitly conveys that q. The essay
thus elaborates on this implicated q. For the record, nihilism was coined
by philosopher Jacobi, while the more primitive negatio and privatio is each a
time-honoured item in the philosophical lexicon, with which mediaeval this or
that speculative grammarian is especially obsessed. Negatio translates the ‘apophasis’
of Aristotle, and has a pretty pedigreed history. The philosophical lexicon has
nĕgātĭo, f. negare, which L and S, unhelpfully, render as a denying,
denial, negation, Cicero, Sull. 13, 39: negatio inficiatioque
facti, id. Part. 29, 102. L and S go on to add that negatio is predicated
of to the expression that denies, a negative. Grice would say that L and S
should realise that its the utterer who denies. The source L and S give is
ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 32, 38. As for Grices other word, there
is “prīvātĭo,” f. privare, which again unhelpfully, L and S render as a
taking away, privation of a thing. doloris, Cic. Fin. 1, 11,
37, and 38, or pain-free, as Grice might prefer, cf. zero-tolerance. L and
S also cite: 2, 9, 28: culpæ, Gell. 2, 6, 10. The negatio-privatio
distinction is attested in Grecian, indeed the distinction requires its own
entry. For it is Boethius who first renders Aristotle’s ‘hexis’ into ‘habitus’
and Aristotle’s steresis’ into ‘privatio.’ So the the Grecians were never just happy
with “ἀπόφασις (A)” and they had to keep multiplying negations beyond
necessity. The noun is from “ἀπόφημι.” Now L and S unhepfully render the noun
as as denial, negation, adding “oκατάφασις,” for which they cites from The Sophista
by Plato (263e), to give then the definition “ἀπόφασις ἐστιν
ἀπόφανσίς τινος ἀπό τινος,” a predication of one thing away
from another, i.e. negation of it, for which they provide the
source that Grice is relying. on: Arist. Int.17a25, cf. APo. 72a14;
ἀπόφασις τινός, negation, exclusion of a thing, Pl. Cra. 426d; δύο ἀ.
μίαν κατάφασιν ἀποτελοῦσι Luc. Gall.11. If he was not the first to explore
philosophically negation, Grice may be regarded as a philosopher who most
explored negation as occurring in a that-clause followed by a propositional
complexus that contains ~, and as applied to a personal agent, in a lower
branch of philosophical psychology. It is also the basis for his linguistic
botany. He seems to be trying to help other philosopher not to fall in the trap
of thinking that not has a special sense. The utterer means that ~p. In what
ways is that to be interpreted? Grice confessed to never
been impressed by Ayer. The crudities and dogmatisms seemed too pervasive.
Is Grice being an empiricist and a verificationist? Let us go back to This is
not red and I am not hearing a noise. Grices suggestion is that the
incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the
utterer of “Someone, viz. I, does not hear that the bell tolls” is indicating
(and informing) that U merely entertains the positive (affirmative)
proposition, Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls, without having an
attitude of certainty towards it. More generally, Grice is proposing, like
Bradley and indeed Bosanquet, who Grice otherwise regards as a minor
philosopher, a more basic Subjects-predicate utterance. The α is
not β. The utterer states I do not know that α is β if and
only if every present mental or souly process, of mine, has some characteristic
incompatible with the knowledge that α is β. One
may propose a doxastic weaker version, replacing the dogmatic Oxonian know
with believe. Grices view of compatibility is an application of the
Sheffer stroke that Grice will later use in accounts of not. ~p iff p|p or ~p ≡df p|p. But
then, as Grice points out, Sheffer is hardly Griceian. If Pirotese did not
contain a unitary negative device, there would be many things that a P should
be able to express that the P should be unable to express unless Pirotese
contained some very artificially-looking dyadic functor like one or other of
the strokes, or the P put himself to a good deal of trouble to find, more or
less case by case, complicated forms of expression, as Platos Parmenides does,
involving such expressions as other than, or incompatible with. V. Wiggins on
Platos Parmenides in a Griceian key. Such a complicate form of expression would
infringe the principle of conversational helpfulness, notably in its
desideratum of conversational clarity, or conversational perspicuity [sic],
where the sic is Grices seeing that unsensitive Oxonians sometimes mistake
perspicuity for the allegedly, cognate perspicacity (L. perspicacitas, like
perspicuitas, from perspicere). Grice finds the unitary brevity of not-p
attractive. Then theres the pretty Griceian idea of the pregnant proposition.
Im not hearing a nose is pregnant, as Occam has it, with I am hearing a
noise. A scholastic and mediæval philosopher loves to be figurative.
Grices main proposal may be seen as drawing on this or that
verificationist assumption by Ayer, who actually has a later essay on not
falsely connecting it with falsity. Grices proposed better analysis would
please Ayer, had Grice been brought on the right side of the tracks, since it
can be Subjectsed to a process of verification, on the understanding
that either perception through the senses (It is red) or
introspection (Every present mental or souly process of mine ) is each an
empirical phenomenon. But there are subtleties to be drawn. At Oxford, Grices
view on negation will influence philosophers like Wiggins, and in a negative
way, Cohen, who raises the Griceian topic of the occurrence of negation in
embedded clauses, found by Grice to be crucial for the rational genitorial
justification of not as a refutation of the composite p and q), and motivating
Walker with a reply (itself countered by Cohen ‒ Can the conversationalist
hypothesis be defended?). So problems are not absent, as they should not! Grice
re-read Peirces definition or reductive analysis of not and enjoyed it!
Peirce discovers the logical connective Grice calls the Sheffer Stroke, as well
as the related connective nor (also called Joint Denial, and quite
appropriately Peirces Arrow, with other Namess in use being Quines Arrow or
Quines Dagger and today usually symbolized by “/”). The relevant manuscript,
numbered MS 378 in a subsequent edition and titled A Boolian [sic] Algebra with
One Constant, MS 378, was actually destined for discarding and was salvaged for
posterity A fragmentary text by Peirce also shows familiarity with the
remarkable meta-logical characteristics that make a single function
functionally complete, and this is also the case with Peirces unfinished Minute
Logic: these texts are published posthumously. Peirce designates the two truth
functions, nand and nor, by using the symbol “” which he called
ampheck, coining this neologism from the Grecian ἀμφήκης, of equal length in
both directions. Peirces editors disambiguate the use of symbols by
assigning “” to the connective we call Sheffers troke while
preserving the symbol “/” for nor. In MS 378, A Boolian Algebra
with One Constant, by Peirce, tagged “to be discarded” at the Department of
Philosophy at Harvard, Peirce reduces the number of logical operators to one
constant. Peirce states that his notation uses the minimum number of different
signs and shows for the first time the possibility of writing both universal
and particular propositions with but one copula. Peirce’s notation is later
termed Sheffers stroke, and is also well-known as the nand operation, in Peirce’s
terms the operation by which two propositions written in a pair are considered
to be both denied. In the same manuscript, Peirce also discovers what is the
expressive completeness of ‘nor,’ indeed today rightly recognized as the Peirce
arrow. Like Sheffer, of Cornell, independently does later (only to be
dismissed by Hilbert and Ackermann), Peirce understands that these two
connectives can be used to reduce all mathematically definable connectives
(also called primitives and constants) of propositional logic. This means that
all definable connectives of propositional logic can be defined by using only
Sheffers stroke or nor as the single connective. No other connective (or
associated function) that takes one or two variables as inputs has this property.
Standard, two-valued propositional logic has no unary functions that have the
remarkable property of functional completeness. At first blush, availability of
this option ensures that economy of resources can be obtained—at least in terms
of how many functions or connectives are to be included as undefined.
Unfortunately, as Grice, following Hilbert and Ackermann realise, there is a
trade-off between this philosophical semantic gain in economy of symbolic
resources and the pragmatically unwieldy length and rather counterintuitive, to
use Grices phrase, appearance of the formulas that use only the one
connective. It is characteristic of his logical genius, however, and
emblematic of his rather under-appreciated, surely not by Grice, contributions
to the development of semiotics that Peirce grasps the significance of
functional completeness and figure out what truth functions — up to arity 2 —
are functionally complete for two-valued propositional logic, never mind
helping the philosopher to provide a reductive analysis of negation that Grice
is looking for. Strictly, this is the property of weak functional completeness,
given that we disregard whether constants or zero-ary functions like 1 or 0 can
be defined. Peirce subscribes to a semeiotic view, popular in the Old World
with Ogden and Welby, and later Grice, according to which the fundamental
nature and proper tasks of the formal study of communication are defined by the
rules set down for the construction and manipulation of symbolic resources. A proliferation
of symbols for the various connectives that are admitted into the signature of
a logical system suffers from a serious defect on this view. The symbolic
grammar fails to match or represent the logical fact of interdefinability of
the connectives, and reductive analysis of all to one. Peirce is willing
sometimes to accept constructing a formal signature for two-valued
propositional logic by using the two-members set of connectives, which is
minimally functionally complete. This means that these two connectives — or, if
we are to stick to an approach that emphasizes the notational character of
logical analysis, these two symbols —are adequate expressively. Every
mathematically definable connective of the logic can be defined by using only
these two. And the set is minimally functionally complete in that neither of
these connectives can be defined by the other (so, as we say, they are both
independent relative to each other.) The symbol can be viewed
as representing a constant truth function (either unary or binary) that returns
the truth value 0 for any input or inputs. Or it can be regarded as a constant,
which means that it is a zero=ary (zero-input) function, a degenerate function,
which refers to the truth value 0. Although not using, as Grice does, Peanos
terminology, Peirce takes the second option. This set has cardinality 2 (it has
exactly 2 members) but it is not the best we can do. Peirces discovery of what
we have called the Sheffer functions or strokes (anachronistically and unfairly
to Peirce, as Grice notes, but bowing to convention) shows that we can have a
set of cardinality 1 (a one-member set or a so-called singleton) that is
minimally functionally complete with respect to the definable connectives of
two-valued propositional logic. Thus, either one of the following sets can do.
The sets are functionally complete and, because they have only one member each,
we say that the connectives themselves have the property of functional
completeness. / is the symbol of Sheffers stroke or nand and /is the
symbol of the Peirce Arrow or nor. Grice stipulates as such, even though he
does not introduce his grammar formally. It is important to show ow these
functions can define other functions. Algebraically approached, this is a
matter of functional composition In case one wonders why the satisfaction
with defining the connectives of the set that comprises the symbols for
negation, inclusive disjunction, and conjunction, there is an explanation.
There is an easy, although informal, way to show that this set is functionally
complete. It is not minimally functionally complete because nor
and nand are inter-definable. But it is functionally complete. Thus,
showing that one can define these functions suffices for achieving functional
completeness. Definability should be thought as logical equivalence. One
connective can be defined by means of others if and only if the formulae in the
definition (what is defined and what is doing the defining) are logically
equivalent. Presuppose the truth-tabular definitions of the connectives.
Grice enjoyed that. Meanwhile, at Corpus, Grice is involved in serious
philosophical studies under the tutelage of Hardie. While his philosophical
socialising is limited, having been born on the wrong side of the tracks,
first at Corpus, and then at Merton, and ending at St. Johns, Grice fails to
attend the seminal meetings at All Souls held on Thursday evenings by the play
group of the seven (Austin, Ayer, Berlin, Hampshire, MacDermott, MacNabb, and
Woozley). Three of them will join Grice in the new play group after the war:
Austin, Hampshire, and Woozley. But at St. Johns Grice tutors Strawson, and
learns all about the linguistic botany methodology on his return from the navy.
Indeed, his being appointed Strawson as his tutee starts a life-long friendship
and collaboration. There are separate entries for the connectives: conjunction,
disjunction, and conditional. Abdicatum -- double negation. 1 The principle, also
called the law of double negation, that every proposition is logically equivalent
to its double negation. Thus, the proposition that Roger is a rabbit is
equivalent to the proposition that Roger is not not a rabbit. The law holds in
classical logic but not for certain non-classical concepts of negation. In
intuitionist logic, for example, a proposition implies, but need not be implied
by, its double negation. 2 The rule of inference, also called the rule of
double negation, that permits one to infer the double negation of A from A, and
vice versa. Refs.: Allusions to negation are scattered, notably in Essay
4 in WoW, but also in “Method in philosophical psychology,” and “Prejudices and
predilections” (repr. in “Conception”), and under semantics and syntax. While
one can draw a skull communicating that there is danger; one can then cross out
the skull indicating that there is no danger. So the emissor communicates that
there is no danger. Or rather, the emissor communicates that it is not the case
that there is danger. Since this involves a ‘that’-clause, it is not
unreasonable to speak of a ‘propositio,’ and such would be ‘abdicativa.’ In his
earliest reflections on the topic, Grice draws on sub-perceptual illustrations
rendered more or less as involving two items of ‘propositio dedicativa’ and
their negation and privation: ‘The bell tolls in Gb” and “The pillar box is
red.” For the latter, “The pillar box is not blue” can be uttered as a
conclusion (“If the pillar box is red, it is not the case that the pillar box
is blue.”). For the former case, “The bell tolls in Ab” may do. “If the bell
tolls in Gb, it is not the case that the bell tolls in Ab.” For Grice, the
métier of a propositio abidcativa has to do with the abdicatum of a conjunctum.
For a more primitive rationale, Grice does not see the complete justification.
That means that Grice sees that there are OPTIONS TO introducing a ‘propositio
abdicativa’. These options are of two kinds. One is the ‘stroke.’ If you draw a
skull, a stroke, and a skull, you communicate that it is not the case there is
danger. The other involves “other than” or “incompatible.” Again, drawsing a
skull and writing INCOMPATIBLE and drawing another skull and you communicate
that it is not the case that there is danger. Refs.: There are specific essays
of different dates, in s. V, in two separate folders, in BANC.
abductum: an implicaturum is abductum, i. e., it is not something
that it is inductum or deductum. It is indeed a demonstratum, an argumentum,
but qua abductum. Grice favours the form ‘implicaturum’ rather than ‘implicaturum’
in that the implicaturum is strictly what follows a ‘that’-clause. Ditto for
‘abductum.’ As
opposed to in-duction and de-duction, abduction refers to canons of reasoning
for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or
theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the
context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only
with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the
latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists
claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for
discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic
inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close examination of
actual scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and
procedures that call into question the adequacy of such logics. N. R. Hanson
distinguishes the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons
for suggesting that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For
the latter he attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive
reasoning that stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing
many that these logics were different in kind from logics of justification.
Today few regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as
promising. Rather, the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker
sense. Heuristic procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are
explored. Others have focused on investigating rationality in the growth of
scientific knowledge, say, by exploring conditions under which research
traditions or programs are progressive or degenerating. Some have explored
recourse to techniques from cognitive science or artificial intelligence.
Claims of success generally are controversial.
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.” Grice commented: “A man of
words, and not of deeds…”
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. 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 the face of these criticisms.” actum: -- behaviourism. Grice was amused that what
Ryle thought was behaviouristic was already pervaded wiith mentalistic talk! Referred
to by H. P. Grice in his criticism of Gilbert Ryle. Ironically, Chomsky
misjudged Grice as a behaviourist, but Chomsky’s critique was demolished by P.
Suppes, broadly, the view that behavior is fundamental in understanding mental
phenomena. The term applies both to a scientific research Beauvoir, Simone de
behaviorism 76 76 program in psychology
and to a philosophical doctrine. Accordingly, we distinguish between scientific
psychological, methodological behaviorism and philosophical logical, analytical
behaviorism. Scientific behaviorism. First propounded by the psychologist J. B. Watson who introduced the
term in 3 and further developed especially by C. L. Hull, E. C. Tolman, and B.
F. Skinner, it departed from the introspectionist tradition by redefining the
proper task of psychology as the explanation and prediction of behavior where to explain behavior is to provide a
“functional analysis” of it, i.e., to specify the independent variables stimuli
of which the behavior response is lawfully a function. It insisted that all
variables including behavior as the
dependent variable must be specifiable
by the experimental procedures of the natural sciences: merely introspectible,
internal states of consciousness are thus excluded from the proper domain of
psychology. Although some behaviorists were prepared to admit internal
neurophysiological conditions among the variables “intervening variables”,
others of more radical bent e.g. Skinner insisted on environmental variables
alone, arguing that any relevant variations in the hypothetical inner states
would themselves in general be a function of variations in past and present
environmental conditions as, e.g., thirst is a function of water deprivation.
Although some basic responses are inherited reflexes, most are learned and
integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. In classical
respondent conditioning, a response already under the control of a given
stimulus will be elicited by new stimuli if these are repeatedly paired with
the old stimulus: this is how we learn to respond to new situations. In operant
conditioning, a response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing
stimulus reward will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected”
over other possible responses: this is how we learn new responses. Conditioned
responses can also be unlearned or “extinguished” by prolonged dissociation
from the old eliciting stimuli or by repeated withholding of the reinforcing
stimuli. To show how all human behavior, including “cognitive” or intelligent
behavior, can be “shaped” by such processes of selective reinforcement and
extinction of responses was the ultimate objective of scientific behaviorism.
Grave difficulties in the way of the realization of this objective led to increasingly
radical liberalization of the distinctive features of behaviorist methodology
and eventually to its displacement by more cognitively oriented approaches e.g.
those inspired by information theory and by Chomsky’s work in linguistics.
Philosophical behaviorism. A semantic thesis about the meaning of mentalistic
expressions, it received its most sanguine formulation by the logical
positivists particularly Carnap, Hempel, and Ayer, who asserted that statements
containing mentalistic expressions have the same meaning as, and are thus
translatable into, some set of publicly verifiable confirmable, testable
statements describing behavioral and bodily processes and dispositions
including verbalbehavioral dispositions. Because of the reductivist concerns expressed
by the logical positivist thesis of physicalism and the unity of science,
logical behaviorism as some positivists preferred to call it was a corollary of
the thesis that psychology is ultimately via a behavioristic analysis reducible
to physics, and that all of its statements, like those of physics, are
expressible in a strictly extensional language. Another influential formulation
of philosophical behaviorism is due to Ryle The Concept of Mind, 9, whose
classic critique of Cartesian dualism rests on the view that mental predicates
are often used to ascribe dispositions to behave in characteristic ways: but
such ascriptions, for Ryle, have the form of conditional, lawlike statements
whose function is not to report the occurrence of inner states, physical or
non-physical, of which behavior is the causal manifestation, but to license
inferences about how the agent would behave if certain conditions obtained. To
suppose that all declarative uses of mental language have a fact-stating or
-reporting role at all is, for Ryle, to make a series of “category
mistakes” of which both Descartes and
the logical positivists were equally guilty. Unlike the behaviorism of the
positivists, Ryle’s behaviorism required no physicalistic reduction of mental
language, and relied instead on ordinary language descriptions of human
behavior. A further version of philosophical behaviorism can be traced to
Vitters Philosophical Investigations, 3, who argues that the epistemic criteria
for the applicability of mentalistic terms cannot be private, introspectively
accessible inner states but must instead be intersubjectively observable
behavior. Unlike the previously mentioned versions of philosophical
behaviorism, Vitters’s behaviorism seems to be consistent with metaphysical mindbody
dualism, and is thus also non-reductivist. behaviorism behaviorism 77 77 Philosophical behaviorism underwent
severe criticism in the 0s and 0s, especially by Chisholm, Charles Taylor,
Putnam, and Fodor. Nonetheless it still lives on in more or less attenuated
forms in the work of such diverse philosophers as Quine, Dennett, Armstrong,
David Lewis, U. T. Place, and Dummett. Though current “functionalism” is often
referred to as the natural heir to behaviorism, functionalism especially of the
Armstrong-Lewis variety crucially differs from behaviorism in insisting that
mental predicates, while definable in terms of behavior and behavioral
dispositions, nonetheless designate inner causal states states that are apt to cause certain
characteristic behaviors. -- behavior
therapy, a spectrum of behavior modification techniques applied as therapy,
such as aversion therapy, extinction, modeling, redintegration, operant
conditioning, and desensitization. Unlike psychotherapy, which probes a
client’s recollected history, behavior therapy focuses on immediate behavior,
and aims to eliminate undesired behavior and produce desired behavior through
methods derived from the experimental analysis of behavior and from
reinforcement theory. A chronic problem with psychotherapy is that the client’s
past is filtered through limited and biased recollection. Behavior therapy is
more mechanical, creating systems of reinforcement and conditioning that may
work independently of the client’s long-term memory. Collectively, behavior-therapeutic
techniques compose a motley set. Some behavior therapists adapt techniques from
psychotherapy, as in covert desensitization, where verbally induced mental
images are employed as reinforcers. A persistent problem with behavior therapy
is that it may require repeated application. Consider aversion therapy. It
consists of pairing painful or punishing stimuli with unwelcome behavior. In
the absence, after therapy, of the painful stimulus, the behavior may recur
because association between behavior and punishment is broken. Critics charge
that behavior therapy deals with immediate disturbances and overt behavior, to
the neglect of underlying problems and irrationalities. Behaviourism. Chomsky, a. n. – cites H. P.
Grice as “A. P. Grice” -- preeminent
philosopher, and political activist who has spent his professional
career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky’s best-known
scientific achievement is the establishment of a rigorous and philosophically
compelling foundation for the scientific study of the grammar of natural
language. With the use of tools from the study of formal languages, he gave a
far more precise and explanatory account of natural language grammar than had
previously been given Syntactic Structures, 7. He has since developed a number
of highly influential frameworks for the study of natural language grammar
e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 5; Lectures on Government and Binding,
1; The Minimalist Program, 5. Though there are significant differences in
detail, there are also common themes that underlie these approaches. Perhaps
the most central is that there is an innate set of linguistic principles shared
by all humans, and the purpose of linguistic inquiry is to describe the initial
state of the language learner, and account for linguistic variation via the
most general possible mechanisms. On Chomsky’s conception of linguistics,
languages are structures in the brains of individual speakers, described at a
certain level of abstraction within the theory. These structures occur within
the language faculty, a hypothesized module of the human brain. Universal
Grammar is the set of principles hard-wired into the language faculty that
determine the class of possible human languages. This conception of linguistics
involves several influential and controversial theses. First, the hypothesis of
a Universal Grammar entails the existence of innate linguistic principles.
Secondly, the hypothesis of a language faculty entails that our linguistic
abilities, at least so far as grammar is concerned, are not a product of
general reasoning processes. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, since
having one of these structures is an intrinsic property of a speaker,
properties of languages so conceived are determined solely by states of the
speaker. On this individualistic conception of language, there is no room in
scientific linguistics for the social entities determined by linguistic
communities that are languages according to previous anthropological
conceptions of the discipline. Many of Chomsky’s most significant contributions
to philosophy, such as his influential rejection of behaviorism “Review of
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, 9, stem from his elaborations and
defenses of the above consequences cf. also Cartesian Linguistics, 6;
Reflections on Language, 5; Rules and Representations, 0; Knowledge of
Language, 6. Chomsky’s philosophical writings are characterized by an adherence
to methodological naturalism, the view that the mind should be studied like any
other natural phenomenon. In recent years, he has also argued that reference,
in the sense in which it is used in the philosophy of language, plays no role
in a scientific theory of language “Language and Nature,” Mind, 5.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment