IMPLICATVRA, in 18 volumes -- vol. X

modified Occam’s razor: Grice was obsessed with ‘sense,’ and thought Oxonian philosohpers were multiplying it otiosely – notably L. J. Cohen (“The diversity of meaning”). The original razor is what Grice would have as ‘ontological,’ to which he opposes with in his ‘ontological marxism’. Entities should not be multiplied beyond the necessity of needing them as honest working entities. He keeps open house provided they come in help with the work. This restriction explains what Grice means by ‘necessity’ in the third lecture – a second sense does not do any work. The implicaturum does.  Grice loved a razor, and being into analogy and focal meaning, if he HAD to have semantic multiplicity, for the case of ‘is,’ (being) or ‘good,’ it had to be a UNIFIED semantic multiplicity, as displayed by paronymy. The essay had circulated since the Harvard days, and it was also repr. in Pragmatics, ed. Cole for Academic Press. Personally, I prefer dialectica.  ‒ Grice. This is the third James lecture at Harvard. It is particularly useful for Grices introduction of his razor, M. O. R., or Modified Occams Razor, jocularly expressed by Grice as: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. An Englishing of the Ockhams Latinate, Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem. But what do we mean sense. Surely Occam was right with his Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem. We need to translate that alla linguistic turn. Grice jokes: Senses are not be multiplied beyond necessity. He also considers irony, stress (supra-segmental fourth-articulatory phonology), and truth, which the Grice Papers have under a special f. in the s. V . Three topics where the implicaturum helps. He is a scoundrel may well be the implicaturum of He is a fine friend. But cf. the pretense theory of irony. Grice, being a classicist, loved the etymological connection. With Stress, he was concerned with anti-Gettier uses of emphatic know: I KNOW. (Implicaturum: I do have conclusive evidence). Truth (or  is true) sprang from the attention by Grice to that infamous Bristol symposium between Austin and Strawson. Cf. Moores paradox. Grice wants to defend correspondence theory of Austin against the performative approach of Strawson. If  is true implicates someone previously affirmed this, that does not mean a ditto implicaturum is part of the entailment of a  is true utterance, further notes on logic and conversation, in Cole, repr. in a revised form, Modified Occams Razor, irony, stress, truth. The preferred citation should be the Harvard. This is originally the third James lecture, in a revised form.In that lecture, Grice introduced the M. O. R., or Modified Occams Razor. Senses are not be multiplied beyond necessity. The point is that entailment-cum-implicaturum does the job that multiplied senses should not do! The Grice Papers contains in a different f. the concluding section for that lecture, on irony, stress, and truth. Grice went back to the Modified Occams razor, but was never able to formalise it! It is, as he concedes, almost a vacuous methodological thingy! It is interesting that the way he defines the alethic value of true alrady cites satisfactory. I shall use, to Names such a property, not true but factually satisfactory. Grices sympathies dont lie with Strawsons Ramsey-based redundance theory of truth, but rather with Tarskis theory of correspondence. He goes on to claim his trust in the feasibility of such a theory. It is, indeed, possible to construct a theory which treats truth as (primarily) a property, not true but factually satisfactory. One may see that point above as merely verbal and not involving any serious threat. Lets also assume that it will be a consequence, or theorem, of such a theory that there will be a class C of utterances (utterances of affirmative Subjects-predicate sentences [such as snow is white or the cat is on the mat of the dog is hairy-coated such that each member of C designates or refers to some item and indicates or predicates some class (these verbs to be explained within the theory), and is factually satisfactory if the item belongs to the class. Let us also assume that there can be a method of introducing a form of expression, it is true that /it is buletic that  and linking it with the notion of factually or alethic or doxastic satisfactory, a consequence of which will be that to say it is true that Smith is happy will be equivalent to saying that any utterance of class C which designates Smith and indicates the class of happy people is factually satisfactory (that is, any utterance which assigns Smith to the class of happy people is factually satisfactory. Mutatis mutandis for Let Smith be happy, and buletic satisfactoriness. The move is Tarskian. TBy stress, Grice means suprasegmental phonology, but he was too much of a philosopher to let that jargon affect him! Refs.: The locus classicus, if that does not sound too pretentious, is Essay 3 in WoW, but there are references elsewhere, such as in “Meaning Revisited,” and under ‘semantics.’ The only one who took up Grice’s challenge at Oxford was L. J. Cohen, “Grice on the particles of natural language,” which got a great response by Oxonian R. C. S. Walker (citing D. Bostock, a tutee of Grice), to which Cohen again responded “Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended.” Cohen clearly centres his criticism on the razor. He had an early essay, citing Grice, on the DIVERSITY of meaning. Cohen opposes Grice’s conversationalist hypothesis to his own ‘semantic hypothesis’ (“Multiply senses all you want.”). T. D. Bontly explores the topic of Grice’s MOR. “Ancestors of this essay were presented at meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Edmonton, Alberta), of the the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (San Francisco, CA) and at the University of Connecticut. I am indebted to all three groups and particularly to the commentators D. Sanford (at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology) and M. Reimer (at the APA). Thanks also to the following for helpful comments or discussion (inclusive): F. Adams, A. Ariew, P. Bloom, M. Devitt, B. Enc, C. Gaulker, M. Lynch, R. Millikan, J. Pust, E. Sober, R. C. Stalnaker, D. W. Stampe, and S. Wheeler.” Bontly writes, more or less (I have paraphrased him a little, with good intentions, always!) “Some philosophers have appealed to a principle which H. P. Grice, in his third William James lecture, dubs Modified Occam’s Razor (henceforth, “M. O. R.”): “Senses – rather than ‘entities,’ as the inceptor from Ockham more boringly has it -- are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’.” What is ‘necessity’? Bontly: “Superficially, Grice’s “M. O. R.” seems a routine application of Ockham’s principle of parsimony: ‘entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Now, parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Grice faces one objection or two. Grice’s “M. O. R.” makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the psychological processes involved in language development, learning, and acquisition, and it describes recent *empirical*, if not philosophical or conceptual, of the type Grice seems mainly interested in -- findings that bear these assumptions out. [My] resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice’s “M. O. R.”, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of the type of phenomena ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers were interested in. In more general terms, when an expression E has two or more uses – U1 and U2, say -- enabling its users to express two or more different meanings – M1 and M2, say -- one is tempted to assume that E is semantically (i.e. lexically) ambiguous, or polysemous, i.e., that some convention, constituting the language L, assign E these two meanings M1 and M2 corresponding to its two uses U1 and U2. One hears, for instance, that ‘or’ is ambiguous (polysemous) between a weak (inclusive) (‘p v q’) and a strong (exclusive) sense, ‘p w q.’ Grice actually feels that speaking of the meaning or sense of ‘or’ sounds harsh (“Like if I were asked what the meaning of ‘to’ is!”). But in one note from a seminar from Strawson he writes: “Jones is between Smith and Williams.” “I wouldn’t say that ‘between’ is ambiguous, even if we interpret the sentence in a physical sense, or in an ordering of merit, say.” Bontly: “Used exclusively, an utterance of ‘p or q’ (p v q) entails that ‘p’ and ‘q’ are NOT both true. Used inclusively, it does not. Still, ambiguity is not the only possible explanation.” (This reminds me of Atlas, “Philosophy WITHOUT ambiguity!” – ambitious title!). The phenomenon can also be approached pragmatically, from within the framework of a general theory conversation alla Grice. One could, e. g., first, maintain that ‘p or q’ is unambiguously monosemous inclusive and, second, apply Grice’s idea of an ‘implicaturum’ to explain the exclusive.” I actually traced this, and found that O. P. Wood in an odd review of a logic textbook (by Faris) in “Mind,” in the 1950s, makes the point about the inclusive-exclusive distinction, pre-Griceianly! Grice seems more interested, as you later consider, the implicaturum: “Utterer U has non-truth-functional grounds for uttering ‘p or q. Not really the ‘inclusive-exclusive’ distinction. Jennings deals with this in “The genealogy of disjunction,” and elsewhere, and indeed notes that ‘or’ may be a dead metaphor from ‘another.’  Bontly goes on: “On any such account, ‘p or q’ would have two uses U1 and U2 and two standard interpretations, I1 and I2, but NEVER two ‘conventional’ meanings,” M1 and M2 Or take ‘and’ (p.q) which (when used as a sentential connective) ordinarily stands for truth-functional conjunction (as in 1a, below). Often enough, though, ‘p and q’ seems to imply temporal priority (1b), while in other cases it suggests causal priority (1c). (1) a. Bill bought a shirt and Christy [bought] a sweater. b. Adam took off his shoes and [he] got into bed. c. “Jack fell down and [he] broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling o:ter.” (to rhyme with ‘water’ in an earlier line.”Apparently Grice loved this nursery rhyme too, “Jack is an Englishman; he must, therefore, be brave,” Jill says.” (Grice, “Aspects of reason.”)Bontly: “Again, one suspects an ambiguity, M1 and M2, but Grice argues that a ‘conversational’ explanation is available and preferable. According to the ‘pragmatist’ or ‘conversationalist’ hypothesis’ (as I shall call it), a temporal or a causal reading of “and” (p.q) may be part of what the UTTERER means, but such a reading I2, are not part of what the sentence means, or the word _and_ means, and thus belong in a general theory of conversation, not the grammar of a specific language.” Oddly, I once noticed that Chomsky, of all people, and since you speak of ‘grammar,’ competence, etc. refers to “A.” Albert? P. Grice in his 1966! Aspects of the theory of syntax. “A. P. Grice wants to say that the temporal succession is not part of the meaning of ‘and.’” I suspect one of Grice’s tutees at Oxford was spreading the unauthorized word! Bontly: “Many an alleged ambiguity seems amenable to Grice’s conversationalist hypothesis. Besides the sentential connectives or truth-functors, a pragmatic explanation has been applied fruitfully to quantifiers (Grice lists ‘all’ and ‘some (at least one’), definite descriptions (Grice lists ‘the,’ ‘the murderer’), the indefinite description (‘a finger’, much discussed by Grice, “He’s meeting a woman this evening.”), the genitive construction (‘Peter’s bat’), and the indirect speech act (‘Can you pass the salt?’) — to mention just a few. The literature on the Griceian treatment of these phenomena is extensive. Some classic treatments are found in the oeuvre of philosophers like Grice, Bach, Harnish, and Davis, and linguists like Horn, Gazdar, and Levinson. But the availability of a pragmatic explanation poses an interesting methodological problem. Prima facie, the alleged ‘ambiguity’ M1 and M2, can now be explained either semantically (by positing two or more senses S1 and S2, or M1 and M2, of expression E) or pragmatically (by positing just one sense (S) plus one super-imposed implicaturum, I).Sometimes, of course, one approach or the other is transparently inadequate. When the ‘use’ of E cannot be derived from a general conversational principle, the pragmatic explanation seems a non-starter.” Not for a radically radical pragmatist like Atlas! Ambitious! Similarly, an ambiguity- or polysemy- based explanation seems out of the question where the interpretation of E at issue is highly context-dependent.” (My favourite is Grice on “a,” that you analyse in term of ‘developmental’ or ontogenetical pragmatics – versus Millikan’s phylogenetical! But, in many cases, a semantic, or polysemy, and a conversational explanations both appear plausible, and the usual data — Grice’s intuitions about how the expression can and cannot be used, should or shouldn’t beused — appear to leave the choice of one of the two hypotheses under-determined.These were the cases that most interest Grice, the philosopher, since they impinge on various projects in philosophical analysis. (Cf. Grice, 1989, pp. 3–21 and passim).” Notably the ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy ‘project,’ I would think. I love the fact that in the inventory of philosophers who are loose about this (as in the reference you mention above, pp. 3-21, he includes himself in “Causal theory of perception”! “To adjudicate these border-line cases, Grice (1978) proposes a methodological principle which he dubs “Modified Occam’s Razor,” M. O. R.” ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ (1978, pp. 118–119) “(I follow Grice in using the Latinate ‘Occam’ rather than the Anglo-Saxon ‘Ockham’ which is currently preferred). More fully, the idea is that one should not posit an alleged special, stronger SENSE S2, for an expression E when a general conversational principle suffices to explain why E, which bears only Sense 1, S1, receives a certain interpretation or carries implicaturum I. Thus, if the ‘use’ (or an ‘use’) of E can be explained pragmatically, other things being equal, the use should be explained pragmatically.” Griceians appeal to M. O. R. quite often,” pragmatically bearded or not! (I love Quine’s idea that Occam’s razor was created to shave Plato’s beard. Cfr. Schiffer’s anti-shave! It is affirmed, in spirit if not letter, by philosopher/linguist Atlas and Levinson, philosopher/linguist Bach, Bach and philosopher Harnish, Horn, Levinson, Morgan, linguist/philosopher Neale, philosopher Searle, philosopher Stalnaker, philosopher Walker (of Oxford), and philosopher Ziff” (I LOVE Ziff’s use, seeing that he could be otherwise so anti-Griceian, vide Martinich, “On Ziff on Grice on meaning,” and indeed Stampe (that you mention) on Ziff on Grice on meaning. One particularly forceful statement is found in “of all people” Kripke, who derides the ambiguity hypothesis as ‘the lazy man’s approach in philosophy’ and issues a strong warning.” When I read that, I was reminded that Stampe, in some unpublished manuscripts, deals with the loose use of Griceian ideas by Kripke. Stampe discusses at length, “Let’s get out of here, the cops are coming.” Stampe thinks Kripke is only superficially a Griceian! Kripke: “‘Do not posit an ambiguity unless you are really forced to, unless there are really compelling theoretical (or intuitive) grounds to suppose that an ambiguity really is present’ (1977, p. 20). A similar idea surfaces in Ruhl’s principle of “mono-semic” bias’. One’s initial effort is directed toward determining a UNITARY meaning S1 for a lexical item E, trying to attribute apparent variations (S2) in meaning to other factors. If such an effort fails, one tries to discover a means of relating the distinct meanings S1 and S2. If this effort fails, there are several words: E1 and E2 (1989, p. 4).” Grice’s ‘vice’ and Grice’s ‘vyse,’ different words in English, same in Old Roman (“violent.”). Ruhl’s position differs from Grice’s approach. Whereas Grice takes word-meaning to be its WEAKEST exhibited meaning, Ruhl argues that word-meaning can be so highly abstract or schematic as to provide only a CORE of meaning, making EVEN the weakest familiar reading a pragmatic specialisation.” Loved that! Ruhl as more Griceian than Grice! Indeed, Grice is freely using the very abstract notion of a Fregeian ‘sense,’ with the delicacy you would treat a brick! “The difference between Grice’s and Ruhl’s positions raises issues beyond the scope of the present essay (though see Atlas, 1989, for further discussion).”  I will! Atlas knows everything you wanted to know, and more, especially when it comes to linguists! He has a later book with ‘implicaturum’ in its subtitle. “Considering the central role that “M. O. R.” plays in Grice’s programme, one is thus surprised to find barely any attention paid to whether it is a good principle — to whether it is true that a pragmatic explanation, when available, is in general more likely to be true than its ‘ambiguity’ or polysemy, or bi-semy, or aequi-vocal rival.” Trying to play with this, I see that Grice loves ‘aequi-vocal.’ He thinks that ‘must’ is ‘aequi-vocal’ between an alethic and a practical ‘use.’ It took me some time to process that! He means that since it’s the ‘same,’ ‘aequi’, ‘voice’, vox’. So ‘aequi-vocal’ IS ‘uni-vocal.’ The Aristotelian in Grice, I guess! “Grice himself offers vanishingly little argument.” How extended is a Harvard philosophical audience’s attention-span? “Examining just two (out of the blue, unphilosophical) cases where we seem happy to attribute a secondary or derivative sense S2 to one word or expression E, but not another, Grice notes that, in both cases, the supposition that the expression E has an additional sense S2 is not superfluous, or unparsimonious, accounting for certain facets of the use of E that cannot, apparently, be explained pragmatically.” I wonder if a radically radical pragmatist would agree! I never met a polysemous expression! Grice concludes that, therefore, ‘there is as yet no reason NOT to accept M. O. R. ’ (1978, p. 120) — faint praise for a principle so important to his philosophical programme! Besides this weak argument for “M. O. R.,” Grice (1978) also mentions a few independent, rather loose, tests for alleged ambiguity.” (“And how to fail them,” as Zwicky would have it!) But Grice’s rationale for “M. O. R.,” presumably, is a thought Grice does not bother to articulate, thinking perhaps that the principle’s name, its kinship with Occam’s famous razor, ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity,’ made its epistemic credentials sufficiently obvious already.” Plus, Harvard is very Occamist!“To lay it out, though, the thought is surely that parsimony -- and other such qualities as simplicity, generality, and unification -- are always prized in scientific (and philosophical?) explanation, the more parsimonious (etc.) of two otherwise equally adequate theories being ipso facto more likely to be true. If, as would seem to be the case, a pragmatic explanation were more parsimonious than its semantic, or ‘conventionalist,’ or ambiguity, or polysemic, or polysemy or bi-semic rival, the conversational explanation would be supported by an established, received, general principle of scientific inference.” I love your exploration of Newton on this below! Hypotheses non fingo! “Certainly, some such argument is on Grice’s mind when he names his principle as he does, and much the same thought surely lies behind Kripke’s references to ‘general methodological considerations’ and ‘considerations of economy’ Other ‘Griceian’ appeals to these theoretical virtues are even more transparent. Linguist J. L. Morgan tells us, for instance, that ‘Occam’s Razor dictates that we take a Gricean account of an indirect speech act as the correct analysis, lacking strong evidence to the contrary’ Philosopher Stalnaker argues that a major advantage accrues to a pragmatic treatment of Strawson’s presupposition in that ‘there will then be no need to complicate the semantics or the lexicon’” or introduce metaphysically dubious truth-value gaps! Linguist S. C. Levinson suggests that a major selling point for a conversational theory in general is that such a theory promises to ‘effect a radical simplification of the semantics’ and ‘approximately halve the size of the lexicon’.” So we don’t need to learn two words, ‘vyse’ and ‘vice.’ There can be little doubt, therefore, that a Griceian takes parsimony to argue for the pragmatic approach.” I use the rather pedantic and awful spelling “Griceian,” so that I can keep the pronunciation /grais/ and also because Fodor used it! And non-philosophers, too! “But a parsimony argument is notoriously problematic, and the argument for “M. O. R.” is no exception. The preference for a parsimonious theory is surprisingly difficult to justify, as is the assumption that a pragmatic explanation IS more parsimonious. This does not mean Grice’s “M. O. R.” is entirely without merit. On the contrary, Grice is right to hold that senses should not be multiplied, if a conversational principle will do.” But the justification for M. O. R. need have nothing to do with the idea that parsimony is, always and everywhere, a virtue in scientific theories.”  Also because we are dealing with philosophy, not science, here? What makes Grice’s “M. O. R.” reasonable, rather, is a set of assumptions about the psychological processes involved in language learning, development, and acquisition, and I will report some empirical (rather than conceptual, as Grice does) evidence that these assumptions are, at least, roughly correct. One disclaimer. While I shall defend Grice’s “M. O. R.,” and therefore the research programme initiated by Grice, it is not my goal here to vindicate any specific pragmatic account, nor to argue that any given linguistic phenomenon requires a pragmatic explanation.” This reminds me of Kilgariff, a Longman linguist. He has a lovely piece, “I don’t believe in word SENSE!” I think he found that Longman had, under ‘horse’: 1. Quadruped animal. 2. Painting of a horse, notably by Stubbs! He did not like that! Why would ‘sense,’ a Fregeian notion, have a place in something like ‘lexicography,’ that deals with corpuses and statistics? “The task is, rather, to understand the logic of a particular type of inference, a type of Griceian inference that can be and has been employed by a philosopher such as Grice who disagree on many other points of theory. Since it would be impossible within the confines of this essay to discuss these disagreements, or to do justice to the many ways in which Grice’s paradigm or programme has been revised and extended (palaeo-Griceians, neo-Griceians, post-Griceians), my discussion is confined to a few hackneyed examples hackneyed by Grice himself, and to Grice’s orthodox theory, if a departure therefrom will be noted where relevant. The conversational explanation of an alleged ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy aims to show how an utterer U can take an expression E with one conventional meaning and use it as if it had other meanings as well. Typically, this requires showing how the utterer U’s intended message can be ‘inferred,’ with the aid of a general principle of communicative behaviour, from the conventional meaning or sense of the word E that U utters. In Grice’s pioneering account, for instance, the idea is that speech is subject to a Principle of Conversational Co-Operation (In earlier Oxford seminars, where he introduced ‘implicaturum’ he speaks of two principles in conflict: the principle of conversational self-interest, and the principle of conversational benevolence! I much love THAT than the rather artificial Kant scheme at Harvard). ‘Make your conversational contribution, or move, such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the conversational exchange in which you are engaged.’(1975, p. 44). “Sub-ordinate to the Principle of Conversational Co-Operation are four conversational maxims (he was jocularly ‘echoing’ Kant!) falling under the four Kantian conversational categories of Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Modus. Roughly: Make your contribution true. Kant’s quality has to do with affirmation and negation, rather. Make your contribution informative. Kant’s quantity has to do with ‘all’ and ‘one,’ rather. Make your contribution relevant. Kant’s relation God knows what it has to do with. Make your contribution perspicuous [sic]. Kant’s modus has to do with ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent.’ Grice actually has ‘sic’ in the original “Logic and Conversation.” It’s like the self-refuting Kantian. Also in ‘be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity’” ‘proguard obfuscation,’ sort of thing? “… further specifying what cooperation entails (pp. 45–46).” It’s sad Grice did not remember about the principle of conversational benevolence clashing with the principle of conversational self-interest, or dismissed the idea, when he wrote that ‘retro-spective’ epilogue about the maxims, etc. Bontly: “Unlike the constitutive (to use Anscombe and Searle, not regulative) principles of a grammar, the Principle of Conversational Co-Operation and the conversational, universalisable, maxims are to be thought of not as an arbitrary convention – vide Lewis -- but rather as a rational STRATEGY or guideline (if ‘strategy’ is too strong) for achieving one’s communicative ends.” I DO think ‘strategy’ is too strong. A strategist is a general: it’s a zero-sum game, war. I think Grice’s idea is that U is a rational agent dealing with his addressee A, another rational agent. So, it’s not strategic rationality, but communicative rationality. But then I’m being an etymologist! Surely chess players speak of ‘strategies,’ but then they also speak of ‘check mate,” kill the king! Bontly quotes from Grice: “‘[A]nyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation,’ says Grice, ought to find the principle of conversational cooperation eminently reasonable (p. 49).” If not rational! I love Grice’s /: rational/reasonable. He explores on this later, “The price of that pair of shoes is not reasonable, but hardly irrational!” Bontly: “Like a grammar, however, the principle of conversational co-operation is (supposedly) tacitly known (or assumed) by conversationalists, who can thus call on it to interpret each other’s conversational moves.” Exactly. Parents teach their children well, not to lie, etc. “These interpretive practices being mutual ‘knowledge,’ or common ground, moreover, an utterer U can plan on his co-conversationalist B using the principle of conversational cooperation, to interpret his own utterances, enabling him to convey a good deal of information (and influencing) implicitly by relying on others to infer his intended meaning.”INFORMING seems to do, because, although Grice makes a distinction between ‘informing’ and ‘influencing,’ he takes an ‘exhibitive’ approach. So “Close the door!” means “I WANT YOU To believe that I want you to close the door.” I.e. I’m informing – influencing VIA informing. “Detailed discussions of Grice’s principle of conversational cooperation are found in many of the essays collected in Grice (1989), as well as in the work by linguists like Levinson (1983) and linguist/philosopher Neale (1992). Extensions and refinements of Grice’s approach are developed by linguist Horn (1972), linguist/philosopher Bach and philosopher Harnish (1979), linguist Gazdar (1979), linguist/philosopher Atlas and philosopher Levinson (1981), anthropologist Sperber and linguist Wilson (1986), linguist/philosopher Bach (1994), linguisdt Levinson (2000), and linguist Carston (2002).). The Principle of conversational cooperation and its conversational maxims allow Grice to draw a distinction between two dimensions of an utterer’s meaning within the total significance.” I never liked that Grice uses “signification,” here when in “Meaning” he had said: “Words, for all that Locke said, are NOT signs.” “We apply ‘sign’ to traffic signals, not to ‘dog’.” Bontly: “That which is ‘closely related to the conventional meaning of the word’ uttered is what the utterer has SAID (1975, p. 44),” or the explicatum, or explicitum. That which must instead be inferred with the aid of the principle of conversational cooperation is what the utterer U has conversationally implicated, the IMPLICATURUM (pp. 49–50), or implicitum. This dichotomy is in several ways oversimplified. First, Grice (1975, 1978) also makes room for ‘conventional’ implicaturums (“She was poor BUT she was honest”) and non-conversational non-conventional implicaturums (“Thank you,” abiding with the maxim, ‘be polite’), although these dimensions are both somewhat controversial (cf. Bach’s attack on conventional implicaturum) and can be set aside here. Also controversial is the precise delineation of Grice’s notion of what is said.” He grants he is using ‘say’ ‘artifiicially,’ which means, “natural TO ME!.” Some (anthropologist Sperber and linguist Wilson, 1986; linguist Carston, 1988, 2002; philosopher Recanati, 1993) hold that ‘what is said,’ the DICTUM, the explicatum, or explicitum, is significantly underdetermined by the conventional meaning of the word uttered, with the result that considerable pragmatic intrusive processing must occur even to recover what the utterer said.” And Grice allows that an implicaturum can occur within the scope of an operator.“Linguist/philosopher Bach disagrees, though he does add an ‘intermediate’ dimension (that of conversational ‘impliciture’) which is, in part, pragmatically determined, enriched, or intruded. For my purpose, the important distinction is between that element of meaning which is conventional or ‘encoded’ and that element which is ‘inferred,’ ab-duced, or pragmatically determined, whether or not it is properly considered part of what is said,” in Grice’s admittedly artificial use of this overused verb! (“A horse says neigh!”) A conversational implicaturum can itself be either particularized (henceforth, PCIs) or generalized (GCIs) (56).” Most familiar examples of implicaturum are particularised, where the inference to the utterer U’s intended meaning relies on a specific assumption regarding the context of utterance.” Grice’s first example, possibly, “Jones has beautiful handwriting” (Grice 1961).“Alter that context much at all and the implicaturum will simply disappear, perhaps to be replaced by another. With a generalised implicaturum, on the other hand, the inference or abduction to U’s intended interpretation is relatively context-independent, going through unless special clues to the contrary are provided to defeat it.”Love the ‘defeat.’ Levinson cites one of Grice’s unpublications as “Probability, defeasibility, and mood operators,” where Grice is actually writing, “desirability.”! “For instance, an utterance of the sentence” ‘SOME residents survived the earth-quake,’ would quite generally, absent any special clues to the contrary, seem to implicate that not all survived. All survived, alas, seems to be, to some, no news. Cruel world. No special ‘stage-setting’ has to be provided to make the implicaturum appreciable. No particular context needs to be assumed in order to calculate the likely intended meaning. All one needs to know is that an utterer U who thought that everyone, all residents survived the earthquake (or that none did?) would probably make this stronger assertion (in keeping with Grice’s first sub-maxim of Quantity: ‘Make your contribution as informative as required’).” Perhaps it’s best to deal with buildings. “Some – some 75%, I would say -- of the buildings did not collapse after the earth-quake on the tiny island, and fortunately, no fatalities need be reported. It wasn’t such a big earth-quake as pessimist had predicted.” “A Gricean should maintain that the ‘ambiguity’ of “some” -> “not all” canvassed at the outset can all be explained in terms of a generalized conversational implicaturum. For instance, linguist Horn shows, in his PhD on English, how an exclusive use of ‘or’ can be treated as a consequence of the maxim of Quantity. Roughly, since ‘p AND q’ is always ‘more informative,’ stronger, than ‘p or q’, an utterer U’s choosing to assert only the disjunction would ordinarily indicate that he takes one or the other disjunct to be false. He could assert the conjunction anyway, but then he would be violating Grice’s first submaxim of Quality: ‘Do not say what you believe to be false’ For similar reasons, the assertion of a disjunction would ordinarily seem to implicate that the utterer U does not know which disjunct is true (otherwise he would assert that disjunct rather than the entire disjunction) and hence, and this is the way Grice puts it, which is technically, the best way, that the utterer wants to be ‘interpreted’ as having some ‘non-truth-functional grounds’ for believing the disjunction (philosopher Grice, 1978; linguist Gazdar, 1979).  For recall that this all goes under the scope of a psychological attitude. In “Method in psychological philosophy: from the banal to the bizarre,” repr. in “The conception of value,” Grice considers proper disjunctions: “The eagle is not sure whether to attack the rabbit or the dove.” I think Loar plays with this too in his book for Cambridge on meaning and mind and Grice. “Grice (1981) takes a similar line with regard to asymmetric uses of ‘and’.” Indeed, I loved his “Jones got into bed and took off his clothes, but I do not want to suggest in that order.” “Is that a linguistic offence?” Don’t think so!” “The fourth submaxim of Manner,” ‘be orderly’ -- I tend to think this is ad-hoc and that Grice had this maxim JUST to explain away the oddity of “She got a children and married,” by Strawson in Strawson 1952. “says that utterers should be ‘orderly,’ and when describing a sequence of events, an orderly presentation would normally describe the events in the order in which they occurred. So an utterance of  (1b) (‘Jones took off his trousers – he had taken off his shoes already -- and got into bed.’ “would ordinarily (unless the utterer U ‘indicates’ otherwise) implicate that Jones did so in that order, hence the temporal reading of ‘and’.” “(Grice’s (1981) account of asymmetric ‘and’ seems NOT to account for causal interpretations like (1c).”Ryle says in “Informal logic,” 1953, in Dilemmas, “She felt ill and took arsenic,” has the conscript ‘and’ of Whitehead and Russell, not the ‘civil’ ‘and’ of the informalist. “Oxonian philosopher R. C. S. Walker – what took him to respond to Cohen? Walker quotes from Bostock, who was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s -- (1975, p. 136) suggests that the causal reading can be derived from the maxim of Relation.”Nowell-Smith had spoken of ‘be relevant’ in Ethics. But Grice HAD to be a Kantian!“Since conversationalists are expected to make their utterances relevant, one expects that conjoined sentences will ‘have some bearing to one another’, often a causal bearing. More nearly adequate accounts of the temporal and causal uses of ‘and’ (so-called ‘conjunction buttressing’) are found in linguist/philosopher Atlas and linguist Levinson (1981) and in linguist Levinson (1983, 2000). Linguist Carston (1988, 2002) develops a rival pragmatic account within the framework of anthropologist Sperber’s and linguist Wilson’s Relevance Theory, on which temporal and causal readings are explicatures rather than implicaturums. For the purposes of this essay, it is immaterial which of these accounts best accords with the data. In these and many other cases, it seems that a general principle regarding communicative RATIONALITY can provide an alternative to positing a semantic ambiguity.”Williamson is lecturing at Yale that ‘rationality’ has little to do with it!“But a Gricean goes a step further and claims that the implicaturum account (when available) is BETTER than an ambiguity or polysemy account. One possible argument for the stronger thesis is that the various specialised uses of ‘or’ (etc.) bear all the usual hallmarks of a conversational implicaturum. An implicaturum is: calculable (i.e. derivable from what is said or dictum or explicatum or explicitum via the Principle of conversational cooperation and the conversational maxims); cancellable (retractable without contradiction), and; non-detachable (incapable of being paraphrased away) Grice, 1975, pp. 50 and 57–58). They ought also to be, sort of, universal.” (Cf. Elinor Keenan Ochs, “The universality of conversational implicaturum.” I hope Williamson considers this. In Madagascar, they have other ‘norms’ of conversation: since speakers are guarded, implicatura to the effect, “I don’t know” are never invited! Unlike the true lexical ambiguity that arises from a language-specific convention, an implicaturum derives rather from general features of communicative RATIONALITY and should thus be similar across different languages (philosopher Kripke, 1977; linguist Levinson, 1983).”I’m not sure. Cfr. Ochs in Madagascar. But she is a linguist/anthropologist, rather than a philosopher? From a philosophical point of view, perhaps the best who treated this issues is English philosopher Martin Hollis in his essays on ‘rationality’ and ‘relativism’ (keywords!)“Since the ‘ambiguity’ in question here has all these features, at least to some degree, the implicaturum approach may well seem irresistible. It is well known, however, that none of the features listed on various occasions by Grice are sufficient (individually or jointly) to establish the presence of a conversational implicaturum (Grice, 1978; linguist Sadock, 1978). Take calculability.” Or how to ‘work it out,’ to keep it Anglo-Saxon, as pretentious Grice would not! The main difficulty is that a conversationalimplicaturum can become fossilized, or ‘conventionalised’ over time but remain calculable nonetheless, as happens with some ‘dead’ metaphors — one-time non-literal uses which congealed into a new conventional meaning.” A linguist at Berkeley worked on this, Traugott, on items in the history of the English language, or H-E-L, for short, H.O.T.E.L, history of the English language. I don’t think Grice considers this. He sticks with old Roman ‘animal’ -> ‘non-human’, strictly, having a ‘soul,’ or animus, anima. (I think Traugott’s focus was on verb forms, like “I have eaten,” meaning, literally, “I possess eating,” or something. But she does quote Grice and speaks of fossilization. “For instance, the expression.” ‘S went to the bathroom’ (Jones?) could, for obvious reasons, be used with its original, compositional, meaning to implicate that S ‘relieved himself’.” “The intended meaning would still be calculable today.”Or “went to powder her nose?” (Or consider the pre-Griceian (?) child’s overinformative, standing from table at dinner, “I’m going to the bathroom to do number 2 (unless he is flouting the maxim). “But the use has been absorbed, or encoded into some people’s grammar, as witnessed by the fact that  ‘S went to the bathroom on the living room carpet.’ is not contradictory (linguist J. L. Morgan, 1978; linguist Sadock, 1978).”I wonder what some contextualists at Yale (De Rose) would say about that!? Cf. Jason Stanley, enfant terrible. “Grice’s cancellability is similarly problematic. While one may cancel the exclusive interpretation of ‘p or q’ (e.g. by adding ‘or possibly both’), the added remark could just as well be disambiguating an ambiguous utterance as canceling the implicaturum (philosopher Walker, 1975; linguist Sadock, 1978).”Excellent POINT! Walker would be fascinated to see that Grice once coined ‘disimplicaturum’ for some loose uses. “Macbeth saw Banquo.” “That tie is yellow under that light, but orange under this one.” Actually, Grice creates ‘disimplicaturum’ to refute Davidson on intending: “Jones intends to climb Mt Everest next weekend.” Intending DOES entail BELIEF, but people abuse ‘intend’ and use it ‘loosely,’ with one sense dropped. Similarly, Grice says, with “You’re the cream in my coffee,” where the ‘disimplicaturum’ is TOTAL!“Non-detachability fares no better. When two sentences are synonymous (if there is, pace Quine, such a thing), utterances of them ought to generate the same implicaturum. But they will also have the same semantic implications, so the non-detachability of an alleged implicaturum shows very little if anything at all (linguist Sadock, 1978).”I never liked non-detachability, because it ENTAILS that there MUST be a synonym expression: cfr. God? Divinity? “Universality is perhaps the best test of the four.”I agree. When linguists like Elinor Keenan disregard this, I tend to think: “the cunning of conversational reason,” alla Hollis. Grice was a member of Austin’s playgroup, and the conversational MAXIMS were ‘universalisable’ within THAT group. That seems okay for both Kant AND Hegel!“Since an implicaturum can fossilise into a conventional meanings, however, it is always possible for a cross-linguistic alleged ‘ambiguity’ to be pragmatic in some language though lexical in another.”Is that ‘f*rnication’? Or is it Grice on ‘pushing up the daisies’ as an “established idiom” for ‘… is dead’ in WJ5? Austin and Grice would I think take for granted THREE languages: Greek and Roman, that they studied at their public schools – and this is important, because Grice says his method of analysis is somehow grounded on his classical education – and, well, English. Donald Davidson, in the New World, would object to the ‘substantiation’ that speaking of “Greek” as a language, say, may entail.“So while Grice’s tests are suggestive, they supply no clear verdict on the presence of an implicaturum. Besides these inconclusive tests for implicaturum, Grice could also appeal to various diagnostic tests for alleged ambiguity.” “And how to fail them,” to echo Zwicky. Grice himself suggests three, although none of them prove terribly helpful.”Loved your terrible. Cfr. ‘terrific’. And the king entering St. Paul’s cathedral: “Aweful!” meaning ‘awe-some!’“First, Grice points out that each alleged sense Sn of an allegedly ambiguous word E ought to be expressible ‘in a reasonably wide range of linguistic environments’ (1978, p. 117). The fact that the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ is UNavailable within the scope of a negation, for instance, would seem to count AGAINST alleged ambiguity or polysemy. On the other hand, the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ IS available within the scope of a propositional-attitude verb. A strong implicaturum of ‘and’ is arguably available in both environments, within the scope of a negation, and within the scope of a psychological-attitude verb. So the first test seems a wash.”Metaphorically, or implicaturally. J“Second, Grice says, if the expression E is ambiguous with one sense S2 being derived (somehow) from the initial or original or etymological sense S1, that derivative sense S2 ‘ought to conform to whatever principle there may be which governs the generation of derivative senses’ (pp. 117–118).”GRICE AT HIS BEST! I think he is trying to irritate Quine, who is seating on second row at Harvard! (After all Quine thought he was a field linguist!)Bontly, charmingly: “Not knowing the content of thi principle Grice invokes— and Grice gives us no hint as to what it might be — we cannot bring it, alas, to bear here!”I THINK he was thinking Ullman. At Oxford, linguists were working on ‘semantics,’ cfr. Gardiner. And he just thought that it would be Unphilosophical on his part to bore his philosophical Harvard audience with ‘facts.’ At one point he does mention that the facts of the history of the English language (how ‘disc’ can be used, etc.) are not part of the philosopher’s toolkit?“Third and finally, Grice says, we must ‘give due (but not undue) weight to MY INTUITIONS about the existence (or indeed non-existence) of a putative sense S2 of a word E.’ (p. 120).”Emphasis on ‘my’ mine! -- As I say, I never had any intuition about an expression having an extra-putative sense. Not even ‘bank,’ – since in Old Germanic, it’s all etymologically related!Bontly: “But, even granting the point that ‘or’ is NON-INTUITIVELY ambiguous in quite the same way that ‘bank’ IS, allegedly, INTUITIVELY ambiguous, the source of our present difficulty is precisely the fact that ‘p or q’ often *seems* intuitively to imply that one or the other disjunct is false.”Grice apparently uses ‘intuition’ and ‘introspection’ interchangeably, if that helps? Continental phenomenological philosophers would make MUCH of this! For Grice’s intuitions are HIS own. In a lecture at Wellesley, of all places (in Grice 1989) he writes: “My problems with my use of E arise from MY intuitions about the use of E. I don’t care how YOU use E. Philosophy is personal.” Much criticised, but authentic, in a way!“Since he discounts the latter intuition, Grice cannot place much weight on the former!”As I say, Grice’s intuitions are hard to fathom! So are his introspections! Actually, I think that Grice’s sticking with introspections and intuitions save him, as Suppes shows in PGRICE ed Grandy and Warner, from being a behaviourist. He is, rather, an intentionalist!“While a complete review of ambiguity tests is beyond the scope of this essay, we have perhaps seen enough to motivate the methodological problem with which we began: viz., that an, intuitive, alleged, ambiguity seems fit to be explained either semantically (ambiguity thesis, polysemy, bi-semy) or pragmatically/conversationally, with little by way of direct evidence to tell us which is which!”“If philosophy generated no problems, it would be dead!” – Grice. J“Linguists Zwicky and Sadock review several linguistic tests for ambiguity (e.g. conjunction reduction) and point out that most are ill-suited to detect ambiguities where the meanings in question are privative opposites,”Oddly, Grice’s first publication ever was on “Negation and privation,” 1938!Bontly: “i.e. where one meaning is a specialization or specification of the other (as for instance with the female and neutral senses of ‘goose’).”Or cf. Urmson, “There is an animal in the backyard.” “You mean Aunt Matilda?”Bontly: “Since the putative ambiguities of ‘or’ and the like are all of this sort, it seems inevitable that these tests will fail us here as well. For further discussion, see linguist Horn (1989, pp. 317–18 and 365–66) and linguist Carston (2002, pp. 274–77).It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that a Gricean typically falls back on a methodological argument like parsimony, as instantiated in “M. O. R.”Let’s now turn to Parsimony and Its Problems. It may, at first, be less than obvious why an ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy account should be deemed less parsimonious than its Gricean rival.” Where the conventionalist or ambiguist posits an additional sense S2, Grice adds, to S1, a conversational implicaturum, I”. Cheap, but no free lunch! (Grice saves)Bontly: “Superficially, little seems to be gained.” Ah, the surfaces of Oxford superficiality! “Looking closer, however, the methodological virtues of the Grice’s approach seem fairly clear.”Good!Bontly: “First, the principles and inference patterns that a pragmatic or conversational account utilizes are independently motivated. The principles and inference patterns are needed in any case to account for the relatively un-controversial class of particularized implicatura, and they provide an elegant approach to phenomena like figures of rhetoric, or speech -- metaphor, irony, meiosis, litotes, understatement, sarcasm – cfr. Holdcroft -- and tricks like Strawson’s presupposition. So it would seem that Grice can make do with explanatory material already on hand, whereas the ambiguity or polysemy theorist must posit a new semantic rule in each and every case. Furthermore, the explanatory material has an independent grounding in considerations of rationality.”I love that evening when Grice received a phonecall at Berkeley: “Professor Grice: You have been appointed the Immanuel Kant Memorial Lecturer at Stanford.” He gave the lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning!Bontly: “Since conversation is typically a goal-directed activity, it makes sense for conversationalists to abide by the Principle of Conversational Cooperation (something like Kant’s categorical imperative, in conversational format) and its (universalisable) conversational maxims, and so it makes sense for a co-conversationalist to interpret the conversationalist accordingly. A pragmatic explanation is therefore CHEAP – hence Occam on ‘aeconomicus’ -- the principle it calls on being explainable by — and perhaps even reducible to — facts about rational behavior in general.”I loved your “REDUCE.” B. F. Loar indeed thought, and correctly, that the maxims are ‘empirical generalisations over functional states.’ Genius!Bontly: A pragmatic account is not only more economic, or cheaper. It also reveals an orderliness or systematicity that positing a separate lexical ambiguity or polysemy or bisemy in each and every case would seem to miss (linguist/philosopher Bach). To a Griceian, it is no accident that a sentential connective or truth-functor (“not,” “and,” “or,” and “if”), a quantified expression (Grice’s “all” and “some (at least one)”) and a description (Grice’s “the”) all lend themselves to a weak and a stronger interpretation”Cf. Holdcroft, “Weak or strong?” in “Words and deeds.”Bontly: “Note, for instance, that a sentence with the logical form ‘Some Fs are Gs’,  and the pleonethetic, to use Geach’s and Altham’s coinage, ‘Most Fs are Gs’, and ‘A few Fs are Gs’ are all allegedly ‘ambiguous’ in the SAME way. Each of those expressions has an obvious weak reading in addition to a stronger reading: ‘Not all Fs are Gs’.Good because Grice’s first examination was: “That pillar-box seems red to me.” And he analyses the oddness in terms of ‘strength.’ (Grice 1961). He tries to analyse this ‘strength’ in terms of ‘entailment,’ but fails (“Neither ‘The pillar-box IS red’ NOR ‘The pillar-box SEEMS red’ entail each other.”)Bontly: For the conventionalist or polysemy theorist, there is no apparent reason why this should be so. There is no reason, that is, why three etymologically unrelated words (“some,” “most,” and “few”) should display the SAME pattern of alleged ambiguity. The Gricean, on the other hand, explains each the SAME way, by appealing to some rational principle of conversation. The implicatura are all ‘scalar’ quantity implicatura, attributable to the utterer U’s having uttered a weaker, less informative, sentence than he might have.” Linguist Levinson, 1983). Together, these considerations make a persuasive case for the Grice’s approach. A pragmatic explanation is more economical, and the resulting view of conversation is more natural and unified. Since economy and unification are both presumably virtues to be sought in a scientific or philosophical explanation — virtues which for brevity I lump together under Occamist ‘parsimony’ — it would NOT be unreasonable to conclude that a pragmatic explanation is (ceteris paribus) a better explanation. So it seems that Grice’s principle, the “M. O. R.” is correct. Senses ought not to be multiplied when pragmatics will do. Still, there are several reasons to be suspicious of the parsimony argument. “I lay out three. It bears emphasis that none of these are objections to the pragmatic approach per se.” I have no quarrel with the theory of conversation or particular attempts to apply it to conversational phenomena. The objections focus rather on the role that parsimony (or simplicity, or generality, etc.) plays in arguments PRO the implicaturum and CONTRA ambiguity or polysemy.” Then, there’s Dead Metaphors. First is a worry that parsimony is too blunt an instrument, generalizing to unwanted conclusions. Versions of this objection appear in philosopher Walker (1975), linguist Morgan (1978), and linguist Sadock (1978).” More recently, Reimer (1998) and Devitt (forthcoming) use it to argue against a Gricean treatment of the referential/attributive distinction.”But have they read Grice’s VACUOUS NAMES? I know you did! Grice notes: “My distinction has nothing to do with Donnellan’s!” Grice’s approach is syntactic: ‘the’ and “THE,” identificatory and non-identificatory uses. R. M. Sainsbury and D. E. Over have worked on this. Fascinating. Bontly: “For as with the afore-mentioned so-called ‘dead’ metaphor, it can happen that a word has a secondary use that is pragmatically predictable, and yet fully conventional. In many such cases, of course, the original, etymological meaning is long forgotten: e. g. the contemporary use of ‘fornication’, originally a euphemism for activities done in fornice (that is, in the vaulted underground dwellings that once served as brothels in Rome). (I owe this [delightful] example to Sam Wheeler). Few speakers recall the original meaning, so the metaphor can no longer be ‘calculated,’ as Grice’s “You’re the cream in my coffee!” (title of song) can!” The metaphor is both dead _and buried_.”Still un-buriable?“In other cases, however, speakers do possess the information to construct a Gricean explanation, and yet the metaphor is dead anyway.”Reimer’s (1998) example of the verb ‘incense’ is a case in point. One conventional meaning (‘to make or become angry’) began life as a metaphorical extension of the other (‘to make fragrant with incense’). The reason for the extension is fairly transparent (resting on familiar comparisons of burning and emotion), but the use allegedly represents an additional sense nonetheless.”What dictionaries have as ‘fig.’ But are we sure that when the dictionaries list things like 1., 2., 3., they are listing SENSES!? Cf. Grice, “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says,” to Austin, “And that’s where you make your big mistake.” Once Grice actually opened the dictionary (he was studying ‘feeling + adj.’ – he got to ‘byzantine,’ finding that MOST adjectives did, and got bored!Bontly: Such examples suggest that an implicaturum makes up an important source of semantic—and, according to linguist Levinson (2000), syntactic—innovation. A linguistic phenomenon can begin life as a pragmatic specialization or an extension and subsequently become conventionalized by stages, making it difficult to determine at what point (and for which ‘utterers’) a use has become fully conventional. One consequence is that an expression E can have, allegedly, a second sense S2, even when a pragmatic explanation appears to make it explanatorily superfluous, and parsimony can therefore mislead.”I’m not sure dictionary readers read ‘fig.’ as a different ‘sense,’ and lexicographers need not be Griceian in style!Bontly: “A related point is that an ambiguity account needn’t be LESS unified than an implicaturum account after all. If pragmatic considerations can explain the origin and development of new linguistic conventions, the ambiguity or polysemy theorist can provide a unified dia-chronic account of how several un-related expressions came to exhibit similar patterns of alleged ‘ambiguity.’ Quantifiers like ‘some’, ‘most’, and ‘a few’ may be similarly allegedly ambiguous today because they generated similar implicaturums in the past (cf. Millikan, 2001).”OKAY, so that’s the right way to go then? Diachrony and evolution, right?Bontly: “Then, there’s Tradeoffs. A ‘dead’ metaphor suggests that parsimony is too strong for the pragmatist’s purposes, but as a pragmatic account could have hidden costs to offset the semantic savings, parsimony may also be too weak! E. g. an implicaturum account looks, at least superficially, to multiply (to use Occam’s term) inferential labour, leaving it to the addressee to infer the utterer’s intended meaning from the words uttered, the context, and the conversational principle. Thus there are trade-offs involved, and the account which is semantically more parsimonious may be less parsimonious all things considered.”Grice once invited the “P. E. R. E.,” principle of economy of rational effort, though. Things which seem to be psychologically UNREAL are just DEEMED, tacitly, to occur.Bontly: “To be clear, this is not to suggest that the ambiguity or polysemy account can dispense with inference entirely. Were the exclusive and inclusive senses of ‘or’ BOTH lexically encoded (as they were in Old Roman, ‘vel’ and ‘aut,’ hence Whitehead’s choice of ‘v’ for ‘p v q’) still hearers would need to infer from contextual clues which meaning were intended. The worry is not, therefore, so much that the implicaturum account increases the number of inferences which conversants or conversationalists have to perform. The issue concerns rather the complexity of these inferences. Alleged dis-ambiguation is a highly constrained process. In principle, one need only choose the relevant sense Sn, from a finite list represented in the so-called ‘mental lexicon’. Implicaturum calculation, on the other hand, is a matter of finding the best explanation (abductively, alla Hanson) for an utterer’s utterance, the utterer’s meaning being introduced as an explanatory hypothesis, answering to a ‘why’ question. Unlike dis-ambiguation, where the various possible readings are known in advance, in the conversational explanation, the only constraints are provided by the addressee’s understanding of the context and the conversational principle. So it appears that Grice’s approach saves on the lexical semantics by placing a greater inferential burden on utterer and addressee.”But Grice played bridge, and loved those burdens. Stampe actually gives a lovely bridge alleged counter-example to Grice (in Grice 1989).Bontly: “Now, a Gricean can try to lessen this load in various ways. Grice can argue, for instance, that the inference used to recover a generalised implicaturum is less demanding than that for a particularized one, that familiarity with types of generalised implicate can “stream-line” the inferential process, and so on.”Love that, P. E. R. E., or principle of economy of rational effort, above?!Bontly: “We examine these moves. There’s Justification. Another difficulty with Grice’s appeals to parsimony is the most fundamental. On the one hand, it can hardly be denied that parsimony plays a role in scientific, if not philosophical, inference.” Across the sciences, if not in philosophy, it is standard practice to cite parsimony (simplicity, generality, etc.) as a reason to choose one hypothesis over another; philosophers often do the same.”Bontly’s ‘often’ implicates, ‘often not’! Grice became an opponent of his own minimalism at a later stage of his life, vide his “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of Paul Grice,” by Paul Grice!Bontly: “At the same time, however, it remains quite mysterious, if that’s the word, why parsimony (etc.) should be given such weight by Occamists like Grice. If it were safe to assume that Nature is simple and economical, the preference for theories with these qualities would make perfect sense. Sir Isaac Newton offers such an ontological rationale for parsimony in the “Principia.” Sir Isaac writes (in Roman?) “I am to admit no more cause of a natural thing than such as are true and sufficient to explain its appearance.” “To this purpose, the philosopher says that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less serves.” “For Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of a superfluous cause.” “While a blanket assertion about the simplicity of Nature is hardly uncommon in the history of science, today it is viewed with suspicion.” Bontly:  “Newton’s reasons were presumably theological.” “If I knew that the Creator values simplicity and economy, I should expect the creatION to display these qualities as well.” “Lacking much information about the Creator’s tastes, however, the assumption becomes quite difficult, if not impossible, to support.”Cfr. literature on ‘biological diversity.’Bontly: “(Sober discusses several objections to an ontological justification for the principle of parsimony. Philosopher of science Mary Hesse surveys several other attempts to justify the use of parsimony and simplicity in scientific inference. Philosophers of science today are largely persuaded that the role of parsimony is ‘purely methodological’ epistemological, pragmatist, rather than ontological — that it is rational to reject unnecessary posits (or complex, dis-unified theories) no matter what Nature is like. One might argue, for instance, that the principle of parsimony is really just a principle of minimum risk. The more existence claims one accepts, the greater the chance of accepting a falsehood. Better, then, to do without any existence claim one does not need. Philosopher J. J. C. Smart attributes this view to John Stuart Mill.”Cf. Grice: “Not to bring more Grice to the Mill.”Bontly: “Now, risk minimization may be a reasonable methodological principle, but it does not suffice to explain the role of parsimony in natural science. When a theoretical posit is deemed explanatorily superfluous, the accepted practice is not merely to withhold belief in its existence but to conclude positively that it does not exist. As Sober notes, ‘Occam’s razor preaches atheism about unnecessary entities, not just a-gnosticism.’” Similarly, Grice’s razor tells us that we should believe an expression E to be unambiguous, aequi-vocal, monosemous, unless we have evidence for a second meaning. The absence of evidence for this alleged additional, ‘multiplied’ ‘sense’ is presumed to count as evidence that this alleged second, additional, multiplied, sense is absent, does not exist. But an absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of an absence.” The difficult question about scientific methodology is why we should count one as the other. Why, that is, should a lack of evidence for an existence claim count as evidence for a non-existence claim? The minimum risk argument leaves this question unanswered. Indeed, philosophers of science have had so little success in explaining why parsimony should be a guide to truth that many are tempted to conclude that it and the other ‘super-empirical virtues’ have no epistemic value whatsoever. Their role is rather pragmatic, or aesthetic.”This is in part Strawson’s reply in his “If and the horseshoe” (1968), repr. in PGRICE, in Grandy/Warner. He says words to the effect: “Grice’s theory may be more BEAUTIFUL than mine, but that’s that!” (Strawson thinks that ‘if’ acts as ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ but in UNASSERTED clauses. So it’s a matter of a ‘conventional’ IMPLICATURUM to the inferrability of “if p, q” or “p; so, q.” I agree with Strawson that Grice’s account of ‘conventional’ implicaturum is not precisely too beautiful?Bontly: “Parsimony can make a theory easier to understand or apply, and it pleases those of us with a taste for desert landscapes, but (according to these sceptics) they do not make the theory any more likely to be true.”The reference to the ‘desert landscape’ is genial. Cfr. Strawson’s “A logician’s landscape.” Later in life, Grice indeed found it unfair that an explanation of cherry trees blooming in spring should be explained as a ‘desert landscape.’ “That’s impoverishing it!”Bontly: “van Fraassen, for instance, tells us that a super-empirical virtue ‘does not concern the relation between the theory and the world, but rather the use and usefulness of the theory; it provide reasons to prefer the theory independently of questions of truth.” “If that were correct, it would be doubtful that parsimony can shoulder the burden Grice places on it.” “For then the conventionalist may happily grant that a pragmatic explanation is clever and elegant, and beautiful.”  “The conventionalist can agree that an implicaturum account comprehends a maximum of phenomena with a minimum of theoretical apparatus.” “But when it comes to truth, or alethic satisfactoriness, as Grice would prefer, a conventionalist may insist that parsimony is simply irrelevant.” “One Gricean sympathizer who apparently accepts the ‘aesthetic’ view of parsimony is the philosopher of science R. C. S. Walker (1975), who claims that the ‘[c]hoice between Grice’s and Cohen’s theories is an aesthetic matter’ and concludes that ‘we should not regard either the Conversationalist Hypothesis or its [conventionalist] rivals as definitely right or wrong.’” Cfr. Strawson in Grandy/Warner, but Strawson is no Griceian sympathiser! “Now asking Grice to justify the principle of parsimony may seem a bit unfair.” “Grice also assumes the reality of the external world, the existence of intentional mental states, and the validity of modus ponens.” “Need Grice justify these assumptions as well?” “Of course not!” “But even if the epistemic value of parsimony is taken entirely for granted, it is unclear why it should even count in semantics.” “All sides agree, after all, that many, perhaps even most, expressions of natural language are allegedly ‘ambiguous.’” “There are both poly-semies, where one word has multiple, though related, meanings (‘horn’, ‘trunk’), and homo-nymies, where two distinct words have converged on a single phonological form (‘bat’, ‘pole’).”  “The distinction between poly-semy and homo-nymy is notoriously difficult to draw with any precision, chiefly because we lack clear criteria for the identity of words (Bach).” “If words are individuated phono-logically, there would be no homo-nyms.” “If words are individuated semantically, there would be no poly-semies.” “Individuating words historically leads to some odd consequences: e.g., that ‘bank’ is poly-semous rather than homo-nymous, since the ‘sense’ in which it means financial institution and the ‘sense’ in which it means edge of a river are derived from a common source.” “I owe this example to David Sanford. For further discussion, see Jackendoff.”Soon at Hartford. And Sanford is right!Bontly: “Given that ambiguity is hardly rare, then, one wonders whether a semantic theory ought really to minimize it (cf. Stampe, 1974).” “One might indeed argue that the burden of proof here is on the pragmatist, not the ambiguity or polysemy theorist.” “Perhaps we ought to assume, ceteris paribus, that every regular use of an expression represents a SPECIAL sense.” “Such a methodological policy may be less economical than Grice’s, but it does extend the same pattern of explanation to all alleged ambiguities, and it might even accord better with the haphazard ways in which natural languages are prone to evolve (Millikan, 2001).”Yes, the evolutionary is the way to go!Bontly: “So Grice owe us some reason to think that parsimony and the like should count in semantics.” “He needn’t claim, of course, that parsimony is always and everywhere a reason to believe a hypothesis true.” “He needn’t produce a global justification for Occam’s Razor, that is—a local justification, one specific to language, would suffice.” “I propose to set aside the larger issue about parsimony in general, therefore, and argue that Modified Occam’s Razor can be justified by considerations peculiar to the study of language.” “Now for A Developmental Account of Semantic Parsimony.”  “My approach to parsimony in linguistics is inspired by Sober’s work on parsimony arguments in evolutionary biology.”And Grice was an evolutionary philosopher of sorts.Bontly: “In Sober’s view, philosophers have misunderstood the role of parsimony in scientific inference, taking it to function as a global, domain-general principle of scientific reasoning (akin perhaps to an axiom of the probability calculus).” “A more realistic analysis, Sober claims, shows that parsimony arguments function as tacit references to domain-specific process assumptions — to assumptions (whether clearly articulated or not) about the process(es) that generate the phenomena under study.” “Where these processes tend to be frugal, parsimony is a reasonable principle of theory-choice.” “Where they are apt to be profligate, it is not.” “What makes parsimony reasonable in one area of inquiry may, on Sober’s view, be quite unrelated to the reasons it counts in another.” “Parsimony arguments in the units of selection controversy, for instance, rest on one set of process assumptions (i.e. assumptions about the conditions necessary for ‘group’ selection to occur).” “The application of parsimony to ‘phylogenetic’ inference rests on a completely different set of assumptions (about rates of evolutionary change).” “As Sober notes, in either case the assumptions are empirically testable, and it could turn out that parsimony is a reliable principle of inference in one, both, or neither of these areas. Sober’s approach amounts to a thorough-going local reductionism about parsimony.It counts in theory-choice if and only if there are domain-specific reasons to think the theory which is more economical (in some specifiable respect) is more likely to be true. The ‘only if’ claim is the more controversial part of the bi-conditional, and I need not defend it here. For present purposes I need only the weaker claim that domain-specific assumptions can be sufficient to justify using parsimony — that parsimony is a sensible principle of inference if the phenomena in question result from processes themselves biased, as it were, towards parsimony. Now, in natural-language semantics, the phenomena in question are ordinarily taken to be the semantic rules or conventions shared by a community of speakers.”Cf. Peacocke on Grice as applied to ‘community of utterers,’ in Evans/McDowell, Truth and meaning, Oxford. Bontly: “The task is to uncover the ‘arbitrary’ mappings between a sound and a meaning (or concepts or referent) of which utterers have tacit knowledge. This ‘semantic competence’ is shaped by both the inputs that language learners encounter and the cognitive processes that guide language acquisition from infancy through adulthood. So the question is whether that input and these processes are themselves biased toward semantic parsimony and against the acquisition of multiple meanings for single phonological forms. As I shall now argue, there are several reasons to suspect that such a bias should exist. Psychologists often conceptualize learning in general and word learning in particular as a process of generating and testing hypotheses. A child (or, in many cases, an adult) encounters an unfamiliar word, forms one or more hypotheses as to its possible meaning, checks the hypotheses against the ways in which he hears the word used, and finally adopts one such hypothesis. This ‘child-as-scientist’ model is plainly short on details, but whatever mechanism implements the generating and testing, it would seem that the process cannot be repeated with every subsequent exposure to a word. Once a hypothesis is accepted — a word learned — the process effectively halts, so that the next time the child hears that word, he doesn’t have to hypothesize. Instead, the child can access the known meaning and use it to grasp the intended message. For that reason, an unfamiliar word ought to be the only one to trigger the learning process, and that of course makes ambiguity problematic. Take a person who knows one meaning of an ambiguous word, but not the other. To him, the word is not unfamiliar, even when used with an unfamiliar meaning. At least, it will not sound unfamiliar. So, the learning process will not kick in unless some other source of evidence suggests another, as-yet-unknown meaning. Presumably the evidence will come from ‘anomalous’ utterances: i.e. uses that are contextually absurd, given only the familiar meaning. This is not to say, of course, that hearing one anomalous utterance would be sufficient to re-start the learning process. Since there are other reasons why an utterance may seem anomalous (e.g. the utterer simply misspoke), it might take several anomalies to convince one that the word has another meaning. In the absence of anomalies, however, it seems highly unlikely that learners would seriously entertain the possibility of a second sense. A related point is that acquisition involves, or is at least thought to involve, a variety of ‘boot-strapping’ operations where the learner uses what he knows of the language in order to learn more.”Oddly Grice has a bootstrap principle (it relates to having one’s metalanguage as rich as one’s object-language.Bontly: “It has been argued, for instance, that children use semantic information to constrain hypotheses about words’ syntactic features (Pinker) and, conversely, syntactic information to constrain hypotheses about words’ semantic features (Gleitman). Likewise, children must surely use their knowledge of some words’ meanings to constrain hypotheses as to the meanings of others, thus inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words from context. However, that process only works insofar as one can safely assume that the familiar words in an utterance are typically used with their familiar meanings. If it were assumed that familiar words are typically used with unknown meanings, the bootstraps would be too weak. Together, these considerations point to the hypothesis that language acquisition is semantically conservative. Children will posit new meanings for familiar words only when necessary—only when they encounter utterances that make no sense to them, even though all the words are familiar. Interestingly, experimental work in language acquisition provides empirical evidence for much the same conclusion. Psychologists have long observed that children have considerable difficulties learning and using homo-nyms (Peters and Zaidel), leading many to suspect that young children operate under the helpful, though mistaken, assumption that a word can have but one meaning (Slobin). Children have similar difficulties acquiring synonyms and may likewise assume that a given meaning can be represented by at most one word. (Markman & Wachtel, see Bloom for a different explanation). I cannot here survey the many experimental studies bearing on this hypothesis, but one series of experiments conducted by Michele Mazzocco is particularly germane. Mazzocco presents children from several age-groups, as well as adults, with stories designed to mimic one’s first encounter with the secondary meaning of an ambiguous word. To control the effects of antecedent familiarity with secondary meanings, the stories used familiar words (e.g., ‘rope’) as if they had further unknown meanings—as ‘pseudo-homo-nyms’.For comparison, other stories included a non-sense word (e.g. ‘blus’) used as if it had a conventional meaning — as a ‘pseudo-word’ — to mimic one’s first encounter with an entirely unfamiliar word.”Cf. Grice’s seminar at Berkeley: “How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways.”“A pirot  can be said to potch or cotch an obble as fang or feng or fid with another obble.”“A person can be said to perceive or cognize an object as having the property f or f2 or being in a relation R with another object.”Bontly: Some stories, finally, used only genuine words with only their familiar meanings. After hearing a story, subjects are presented with a series of illustrations and asked to pick out the item referred to in the story. In a subsequent experiment, subjects had to act out their interpretations of the stories. In the pseudo-homo-nym condition, one picture would always illustrate the word’s conventional but contextually inappropriate meaning, one would depict the unfamiliar but contextually appropriate meaning, and the rest would be distractors. As one would expect, adults and older children (10- to 12-year-olds) performed equally well on these tasks, reliably picking out the intended meanings for familiar words, non-sense words and pseudo-homonyms alike. Young children (3- to 5-year-olds), on the other hand, could understand the stories where familiar words were used conventionally, and they were reasonably good at inferring the intended meanings of non-sense words from context, but they could not do so for pseudo-homonyms. Instead, they reliably chose the picture illustrating the familiar meaning, even though the story made that meaning quite inappropriate. These results are noteworthy for several reasons. It is significant, first of all, that spontaneous positing of ambiguities did not occur. As long as the known meaning of a word comported with its use in a story, subjects show not the slightest tendency to assign that word a new, secondary meaning—just as one would expect if the acquisition process were semantically conservative. Second, note that performance in the non-sense word condition confirms the familiar finding that young children can acquire the meanings of novel words from context — just as the bootstrapping procedure suggests. Unlike older children and adults, however, these young children are unable to determine the meanings of pseudo-homo-nyms from context, even though they could do so for pseudo-words — exactly what one would expect if young children assumed that words can have one meaning only. Why young children would have such a conservative bias remains controversial. Unfortunately it would take us too far afield to delve into this debate here. Doherty finds evidence that the understanding of ambiguity is strongly correlated with a grasp of synonymy, suggesting that these biases have a common source.” Doherty also finds evidence that the understanding of ambiguity/synonymy is strongly predicted by the ability to reason about false beliefs, suggesting the intriguing hypothesis that young children’s biases are due to their lack of a representational ‘theory of mind’).”  Cf. Grice on transmission of true beliefs in “Meaning, revisited.” – a transcendental argument.Bontly: “Nonetheless, Mazzocco’s results provide empirical evidence for our conjecture that a person will typically posit a second meaning for a known word only when necessary (and, as with young children, not always then). And that, of course, is precisely the sort of process assumption that would make Grice’s “M. O. R.” a reasonable principle for theory choice in semantics. For we have been operating under the assumption that the principal task of linguistic semantics is to describe the competent speaker’s tacit linguistic knowledge. If that knowledge is shaped by a process biased toward semantic parsimony, our semantic theorizing ought surely to be biased in the same direction. Is Pragmatism Vindicated?” That said, the question is still open whether Grice’s “M. O. R.,” understood now developmentally, ontogenetically, and not phylogenetically, as perhaps Millikan would prefer, has such consequences as Gricea typically assumes. In particular, it remains for us to consider whether and, if so, when the above process assumptions favor implicaturum hypotheses over ambiguity hypotheses, and the answer would seem to hang on two further issues. First, there is in each case the question whether a child learning the language will find it necessary to posit a second sense for a given expression. The fact that linguists, apprised as they are of the principles of conversation, find it unnecessary to introduce a second sense for (e.g.) ‘or’ does NOT imply that children would find it unnecessary. For one thing, children might acquire the various uses of ‘or’ well before they have any pragmatic understanding themselves.”Cfr. You can eat the cake or the sandwich.”Bontly: Even if they do not, the order in which the various uses are acquired could make considerable difference.It may be, for instance, that a child who first learned the inclusive use of ‘or’ would have no need to posit a second exclusive sense, whereas a child who originally interpreted ‘or’ exclusively might need eventually to posit an additional, inclusive sense. So we may well have to determine what meaning children first attach to an expression in order to determine whether they would find it necessary to posit a second. The issues raised above are pretty clearly empirical ones, and significant inter-personal differences could complicate matters considerably. Just for the sake of argument, however, let us grant that children do indeed first learn to interpret ‘or’ inclusively, to interpret ‘and’ as mere conjunction, and so on. Let us assume, that is, that the meanings which Grice typically takes to be conventional are just that. In fact, the assumption that weak uses are typically learned first has garnered some empirical support, as one referee brought to my attention. Paris shows that children are less likely than adults to interpret ‘or’ exclusively (see also Sternberg, and Braine and Rumain). More recent experimental work indicates that children first learn to interpret ‘and’ a-temporally (Noveck and Chevaux) and ‘some’ weakly (as compatible with ‘all’) (Noveck, 2001). Even so, it remains an interesting question whether children would posit secondary senses for any of these expressions, and Grice would be on firm ground in arguing that they would not. First, the ‘ambiguities’ discussed at the outset all involve secondary uses which can, with the help of pragmatic principles, be understood in terms of the presumed primary meaning of the expression. If a child, encountering this secondary use for the first time, already knows the primary meaning, and if he has moreover an understanding of the norms of conversation—if he is a ‘Griceian child’ —, he ought to be able to understand the secondary use perfectly well. He can recover the implicaturum and infer the speaker’s meaning from the encoded meaning of the utterance. To the ‘Griceian child,’ therefore, the utterance would not be anomalous. It would make perfect sense in context, giving him no reason to posit a secondary meaning. But what about children who are not yet Griceans — children too young to understand pragmatic principles or to have the conceptual resources to make inferences about other people’s likely communicative intentions? While there seems to be no consensus as to when pragmatic abilities emerge, several considerations suggest that they develop fairly early. Bloom argues that pragmatic understanding is part of the best account of how children learn the meanings of words. Papafragou discusses evidence that children can calculate implicaturums as early as age three. Such children, knowing only the primary meaning of the expression, would be unable to recover the conversational implicaturum and thus unable to grasp the secondary use of the expression via the pragmatic route. Nonetheless, I argue that they would still (at least in most cases) find it unnecessary to posit a second meaning for the expression. Consider: the ‘ambiguities’ at issue all involve secondary meanings which are specificatory, being identical to the primary but for some additional feature making it more restricted or specific. The primary and second meanings would thus be privative, as opposed to polar, opposites; Zwicky and Sadock). What a speaker means when he uses the expression in this secondary way, therefore, would typically imply the proposition he would mean if he were speaking literally (i.e. if he were using the primary meaning of the expression). One could thus say something true using the secondary sense only in contexts where one could say something true using the primary sense—whenever ‘P exclusive-or Q’ is true, so is ‘P inclusive-or Q’; whenever ‘P and-then Q’ is true, so is ‘P and Q’; and so on. Thus even when the intended meaning involves the alleged second sense, the utterance would still come out true if interpreted with the primary sense in mind. And this means, crucially, that the utterance would not seem anomalous, there being no obvious clash between the primary interpretation of the utterance and the conversational context. The utterance may well be pragmatically inappropriate when interpreted this way, but our pre-Gricean child is insensitive to such niceties. Otherwise, he would be already a ‘Gricean’ child. On our account, therefore, the pre-Gricean child still sees no need to posit a second meaning for the expression, even though he could not grasp the intended (specificatory) meaning. We may illustrate the above with the help of an ‘ambiguity’ in the indefinite description (“a dog”) made famous by Grice. A philosopher would ordinarily take an expressions of the form ‘an F’ to be a straightforward existential quantifier, “(Ex)”, as would seem to be the case in ‘I am going to a meeting’ On the other hand, an utterance of ‘I broke a finger’ seems to imply that it is my finger which I broke (unless you are a nurse – I think Horn’s cancellation goes), whereas ‘I saw a dog in the backyard’ would seem to carry the opposite sort of implication — i.e. that it was not my dog which I saw.”Grice finds this delightful ‘reductio’ of the sense-positer: “a” would have _three_ senses!Bontly: “We have then the potential for a three-way ambiguity, but our ruminations on word learning argue against it.”Take a child who has learned (somehow) the weak (existential quantier) use of ‘an F’ (Ex)Fx, but has for some reason never been exposed to strong uses: ‘my,’ ‘not mine.’ Now the child hears his mother say ‘Come look! There is a dog in the backyard!’ Running to the window, the child sees not his mother’s pet dog Fido, but some strange dog, that is not her mother’s. To an adult, this would be entirely predictable.” Using the indefinite description ‘a dog’ (logical form, “(Ex)Dx”) instead of the name for the utterer’s dog would lead one to expect that Fido (the utterer’s dog) is not the dog in question.”Actually, like Ryle, Grice has a shaggy-dog story in WJ5, “That dog is hairy-coated.” “Shaggy, if you must!”. Bontly: “And if the child were of an age to have a rudimentary understanding of the pragmatic aspects of language use, he would make the same prediction and thus see no need here to posit a second ‘sense’ for ‘an F,’ and take ‘not mine’ as an implicaturum.”It’s different with what Grice would have as an ‘established idiom’ (his example, “He’s pushing up the daisies,” but not “He is fertilizing the daffodils”) as one might argue that “I broke a finger” is. Bontly: “The child would not, because the intended, contextually appropriate interpretation would be clear given the primary meaning plus pragmatics, or implicaturum. But even if the child fails to grasp the intended meaning of his mother’s remark, it still seems unlikely that the child would be compelled to posit an ambiguity. No matter what the child’s mother means, there is, after all, a dog in the backyard (“Gotcha! That’s _a_ dog, my Fido is, ain’t it?!”). So the primary interpretation still yields a true proposition. While the ‘pre-Gricean child’ thus misses (part of) the intended meaning of the utterance, still he would not experience a clash between his interpretation and the contextually appropriate interpretation. Perhaps the pre-Gricean child could be forced to see an anomaly. Consider the following example. A parent offers her pre-Gricean child dessert, saying, ‘Ice-cream, or cake?’ When the child helps himself to some of each, the mother removes the cake with a look of annoyance and says:‘I said ice-cream OR cake’.  “While the mother’s behavioural response makes it abundantly clear that the child’s ‘inclusive’ interpretation is inappropriate, there are several reasons why he might still refrain from positing an ambiguity. For one, young children, who are more Griceian (even pre-Griceian) and logical than a few adults, appear to operate under the assumption that a word can have one meaning only, and it may be that pre-Gricean children are simply unable to override this assumption. This would seem particularly likely if Doherty is right that the ability to understand ambiguity requires a robust ‘theory of mind’.At any rate, the position taken here is that recognition of anomaly is necessary for one to posit a second meaning, not that it is sufficient. Contrast this with a similar case where, coming to the window, the child sees no dog but does see (e.g.) a motorcycle, a tree, a bird, and a fence.Then he would have reason to consider an ambiguity, though other explanations might also fit.” “Perhaps Mom was joking or hallucinating.” The claim is, then, that language acquisition works in such a way as to make it unlikely that learners would introduce a second senses for the ‘ambiguities’ in question. Of course, that claim is contingent on a very large assumption — viz., that the meaning which Grice take to be lexically ‘encoded’ is indeed the primary meaning of the expression — and that assumption may be mistaken.” In the continuing debate over Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction, for instance, Grice takes it as uncontroversial that Russell on ‘the’ provides at least one of the conventional interpretations for sentences of the form ‘The king of France is bald’ (i.e., the attributive interpretation).” Grice’s example in “Vacuous names,” that Bontly quotes,  is “Jones’s butler mixed our coats and hats,” when “Jones’s butler” is actually Jones’s haberdasher dressed as a butler for the occasion.” So Grice distinguishes between THE butler (identificatory) and ‘the’ butler (non-identificatory, whoever he might be). Bontly: From there, they argue that we needn’t posit a secondary (referential) semantics for descriptions since the referential use can be captured by Russell’s theory supplemented by Grice’s pragmatics. Grice, 1969 (Vacuous Names); Kripke, 1977; Neale, 1990). From a developmental perspective, however, the ‘uncontroversial’ assumption that Russell on ‘the’ provides the primary meaning for description phrases is certainly questionable. It being likely that the vast majority of descriptions children hear early in life are used referentially, Grice’s position could conceivably have things exactly backwards— perhaps the referential is primary with the attributive acquired later, either as an additional meaning or a pragmatic extension. Still, the fact, if it is a fact, that a referential use is more common in children’s early environment does not imply that the referential is acquired first.” Exclusive uses of ‘or’ are at least as frequent as inclusive uses, and yet there is a good deal of evidence that the inclusive is developmentally primary. (Paris, Sternberg, Braine and Rumain). Either way, the point remains that plausible assumptions about language acquisition do indeed justify a role for parsimony in semantics. These ‘process’ assumptions may, of course, turn out to be incorrect.” If the evidence points the other way—if it emerges that the learning process posits ambiguities quite freely—then Grice’s “M. O. R.” could conceivably be groundless.”Making it a matter of empirical support or lack thereof, and that was perhaps why Millikan thought that was the wrong way to go? But then if she thought the evolutionary was the right way to go, wouldn’t THAT make Grice’s initially ‘sort of’ analytic pragmatist methodological philosophical decision a matter of fact or lack thereof? Bontly: “Nonetheless, we can see now that the debate between Grice and the conventionalists is ultimately an empirical, rather than, as Grice perhaps thougth, a conceptual one. Choices between pragmatic and semantic accounts may be under-determined by Grice’s intuitions about meaning and use, but they need not be under-determined tout court. Then there’s Tradeoffs, Dead Metaphors, and a Dilemma. The developmental approach to parsimony provides some purchase on the problems regarding tradeoffs and dead metaphors as well. The former problem is that parsimony can be a double-edged sword. While an ambiguity account does multiply senses, the implicaturum account appears to multiply inferential labour. Hearers have to ‘work out’ or ‘calculate’ the utterer’s meaning from the conversational principle, without the benefit of a list of possible meanings as in disambiguation. Pragmatic inference thus seems complex and time-consuming. But the fact is that we are rarely conscious of engaging in any reasoning of the sort Grice requires, pace his Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Consequently, the claim that communicators actually work through all these complicated inferences seems psychologically unrealistic. To combat these charges, Grice’s response is to claim that implicaturum calculation is largely unconscious and implicit.”Indeed Grice’s principle of economy of rational effort. Bontly: “Background assumptions can be taken for granted, steps can be skipped, and only rarely need the entire process breach the surface of consciousness. This picture seems particularly plausible with a generalised implicaturum as opposed to a particularized one.” When a particular use of an expression E, though unconventional, has become standard or regular (“I broke a finger”? “He’s pushing up the daisies”), the inferential process can be considerably stream-lined; it gets ‘short-circuited’ or ‘compressed by precedent’ (Bach and Harnish). “Bach’s and Harnish’s notion of short-circuited inference is similar to but not quite the same as J. L. Morgan’s notion of short-circuited implicaturum. The latter involves conventions of use (as Searle would put it), to which Bach and Harnish see their account as an alternative. Levinson objects to Bach’s and Harnish’s characterization of default inferences as those compressed by the weight of precedent. A generalised implicaturum, Levinson says, ‘is generative, driven by general heuristics and not dependent on routinization’ But Levinson’s complaint against Bach and Harnish may seem uncharitable. Even on Bach’s and Harnish’s view, where a default inference is that ‘compressed by the weight of precedent’, a generalised implicaturum is still generative: it is still generated by the maxims of conversation. Only the stream-lined character of the inference is dependent on precedent, not the implicaturum itself. If the addressee has calculated the EXCLUSIVE meaning of ‘or’ enough times in the past (from  his mother, we’ll assume) it becomes the default, allowing one to proceed directly to the exclusive interpretation (unless something about the context provides a clue that the standard interpretation would here be inappropriate. Now, the idea that the generalised implicaturum can be the default interpretation, reached without all the fancy inference, provides an obvious reply to the worry about tradeoffs. While it is true that a pragmatic inference, as Grice calls it, in contrast with the ‘logical inference, -- “Retrospective Epilogue” -- are in principle abductive, fairly complex and potentially laborious, familiarity can simplify the process enormously, to the point where it becomes no more difficult than dis-ambiguation.” But the appeal to a default interpretation raises an interesting difficulty that (to my knowledge) Grice never adequately addressed. It is now quite unclear why this default interpretation should be considered an implicaturum rather than an additional sense of the expression.”Because it’s cancellable?Bontly: “To say that it is a default interpretation is, after all, to say that utterers and addressees learn to associate that interpretation with the type of expression in question. The default meaning is known in advance, and all one has to do is be on the lookout for information that could rule it out. “‘Short-circuited’ implicaturum-calculation is thus hard to differentiate from disambiguation, making Grice’s hypothesis look more like a notional variant than a real competitor to the ambiguity hypothesis. Insofar as Grice has considered this problem, his answer appears to be that linguistic meanings, being conventional, are inherently arbitrary.”cf. Bach and Harnish, 1979, pp. 192–195).”Indeed, in his evolutionary take on language, it all starts with Green’s self-expression. You get hit, and you express pain unvoluntarily. Then you proceed to simulate the response in absence of the hit, but the meaning is “I’m in pain.” Finally, you adopt the conventions, arbitrary, and say, ‘pain,’ which is only arbitrarily connected with, well, the pain. It is the last stage that Grice stresses as ‘artificial,’ and ‘arbitrary,’ “non-iconic,” as he retorts to Peirceian terminology he was familiar with since his Oxford days. Bontly: “The exclusive use of ‘or’, on the other hand, is entirely predictable from the conversational principle, so there is nothing arbitrary about it. Thus the exclusive interpretation cannot be part of the encoded meaning, even if it is the default interpretation. Familiarity with that use, in other words, can remove the need to go through the canonical inference, but it does not change the fact that the use has a ‘natural’ (i.e., non-conventional, principled, indeed rational) explanation. It doesn’t change the fact that it is calculable. At this point, however, Grice’s defense of default pragmatic interpretations collides with our remaining issue, the problem of a dead metaphor, such as “He is pushing up the daisies.”” Or as Grice prefers, an ‘established’ or ‘recognised’ ‘idiom.’Bontly: “A metaphor and other conversational implicatura can become conventionalized and ‘die’, turning into new senses. In many such cases the original rationale for the use is long forgotten, but in other cases the dead metaphor remains calculable. A dead metaphors thus pose a nasty, macabre?, dilemma for Grice.”Especially if the implicaturum is “He is dead”!Bontly: “On the one hand, it is tempting to argue that a dead metaphor involves a new conventional meaning precisely because the interpretation in question is no longer actually inferred via Gricean inferences (though one could do so if one had to—if, say, one somehow forgot that the expression had this secondary meaning). If a conversational implicaturum had to be not just calculaBLE but actually calculatED, that would suffice to explain why this one-time, one-off, implicaturum is now semantically significant. But that reply is apparently closed to pragmatists, for then it will be said that the same is true of (e.g.) the exclusive use of ‘or.’ The exclusive interpretation is certainly calculabLE, but since no one actually calculatES it (except in the most unusual of circumstances, as Grice at Harvard!), the implication should be considered semantic, not pragmatic. On the other hand, Grice might maintain that an implicaturum need only be calculabLE and stick by their view that the exclusive reading of ‘or’ is conversationally implicated. But then we shall have to face the consequence that many a dead metaphor (“He is pushing up the daisies”) is likewise calculabLE and thus, according to the present view, ought not to be considered conventional meanings of the expressions in question, which in most cases seems quite wrong.”I’m never sure what Grice means by an ‘established idiom.’ Established by whom? Perhaps he SHOULD consult the dictionary every now and then! Sad the access to OED3 is so expensive!Bontly: What one needs, evidently, is some reason to treat these two types of cases differently.To treat the exclusive use of ‘or’ as an implicaturum (even though it is only rarely calculatED as such) while at the same time to view (e.g.) the once metaphorical use of ‘incense’ (or ‘… pushing up the daisies”) as semantically significant (even though it remains calculabLE).” And the developmental account of parsimony offers just such a reason. On the present view, the reason that the ambiguity account has the burden of proof has to do with the nature of the acquisition, learning, ontogenetical process and specifically with the presumption that language learners will avoid postulating unnecessary senses. But the implicaturum must be calculable by the learner, given his prior understanding of the expression E and his level of pragmatic sophistication.”Grice was a sophisticated. As I think Dora B.-O knows, Moore has been claiming that Grice’s idea that animals cannot mean, because they are not ‘sophisticated’ enough, is an empirical claim, even for Grice!Bontly: “t may be, therefore, that children at the relevant developmental stage have no difficulty understanding the exclusive use of ‘or’ (etc.) as an implicaturum and yet lack the understanding necessary to predict that ‘incense’ could be used to mean to make or become angry, or that to say of someone that he ‘is pushing up the daisies,’ means that, having died and getting buried, the corpse is helping the flowers to grow. The child might not realize, for instance, that ‘incense’ also means an aromatic substance that burns with a pleasant odour, and even those who do probably lack the general background knowledge necessary to appreciate the metaphorical connections between burning and emotion.”Cf. Turner and Fauconnier on ‘blends.’Bontly: Either way, the metaphor would be dead to the child, forcing him to learn that use the same way they learn any arbitrary convention.”It may do to explore ‘established idioms’ in, say, parts of England, which are not so ‘established’ in OTHER parts. Nancy Mitford with his U and non-U distinction may do. “He went to Haddon Hall” invites, for Mitford, the ‘unintended’ implicaturum that the utterer is NOT upper-class. “Surely we drop “hall.’ What else can Haddon be?” But the inference may be lacking for a non-U addressee or utterer. Similarly, in the north of England, “our Mary,” invites the implicaturum of ‘affection,’ and this may go over the head of members of the south-of-England community.Bontly: “The way out of the dilemma, then, is to look to learning.”Alla Kripkenstein?Bontly: To the problem of tradeoffs, Grice can reply that it is better to multiply (if we must use the Occamist verb) inferences – logical inference and pragmatic inference -- than multiply senses because language acquisition is biased in that direction. And Grice may likewise answer the problem of a dead metaphor, or established idiom like, “He’s been pushing up the daisies for some time, now. The reason that Grice’s “M. O. R.” does not mandate an implicaturum account for Grice as well is that such a dead metaphor or established idiom is not calculable by children at the time they learn such expressions, even if they are calculable by some adult speakers.”Is that a fact? I would think that a child is a ‘relentless literalist,’ as Grice called Austin. “Pushing up the daisies?” “I don’t see any daisies!”I think Brigitte Nerlich has a similar example re: irony: MOTHER: What a BEAUTIFUL day! (ironically)CHILD: What do you mean? It’s pouring and nasty. MOTHER: I was being ironic.I don’t think the child is going to posit a second sense to ‘beautiful’ meaning ‘nasty.’Bontly: “For the deciding question in applying Grice’s “M. O. R.” is NOT whether the implicaturum account is available to a philosopher like Grice, but whether it is available to the learner! On this way of carving things up, by the way, some alleged ambiguities which Grice would treat as implicatura could turn out to be semantically significant after all. Likewise, some allegedly dead metaphor may turn out to be very much alive.” Look! He did kick the bucket!” “But he’s PRETENDING to die, dear! Some uses, finally, may vary from utterer to utterer, there being no guarantee that every utterer will have learned the use in the same way. As a conclusion, a better understanding of developmental processes might therefore enlarge our appreciation of the ways in which semantics and pragmatics interact.”Indeed.REFERENCES Atlas, J. D. “Philosophy without Ambiguity.” Oxford: Clarendon Press. E: Wolfson, Oxford. Philosopher. And S. Levinson, “It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version),” in P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Bach, K. “Thought and Reference,” Oxford.“Conversational impliciture,” Mind & Language, 9And R. Harnish, “Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, P. “How Children Learn the Meanings of Words,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  “Mind-reading, communication and the learning of names for things,” Mind & Language, 17Braine, M. and Rumain, B. “Development of comprehension of ‘or’: evidence for a sequence of developmental competencies,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31. Davis, S. (ed.) “Pragmatics: A Reader,” Oxford Devitt, M. “The case for referential descriptions,” in M. Reimer/A. Bezuidenhout, “Descriptions and Beyond,” Oxford Doherty, M. “Children’s understanding of homonymy: meta-linguistic awareness and false belief,” Journal of Child Language, 27 Gazdar, G. “Pragmatics: Implicaturum, Presupposition, and Logical Form,” New York: Academic Press. Gleitman, L. “The structural sources of verb meanings,” Language Acquisition, 1Grice, H. P. “Vacuous names,” in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, Words and Objections. Dordrecht: Reidel. Repr. in part in Ostertag, “Definite descriptions,” MIT.Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58. Reprinted in Grice, 1989, and Davis, 1991. Grice, P. 1978: Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 113–128. Reprinted in Grice, 1989. Presupposition and conversational implicaturum. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 183–198. Reprinted in Grice, 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hesse, M. “Simplicity,” in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: MacMillan.Jackendoff, R. “Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution,” Oxford. Kripke, S. “Speaker’s reference and semantic reference,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Levinson, S. “Pragmatics,” Cambridge.“Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicaturum,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Markman, E./G. Wachtel, “Childrens’ use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meaning of words,” Cognitive Psychology, 20Mazzocco, M. “Children’s interpretations of homonyms: A developmental study,” Journal of Child Language, 24Morgan, J. L. “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts,” n P. Cole (ed.): Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, reprinted in Davis, 1991. Newton, I. “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” A. Motte (trans.) and F. Cajori (rev.). Repr. in R. Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, vol. 34. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952. Noveck, I. When children are more logical than adults are: Experimental investigations of scalar implicaturum, Cognition, 78, 165–188. And F. Chevaux, “The pragmatic development of and. In A. Ho, S. Fish, and B. Skarabela, Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Papafragou, A. “Mind-reading and verbal communication,” Mind & Language, 17Paris, S. “Comprehension of language connectives and propositional logical relationships,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 16.Peters, A./E. Zaidel, “The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition, 8.Pinker, S. “Language Learnability and Language Development,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reimer, M. “Donnellan’s distinction/Kripke’s test.” Analysis, 58.Ruhl, C. “On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics,” Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Sadock, J. “On testing for conversational implicaturum,” in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Searle, J. R. “Indirect speech acts,” n P. Cole and J. Morgan, Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Slobin, D. “Crosslinguistic evidence for a language-making capacity,” n D. Slobin, The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Smart, J. “Ockham’s razor,” in J. Fetzer, “Principles of Philosophical Reasoning,” Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Allanheld. Sober, E. “The principle of parsimony,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 32“Reconstructing the Past,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.“Let’s razor Ockham’s razor,” in D. Knowles, Explanation and Its Limits. Cambridge.Stalnaker, R. C. “Pragmatic presupposition,” in M. Munitz/P. Unger, “Semantics and Philosophy,” New York: Academic Press, pp. 197–213. Repr. in Davis, 1991. Stampe, D. W. “Attributives and interrogatives,” in M. Munitz/P. Unger, Semantics and Philosophy. New York: Academic Press.Sternberg, R. “Developmental patterns in the encoding and combination of logical connectives,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 28 Van Fraassen, B. “The Scientific Image,” Oxford.Walker, R. C. S. “Conversational implicaturums: a reply to Cohen,” in S. W. Blackburn, Meaning, Reference, and Necessity. Cambridge. Ziff, P. “Semantic Analysis.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zwicky, A./J. Sadock, “Ambiguity tests and how to fail them,” in J. Kimball, Syntax and Semantics, vol. 4. New York: Academic Press.Refs: The Grice Papers, BANC, Bancroft.

modus. “The distinction between Judicative and Volitive Interrogatives corresponds with the difference between cases in which a questioner is indicated as being, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information ("Is he at home?"), and cases in which the questioner is indicated as being concerned to settle a problem about what he is to do ("Am I to leave the door open?", "Is the prisoner to be released?", "Shall I go on reading?"). This difference is better represented in Grecian and Roman.”The Greek word was ‘egklisis,’ which Priscian translates as ‘modus’ and defines as ‘inclinatio anima, affectionis demonstrans.’ The Greeks recognised five: horistike, indicativus, pronuntiativus, finitus, or definitivus, prostastike, imperativus, euktike, optativus, hypotaktike (subjunctivus, or conjunnctivus, but also volitivus, hortativus, deliberativus, iussivus, prohibitivus anticipativus ) and aparemphatos infinitivus or infinitus.

modus optativus. optative enclisis (gre: ευκτική έγκλιση, euktike enclisis, hence it may be seen as a modus optatīvus. Something that fascinated Grice. The way an ‘action’ is modalised in the way one describes it. He had learned the basics for Greek and Latin at Oxford, and he was exhilarated to be able to teach now on the subtleties of the English system of ‘aspect.’ To ‘opt’ is to choose. So ‘optativus’ is the deliberative mode. Grice proved the freedom of the will with a “grammatical argument.” ‘Given that the Greeks and the Romans had an optative mode, there is free will.” Romans, having no special verbal forms recognized as Optative, had no need of the designation modus optativus. Yet they sometimes used it, ad imitationem.

modality: Grice: “Modality is the manner in which a proposition (or statement) describes or applies to its subject matter. Derivatively,’ modality’ refers to characteristics of entities or states of affairs described by this or that modal proposition. Modalities are classified as follows. An assertoric proposition is the expression of a mere fact. Alethic modality includes necessity and possibility. The latter two sometimes are referred to respectively as the apodeictic modality and the problematic modality – vide Grice’s category of conversational mode – which covers three categories under what Kant calls the ‘Funktion’ of Mode – the assertoric, the apodeictic and the problematic). Grice takes ‘must’ as basic and defines ‘may’ in terms of ‘must.’ Causal modality includes causal necessity or empirical necessity and causal possibility or empirical possibility. The deontic modality includes obligation and permittedness. Of course this hardly means that ‘must’ is polysemous. It is ‘aequi-vocal’ at most. There is epistemic modality or modalities such as knowing that and doxastic modality (what Grice calls ‘credibility,’ as opposed to ‘desirability’) or modalities ones such as believing that. There is desiderative modality such as ‘willing that’ (what Grice calls ‘desirability’ as prior to ‘credibility.’) Following medieval philosophers, a proposition can be distinguished on the basis of whether the modality is introduced via adverbial modification of the “copula” or verb (“sensus divisus”) – as in Grice’s “Fido is shaggy” versus “Fido may be shaggy” – (in Roman, “Fidus est fidelis” versus “Fidus sit fidelis” – Grice: “Not to be confused with “Fido, sit!” ) or via a modal operator that modifies the proposition (“sensus compositus” – as preferred by Strawson: “It is the case that,” “It is not the case that,” “It must be the case that” and “It may be the case that”). Grice actually calls ‘adverbial modifier’ the external version. The internal version he just calls, as everybody at Clifton does, ‘conjugation’ (“We are not Tarzan!”). Grice: "In Gricese, in the instance in which the indicative occurs after "acsian" here is no doubt in the minds of those who ask the question, the content of the dependent clause being by them regarded as a fact. Mk. X. 2. Da genealsehton him pharisei and hine axodon hwseber alyfS senegum men his wif forlsetan. Interrogabant eum: INTERROGABANT EUM: SI LICET Si licet. L. XII. 36. beo gelice pam mannum be hyra hlaforde abidafr hwsenne he sy fram gyftum gecyrred. L. XXII. 24. hi flitun betwux him hwylc hyra wsere yldest. J. XIX. 24. uton hleotan hwylces ures heo sy. Mk. XV. 24. hi hlotu wurpon, hwset gehwa name. mittentes  sortem super eis, quis quid tolleret. MITTENTES SORTEM SVPER EIS, QVIS QVID TOLLERET. M. XXVII. 49. Uton geseon hwseber Helias cume and wylle  hyne alysan. Mk. V. 14. hi ut eodon bset hi gesawon hwset par gedon wsere. L. XIX. 3.he wolde geseon hwylc se hselend wsere. Mk. IX. 34.hi on wege smeadon hwylc hyra yldost wsere. Mk. IX. 10. L. XI, 38. XXII. 23. L. XIV. 28. Hwylc eower wyle timbrian anne stypel, hu ne sytt he serest and teleS pa andfengas be him behefe synt, hwseder he hsebbe hine to full-fremmenne? L. I. 29. ba wearS heo on his sprsece gedrefed, and pohte hwset seo greting wsere. L. Ill, 15. XIV. 31. L. IX. 46. bset gepanc eode on hig, hwylc hyra yldest wsere. Mk. XV. 47. Da com Maria Magdalene and Josepes Maria, and beheoldon hwar he geled wsere. aspiciebant. ubi poneretur ASPICIEBANT. VBI PONERETVR. (Looked around, in order to discover). The notion of purpose is sometimes involved, the indirect question having something of the force of a final clause: Mk. XIII. 11. ne foresmeage ge hwset ge specan. L. XXI. 14.  *) Direct rather than indirect question. L. XII. 22. ne beo ge ymbehydige eowre sawle hwset ge etan, ne eowrum lichaman hwset ge scrydun. M. VI, 25. L. XII. 11. ne beo ge embebencynde hu oSSe hwset ge specon oSSe andswarian. M. X. 19. ne bence ge hu oSSe hwset ge sprecun. L. XII. 29. Nelle ge secean hwset ge eton oSSe drincon.  J. XIX. 12. and sySSan sohte Pilatus hu he hyne forlete. quaerebat Pilatus dimittere eum. QVAEREBAT PILATVS DIMITTERE EVM  2. When the content of the dependent clause is regarded as an actual fact, which is the case when the leading verb expresses the act of learning, perceiving, etc., the indicative is used. M. VI. 28. BesceawiaS secyres Man hu hig weaxaO. M. XXI. 16.gehyrst bu hwset pas cwseoab? M. XXVII. 13. Ne gehyrst Jm hu fela sagena hig ongen be  secgeaS? L. XVIII. 6. M. IX. 13.leornigeab hwset is, ic wylle mildheortnesse nses  onssegdnesse. M. XXI. 20. loca nu hu hrsedlice bset fic-treow forscranc. Mk. XV. 4. loca hu mycelum hi be wregea§. M. XII. 4.Ne rsedde ge hwset David dyde hu he ineode on Godes hus, and set ba offring-hlafas? L. VI, 4. Mk. XII. 26. Be bam deadum ■ bset hi arison, ne rsedde ge on Moyses bec hu God to him cwseb? Mk. I, 26. Mk. V. 16. hi rehton him ba Se hit gesawon hu hit gedon  wses. L. VIII. 36. Da cyddon him ba Se gesawon hu he wses hal geworden. L. XXIII. 55.hig gesawon ba byrgene and hu his lichama aled wses.  J. XX. 14.heo geseah hwar se hselend stod. Vidit Jesum stantem.  *) VIDIT IESVM STANTEM. Not the endeavour to learn, perceive, which would require the SUBJUNCTIVE.  L. XXIV. 6. gebencao hu he spsec wiS eow. recordamini. Mk. VIII. 19.  3.After verbs of knowing both the indicative and subjunctive are used, usually the indicative. See general statement before § 2.  a) Indicative:*) L. XIII. 27. Ne cann ic hwanon ge synt. Mk. XIV, 68.  M. VI. 8. eower fseder wat hwset eow bearf ys.  M. XX. 22. Gyt nyton hwset gyt biddab.  L. XIII. 25. nat ic hwanon ge synt.   J. IX. 21. we nyton humete he nu gesyhb. quomodo autem  nunc videat, nescimus. QVOMODO AVTEM NVNC, NESCIMVS.  J. IX. 25. gif he synful is, bset ic nat.  si peccator est, nescio. SI PECCATOR EST, NESCIO. I know not if he is a sinner. gif he synful is, bset ic nat. "Gif he synful is, ᚦaet ic nat." In Oxonian: "If he sinful is, that I know not. M. XXVI. 70. Mk. IX. 6. X, 28. XIII, 33, 35. L. IX, 33.  XX, 7. XXII, 60. L. XXIII. 34. J. II. 9. III. 8. V. 13. VII.  27, 27, 28. VIII. 14, 14. J. IX. 29. 30. X. 6. XIII. 18.  XIV. 5. XV. 15.  b) Indicative and subjunctive: L. X. 22. nan man nat hwylc IS se sunu buton se fseder, ne hwylc SI Se fseder buton se sunu. -- In Latin, both times have subjunctive third person singular, "sit".)  c) Subjunctive.  a. In the protasis of a conditional sentence: J. VII. 51.Cwyst bu demS ure se senine man buton hyne man ser gehyre and wite hwset he do? J. XI. 57. pa pharisei hsefdon beboden gif hwa wiste hwaer he wsere paet he hyt cydde bset hig mihton hine niman. Translating the Latin subjunctive in 21 instances, the indic. in 9. As a rule, the mood (or mode, as Grice prefers) of the Latin (or Roman, as Grice prefers) verb does not determine the O. E. (or A. S., as Grice prefers) usage. In Anglo-Saxon, Oxonian, and Gricese, "si" seems to be no more than a literal (mimetic) rendering of Roman "sit," the correct third person singular subjunctive.  Ms. A. reads "ys" with'-sy" above. The Lind. gloss reads "is".  M. XXIV. 43. WitaS bset gyf se hiredes ealdor wiste on hwylcere tide se beof towerd waere witodlice he wolde wacigean. si sciret paterfamilias qua hora fur venturus esset vigilaret, (Cf. J. IV, 10. Gif bu wistest — hwaet se is etc.  Si scirest quis est. SI SCIREST QVIS EST.  /J. In the apodosis of a conditional sentence:  J. VII. 17. gyf hwa wyle his willan don he gecwemo (sic.  A.B.C. gecnsewS) be bsere lare hwseber heo si of Gode  hwseber be ic he me sylfum spece. L. VII. 39.  Gyf be man witega wsere witodlice he wiste hwset and hwylc bis wif wsere be his sethrinb bset heo synful  is. sciret utique quae et qualis est mulier. SCIRET VTIQVE QVAE ET QVALIS EST MULIER. y. After a hortatory subjunctive. M. VI. 3. Nyte bin wynstre hwset do bin swybre.  4. After verbs of saying and declaring. a) Here the indicative is used when the dependent clause contains a statement rather than a question. L. VIII. 39. cyS hu mycel be God gedon h3efS.  L. VIII. 47.Da bset wif geseah bset hit him nses dyrne heo com forht and astrehte hig to his fotum and geswutulude beforan eallum folce for hwylcum binge heo hit sethran and hu heo wearS sona hal. ob quam causam tetigerit eum, indicavit; et quemadmodum confestim SANATA SIT.  Further examples of the indicative are. L. XX. 2.*) Sege us on hwylcum anwalde wyrcst bu Sas bing  oSSe hwset ys se Se be bisne anwald sealde. L. VI. 47.  iElc bara be to me cymb and mine sprseca gehyi*S  and pa deb, ic him setywe hwam he gelic is.  b) When the subordinate clause refers to the future both the indicative and subjunctive are used:  *) Direct question, as the order of the words shows. Mk. XIII. 4. Sege us hwsenne bas bing gewurdon (A. geweorSon, H. gewurSen, R. gewurdon)  and hwylc tacen bid bsenne ealle bas Sing onginnaS beon geendud. (Transition to direct question.) Dic nobis, quando ista fient?  DIC NOBIS, QVANDO ISTA FIENT? et quod signum erit?  ET QVOD SIGNVM ERIT? M. XXIV. 3. Sege us hwsenne bas Sing gewurbun and hwile tacn si bines to-cymes.  J. XVIII. 32. he geswutelode hwylcon deaSe lie swulte. qua morte ESSET moriturus.   c) When the question presents a distinct alternative, so that the idea of doubt and uncertainty is prominent, the subjunctive in Gricese, Oxonian, and Anglo-Saxon, qua conjugated version, is used:  M. XXVI. 63. Ic halsige be Surh bone lyfiendan God, b*t Su secge us gyf \>u sy Crist Godes sunu. L. XXII. 67. J. X. 24. d) The following is hortatory as well as declarative:  L. XII. 5. Ic eow setywe hwsene ge ondredon. Ostendam autem vobis, quem TIMEATIS.  5. In three indirect questions which in the original are direct, the subjunctive is used:  M. XXIV. 45.Wens (sic. A. H. & R. wenst) \>u hwa sy getrywe and gleaw BEOW? Quis, putas, EST fidelis servus?  QVIS, PVTAS, EST FIDELIS SERVS. M. XXVI. 25. Cwyst bu lareow hwseSer ic hyt si? Numquid ego sum?  NVMQVID EGO SVM, J. VII. 26. CweSe we hwseber ba ealdras ongyton ^set bis IS Crist? Numquid vere cognoverunt principes, quia hie EST Christus?  § 11. RELATIVE CLAUSES. Except in the relations discussed in the following the indicative is used in relative clauses. Grice: "The verb 'to be' is actually composed of three different stems -- not only in Aristotle, but in Gricese." CONIUGATVM, persona, s-stem (cognate with Roman "sit"), b-stem, w-stem (cognate with Roman, "ero") MODVS INFINITVUM, the verb "sīn,” the verb "bion,” the verb "wesan.” MODVS INDICATIVM PRAESENS prima singularis: "ik" -- Oxonian "I" "em" Oxonian, "am." Bium wisu secunda singularis: "thū" -- Oxonian: "thou" "art" Oxonian "art" bis(t) wisis tertia singularis: "hē" Oxonian, 'he' "ist" (Cognate with Roman "est") Oxonian 'is' *bid wis(id) prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "sindun" *biod wesad MODVS INDCATIVVM PRAETERITVM prima singularis "was" Oxonian: "was."  seconda singularis ""wāri" Oxonian "were" tertia singularis "was" Oxonian "was" prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "wārun" Oxonian "were" MODVS  SVBIVCTIVVM PRAESENS prima, secunda, tertia, singularis "sīe" (Lost in Oxonian after Occam) "wese" (cognate with "was", and Roman, "erat") prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "sīen" wesen MODVS  SVBIVNCTIVVM PRAETERITUM  prima, secunda, tertia, singularis wāri prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis wārin MODVS IMPERATIVUM singularis  "wis," "wes" (Cognate with "was" and Roman "erat") pluralis wesad MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAESENT wesandi (cognate with Cicero's "essens" and "essentia" MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAETERITVM "giwesan"   The present-tense forms of 'be' with the w-stem, "wesan" are almost never used.     Therefore, wesan is used as IMPERATIVE, in the past tense, and in the participium prasesens versions of     "sīn" -- Grice: "I rue the day when the Bosworth and Toller left Austin!" -- "Now the OED, is not supposed to include Anglo-Saxon forms!") and does not have a separate meaning. The b-stem is only met in the present indicative of wesan, and only for the first and second persons in the singular.    So we see that if Roman had the 'est-sit" distinction, the Oxonians had "The 'ist'/"sīe"/"wese" tryad).     Grice: "To simplify the Oxonian forms and make them correlative to Roman, I shall reduce the Oxonian triad,  'ist'/'sīe'/"wese" to the division actually cognate with Roman:  'ist'/'sīe."   And so, I shall speak of  the 'ist'/'sīe" distinction, or the 'est-sit' distinction interchangeably." Today many deny the distinction or confine attention just to modal operators. Modal operators in non-assertoric propositions are said to produce referential opacity or oblique contexts in which truth is not preserved under substitution of extensionally equivalent expressions. Modal and deontic logics provide formal analyses of various modalities. Intensional logics investigate the logic of oblique contexts. Modal logicians have produced possible worlds semantics interpretations wherein propositions MP with modal operator M are true provided P is true in all suitable (e.g., logically possible, causally possible, morally permissible, rationally acceptable) possible worlds. Modal realism grants ontological status to possible worlds other than the actual world or otherwise commits to objective modalities in nature or reality.

modus: the study of the logic of the operators ‘it is possible that’ (or, as Grice prefers, “it may be that”) and ‘it is necessary that’ (or as Grice prefers, “It must be that…”). For some reason, Grice used ‘mode’ at Oxford – but ‘manner’ in the New World! The sad thing is that when he came back to the Old World, to the puzzlmenet of Old-Worlders, he kept using ‘manner.’ So, everytime we see Grice using ‘manner,’ we need to translate to either the traditional Oxonian ‘modus,’ or the Gricese ‘mode.’ These operators Grice symbolizes by a diamond and a square respectively. and each can be defined in terms of the other. □p (necessarily p) is equivalent to ¬◇¬p ("not possible that not-p") ◇p (possibly p) is equivalent to ¬□¬p ("not necessarily not-p"). To say that Fido may be shaggy is to say that it is not necessarily false. Thus possP could be regarded as an abbreviation of -Nec-p Equally, to say that Fido *must* be shaggy is to deny that its negation is possible. Thus Af could be regarded as an abbreviation of -B-f. Grice prefers to take ‘poss” as primitive (“for surely, it may rain before it must pour!”). Grice’s ystem G of modality is obtained by introducing Poss. and Nec. If system, as Grice’s is, is classical/intuitionist/minimal, so is the corresponding modal logic. Grice surely concentrates on the classical case (“Dummett is overconcentraating on the intuitionist, and nobody at Oxford was, is, or will be minimal!”).  As with any kind of logic, there are three components to a system of modal logic: a syntactics, which determines the system or calculus + and the notion of well-formed formula (wff). Second, a semantics, which determines the consequence relation X on +-wffs. Third, a pragmatics or sub-system of inference, which determines the deductive consequence relation Y on +-wffs. The syntactis of the modal operators is the same in every system. Briefly, the modal operator is a one-place or unary ‘connective,’ or operator, strictly, since it does not connect two atoms into a molecule, like negation. There are many different systems of modal logic, some of which can be generated by different ways of setting up the semantics. Each of the familiar ways of doing this can be associated with a sound and complete system of inference. Alternatively, a system of inference can be laid down first and we can search for a semantics for it relative to which it is sound and complete. Grice gives primacy to the syntactic viewpoint. Semantic consequence is defined in modal logic in the usual classical way: a set of sentences 9 yields a sentence s, 9 X s, iff if no “interpretation” (to use Grice’s jargon in “Vacuous Names”) I makes all members of 9 true and s false. The question is how to extend the notion of “interpretation” to accommodate for “may be shaggy” – and “must be shaggy”. In classical sentential logic, an interpretation is an assignment to each sentence letter of exactly one of the two truth-values = and where n % m ! 1. So to determine relative possibility in a model, we identify R with a collection of pairs of the form where each of u and v is in W. If a pair is in R, v is possible relative to u, and if is not in R, v is impossible relative to u. The relative possibility relation then enters into the rules for the evaluating modal operator. We do not want to say, e. g. that at the actual world, it is possible for Grice to originate from a different sperm and egg, since the only worlds where this takes place are impossible relative to the actual world. So we have the rule that B f is true at a world u if f is true at some world v such that v is possible relative to u. Similarly, Af is true at a world u if f is true at every world v which is possible relative to u. R may have simple first-order properties such as reflexivity, (Ex)Rxx, symmetry, (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy P Ryx), and transitivity, (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) P Rxz), and different modal systems can be obtained by imposing different combinations of these on R (other systems can be obtained from higher-order constraints). The least constrained system is the system Ghp, in which no structural properties are put on R. In G-hp we have B (B & C) X B B, since if B (B & C) holds at w* then (B & C) holds at some world w possible relative to w*, and thus by the truth-function for &, B holds at w as well, so B B holds at w*. Hence any interpretation that makes B (B & C) true (% true at w*) also makes B B true. Since there are no restrictions on R in G-hp, we can expect B (B & C) X B B in every system of modal logic generated by constraining R. However, for G-hp we also have C Z B C. For suppose C holds at w*. B C holds at w* only if there is some world possible relative to w* where C holds. But there need be no such world. In particular, since R need not be reflexive, w* itself need not be possible relative to w*. Concomitantly, in any system for which we stipulate a reflexive R, we will have C X B C. The simplest such system is known as T, which has the same semantics as K except that R is stipulated to be reflexive in every interpretation. In other systems, further or different constraints are put on R. For example, in the system B, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and symmetric, and in the system S4, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and transitive. In B we have B C Z B B C, as can be shown by an interpretation with nontransitive R, while in S4 we have B AC Z C, as can be shown by an interpretation with non-symmetric R. Correspondingly, in S4, B C X B B C, and in B, B AC X C. The system in which R is reflexive, transitive, and symmetric is called S5, and in this system, R can be omitted. For if R has all three properties, R is an equivalence relation, i.e., it partitions W into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive equivalence classes. If Cu is the equivalence class to which u belongs, then the truth-value of a formula at u is independent of the truth-values of sentence letters at worlds not in Cu, so only the worlds in Cw* are relevant to the truth-values of sentences in an S5 interpretation. But within Cw* R is universal: every world is possible relative to every other. Consequently, in an S5 interpretation, we need not specify a relative possibility relation, and the evaluation rules for B and A need not mention relative possibility; e.g., we can say that B f is true at a world u if there is at least one world v at which f is true. Note that by the characteristics of R, whenever 9 X s in K, T, B, or S4, then 9 X s in S5: the other systems are contained in S5. K is contained in all the systems we have mentioned, while T is contained in B and S4, neither of which is contained in the other. Sentential modal logics give rise to quantified modal logics, of which quantified S5 is the bestknown. Just as, in the sentential case, each world in an interpretation is associated with a valuation of sentence letters as in non-modal sentential logic, so in quantified modal logic, each world is associated with a valuation of the sort familiar in non-modal first-order logic. More specifically, in quantified S5, each world w is assigned a domain Dw – the things that exist at w – such that at least one Dw is non-empty, and each atomic n-place predicate of the language is assigned an extension Extw of n-tuples of objects that satisfy the predicate at w. So even restricting ourselves to just the one first-order extension of a sentential system, S5, various degrees of freedom are already evident. We discuss the following: (a) variability of domains, (b) interpretation of quantifiers, and (c) predication. (a) Should all worlds have the same domain or may the domains of different worlds be different? The latter appears to be the more natural choice; e.g., if neither of of Dw* and Du are subsets of the other, this represents the intuitive idea that some things that exist might not have, and that there could have been things that do not actually exist (though formulating this latter claim requires adding an operator for ‘actually’ to the language). So we should distinguish two versions of S5, one with constant domains, S5C, and the other with variable domains, S5V. (b) Should the truth of (Dn)f at a world w require that f is true at w of some object in Dw or merely of some object in D (D is the domain of all possible objects, 4weWDw)? The former treatment is called the actualist reading of the quantifiers, the latter, the possibilist reading. In S5C there is no real choice, since for any w, D % Dw, but the issue is live in S5V. (c) Should we require that for any n-place atomic predicate F, an n-tuple of objects satisfies F at w only if every member of the n-tuple belongs to Dw, i.e., should we require that atomic predicates be existence-entailing? If we abbreviate (Dy) (y % x) by Ex (for ‘x exists’), then in S5C, A(Ex)AEx is logically valid on the actualist reading of E (%-D-) and on the possibilist. On the former, the formula says that at each world, anything that exists at that world exists at every world, which is true; while on the latter, using the definition of ‘Ex’, it says that at each world, anything that exists at some world or other is such that at every world, it exists at some world or other, which is also true; indeed, the formula stays valid in S5C with possibilist quantifiers even if we make E a primitive logical constant, stipulated to be true at every w of exactly the things that exist at w. But in S5V with actualist quantifiers, A(Ex)AEx is invalid, as is (Ex)AEx – consider an interpretation where for some u, Du is a proper subset of Dw*. However, in S5V with possibilist quantifiers, the status of the formula, if ‘Ex’ is defined, depends on whether identity is existence-entailing. If it is existenceentailing, then A(Ex)AEx is invalid, since an object in D satisfies (Dy)(y % x) at w only if that object exists at w, while if identity is not existence-entailing, the formula is valid. The interaction of the various options is also evident in the evaluation of two well-known schemata: the Barcan formula, B (Dx)fx P (Dx) B fx; and its converse, (Dx) B fx P B (Dx)fx. In S5C with ‘Ex’ either defined or primitive, both schemata are valid, but in S5V with actualist quantifiers, they both fail. For the latter case, if we substitute -E for f in the converse Barcan formula we get a conditional whose antecedent holds at w* if there is u with Du a proper subset of Dw*, but whose consequent is logically false. The Barcan formula fails when there is a world u with Du not a subset of Dw*, and the condition f is true of some non-actual object at u and not of any actual object there. For then B (Dx)f holds at w* while (Dx) B fx fails there. However, if we require atomic predicates to be existence-entailing, then instances of the converse Barcan formula with f atomic are valid. In S5V with possibilist quantifiers, all instances of both schemata are valid, since the prefixes (Dx) B and B (Dx) correspond to (Dx) (Dw) and (Dw) (Dx), which are equivalent (with actualist quantifiers, the prefixes correspond to (Dx 1 Dw*), and (Dw) (Dx 1 Dw) which are non-equivalent if Dw and Dw* need not be the same set). Finally in S5V with actualist quantifiers, the standard quantifier introduction and elimination rules must be adjusted. Suppose c is a name for an object that does not actually exist; then - Ec is true but (Dx) - Ex is false. The quantifier rules must be those of free logic: we require Ec & fc before we infer (Dv)fv and Ec P fc, as well as the usual EI restrictions, before we infer (Ev)fv. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Modality: Desirability and Credibility;” H. P. Grice, “The may and the may not;” H. P. Grice, “The Big Philosophical Mistake: ‘What is actual is not also possible’.”

modus: Grice: “In Roman, ‘modus’ may have been rendered as ‘way’, ‘fashion’ – but I will not, and use ‘modus’ as THEY did! ‘Modus’ is used in more than one ‘modus’ in philosophy. In Ariskantian logic, ‘modus’ refers either to the arrangement of universal, particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only certain of which are valid this is often tr., confusingly, as ‘modus’ in English – “the valid modes, such as Barbara and Celarent.” But then ‘modus’ may be used to to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or contingent, possible or impossible, or ‘actual.’ In Oxonian scholastic metaphysics, ‘modus’ is often used in a not altogether technical way to mean that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius, in his best-selling “Lexicon philosophicum,” has it that “a mode does not compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” ‘Modus’ is also used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or between two modes of a single substance. ‘Modus’ also appears in the technical vocabulary of medieval speculative ‘grammar’ or ‘semantics’ (“speculative semantics” makes more sense) -- in connection with the notions of the “modus significandi,” “the modus intelligendi” (more or less the same thing), and the “modus essendi.” The term ‘modus’ becomes especially important when Descartes (vide Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”), Spinoza (vide S. N. Hampshire, “Spinoza”), and Locke each take it up, giving it three somewhat different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes (vide Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”) makes ‘modus’ a central notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each substantia is characterized by a principal attribute, ‘cogitatio’ for ‘anima’ and ‘extensio’ for ‘corpus’. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts, properties in the broad sense that individual things substances have. In this way, ‘modus’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substania,’ ‘attributum’, and ‘modus’. Recalling Descartes, Spinoza defines ‘modus’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through another” Ethics I. But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what Spinoza means by ‘modus’, whether they are to be construed as being in some say a “property” of God, the one infinite substance, or whether they are to be construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance. Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between modus infinitus and modus finitus, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Now, much closer to Grice, Englishman and Oxonian Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For Locke, a ‘modus’ is “such complex idea – as Pegasus the flying horse --, which however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances” Essay II. A ‘modus,’ for Locke, is thus an idea that represents to us the a ‘complex’ propertiy of a thing, sc. an idea derived from what Locke a ‘simple’ idea that come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between a ‘modus simplex,’ like number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by compounding the SAME simple idea many times, and ‘modus complexum,’ or ‘modus mixtum,’ a mode like obligation or theft, which is supposed to be compounded of at least two simple ideas of a different sort.  Refs.: Grice applies Locke’s idea of the modus mixtum in his ‘labour’ against Empiricism, cf. H. P. Grice, “I may care a hoot what the dictionary says, but it is not the case that I care a hoot what Micraelius’s “Lexicon philosophicum” says.”

Grice against a pragmatic or rational module: from Latin ‘modulus,’ ‘little mode.’  the commitment to functionally independent and specialized cognitive system in psychological organizatio, or, more generally, in the organization of any complex system. A ‘modulus’ entails that behavior is the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive. Organization in terms of a modulus varies from simple decomposability to what Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a relatively simple function of component contributions. Gall defends a modular organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general unitary ‘faculty’ in a variety of this or that‘domain’, where a ‘domain’ is not a ‘modulus’ -- a view that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as Flourens. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bouillaud and Broca (a French doctor, of Occitan ancestry – brooch, broca – thorn --) defended the view that language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered by Wernicke that there are at least two centers for the control of language, one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete physical structures responsible for communication, which are largely independent of one another and of structures responsible for other psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of the neurophysiological organization of communication continues to have advocates, though the precise characterization of the functions these two centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor control and speech, but have excluded “what I am interested in, viz. so-called higher cognitive processes.” – H. P. Grice, “The power structure of the soul.”

modus ponendo ponens: 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of affirming the consequent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment. 

modus tollendo tollens: 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of denying the antecedent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and the negation of its consequent. 

Molina, L. de 15351600,  Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He studied and taught at Coimbra and Évora and also taught in Lisbon and Madrid. His most important works are the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis“Free Will and Grace,” 1588, Commentaria in primam divi Thomae partem “Commentary on the First Part of Thomas’s Summa,” 1592, and De justitia et jure “On Justice and Law,” 15921613. Molina is best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge scientia media. Its aim was to preserve free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace. It was opposed by Thomists such as Bañez, who maintained that God exercises physical predetermination over secondary causes of human action and, thus, that grace is intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will; the cooperation concursus of divine grace with human will does not determine the will to a particular action. This is made possible by God’s middle knowledge, which is a knowledge in between the knowledge God has of what existed, exists, and will exist, and the knowledge God has of what has not existed, does not exist, and will not exist. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of conditional future contingent events, namely, of what persons would do under any possible set of circumstances. Thanks to this knowledge, God can arrange for certain human acts to occur by prearranging the circumstances surrounding the choice without determining the human will. Thus, God’s grace is concurrent with the act of the will and does not predetermine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace superfluous. 

molyneux question: also called Molyneux’s problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, William Molyneux or Molineux, 1656 98, a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, posed and Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted adults have yielded disappointing and ambiguous results. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate. Such a theory answers the question in the negative as did Molyneux himself. Other theories encourage different responses. 

Montaigne: philosopher who set forth the Renaissance version of Grecian scepticism. Born and raised in Bordeaux, he became its mayor, and was an adviser to leaders of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In 1568 he tr. the work of the  rationalist theologian Raimund Sebond on natural theology. Shortly thereafter he began writing essais, attempts, as the author said, to paint himself. These, the first in this genre, are rambling, curious discussions of various topics, suggesting tolerance and an undogmatic Stoic morality. The longest essai, the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” “defends” Sebond’s rationalism by arguing that since no adequate reasons or evidence could be given to support any point of view in theology, philosophy, or science, one should not blame Sebond for his views. Montaigne then presents and develops the skeptical arguments found in Sextus Empiricus and Cicero. Montaigne related skeptical points to thencurrent findings and problems. Data of explorers, he argues, reinforce the cultural and ethical relativism of the ancient Skeptics. Disagreements between Scholastics, Platonists, and Renaissance naturalists on almost everything cast doubt on whether any theory is correct. Scientists like Copernicus and Paracelsus contradict previous scientists, and will probably be contradicted by future ones. Montaigne then offers the more theoretical objections of the Skeptics, about the unreliability of sense experience and reasoning and our inability to find an unquestionable criterion of true knowledge. Trying to know reality is like trying to clutch water. What should we then do? Montaigne advocates suspending judgment on all theories that go beyond experience, accepting experience undogmatically, living according to the dictates of nature, and following the rules and customs of one’s society. Therefore one should remain in the religion in which one was born, and accept only those principles that God chooses to reveal to us. Montaigne’s skepticism greatly influenced European thinkers in undermining confidence in previous theories and forcing them to seek new ways of grounding knowledge. His acceptance of religion on custom and faith provided a way of living with total skepticism. His presentation of skepticism in a modern language shaped the vocabulary and the problems of philosophy in modern times. 

Montanism, a charismatic, schismatic movement in early Christianity, originating in Phrygia in the late second century. It rebuked the mainstream church for laxity and apathy, and taught moral purity, new, i.e. postbiblical, revelation, and the imminent end of the world. Traditional accounts, deriving from critics of the movement, contain exaggerations and probably some fabrications. Montanus himself, abetted by the prophetesses Maximilla and Prisca, announced in ecstatic speech a new, final age of prophecy. This fulfilled the biblical promises that in the last days the Holy Spirit would be poured out universally Joel 2: 28ff.; Acts 2: 16ff. and would teach “the whole truth” Jon. 14:26; 16:13. It also empowered the Montanists to enjoin more rigorous discipline than that required by Jesus. The sect denied that forgiveness through baptism covered serious subsequent sin; forbade remarriage for widows and widowers; practiced fasting; and condemned believers who evaded persecution. Some later followers may have identified Montanus with the Holy Spirit itself, though he claimed only to be the Spirit’s mouthpiece. The “new prophecy” flourished for a generation, especially in North Africa, gaining a famous convert in Tertullian. But the church’s bishops repudiated the movement’s criticisms and innovations, and turned more resolutely against postapostolic revelation, apocalyptic expectation, and ascetic extremes.

Montesquieu, philosopher of the Enlightenment. He was born at La Brède, educated at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly and received law degrees from Bordeaux. From his uncle he inherited the barony of Montesquieu and the office of Président à Mortier at the Parliament of Guyenne at Bordeaux. Fame, national and international, came suddenly 1721 with the Lettres persanes “The Persian Letters”, published in Holland and France, a landmark of the Enlightenment. His Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, written and printed 1734 to remind the authorities of his qualifications and availability, delivered the wrong message at the wrong time anti-militarism, pacifism, free trade, while France supported Poland’s King Stanislas, dethroned by Russia and Austria. Montesquieu withdrew the Réflexions before publication and substituted the Considerations on the Romans: the same thesis is expounded here, but in the exclusively classical context of ancient history. The stratagem succeeded: the Amsterdam edition was freely imported; the Paris edition appeared with a royal privilège 1734. A few months after the appearance of the Considerations, he undertook L’Esprit des lois, the outline of a modern political science, conceived as the foundation of an effective governmental policy. His optimism was shaken by the disasters of the War of Austrian Succession 174048; the Esprit des lois underwent hurried changes that upset its original plan. During the very printing process, the author was discovering the true essence of his philosophie pratique: it would never culminate in a final, invariable program, but in an orientation, continuously, intelligently adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of historical time in the light of permanent values. According to L’Esprit des lois, governments are either a “republic,” a “monarchie,” or a “despotism.” The principles, or motivational forces, of these types of government are, respectively, “virtus,” “honor,” and fear. The type of government a people has depends on its character, history, and geographical situation. Only a constitutional government that separates its executive, legislative, and judicial powers (cf. Grice, “The power structure of the soul: politics”) preserves liberty, taken as the power to do what one ought to will. A constitutional monarchy with separation of powers is the best form of government. Montesquieu influenced the authors of the New World Constitution and the political philosophers Burke and Rousseau. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Social justice.”

Moore: g. e. –  and his paradox: cited by H. P. Grice. Irish London-born philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his undergraduate work at Cambridge ; spent 84 as a fellow of Trinity ; returned to Cambridge in 1 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 5. He also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics. In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” 3, he argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental spiritual.” This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” in the broad sense of ‘perceive’. Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense” 5, that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in some cases there is no good reason to believe them. Among the claims that Moore attacked are these: “Propositions about purported material facts are false”; “No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every purported physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and later to give a “Proof of an External World” 3. Epistemology. Most of Moore’s work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and chapters e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 6 he examined and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism, representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What is their ontological status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing, Moore made a distinction between dispositional or non-actualized and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made distinctions between direct apprehension often known as knowledge by acquaintance, indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper or propositional knowledge. He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica 3, Moore maintained that the central problem of ethics is, What is good?  meaning by this, not what things are good, but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer, one that may seem disappointing, namely: good is good, or, alternatively, ‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought” that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object i.e., to define ‘good’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions  ethical propositions would be tautologies! For example, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy  the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of various methods of philosophical/conceptual analysis. “A Defense of Common Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies2 and Philosophical Papers 9. These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”; distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis either definitional or divisional; and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher. Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm and grateful terms.  Moore’s paradox, as first discussed by G. E. Moore, the perplexity involving assertion of what is expressed by conjunctions such as ‘It’s raining, but I believe it isn’t’ and ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is’. The oddity of such presenttense first-person uses of ‘to believe’ seems peculiar to those conjunctions just because it is assumed both that, when asserting  roughly, representing as true  a conjunction, one also asserts its conjuncts, and that, as a rule, the assertor believes the asserted proposition. Thus, no perplexity arises from assertions of, for instance, ‘It’s raining today, but I falsely believed it wasn’t until I came out to the porch’ and ‘If it’s raining but I believe it isn’t, I have been misled by the weather report’. However, there are reasons to think that, if we rely only on these assumptions and examples, our characterization of the problem is unduly narrow. First, assertion seems relevant only because we are interested in what the assertor believes. Secondly, those conjunctions are disturbing only insofar as they show that Moore’s paradox Moore’s paradox 583    583 some of the assertor’s beliefs, though contingent, can only be irrationally held. Thirdly, autobiographical reports that may justifiably be used to charge the reporter with irrationality need be neither about his belief system, nor conjunctive, nor true e.g., ‘I don’t exist’, ‘I have no beliefs’, nor false e.g., ‘It’s raining, but I have no evidence that it is’. So, Moore’s paradox is best seen as the problem posed by contingent propositions that cannot be justifiably believed. Arguably, in forming a belief of those propositions, the believer acquires non-overridable evidence against believing them. A successful analysis of the problem along these lines may have important epistemological consequences.  Refs.: Grice, “Oxford seminars.” Grice dedicated a full chapter to the Moore paradox. Mainly, Moore is confused in lexicological ways. An emisor EXPRESSES the belief that p. What the emisor communicates is that p, not that he believes that p. He does not convey explicitly that he believes that p, nor implicitly. Belief and its expression is linked conceptually with the mode – indicative (‘est’); as is desire and its expression with the imperative mode (“sit”).

dilemma. Grice: “Ryle overuses the word dilemma in his popularization, “Dilemmas”.” 1 Any problem where morality is relevant. This broad use includes not only conflicts among moral reasons but also conflicts between moral reasons and reasons of law, religion, or self-interest. In this sense, Abraham is in a moral dilemma when God commands him to sacrifice his son, even if he has no moral reason to obey. Similarly, I am in a moral dilemma if I cannot help a friend in trouble without forgoing a lucrative but morally neutral business opportunity. ’Moral dilemma’ also often refers to 2 any topic area where it is not known what, if anything, is morally good or right. For example, when one asks whether abortion is immoral in any way, one could call the topic “the moral dilemma of abortion.” This epistemic use does not imply that anything really is immoral at all. Recently, moral philosophers have discussed a much narrower set of situations as “moral dilemmas.” They usually define ‘moral dilemma’ as 3 a situation where an agent morally ought to do each of two acts but cannot do both. The bestknown example is Sartre’s student who morally ought to care for his mother in Paris but at the same time morally ought to go to England to join the Free  and fight the Nazis. However, ‘ought’ covers ideal actions that are not morally required, such as when someone ought to give to a certain charity but is not required to do so. Since most common examples of moral dilemmas include moral obligations or duties, or other requirements, it is more accurate to define ‘moral dilemma’ more narrowly as 4 a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to do each of two acts but cannot do both. Some philosophers also refuse to call a situation a moral dilemma when one of the conflicting requirements is clearly overridden, such as when I must break a trivial promise in order to save a life. To exclude such resolvable conflicts, ‘moral dilemma’ can be defined as 5 a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither requirement is overridden, but the agent cannot fulfill both. Another common move is to define ‘moral dilemma’ as 6 a situation where every alternative is morally wrong. This is equivalent to 4 or 5, respectively, if an act is morally wrong whenever it violates any moral requirement or any non-overridden moral requirement. However, we usually do not call an act wrong unless it violates an overriding moral requirement, and then 6 rules out moral dilemmas by definition, since overriding moral requirements clearly cannot conflict. Although 5 thus seems preferable, some would object that 5 includes trivial requirements and conflicts, such as conflicts between trivial promises. To include only tragic situations, we could define ‘moral dilemma’ as 7 a situation where an agent has a strong moral obligation or requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither is overridden, but the agent cannot adopt both alternatives. This definition is strong enough to raise the important controversies about moral dilemmas without being so strong as to rule out their possibility by definition. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ryle’s dilemmas: are they?”

epistemology, the discipline, at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and relations of moral judgments and principles. It has developed out of an interest, common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and justifiability  in epistemology, of statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgments of actions and also general principles of judgment. Its most prominent questions include the following. Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are they capable of justification? If they are capable of justification, how can they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles? In epistemology recent years have seen a tendency to accept as valid an account of knowledge as entailing justified true belief, a conception that requires an account not just of truth but also of justification and of justified belief. Thus, under what conditions is someone justified, epistemically, in believing something? Justification, of actions, of judgments, and of principles, has long been a central element in ethics. It is only recently that justification in ethics came to be thought of as an epistemological problem, hence ‘moral epistemology’, as an expression, is a fairly recent coinage, although its problems have a long lineage. One long-standing linkage is provided by the challenge of skepticism. Skepticism in ethics can be about the existence of any genuine distinction between right and wrong, or it can focus on the possibility of attaining any knowledge of right and wrong, good or bad. Is there a right answer? is a question in the metaphysics of ethics. Can we know what the right answer is, and if so how? is one of moral epistemology. Problems of perception and observation and ones about observation statements or sense-data play an important role in epistemology. There is not any obvious parallel in moral epistemology, unless it is the role of prereflective moral judgments, or commonsense moral judgments  moral judgments unguided by any overt moral theory  which can be taken to provide the data of moral theory, and which need to be explained, systematized, coordinated, or revised to attain an appropriate relation between theory and data. This would be analogous to taking the data of epistemology to be provided, not by sense-data or observations but by judgments of perception or observation statements. Once this step is taken the parallel is very close. One source of moral skepticism is the apparent lack of any observational counterpart for moral predicates, which generates the question how moral judgments can be true if there is nothing for them to correspond to. Another source of moral skepticism is apparently constant disagreement and uncertainty, which would appear to be explained by the skeptical hypothesis denying the reality of moral distinctions. Noncognitivism in ethics maintains that moral judgments are not objects of knowledge, that they make no statements capable of truth or falsity, but are or are akin to expressions of attitudes. Some other major differences among ethical theories are largely epistemological in character. Intuitionism maintains that basic moral propositions are knowable by intuition. Empiricism in ethics maintains that moral propositions can be established by empirical means or are complex forms of empirical statements. Ethical rationalism maintains that the fundamental principles of morality can be established a priori as holding of necessity. This is exemplified by Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the categorical imperative is regarded as synthetic a priori; more recently by what Alan Gewirth b.2 calls the “principle of generic consistency,” which he claims it is selfcontradictory to deny. Ethical empiricism is exemplified by classical utilitarianism, such as that of Bentham, which aspires to develop ethics as an empirical science. If the consequences of actions can be scientifically predicted and their utilities calculated, then ethics can be a science. Situationism is equivalent to concrete case intuitionism in maintaining that we can know immediately what ought to be done in specific cases, but most ethical theories maintain that what ought to be done is, in J. S. Mill’s words, determined by “the application of a law to an individual case.” Different theories differ on the epistemic status of these laws and on the process of application. Deductivists, either empiricistic or rationalistic, hold that the law is essentially unchanged in the application; non-deductivists hold that the law is modified in the process of application. This distinction is explained in F. L. Will, “Beyond Deduction.” There is similar variation about what if anything is selfevident, Sidgwick maintaining that only certain highly abstract principles are self-evident, Ross that only general rules are, and Prichard that only concrete judgments are, “by an act of moral thinking.” Other problems in moral epistemology are provided by the factvalue distinction  and controversies about whether there is any such distinction  and the isought question, the question how a moral judgment can be derived from statements of fact alone. Naturalists affirm the possibility, non-naturalists deny it. Prescriptivists claim that moral judgments are prescriptions and cannot be deduced from descriptive statements alone. This question ultimately leads to the question how an ultimate principle can be justified. If it cannot be deduced from statements of fact, that route is out; if it must be deduced from some other moral principle, then the principle deduced cannot be ultimate and in any case this process is either circular or leads to an infinite regress. If the ultimate principle is self-evident, then the problem may have an answer. But if it is not it would appear to be arbitrary. The problem of the justification of an ultimate principle continues to be a leading one in moral epistemology. Recently there has been much interest in the status and existence of “moral facts.” Are there any, what are they, and how are they established as “facts”? This relates to questions about moral realism. Moral realism maintains that moral predicates are real and can be known to be so; anti-realists deny this. This denial links with the view that moral properties supervene on natural ones, and the problem of supervenience is another recent link between ethics and epistemology. Pragmatism in ethics maintains that a moral problem is like any problem in that it is the occasion for inquiry and moral judgments are to be regarded as hypotheses to be tested by how well they resolve the problem. This amounts to an attempt to bypass the isought problem and all such “dualisms.” So is constructivism, a development owing much to the work of Rawls, which contrasts with moral realism. Constructivism maintains that moral ideas are human constructs and the task is not epistemological or metaphysical but practical and theoretical  that of attaining reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and the principles that coordinate and explain them. On this view there are no moral facts. Opponents maintain that this only replaces a foundationalist view of ethics with a coherence conception. The question whether questions of moral epistemology can in this way be bypassed can be regarded as itself a question of moral epistemology. And the question of the foundations of morality, and whether there are foundations, can still be regarded as a question of moral epistemology, as distinct from a question of the most convenient and efficient arrangement of our moral ideas. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Our knowledge of right and wrong: do we have it? Is it intuitive as Oxonians believe?”

meta-ethics: morality, an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its goal, and including what are commonly known as the moral rules, moral ideals, and moral virtues. To say that it is a public system means that all those to whom it applies must understand it and that it must not be irrational for them to use it in deciding what to do and in judging others to whom the system applies. Games are the paradigm cases of public systems; all games have a point and the rules of a game apply to all who play it. All players know the point of the game and its rules, and it is not irrational for them to be guided by the point and rules and to judge the behavior of other players by them. To say that morality is informal means that there is no decision procedure or authority that can settle all its controversial questions. Morality thus resembles a backyard game of basketball more than a professional game. Although there is overwhelming agreement on most moral matters, certain controversial questions must be settled in an ad hoc fashion or not settled at all. For example, when, if ever, abortion is acceptable is an unresolvable moral matter, but each society and religion can adopt its own position. That morality has no one in a position of authority is one of the most important respects in which it differs from law and religion. Although morality must include the commonly accepted moral rules such as those prohibiting killing and deceiving, different societies can interpret these rules somewhat differently. They can also differ in their views about the scope of morality, i.e., about whether morality protects newborns, fetuses, or non-human animals. Thus different societies can have somewhat different moralities, although this difference has limits. Also within each society, a person may have his own view about when it is justified to break one of the rules, e.g., about how much harm would have to be prevented in order to justify deceiving someone. Thus one person’s morality may differ somewhat from another’s, but both will agree on the overwhelming number of non-controversial cases. A moral theory is an attempt to describe, explain, and if possible justify, morality. Unfortunately, most moral theories attempt to generate some simplified moral code, rather than to describe the complex moral system that is already in use. Morality does not resolve all disputes. Morality does not require one always to act so as to produce the best consequences or to act only in those ways that one would will everyone to act. Rather morality includes both moral rules that no one should transgress and moral ideals that all are encouraged to follow, but much of what one does will not be governed by morality. H. P. Grice, “Meta-ethics in postwar Oxford philosophy: Hare, Nowell-Smith, myself, and others!”

meta-ethics:, 1 the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals this subdiscipline includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan; 2 the part of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge. Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways: noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of cognitivism, the view that moral declarative sentences do express truths or falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons, and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions, intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition, the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives, beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions. Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful to ethics.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Meta-ethics in post-war Oxford philosophy: Hare, Nowell-Smith, myself, and others!”

“pratical reason” -- moral rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire. Rationalists who make the first claim have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action. 

Griceian realism: a metaethical view committed to the objectivity of ethics. It has 1 metaphysical, 2 semantic, and 3 epistemological components. 1 Its metaphysical component is the claim that there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right or wrong. In this claim, moral realism contrasts with an error theory and with other forms of nihilism that deny the existence of moral facts and properties. It contrasts as well with various versions of moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make moral facts consist in facts about people’s moral beliefs and attitudes. 2 Its semantic component is primarily cognitivist. Cognitivism holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments or the propositions that they express can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. These cognitivist claims contrast with the noncognitive claims of emotivism and prescriptivism, according to which the primary purpose of moral judgments is to express the appraiser’s attitudes or commitments, rather than to state facts or ascribe properties. Moral realism also holds that truth for moral judgments is non-epistemic; in this way it contrasts with moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make the truth of a moral judgment epistemic. The metaphysical and semantic theses imply that there are some true moral propositions. An error theory accepts the cognitivist semantic claims but denies the realist metaphysical thesis. It holds that moral judgments should be construed as containing referring expressions and having truth-values, but insists that these referring expressions are empty, because there are no moral facts, and that no moral claims are true. Also on this theory, commonsense moral thought presupposes the existence of moral facts and properties, but is systematically in error. In this way, the error theory stands to moral realism much as atheism stands to theism in a world of theists. J. L. Mackie introduced and defended the error theory in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 7. 3 Finally, if moral realism is to avoid skepticism it must claim that some moral beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that moral knowledge is possible. While making these metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological claims, moral realism is compatible with a wide variety of other metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological principles and so can take many different forms. The moral realists in the early part of the twentieth century were generally intuitionists. Intuitionism combined a commitment to moral realism with a foundationalist moral epistemology according to which moral knowledge must rest on self-evident moral truths and with the nonnaturalist claim that moral facts and properties are sui generis and not reducible to any natural facts or properties. Friends of noncognitivism found the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of intuitionism extravagant and so rejected moral realism. Later moral realists have generally sought to defend moral realism without the metaphysical and epistemological trappings of intuitionism. One such version of moral realism takes a naturalistic form. This form of ethical naturalism claims that our moral beliefs are justified when they form part of an explanatorily coherent system of beliefs with one another and with various non-moral beliefs, and insists that moral properties are just natural properties of the people, actions, and policies that instantiate them. Debate between realists and anti-realists and within the realist camp centers on such issues as the relation between moral judgment and action, the rational authority of morality, moral epistemology and methodology, the relation between moral and non-moral natural properties, the place of ethics in a naturalistic worldview, and the parity of ethics and the sciences. 

“Some remarks about the senses” – Grice: “Grice: “And then there’s Shaftesbury who thinks he is being witty when he speaks of a ‘moral’ “sense”!” -- moral sense theory, an ethical theory, developed by some British philosophers  notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume  according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking about or “observing” certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,” offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions” of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer” only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed or contemplated  as when a person realizes that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for example, we approve of someone’s temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure sometimes identified with approval at the thought of characters that exhibit benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This disposition to feel approval and disapproval is what Hutcheson identifies as the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume, the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse such passions. Roderick Firth’s 787 twentieth-century ideal observer theory, according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the moral sense theory.  Refs: H. P. Grice: “Shaftesbury’s moral sense: some remarks about the ‘senses’ of this ‘expression’!”

moral scepticism, any metaethical view that raises fundamental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever has any or adequate justification for believing any substantive moral claim. Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism. Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims like “Cheating is morally wrong” resemble expressions of emotion or desire like “Boo, cheating” or prescriptions for action like “Don’t cheat”, which are neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false. This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism, implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such linguistic analyses are rejected, one can still hold that no moral properties or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the same way as non-skeptics. Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral. 

moral status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance of a kind of being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a ceramic plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The same applies, presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient being, such as a dandelion, in the same way; others have doubts. According to some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that “humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation; analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering in the sense of being the objects of the actions of moral agents permits or demands moral evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not also moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly, the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made famous by Thomson, does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them morally more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be “correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively, persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially privileged elite among moral patients, possessing rights as well as interests. 

More, Henry 161487, English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s , where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He described himself as “a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism notably Plotinus and Ficino, mystical theologies, cabalistic doctrines as More misconceived them, empirical findings including reports of witchcraft and ghosts, the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible divisible into parts, the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his “extramural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ 1662, coined a few years before the first appearance of the  equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ 1668.

More, Sir Thomas: English humanist, statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service in 1517 and became lord chancellor in 1529. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which named Henry VIII the head of the English church, More was beheaded as a traitor. Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia published in Latin, 1516, is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including government, education, punishment, religion, family life, and euthanasia, Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists. Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different interpretations. 

Mosca: philosopher who made pioneering contributions to the theory of democratic elitism. Combining the life of a  professor with that of a politician, he taught such subjects as constitutional law, public law, political science, and history of political theory; at various times he was also an editor of the Parliamentary proceedings, an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, an under-secretary for colonial affairs, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Senate. For Mosca ‘elitism’ refers to the empirical generalization that a society is ruled by an organised minority. His democratic commitment is embodied in what he calls juridical defense: the normative principle that political developments are to be judged by whether and how they prevent any one person, class, force, or institution from dominating the others. Mosca’s third main contribution is a framework consisting of two intersecting distinctions that yield four possible ideal types, defined as follows: in autocracy, authority flows from the rulers to the ruled. In liberalism, from the ruled to the rulers. In democracy, the ruling class is open to renewal by members of other classes; in aristocracy it is not. He was influenced by, and in turn influenced, positivism, for the elitist thesis presumably constitutes the fundamental “law” of political “science.” Even deeper is his connection with the tradition of Machiavelli’s political realism. There is also no question that he practiced an empirical approach. In the tradition of elitism, he may be compared and contrasted with Pareto, Michels, and Schumpeter; and in the tradition of  political philosophy, to Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Mosca’s liberalism.”

Motivatum -- motivation, a property central in motivational explanations of intentional conduct. To assert that Grice is driving to Lord’s today because she wants to see his cricket team play and believes that they are playing today at Lord’s is to offer an explanation of Grice’s action. On a popular interpretation, the assertion mentions a pair of attitudes: a desire and a belief. Grice’s s desire is a paradigmatic motivational attitude in that it inclines him to bring about the satisfaction of that very attitude. The primary function of motivational attitudes is to bring about their own satisfaction by inducing the agent to undertake a suitable course of action, and, arguably, any attitude that has that function is, ipso facto, a motivational one. The related thesis that only attitudes having this function are motivational  or, more precisely, motivation-constituting  is implausible. Grice hopes that the Oxfordshire Cricket Team won yesterday. Plainly, his hope cannot bring about its own satisfaction, since Grice has no control over the past. Even so, the hope seemingly may motivate action e.g., Grice’s searching for sports news on her car radio, in which case the hope is motivation-constituting. Some philosophers have claimed that our beliefs that we are morally required to take a particular course of action are motivation-constituting, and such beliefs obviously do not have the function of bringing about their own satisfaction i.e., their truth. However, the claim is controversial, as is the related claim that beliefs of this kind are “besires”  that is, not merely beliefs but desires as well. Refs.: “Desire, belief, and besire.”   

Grice: the explanatory-justificatory distinction – “To explain” is not to explicate, but to render ‘plain’ – To justify is hardly to render ‘plain’! Grice is aware of this, because he does not use the ‘explicatory-justificatory’ distinction. Therefore, the ‘justificatory’ is conceptually prior – a philosopher looks for justification – hardly to render stuff plain – “Quite the opposite: my claim to fame is to follow the alleged professional duty of a philosophy professor: to render obscure what is clear, and vice versa!” -- motivational explanation -- a type of explanation of goal-directed behavior where the explanans appeals to the motives of the agent. The explanation usually is in the following form: Smith swam hard in order to win the race. Here the description of what Smith did identifies the behavior to be explained, and the phrase that follows ‘in order to’ identifies the goal or the state of affairs the obtaining of which was the moving force behind the behavior. The general presumption is that the agent whose behavior is being explained is capable of deliberating and acting on the decisions reached as a result of the deliberation. Thus, it is dubious whether the explanation contained in ‘The plant turned toward the sun in order to receive more light’ is a motivational explanation. Two problems are thought to surround motivational explanations. First, since the state of affairs set as the goal is, at the time of the action, non-existent, it can only act as the “moving force” by appearing as the intentional object of an inner psychological state of the agent. Thus, motives are generally desires for specific objects or states of affairs on which the agent acts. So motivational explanation is basically the type of explanation provided in folk psychology, and as such it inherits all the alleged problems of the latter. And second, what counts as a motive for an action under one description usually fails to be a motive for the same action under a different description. My motive for saying “hello” may have been my desire to answer the phone, but my motive for saying “hello” loudly was to express my irritation at the person calling me so late at night. 

motivational internalism, the view that moral motivation is internal to moral duty or the sense of duty. The view represents the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then necessarily one has a motive to do it. For example, if one sees that it is one’s duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood. Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it. Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance. Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to draw an analogous distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been cognitivist. 

mystical experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience  typically characterized by its profound emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability  is often but not always associated with some religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience them with a sense of inner peace or bliss.

mysticism, a doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought. Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, or a non-theistic form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystic  knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic. Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience, they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical. Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con   593 troversial whether all mystical experiences are basically the same, and whether the apparent diversity among them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural traditions. 

myth: Grice was aware of Grice, the Welsh philosopher. For Grice had turned a ‘myth,’ the myth of the compact, into a thing that would justify moral obligation – When Grice, the Englishman, gives a mythical account of communication, alla Plato and Paget, he faces the same problem – which he hopes is “very minor,” compared to others. In this case, it’s not about ‘moral obligation’ but about “something else.” Grice was possibly motivated by Quine’s irreverent, “The mth of meaning,” a talk at France, “Le mythe de la signification.” It’s odd that he gives the example of a ‘social contract’, developed by G. R. Grice as a ‘myth’ as his own on ‘expressing pain.’ “My succession of stages is a methodological myth designed to exhibit the conceptual link between expression and communication. Rather than Plato, he appeals to Rawls and the myth of the social conpact! Grice knows a little about Descartess “Discours de la methode,” and he is also aware of similar obsession by Collingwood with philosopical methodology. Grice would joke on midwifery, as the philosopher’s apter method at Oxford: to strangle error at its birth. Grice typifies a generation at Oxford. While he did not socialize with the crème de la crème in pre-war Oxford, he shared some their approach. E.g. a love affair with Russell’s logical construction. After the war, and in retrospect, Grice liked to associate himself with Austin. He obviously felt the need to belong to a group, to make a difference, to make history. Many participants of the play group saw themselves as doing philosophy, rather than reading about it! It was long after that Grice started to note the differences in methodology between Austin and himself. His methodology changed a little. He was enamoured with formalism for a while, and he grants that this love never ceased. In a still later phase, he came to realise that his way of doing philosophy was part of literature (essay writing). And so he started to be slightly more careful about his style – which some found florid. The stylistic concerns were serious. Oxonian philosophers like Holloway had been kept away from philosophy because of the stereotype that the Oxonian philosophers style is pedantic, when it neednt! A philosopher should be allowed, as Plato was, to use a myth, if he thinks his tutee will thank him for that! Grice loved to compare his Oxonian dialectic with Platos Athenian (strictly, Academic) dialectic. Indeed, there is some resemblance of the use of myth in Plato and Grice for philosophical methodological purposes. Grice especially enjoys a myth in his programme in philosophical psychology. In this, he is very much being a philosopher. Non-philosophers usually criticise this methodological use of a myth, but they would, wouldnt they. Grice suggests that a myth has diagogic relevance. Creature construction, the philosopher as demi-god, if mythical, is an easier way for a philosophy don to instil his ideas on his tutee than, say, privileged access and incorrigibility. myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic dramatizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and to be born anew.  Refs.: The main source is Grice’s essay on ‘myth’, in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

Nagel: not to be confused with Grice’s tutee, Nagel --: a preeminent  philosopher of science, born in the Old World, but with a B.S. degree from the  of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia, where he taught philosophy at the Philosophy Department. Nagel coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with M. R. Cohen. His publications include “Principles of the Theory of Probability” and “Structure of Science.” Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself calls “contextualist naturalism.” He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, Nagel rejects the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction “can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter” Principles of the Theory of Probability. This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for context-sensitive scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. 

Nagel, Thomas, professor of philosophy and of law at New York , known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality 595 N    595 resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories like utilitarianism, which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An examination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his “Moral Questions” 9 and The View from Nowhere 6. In Equality and Partiality 0 Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated. Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism 0 is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word 8 is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative.  Refs: Nagel, “Grice,” from  “A memoir,” H. P. Grice, “Nagel.” Grice: “I bought ‘moral questions’ and found them to be mortal!” --.

natura: Grice -- Grice: beyond the natural/non-natural distinction     ABSTRACT. When we approach, with Grice, the philosophical question involved in what we may call the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction, various conceptual possibilities are open to us. In this contribution, after providing a a historical survey of the distinction with special focus on  its treatment by Grice, I offer a thesis which, echoing Bennett, I label ‘meaning-naturalism.’        Keywords: H. Paul Grice, meaning, naturalism, non-natural meaning  Introduction  Grice sees his approach to ‘meaning’ (or “meaning that …”, as he would rather put it) as ‘rhapsody on a theme by Peirce.’  When he presents his “Meaning” to the Oxford Philosophical Society (only to be published almost a decade later by The Philosophical Review), Grice endows the philosophical community with a full-blown ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction, for which he has naturally become somewhat infamously famous, as when a philosopher, exploring the different causes of death of this or that other philosopher cites Grice as having passed of ‘non-natural causes.’  What is Grice’s ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction about?  As a member of the so-called ‘Oxford school of “ordinary-language” philosophy’ (he disliked the sobriquet), Grice seems initially to have been concerned with what at a later stage he calls a ‘pre-theoretical’ exploration of this or that use of the lexeme ‘mean,’ notably by Peirce.  Grice finds Peirce’s attempt to ‘replace’ the vernacular Anglo-Saxon ‘mean’ with ‘krypto-technical’ jargon as not too sympathetic to these or those Oxonian ears. So, it is this lexeme, or ‘expression,’ ‘mean,’ to which Grice’s distinction applies.  Carefully, as Bennett would point out, using lower-case ‘x’ and ‘y’ for tokens, Grice attempts to  formulate the distinction into two separate super-expressions, where the sub-expression “means that …” occurs:  i.  x meansN that p.  ii.  x meansNN that q.  What is ‘x’? Grice spends some time on this double-edged elucidation (and indeed, the ‘that’-clause explication is a later vintage). He grants that his main focus of concern is with (ii). In passing, he makes some rather intriguing running commentary.  It’s clear why Grice feels the need to spend some time in explicating what he is about to do. Grice’s distinction, as he formulates it, is supposed to ‘refine’ this or that distinction, made by this or that philosopher. While ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers are taken as approaching ‘ordinary-language,’ their underlying motivation is to criticise this or that philosopher’s mischaracterisation of the linguistic nuance at hand.  Grice’s avowed aim in his talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society is to shed light on, to use his characteristically cavalier wording, ‘what people have been thinking,’ which in that context, means ‘what other philosophers have been thinking’ – including Ayer -- or even getting at, ‘when they speak of such things as “natural” versus “conventional” signs.’  Grice thinks that, by his sticking with ‘meaning that …’ (rather than ‘sign’) and ‘non-natural’ (rather ‘conventional’) he is setting a better scene. Why would this be a conceptual improvement? Grice gives two reasons.  First, and again, Grice presents himself as a representative of the Oxonian school of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy, and exercising what these philosophers referred to this or that adventure in ‘linguistic botany.’ Grice thus sets to explore, introspectively, relying on his intuitions behind his own usage, philosophical and other: a ‘word,’ for example, Grice notes, he would not naturally describe as a ‘sign.’ In Grice’s (but surely not Peirce’s) idio-lect, the expression ‘sign’ is restricted to things like a traffic signal, say.  Second, and again in this adventure in ‘linguistic-botany,’ x (or strictly ‘a,’ for ‘agent,’ now) that can ‘mean’ that p, in a way that is specifically NON-factive (as he’ll later put it, echoing the Kiparskys) but which need not be ‘conventional.’ Grice gives the example of ‘a gesture,’ which a few philosophers would associate with Sraffa’s!  The historical background  Grice’s cavalier reference to ‘what people are getting at’ sounds charmingly Oxonian. He surely has no intention to underestimate the knowledge of the fellow members of The Oxford Philosophical Society. He won’t be seen as ‘going to lecture’ them. This is not a seminar, but a public occasion. He is allowed to be a cavalier.  Had this been a seminar, and being indeed a Lit. Hum. Oxon., Grice knows he can trace the distinction he is making, as he refines alternative ones, to Plato’s Cratylus, where we have Socrates and his dialogical companion playing with various adverbial modifiers, notably, ‘phusei’ and ‘thesei.’  Plato’s ‘phusei,’ surely translates to Grice’s ‘nature’ in ‘natural.’ Plato is carefully in avoiding the subsantive nominative ‘phusis.’ His ‘phusei’ is meant to modify the way something may such may be said to ‘mean’ (‘semein’). Possibly the earliest incarnation of what later will be dubbed as the ‘pooh’ pooh theory of language.  Plato’s ‘thesei’ is slightly more complicated. It is best to stay lexically conservative here and understand it to mean, ‘by position,’ i.e. or, in Grice’s freer prose, by convention. While Plato has to his disposal various other lexemes to do duty for this, he chooses a rather weak one, and again, not in the nominative “thesis,” but as applied to something that ‘means’ that p or q. In any case, Plato’s interest, as indeed Grice’s, is ‘dialectic.’ That x (or a) means that q thesei, by position, entails (as Plato would say if he could borrow from Moore) that it is not the case that x (or a) means that q phusei, by nature. The distinction is supposed to be absolute.  The ‘phusis’/‘thesis’ distinction undergoes a fascinating development in the philosophical tradition, from Greek (or Grecian) into Latin (Roman), and eventually makes it to scholastic philosophy: ‘per natura’/ ‘per positionem,’ or ‘ad placitum.’  Closer to Grice, authors partly philosophising in Grice’s vernacular, such as Hobbes, who is indeed fighting against Latin for the the use of the vernacular in philosophical discourse, will speak of what Grice knew would be familiar terminology to his Oxford audience: ‘natural sign’ versus, rather than Grice’s intentionally rather ugly-sounding ‘non-natural,’ ‘artificial’ or ‘conventional’ sign.  Grice does not use ‘scare quotes,’ but perhaps Umberto Eco would have wished he did! (Indeed, it is best to see Grice as treating ‘a means that p’ as the only ‘literal’ use of ‘mean,’ with ‘natural’ and ‘expression-relative’ uses as ‘derivative, or transferred, or figurative. While he does NOT use ‘scare quotes’ for his examples of ‘meanN,’ as in iii.  iii. Smoke means that there is fire.  Grice cares to quote in the talk from just one rather recent philosopher who was being discussed at Oxford in connection with A. J. Ayer’s approach to ‘moral’ language as being merely ‘emotive.’  Grice makes an explicit reference to Stevenson. While Grice finds Stevenson’s account of the ‘non-natural’ use of “mean” ‘circular’ (in that it relies on conditioning related to ‘communication,’ Stevenson explores various ‘natural’ uses of ‘mean’, and, to emphasise the figurative status, explicitly employs ‘scare quotes.’ For Stevenson, (iii) becomes (iv).  iv. Smoke ‘means’ that there is fire.     For surely ‘smoke’ cannot have an intention – and ‘mean’ is too close to ‘intend’ in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular to allow smoke to mean that p or q – ‘mean’ at most. This is crucial (and suggests just one way of the figuration of ‘mean,’ that will go two ways with Grice when he sees this figuration as applying to ‘expression-relative’ uses of ‘mean,’ as in  v.  ‘There’s smoke’ ‘means’ that there’s smoke.  (Ubi fumus ibi ignis). By carefully deploying scare-quotes, Stevenson is fighting against ‘animism.’ The root of ‘mean’ is cognate with Latin ‘mentare’ and ‘mentire,’ and can notably be traced back to ‘mens,’ the mind. Surely smoke cannot really (if we must use one of those adverbs that Austin called ‘trouser words’) that there is fire – just ‘mean’ it. A careful ‘utterer’ is using the same lexeme in an obviously ‘figurative’ way, and marking this fact explicitly by appealing to an ‘echoic,’ or as Grice may prefer, ‘trans-categorial,’ use.  The ‘fun’ side to this (and for Grice, ‘philosophy need be fun’) is that Grice’s distinction then becomes now the ‘non-natural’/‘natural’ distinction. Scare quotes signal that the realm of ‘mean’ is the realm of the ‘mind,’ and not what Plato might have seen as the realm of nature simpliciter.   But back to Hobbes. Indeed, Hobbes may be drawing on the earlier explorations on this in Latin, by, of all people, Ockham, who speaks now of scenarios where ‘significare’ is modified by the adverb ‘naturaliter,’ and scenarios where it is not.  For this or that example of what Grice has as the ‘natural’ use of ‘mean’, Ockham will stick with ‘significare,’ qualified by ‘naturaliter.’  vi. By smiling, Smith means that he is happy.  Or as Ockham more generically puts it,  vii. Risus ‘significat’ naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.  But Ockham can go pretty Griceian too, as when he wonders about a ‘circulus’ – of a wine barrel ‘artificially’ (or not ‘naturaliter’) placed, or positioned, outside a building, yielding:  viii. Circulus ‘significat’ naturaliter vinum.  The circle, even if artificially (or at least not naturally) placed, is a ‘sign’ or means that wine which is being sold inside the building (Ockham is playing with the composite nature of ‘significare,’ literally to ‘make sign’). In the Peirceian theme on which Grice offers his rhapsody, and which he’ll later adopt in his “Retrospective epilogue,” there is an iconicity involved in the ‘circulus’ scenario, where this ‘iconicity’ requires some conceptual elucidation.   Ockham’s use of the Latin ‘significare’ poses a further question. Strictly, of course, is to ‘make’ (‘ficare’) a sign. Therefore, Grice feels its Latinate counterpart, ‘signifies that…’ as too strong a way to qualify a thing like an expression (or ‘word,’) which for him may not be a sign at all.  Grice’s cavalier attitude and provocative intent is further evidenced by the fact that, years later, when delivering the William James lectures at Harvard, and refining his “Meaning,” he does mention that his programme is concerned with the elucidation of the ‘total signification’ of a remark as uttered by this or that utterer, into this or that variety of this or that explicit and implicit component.  When Grice refers to “what people are thinking,” he is aware that Hobbes more or less maintains the Ockham (or ‘Occam,’ in Grice’s preferred spelling) paradigm, both in his work written in his late scholastic Latin (“Computatio, sive logica”) and the vernacular (“Leviathan”) which almost marks the beginning of so-called, by Sorley, “English philosophy.”  With the coming of empiricism, with Locke’s Essay (1690), and later Mill’s “System of Logic (mandatory reading at Oxford for the Lit. Hum. degree – “more Grice to the Mill,” Grice will put it) it seems obvious that the tradition in which Grice is immersed is not strange to ‘naturalism.’  “Nature” itself, as Plato already knew, need not be hypostasized. It is a fascinating fact that, for years, Oxford infamously kept two different chairs for the philosopher: one of ‘natural’ philosophy, and the Waynflete chair of ‘meta-physical philosophy,’ where ‘metaphysical’ is merely an obscure way of referring to the ‘trans-natural.’ Or is it the other way around?  Few empiricist philosophers need to postulate the ‘unity’ (less so, the uniformity) of “Nature,” even if this or that Griceians will later will. Witness Nancy Cartwright in the festschrift for Grice edited by Grandy and Warner for Clarendon, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (or “G. R. I. C. E.,” for short): ‘how the laws of nature lie.’  In its simplest formulation, which should do for the purposes of this contribution, the philosophical thesis of ‘naturalism’ may be understood as positing an ontological continuum between this or that allegation concerning ‘Nature’ and what is not nature (‘art,’ as in ‘artifice’).  And then, Grice comes to revisit “Meaning.”  In 1976, Grice gets invited to a symposium at Brighton and resumes his 1948 vintage ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction. He had more or less kept it all through the William James lectures. At Brighton, Grice adds some crucial elaborations, in terms of what he now calls ‘philosophical psychology’ (Surely he doesn’t want to be seen as a ‘scientific’ psychologist). The audience is a different one, and not purely philosophical, so he can be cavalier and provocative in a different way.  While in his talk on “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical Society Grice had, rather casually, referred to this or that application, collocation, or occurrence, of the lexeme ‘mean’ as being this or that (Fregeian) ‘sense’ of the lexeme ‘mean’ -- and thus yielding ‘mean’ as, strictly, polysemous -- he now feels it’s time to weaken the claim to this or that (Ryleian) ‘use,’ not (Fregeian) ‘sense,’ of “mean.”  His motivation is obvious, and can be brought back a point he makes in his third William James lectures, and which in fact underlies his philosophical methodology regarding other philosophers’ mistakes when dealing with this or that linguistic nuance. If you are going to be Occamist, ‘senses,’ as specific entities, are not be multiplied beyond necessity.’ Grice is playing the etymological game here, concerning ‘mean’ (mens, mind). His example, in “Meaning revisited,” concerns Smith as ‘being caught in the grip of a vyse/vice.’ The root in both ‘vice’ and ‘vyse’ – Latin ‘vim’ – is cognate with ‘violence’ and gives two lexemes in Grice’s vernacular: one applies to something like a carpenter’s tool, and the other to the opposite of a virtue. Grice wants to explore how the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction may compare to the ‘vyse’/‘vice’ distinction. With ‘vice,’ Grice suggests, we have, in his vernacular, as opposed to Latin, two different lexemes (even if ultimately from a common Latin root, ‘vim,’ which surely mitigates the case for polysemy). But with ‘mean,’ that’s surely that’s not the case. The ultimate root is that of ‘mens,’ mind, and there’s no spelling difference to deal with.  Grice does not reverse the order of the terms in his ‘natural’/’non-natural’ distinction, though, as Eco would (“a sign is something you can use to lie”). Rather, he allows for this or that loose, or figurative, or ‘disimplicatural’ use of “means ….” His craving for a further philosophical generality justifies his disimplicature. This generality is of two kinds, one of which he deem thems ‘conceptual,’ or ‘methodological,’ and the other ‘mythic.’  The ‘conceptual’ or methodological manoevure is ontological in flavour. If there is a common core that both our (i) and (ii) above share, it should be rephrasable by a neutral form for both the ‘natural’ and the ‘non-natural’ scenario:  ix.  p is a consequence of x/a  ‘Consequentia’ is exactly the term used by Hobbes (some would prefer post-sequentia) when considering the generic concept of a ‘sign.’ It is thus very apt of Hacking (in his “Why does language matter to philosophy?”) to see Hobbes as a pre-Griceian (or is it, Grice as a post-Hobbesian?)  When it comes to ‘naturalism’ proper, we have to be careful in our exegesis of it as label for this or that philosophical overarching thesis. When reminiscing about his progress to ‘The City of the Eternal Truth,’ in his parody of Bunyan’s, pilgrim Grice meets face to face with the monster of “Naturalism.”  One may see this as Grice’s warning against some trends he found in The New World, ‘the devil of scientism,’ as he called it, towards ‘reductionism’ and ‘eliminationism,’ as flourishing in the idea that a ‘final cause’ is ‘mechanistically reducible.’ In Grice’s philosophical psychology, ‘Naturalism’ for Grice, amounts to rejecting this or that psychological law when this or that physiological law already explains the same phenomenon. Grice finds that his Occamism for ‘mean’ is not enough here and fangles an ‘ontological marxism’: this or that entity (an autonomous rational soul, say) that seems to go against naturalism may be justified, ‘provided they help with the house-work’ the philosopher is engaged in, in this case, and into the bargain, saving the philosopher’s existence.  The spirit, however, if not the letter, of ‘naturalism’ as a grand philosophical thesis still survives. Grice regards himself as ultimately a ‘constructivist.’ The realm of his ‘non-natural’ needs to be rooted in a previous realm of the ‘natural.’ He suggest here a ‘genitorially justified’ ‘myth’ for the ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction:  x.                  a meaninngNN that q derives from x meaningN that p  Grice is exploring ‘emergence’ as a viable concept in philosophical psychology. Philosophical psychology is thus rooted in philosophical ethology. This or that psychological (or souly) state, (or attitude, or stance) may be understood as emerging from (or supervening on) a mere biological and ultimately physical (i. e. natural) state. (He is clear about that in his “Intention and uncertainty,” when, adopting the concept of ‘willing that’ from Prichard, he allows it to be amenable to a ‘physicalist’ treatment).  In his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, Grice feels the need to creates a new philosophical sub-discipline, which he, echoing Carnap, christens ‘pirotology.’  Grice’s ‘pirotology’ concern Carnap’s ‘pirot,’ that ‘karulises elatically’ in his “Introduction to Semantics.” Grice adds a nod to Locke’s reflection on Prince Maurice’s ‘parot’ being “very intelligent, and rational.” The pirotological justification of the ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction involves three stages.  The first stage in the sequence or series involves the pirot, P1, as a merely physical (or purely ‘natural’) entity, P1.  The second stage involves our ‘natural’ pirot giving way to the emergence, pretty much alla Nicolai Hartmann, of a now bio-logical pirot P2 (a ‘human’), endowed with the goal of survival and adaptation to its natural environment.  The third and last stage sees our P2 ‘re-constituting’ itself as now a psycho-logical pirot P3, as a ‘person’, endowed with a higher type of ‘soul.’ (Grice is following Aristotle’s progression in “De anima.”  Grice carefully avoids the use of ‘mind,’ in what he felt was an over-use by philosophers in the discipline of ‘mental philosophy,’ as it is referred to at Oxford in connection with Wilde. As a Kantotelian, Grice sees the biological pirot P2 as having a ‘soul,’ even if not a rational one. Grice was fascinated by Aristotle’s insight that, ‘soul,’ like ‘figure’ or ‘number,’ is a concept that cannot be defined by ‘genus,’ but only within this or that ‘series,’ such as the three-stage one he provides from the ‘natural’ to the ‘non-natural’ pirot.  It is thus no easy exegetic task to make sense of Grice’s somewhat rhetorical antipathy towards ‘Naturalism,’ but I shall leave that as an open question.  Beyond the distinction?  In the end, for Grice, the key-word is not ‘culture,’ as opposed to ‘nature,’ but ‘rationality,’ as displayed by our ‘non-natural’ pirot P3. Rationality becomes the philosopher’s main concern, as it is conceptualized to develop from this or that pre-rational propension, which is biological and ultimately physical, i.e. natural.  Grice’s exploration on the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction thus agrees with a very naturalistic approaches to things like adaptation and survival in a natural environment, and the evolution of altruism (a ‘talking pirot’ who transfers his psychological attitude to another pirot).  While his tone remains distinctively philosophical – and indeed displaying what he thought as a bit of ‘irreverent, conservative, dissenting rationalism,’ by his example he has indeed shown that the philosopher’s say has a relevance that no other discipline can provide. REFERENCES  Grice, H. P. (1948). ‘Meaning,’ repr. in Studies in the Way of Words.  Grice, H. P. (1975). ‘Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, repr. in Grice, 1991.  Grice, H. P. (1976). ‘Meaning revisited,’ repr. in Studies in the Way of Words.  Grice, H. P. (1986). ‘Reply to Richards,’ in Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxord: The Clarendon Press.  Grice, H. P. (1991). The conception of value. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.  Hacking, I. M. (1977). Why does language matter to philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Hobbes, Thomas. Computatio sive logica.  Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.  Locke, John. A theory concerning humane [sic] understanding.  Mellor, D. H. (n.d.) ‘Causes of deaths of philosophers’ (accessed February 20th, 2020) https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/people/teaching-research-pages/mellor/dhm11/deaths-dg.html  Mill, J. S. A system of logic. London: Macmillan.  Ockham, William. Theory of signs.  Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko and Francesco Bellucci (2016). ‘H. Paul Grice’s Lecture Notes on Charles S. Peirce’s Theory of Signs,’ International Review of Pragmatics, 8(1):82-129.  Sorley, W. R. (1920). A history of English philosophy. Cambridge. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Natural and non-natural, and naturalism.”

natural intelligence -- artificial (or non-natural) intelligence, also called AI, the scientific effort to design and build intelligent artifacts. Grice disliked the phrase “artificial intelligence.” “Strictly, what Minsky means is ‘non-natural’ intelligence.’”Since the effort inevitably presupposes and tests theories about the nature of intelligence, it has implications for the philosophy of mind  perhaps even more than does empirical psychology. For one thing, actual construction amounts to a direct assault on the mindbody problem; should it succeed, some form of materialism would seem to be vindicated. For another, a working model, even a limited one, requires a more global conception of what intelligence is than do experiments to test specific hypotheses. In fact, psychology’s own overview of its domain Arouet, François-Marie artificial intelligence 53   53 has been much influenced by fundamental concepts drawn from AI. Although the idea of an intelligent artifact is old, serious scientific research dates only from the 0s, and is associated with the development of programmable computers. Intelligence is understood as a structural property or capacity of an active system; i.e., it does not matter what the system is made of, as long as its parts and their interactions yield intelligent behavior overall. For instance, if solving logical problems, playing chess, or conversing in English manifests intelligence, then it is not important whether the “implementation” is electronic, biological, or mechanical, just as long as it solves, plays, or talks. Computers are relevant mainly because of their flexibility and economy: software systems are unmatched in achievable active complexity per invested effort. Despite the generality of programmable structures and the variety of historical approaches to the mind, the bulk of AI research divides into two broad camps  which we can think of as language-oriented and pattern-oriented, respectively. Conspicuous by their absence are significant influences from the conditionedresponse paradigm, the psychoanalytic tradition, the mental picture idea, empiricist atomistic associationism, and so on. Moreover, both AI camps tend to focus on cognitive issues, sometimes including perception and motor control. Notably omitted are such psychologically important topics as affect, personality, aesthetic and moral judgment, conceptual change, mental illness, etc. Perhaps such matters are beyond the purview of artificial intelligence; yet it is an unobvious substantive thesis that intellect can be cordoned off and realized independently of the rest of human life. The two main AI paradigms emerged together in the 0s along with cybernetic and information-theoretic approaches, which turned out to be dead ends; and both are vigorous today. But for most of the sixties and seventies, the language-based orientation dominated attention and funding, for three signal reasons. First, computer data structures and processes themselves seemed languagelike: data were syntactically and semantically articulated, and processing was localized serial. Second, twentieth-century linguistics and logic made it intelligible that and how such systems might work: automatic symbol manipulation made clear, powerful sense. Finally, the sorts of performance most amenable to the approach  explicit reasoning and “figuring out”  strike both popular and educated opinion as particularly “intellectual”; hence, early successes were all the more impressive, while “trivial” stumbling blocks were easier to ignore. The basic idea of the linguistic or symbol manipulation camp is that thinking is like talking  inner discourse  and, hence, that thoughts are like sentences. The suggestion is venerable; and Hobbes even linked it explicitly to computation. Yet, it was a major scientific achievement to turn the general idea into a serious theory. The account does not apply only, or even especially, to the sort of thinking that is accessible to conscious reflection. Nor is the “language of thought” supposed to be much like English, predicate logic, LISP, or any other familiar notation; rather, its detailed character is an empirical research problem. And, despite fictional stereotypes, the aim is not to build superlogical or inhumanly rational automata. Our human tendencies to take things for granted, make intuitive leaps, and resist implausible conclusions are not weaknesses that AI strives to overcome but abilities integral to real intelligence that AI aspires to share. In what sense, then, is thought supposed to be languagelike? Three items are essential. First, thought tokens have a combinatorial syntactic structure; i.e., they are compounds of welldefined atomic constituents in well-defined recursively specifiable arrangements. So the constituents are analogous to words, and the arrangements are analogous to phrases and sentences; but there is no supposition that they should resemble any known words or grammar. Second, the contents of thought tokens, what they “mean,” are a systematic function of their composition: the constituents and forms of combination have determinate significances that together determine the content of any wellformed compound. So this is like the meaning of a sentence being determined by its grammar and the meanings of its words. Third, the intelligent progress or sequence of thought is specifiable by rules expressed syntactically  they can be carried out by processes sensitive only to syntactic properties. Here the analogy is to proof theory: the formal validity of an argument is a matter of its according with rules expressed formally. But this analogy is particularly treacherous, because it immediately suggests the rigor of logical inference; but, if intelligence is specifiable by formal rules, these must be far more permissive, context-sensitive, and so on, than those of formal logic. Syntax as such is perfectly neutral as to how the constituents are identified by sound, by artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 54   54 shape, by magnetic profile and arranged in time, in space, via address pointers. It is, in effect, a free parameter: whatever can serve as a bridge between the semantics and the processing. The account shares with many others the assumptions that thoughts are contentful meaningful and that the processes in which they occur can somehow be realized physically. It is distinguished by the two further theses that there must be some independent way of describing these thoughts that mediates between simultaneously determines their contents and how they are processed, and that, so described, they are combinatorially structured. Such a description is syntactical. We can distinguish two principal phases in language-oriented AI, each lasting about twenty years. Very roughly, the first phase emphasized processing search and reasoning, whereas the second has emphasized representation knowledge. To see how this went, it is important to appreciate the intellectual breakthrough required to conceive AI at all. A machine, such as a computer, is a deterministic system, except for random elements. That is fine for perfectly constrained domains, like numerical calculation, sorting, and parsing, or for domains that are constrained except for prescribed randomness, such as statistical modeling. But, in the general case, intelligent behavior is neither perfectly constrained nor perfectly constrained with a little random variation thrown in. Rather, it is generally focused and sensible, yet also fallible and somewhat variable. Consider, e.g., chess playing an early test bed for AI: listing all the legal moves for any given position is a perfectly constrained problem, and easy to program; but choosing the best move is not. Yet an intelligent player does not simply determine which moves would be legal and then choose one randomly; intelligence in chess play is to choose, if not always the best, at least usually a good move. This is something between perfect determinacy and randomness, a “between” that is not simply a mixture of the two. How is it achievable in a machine? The crucial innovation that first made AI concretely and realistically conceivable is that of a heuristic procedure. The term ‘heuristic’ derives from the Grecian word for discovery, as in Archimedes’ exclamation “Eureka!” The relevant point for AI is that discovery is a matter neither of following exact directions to a goal nor of dumb luck, but of looking around sensibly, being guided as much as possible by what you know in advance and what you find along the way. So a heuristic procedure is one for sensible discovery, a procedure for sensibly guided search. In chess, e.g., a player does well to bear in mind a number of rules of thumb: other things being equal, rooks are more valuable than knights, it is an asset to control the center of the board, and so on. Such guidelines, of course, are not valid in every situation; nor will they all be best satisfied by the same move. But, by following them while searching as far ahead through various scenarios as possible, a player can make generally sensible moves  much better than random  within the constraints of the game. This picture even accords fairly well with the introspective feel of choosing a move, particularly for less experienced players. The essential insight for AI is that such roughand-ready ceteris paribus rules can be deterministically programmed. It all depends on how you look at it. One and the same bit of computer program can be, from one point of view, a deterministic, infallible procedure for computing how a given move would change the relative balance of pieces, and from another, a generally sensible but fallible procedure for estimating how “good” that move would be. The substantive thesis about intelligence  human and artificial alike  then is that our powerful but fallible ability to form “intuitive” hunches, educated guesses, etc., is the result of largely unconscious search, guided by such heuristic rules. The second phase of language-inspired AI, dating roughly from the mid-0s, builds on the idea of heuristic procedure, but dramatically changes the emphasis. The earlier work was framed by a conception of intelligence as finding solutions to problems good moves, e.g.. From such a perspective, the specification of the problem the rules of the game plus the current position and the provision of some heuristic guides domain-specific rules of thumb are merely a setting of the parameters; the real work, the real exercise of intelligence, lies in the intensive guided search undertaken in the specified terms. The later phase, impressed not so much by our problem-solving prowess as by how well we get along with “simple” common sense, has shifted the emphasis from search and reasoning to knowledge. The motivation for this shift can be seen in the following two sentences: We gave the monkey the banana because it was ripe. We gave the monkey the banana because it was hungry. artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 55   55 The word ‘it’ is ambiguous, as the terminal adjectives make clear. Yet listeners effortlessly understand what is meant, to the point, usually, of not even noticing the ambiguity. The question is, how? Of course, it is “just common sense” that monkeys don’t get ripe and bananas don’t get hungry, so . . . But three further observations show that this is not so much an answer as a restatement of the issue. First, sentences that rely on common sense to avoid misunderstanding are anything but rare: conversation is rife with them. Second, just about any odd fact that “everybody knows” can be the bit of common sense that understanding the next sentence depends on; and the range of such knowledge is vast. Yet, third, dialogue proceeds in real time without a hitch, almost always. So the whole range of commonsense knowledge must be somehow at our mental fingertips all the time. The underlying difficulty is not with speed or quantity alone, but with relevance. How does a system, given all that it knows about aardvarks, Alabama, and ax handles, “home in on” the pertinent fact that bananas don’t get hungry, in the fraction of a second it can afford to spend on the pronoun ‘it’? The answer proposed is both simple and powerful: common sense is not just randomly stored information, but is instead highly organized by topics, with lots of indexes, cross-references, tables, hierarchies, and so on. The words in the sentence itself trigger the “articles” on monkeys, bananas, hunger, and so on, and these quickly reveal that monkeys are mammals, hence animals, that bananas are fruit, hence from plants, that hunger is what animals feel when they need to eat  and that settles it. The amount of search and reasoning is minimal; the issue of relevance is solved instead by the antecedent structure in the stored knowledge itself. While this requires larger and more elaborate systems, the hope is that it will make them faster and more flexible. The other main orientation toward artificial intelligence, the pattern-based approach  often called “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing”  reemerged from the shadow of symbol processing only in the 0s, and remains in many ways less developed. The basic inspiration comes not from language or any other psychological phenomenon such as imagery or affect, but from the microstructure of the brain. The components of a connectionist system are relatively simple active nodes  lots of them  and relatively simple connections between those nodes  again, lots of them. One important type and the easiest to visualize has the nodes divided into layers, such that each node in layer A is connected to each node in layer B, each node in layer B is connected to each node in layer C, and so on. Each node has an activation level, which varies in response to the activations of other, connected nodes; and each connection has a weight, which determines how strongly and in what direction the activation of one node affects that of the other. The analogy with neurons and synapses, though imprecise, is intended. So imagine a layered network with finely tuned connection weights and random or zero activation levels. Now suppose the activations of all the nodes in layer A are set in some particular way  some pattern is imposed on the activation state of this layer. These activations will propagate out along all the connections from layer A to layer B, and activate some pattern there. The activation of each node in layer B is a function of the activations of all the nodes in layer A, and of the weights of all the connections to it from those nodes. But since each node in layer B has its own connections from the nodes in layer A, it will respond in its own unique way to this pattern of activations in layer A. Thus, the pattern that results in layer B is a joint function of the pattern that was imposed on layer A and of the pattern of connection weights between the two layers. And a similar story can be told about layer B’s influence on layer C, and so on, until some final pattern is induced in the last layer. What are these patterns? They might be any number of things; but two general possibilities can be distinguished. They might be tantamount to or substrata beneath representations of some familiar sort, such as sentencelike structures or images; or they might be a kind or kinds of representation previously unknown. Now, people certainly do sometimes think in sentences and probably images; so, to the extent that networks are taken as complete brain models, the first alternative must be at least partly right. But, to that extent, the models are also more physiological than psychological: it is rather the implemented sentences or images that directly model the mind. Thus, it is the possibility of a new genus of representation  sometimes called distributed representation  that is particularly exciting. On this alternative, the patterns in the mind represent in some way other than by mimetic imagery or articulate description. How? An important feature of all network models is that there are two quite different categories of pattern. On the one hand, there are the relatively ephemeral patterns of activation in various artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 56   56 groups of nodes; on the other, there are the relatively stable patterns of connection strength among the nodes. Since there are in general many more connections than nodes, the latter patterns are richer; and it is they that determine the capabilities of the network with regard to the former patterns. Many of the abilities most easily and “naturally” realized in networks can be subsumed under the heading pattern completion: the connection weights are adjusted  perhaps via a training regime  such that the network will complete any of the activation patterns from a predetermined group. So, suppose some fraction say half of the nodes in the net are clamped to the values they would have for one of those patterns say P while the remainder are given random or default activations. Then the network, when run, will reset the latter activations to the values belonging to P  thus “completing” it. If the unclamped activations are regarded as variations or deviations, pattern completion amounts to normalization, or grouping by similarity. If the initial or input nodes are always the same as in layered networks, then we have pattern association or transformation from input to output. If the input pattern is a memory probe, pattern completion becomes access by content. If the output pattern is an identifier, then it is pattern recognition. And so on. Note that, although the operands are activation patterns, the “knowledge” about them, the ability to complete them, is contained in the connection patterns; hence, that ability or know-how is what the network represents. There is no obvious upper bound on the possible refinement or intricacy of these pattern groupings and associations. If the input patterns are sensory stimuli and the output patterns are motor control, then we have a potential model of coordinated and even skillful behavior. In a system also capable of language, a network model or component might account for verbal recognition and content association, and even such “nonliteral” effects as trope and tone. Yet at least some sort of “symbol manipulation” seems essential for language use, regardless of how networklike the implementation is. One current speculation is that it might suffice to approximate a battery of symbolic processes as a special subsystem within a cognitive system that fundamentally works on quite different principles. The attraction of the pattern-based approach is, at this point, not so much actual achievement as it is promise  on two grounds. In the first place, the space of possible models, not only network topologies but also ways of construing the patterns, is vast. Those built and tested so far have been, for practical reasons, rather small; so it is possible to hope beyond their present limitations to systems of significantly greater capability. But second, and perhaps even more attractive, those directions in which patternbased systems show the most promise  skills, recognition, similarity, and the like  are among the areas of greatest frustration for languagebased AI. Hence it remains possible, for a while at least, to overlook the fact that, to date, no connectionist network can perform long division, let alone play chess or solve symbolic logic problems. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Intelligence: natural and non-natural.”

natural life -- artificial life, an interdisciplinary science studying the most general character of the fundamental processes of life. These processes include self-organization, self-reproduction, learning, adaptation, and evolution. Artificial life or ALife is to theoretical biology roughly what artificial intelligence AI is to theoretical psychology  computer simulation is the methodology of choice. In fact, since the mind exhibits many of life’s fundamental properties, AI could be considered a subfield of ALife. However, whereas most traditional AI models are serial systems with complicated, centralized controllers making decisions based on global state information, most natural systems exhibiting complex autonomous behavior are parallel, distributed networks of simple entities making decisions based solely on their local state information, so typical ALife models have a corresponding distributed architecture. A computer simulation of evolving “bugs” can illustrate what ALife models are like. Moving around in a two-dimensional world periodically laden with heaps of “food,” these bugs eat, reproduce, and sometimes perish from starvation. Each bug’s movement is genetically determined by the quantities of food in its immediate neighborhood, and random mutations and crossovers modify these genomes during reproduction. Simulations started with random genes show spontaneous waves of highly adaptive genetic novelties continuously sweeping through the population at precisely quantifiable rates.C. Langston et al., eds., Artificial Life II 1. artificial language artificial life 57   57 ALife science raises and promises to inform many philosophical issues, such as: Is functionalism the right approach toward life? When, if ever, is a simulation of life really alive? When do systems exhibit the spontaneous emergence of properties?  Refs.: Grice: “Life: natural and non-natural.”

naturalism, the twofold view that 1 everything is composed of natural entities  those studied in the sciences on some versions, the natural sciences  whose properties determine all the properties of things, persons included abstracta like possibilia and mathematical objects, if they exist, being constructed of such abstract entities as the sciences allow; and 2 acceptable methods of justification and explanation are continuous, in some sense, with those in science. Clause 1 is metaphysical or ontological, clause 2 methodological and/or epistemological. Often naturalism is formulated only for a specific subject matter or domain. Thus ethical naturalism holds that moral properties are equivalent to or at least determined by certain natural properties, so that moral judgments either form a subclass of, or are non-reductively determined by the factual or descriptive judgments, and the appropriate methods of moral justification and explanation are continuous with those in science. Aristotle and Spinoza sometimes are counted among the ancestors of naturalism, as are Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes. But the major impetus to naturalism in the last two centuries comes from advances in science and the growing explanatory power they signify. By the 1850s, the synthesis of urea, reflections on the conservation of energy, work on “animal electricity,” and discoveries in physiology suggested to Feuerbach, L. Buchner, and others that all aspects of human beings are explainable in purely natural terms. Darwin’s theory had even greater impact, and by the end of the nineteenth century naturalist philosophies were making inroads where idealism once reigned unchallenged. Naturalism’s ranks now included H. Spencer, J. Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, W. K. Clifford, and E. Haeckel. Early in the twentieth century, Santayana’s naturalism strongly influenced a number of  philosophers, as did Dewey’s. Still other versions of naturalism flourished in America in the 0s and 0s, including those of R. W. Sellars and M. Cohen. Today most New-World philosophers of mind are naturalists of some stripe, largely because of what they see as the lessons of continuing scientific advances, some of them spectacular, particularly in the brain sciences. Nonetheless, twentieth-century philosophy has been largely anti-naturalist. Both phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition and analytic philosophy in the Fregean tradition, together with their descendants, have been united in rejecting psychologism, a species of naturalism according to which empirical discoveries about mental processes are crucial for understanding the nature of knowledge, language, and logic. In order to defend the autonomy of philosophy against inroads from descriptive science, many philosophers have tried to turn the tables by arguing for the priority of philosophy over science, hence over any of its alleged naturalist implications. Many continue to do so, often on the ground that philosophy alone can illuminate the normativity and intentionality involved in knowledge, language, and logic; or on the ground that philosophy can evaluate the normative and regulative presuppositions of scientific practice which science itself is either blind to or unequipped to analyze; or on the ground that phi- losophy understands how the language of science can no more be used to get outside itself than any other, hence can no more be known to be in touch with the world and ourselves than any other; or on the ground that would-be justifications of fundamental method, naturalist method certainly included, are necessarily circular because they must employ the very method at issue. Naturalists may reply by arguing that naturalism’s methodological clause 2 entails the opposite of dogmatism, requiring as it does an uncompromising fallibilism about philosophical matters that is continuous with the open, selfcritical spirit of science. If evidence were to accumulate against naturalism’s metaphysical clause 1, 1 would have to be revised or rejected, and there is no a priori reason such evidence could in principle never be found; indeed many naturalists reject the a priori altogether. Likewise, 2 itself might have to be revised or even rejected in light of adverse argument, so that in this respect 2 is self-referentially consistent. Until then, 2’s having survived rigorous criticism to date is justification enough, as is the case with hypotheses in science, which often are deployed without circularity in the course of their own evaluation, whether positive or negative H. I. Brown, “Circular Justifications,” 4. So too can language be used without circularity in expressing hypotheses about the relations between language and the prelinguistic world as illustrated by R. Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, 4; cf. Post, “Epistemology,” 6. As for normativity and intentionality, naturalism does not entail materialism or physicalism, according to which everything is composed of the entities or processes studied in physics, and the properties of these basic physical affairs determine all the properties of things as in Quine. Some naturalists deny this, holding that more things than are dreamt of in physics are required to account for normativity and intentionality  and consciousness. Nor need naturalism be reductive, in the sense of equating every property with some natural property. Indeed many physicalists themselves explain how the physical, hence natural, properties of things might determine other, non-natural properties without being equivalent to them G. Hellman, T. Horgan, D. Lewis; see J. Post, The Faces of Existence, 7. Often the determining physical properties are not all properties of the thing x that has the non-natural properties, but include properties of items separated from x in space and time or in some cases bearing no physical relation to x that does any work in determining x’s properties Post, “ ‘Global’ Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?” 5. Thus naturalism allows a high degree of holism and historicity, which opens the way for a non-reductive naturalist account of intentionality and normativity, such as Millikan’s, that is immune to the usual objections, which are mostly objections to reduction. The alternative psychosemantic theories of Dretske and Fodor, being largely reductive, remain vulnerable to such objections. In these and other ways non-reductive naturalism attempts to combine a monism of entities  the natural ones of which everything is composed  with a pluralism of properties, many of them irreducible or emergent. Not everything is nothing but a natural thing, nor need naturalism accord totalizing primacy to the natural face of existence. Indeed, some naturalists regard the universe as having religious and moral dimensions that enjoy a crucial kind of primacy; and some offer theologies that are more traditionally theist as do H. N. Wieman, C. Hardwick, J. Post. So far from exhibiting “reptilian indifference” to humans and their fate, the universe can be an enchanted place of belonging. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “My labour against Naturalism.”

naturalistic epistemology, an approach to epistemology that views the human subject as a natural phenomenon and uses empirical science to study epistemic activity. The phrase was introduced by Quine “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 9, who proposed that epistemology should be a chapter of psychology. Quine construed classical epistemology as Cartesian epistemology, an attempt to ground all knowledge in a firmly logical way on immediate experience. In its twentieth-century embodiment, it hoped to give a translation of all discourse and a deductive validation of all science in terms of sense experience, logic, and set theory. Repudiating this dream as forlorn, Quine urged that epistemology be abandoned and replaced by psychology. It would be a scientific study of how the subject takes sensory stimulations as input and delivers as output a theory of the three-dimensional world. This formulation appears to eliminate the normative mission of epistemology. In later writing, however, Quine has suggested that normative epistemology can be naturalized as a chapter of engineering: the technology of predicting experience, or sensory stimulations. Some theories of knowledge are naturalistic in their depiction of knowers as physical systems in causal interaction with the environment. One such theory is the causal theory of knowing, which says that a person knows that p provided his belief that p has a suitable causal connection with a corresponding state of affairs. Another example is the information-theoretic approach developed by Dretske Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1. This says that a person knows that p only if some signal “carries” this information that p to him, where information is construed as an objective commodity that can be processed and transmitted via instruments, gauges, neurons, and the like. Information is “carried” from one site to another when events located at those sites are connected by a suitable lawful dependence. The normative concept of justification has also been the subject of naturalistic construals. Whereas many theories of justified belief focus on logical or probabilistic relations between evidence and hypothesis, naturalistic theories focus on the psychological processes causally responsible for the belief. The logical status of a belief does not fix its justificational status. Belief in a tautology, for instance, is not justified if it is formed by blind trust in an ignorant guru. According to Goldman Epistemology and Cognition, 6, a belief qualifies as justified only if it is produced by reliable belief-forming processes, i.e., processes that generally have a high truth ratio. Goldman’s larger program for naturalistic epistemology is called “epistemics,” an interdisciplinary enterprise in which cognitive science would play a major role. Epistemics would seek to identify the subset of cognitive operations available to the human cognizer that are best from a truth-bearing standpoint. Relevant truth-linked properties include problem-solving power and speed, i.e., the abilities to obtain correct answers to questions of interest and to do so quickly. Close connections between epistemology and artificial intelligence have been proposed by Clark Glymour, Gilbert Harman, John Pollock, and Paul Thagard. Harman stresses that principles of good reasoning are not directly given by rules of logic. Modus ponens, e.g., does not tell you to infer q if you already believe p and ‘if p then q’. In some cases it is better to subtract a belief in one of the premises rather than add a belief in q. Belief revision also requires attention to the storage and computational limitations of the mind. Limits of memory capacity, e.g., suggest a principle of clutter avoidance: not filling one’s mind with vast numbers of useless beliefs Harman, Change in View, 6. Other conceptions of naturalistic epistemology focus on the history of science. Larry Laudan conceives of naturalistic epistemology as a scientific inquiry that gathers empirical evidence concerning the past track records of various scientific methodologies, with the aim of determining which of these methodologies can best advance the chosen cognitive ends. Naturalistic epistemology need not confine its attention to individual epistemic agents; it can also study communities of agents. This perspective invites contributions from sciences that address the social side of the knowledge-seeking enterprise. If naturalistic epistemology is a normative inquiry, however, it must not simply naturalism, biological naturalistic epistemology 598    598 describe social practices or social influences; it must analyze the impact of these factors on the attainment of cognitive ends. Philosophers such as David Hull, Nicholas Rescher, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Goldman have sketched models inspired by population biology and economics to explore the epistemic consequences of alternative distributions of research activity and different ways that professional rewards might influence the course of research. 

Lockeian ‘sort’ -- natural kind, a category of entities classically conceived as having modal implications; e.g., if Socrates is a member of the natural kind human being, then he is necessarily a human being. The idea that nature fixes certain sortals, such as ‘water’ and ‘human being’, as correct classifications that appear to designate kinds of entities has roots going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Anil Gupta has argued that sortals are to be distinguished from properties designated by such predicates as ‘red’ by including criteria for individuating the particulars bits or amounts for mass nouns that fall under them as well as criteria for sorting those particulars into the class. Quine is salient among those who find the modal implications of natural kinds objectionable. He has argued that the idea of natural kinds is rooted in prescientific intuitive judgments of comparative similarity, and he has suggested that as these intuitive classifications are replaced by classifications based on scientific theories these modal implications drop away. Kripke and Putnam have argued that science in fact uses natural kind terms having the modal implications Quine finds so objectionable. They see an important role in scientific methodology for the capacity to refer demonstratively to such natural kinds by pointing out particulars that fall under them. Certain inferences within science  such as the inference to the charge for electrons generally from the measurement of the charge on one or a few electrons  seem to be additional aspects of a role for natural kind terms in scientific practice. Other roles in the methodology of science for natural kind concepts have been discussed in recent work by Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn. H. P. Grice: “Lockeian sorts: natural and non-natural.”

natural law, also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Grecian and Roman thought, particularly Stoicism, introduced ideas of eternal laws directing the actions of all rational beings and built into the very structure of the universe. Roman lawyers developed a doctrine of a law that all civilized peoples would recognize, and made some effort to explain it in terms of a natural law common to animals and humans. The most influential forms of natural law theory, however, arose from later efforts to use Stoic and legal language to work out a Christian theory of morality and politics. The aim was to show that the principles of morals could be known by reason alone, without revelation, so that the whole human race could know how to live properly. The law of nature applies, on this understanding, only to rational beings, who can obey or disobey it deliberately and freely. It is thus different in kind from the laws God laid down for the inanimate and irrational parts of creation. Natural law theorists often saw continuities and analogies between natural laws for humans and those for the rest of creation but did not confuse them. The most enduringly influential natural law writer was Aquinas. On his view God’s eternal reason ordains laws directing all things to act for the good of the community of the universe, the declaration of His own glory. Human reason can participate sufficiently in God’s eternal reason to show us the good of the human community. The natural law is thus our sharing in the eternal law in a way appropriate to our human nature. God lays down certain other laws through revelation; these divine laws point us toward our eternal goal. The natural law concerns our earthly good, and needs to be supplemented by human laws. Such laws can vary from community to community, but to be binding they must always stay within the limits of the law of nature. God engraved the most basic principles of the natural law in the minds of all people alike, but their detailed application takes reasoning powers that not everyone may have. Opponents of Aquinas  called voluntarists  argued that God’s will, not his intellect, is the source of law, and that God could have laid down different natural laws for us. Hugo Grotius rejected their position, but unlike Aquinas he conceived of natural law as meant not to direct us to bring about some definite common good but to set the limits on the ways in which each of us could properly pursue our own personal aims. This Grotian outlook was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke along voluntarist lines. Thomistic views continued to be expounded by Protestant as well as Roman Catholic writers until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, while natural law theory remained central to Catholic teaching, it ceased to attract major new non-Catholic proponents. Natural law doctrine in both Thomistic and Grotian versions treats morality as basically a matter of compliance with law. Obligation and duty, obedience and disobedience, merit and guilt, reward and punishment, are central notions. Virtues are simply habits of following laws. Though the law is suited to our distinctive human nature and can be discovered by the proper use of reason, it is not a self-imposed law. In following it we are obeying God. Since the early eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of whether or not there is an objective morality have largely ceased to center on natural law. The idea remains alive, however, in jurisprudence. Natural law theories are opposed to legal positivism, the view that the only binding laws are those imposed by human sovereigns, who cannot be subject to higher legal constraints. Legal theorists arguing that there are rational objective limits to the legislative power of rulers often think of these limits in terms of natural law, even when their theories do not invoke or imply any of the religious aspects of earlier natural law positions. Refs.: N. Cartwright-Hampshire, “How the laws of phyiscs lie,” in P. G. R. I. C. E., without a response by H. P. Grice. (“That will not be feasible.”)

natural philosophy – Grice: “It’s funny: there are only three or four chairs of philosophy at Oxford and one had to be on ‘the trans-natural’ philosophy! Back in the day, I might just as well have to have attended the ‘natural’ philosophy lectures!” --  the study of nature or of the spatiotemporal world. This was regarded as a task for philosophy before the emergence of modern science, especially physics and astronomy, and the term is now only used with reference to premodern times. Philosophical questions about nature still remain, e.g., whether materialism is true, but they would usually be placed in metaphysics or in a branch of it that may be called philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy is not to be confused with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical view no part of science itself that all that there is is the spatiotemporal world and that the only way to study it is that of the empirical sciences. It is also not to be confused with natural theology, which also may be considered part of metaphysics. The Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy is the name of a chair at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford.  The Sedleian Chair was founded by Sir William Sedley who, by his will dated 20 October 1618, left the sum of £2,000 to the University of Oxford for purchase of lands for its endowment. Sedley's bequest took effect in 1621 with the purchase of an estate at Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire to produce the necessary income.  It is regarded as the oldest of Oxford's scientific chairs. Holders of the Sedleian Professorship have, since the mid 19th Century, worked in a range of areas of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. They are simultaneously elected to fellowships at Queen's College, Oxford.  The Sedleian Professors in the past century have been Augustus Love (1899-1940), who was distinguished for his work in the mathematical theory of elasticity, Sydney Chapman (1946-1953), who is renowned for his contributions to the kinetic theory of gases and solar-terrestrial physics, George Temple (1953-1968), who made significant contributions to mathematical physics and the theory of generalized functions, Brooke Benjamin (1979-1995), who did highly influential work in the areas of mathematical analysis and fluid mechanics, and Sir John Ball (1996-2019), who is distinguished for his work in the mathematical theory of elasticity, materials science, the calculus of variations, and infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Oxford and the four Ws: Waynflete, White, Wykeham, and Wilde.”

natural religion, a term first occurring in the second half of the seventeenth century, used in three related senses, the most common being 1 a body of truths about God and our duty that can be discovered by natural reason. These truths are sufficient for salvation or according to some orthodox Christians would have been sufficient if Adam had not sinned. Natural religion in this sense should be distinguished from natural theology, which does not imply this. A natural religion may also be 2 one that has a human, as distinct from a divine, origin. It may also be 3 a religion of human nature as such, as distinguished from religious beliefs and practices that have been determined by local circumstances. Natural religion in the third sense is identified with humanity’s original religion. In all three senses, natural religion includes a belief in God’s existence, justice, benevolence, and providential government; in immortality; and in the dictates of common morality. While the concept is associated with deism, it is also sympathetically treated by Christian writers like Clarke, who argues that revealed religion simply restores natural religion to its original purity and adds inducements to compliance. The  Faculty of Medicine appoints an elector for the professorship of Human Anatomy and for the professorship of Pathology. The Board of Natural Science appoints one elector for the professorship of Pathology and two for the Lee's Readerships. The Board of Modern History appoints two electors for the Beit professorship and lectureship, and three for the Ford lectureship. The Board of Theology appoints three of the seven electors for the Speaker's lectureship in Biblical Studies. Three different Boards of Faculty appoint electors for the Wilde lectureship in Natural Religion.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Natural religion at Oxford – the Wilde and the Wilde.”

Necessitarianism: “An ugly word once used by Strawson in a tutorial!” – Grice. -- the doctrine that necessity is an objective feature of the world. Natural language permits speakers to express modalities: a state of affairs can be actual Paris’s being in France, merely possible chlorophyll’s making things blue, or necessary 2 ! 2 % 4. Anti-necessitarians believe that these distinctions are not grounded in the nature of the world. Some of them claim that the distinctions are merely verbal. Others, e.g., Hume, believed that psychological facts, like our expectations of future events, explain the idea of necessity. Yet others contend that the modalities reflect epistemic considerations; necessity reflects the highest level of an inquirer’s commitment. Some necessitarians believe there are different modes of metaphysical necessity, e.g., causal and logical necessity. Certain proponents of idealism believe that each fact is necessarily connected with every other fact so that the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is the discovery of a completely rigorous mathematical system of the world.

Necessitas – necessarium -- necessity, a modal property attributable to a whole proposition dictum just when it is not possible that the proposition be false the proposition being de dicto necessary. Narrowly construed, a proposition P is logically necessary provided P satisfies certain syntactic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is formally self-contradictory. More broadly, P is logically necessary just when P satisfies certain semantic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is false, and P true, in all possible worlds. These semantic conditions were first suggested by Leibniz, refined by Vitters and Carnap, and fully developed as the possible worlds semantics of Kripke, Hintikka, et al., in the 0s. Previously, philosophers had to rely largely on intuition to determine the acceptability or otherwise of formulas involving the necessity operator, A, and were at a loss as to which of various axiomatic systems for modal logic, as developed in the 0s by C. I. Lewis, best captured the notion of logical necessity. There was much debate, for instance, over the characteristic NN thesis of Lewis’s system S4, namely, AP / A AP if P is necessary then it is necessarily necessary. But given a Leibnizian account of the truth conditions for a statement of the form Aa namely R1 that Aa is true provided a is true in all possible worlds, and R2 that Aa is false provided there is at least one possible world in which a is false, a proof can be constructed by reductio ad absurdum. For suppose that AP / AAP is false in some arbitrarily chosen world W. Then its antecedent will be true in W, and hence by R1 it follows a that P will be true in all possible worlds. But equally its consequent will be false in W, and hence by R2 AP will be false in at least one possible world, from which again by R2 it follows b that P will be false in at least one possible world, thus contradicting a. A similar proof can be constructed for the characteristic thesis of S5, namely, -A-P / A-A-P if P is possibly true then it is necessarily possible. Necessity is also attributable to a property F of an object O provided it is not possible that there is no possible world in which O exists and lacks F  F being de re necessary, internal or essential to O. For instance, the non-repeatable haecceitist property of being identical to O is de re necessary essential to O, and arguably the repeatable property of being extended is de re necessary to all colored objects. nĕcesse (arch. nĕcessum , I.v. infra: NECESVS, S. C. de Bacch. l. 4: necessus , Ter. Heaut. 2, 3, 119 Wagn. ad loc.; id. Eun. 5, 5, 28; Gell. 16, 8, 1; v. Lachm. ad Lucr. 6, 815), neutr. adj. (gen. necessis, Lucr. 6, 815 ex conj. Lachm.; cf. Munro ad loc.; elsewhere only nom. and acc. sing., and with esse or habere) [perh. Sanscr. naç, obtain; Gr. root ἐνεκ-; cf. ἀνάγκη; v. Georg Curtius Gr. Etym. 424]. I. Form necesse. A. Unavoidable, inevitable, indispensable, necessary (class.; cf.: opus, usus est) 1. With esse. a. With subject.-clause: “edocet quanto detrimento...necesse sit constare victoriam,” Caes. B. G. 7, 19: “necesse est eam, quae ... timere permultos,” Auct. Her. 4, 16, 23: emas, non quod opus est, sed quod necesse est, Cato ap. Sen. Ep. 94, 28: “nihil fit, quod necesse non fuerit,” Cic. Fat. 9, 17: “necesse est igitur legem haberi in rebus optimis,” id. Leg. 2, 5, 12; id. Verr 2, 3, 29, § 70. — b. With dat. (of the person, emphatic): nihil necesse est mihi de me ipso dicere, Cic. Sen. 9, 30: “de homine enim dicitur, cui necesse est mori,” id. Fat. 9, 17.— c. With ut and subj.: “eos necesse est ut petat,” Auct. Her. 4, 16, 23: “sed ita necesse fuisse, cum Demosthenes dicturus esset, ut concursus ex totā Graeciā fierent,” Cic. Brut. 84, 289; Sen. Ep. 78, 15: “hoc necesse est, ut, etc.,” Cic. de Or. 2, 29, 129; Sen. Q. N. 2, 14, 2: “neque necesse est, uti vos auferam,” Gell. 2, 29, 9: “necesse est semper, ut id ... per se significet,” Quint. 8, 6, 43.— d. With subj. alone: “haec autem oratio ... aut nulla sit necesse est, aut omnium irrisione ludatur,” Cic. de Or. 1, 12, 50: “istum condemnetis necesse est,” Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 18, § 45: “vel concidat omne caelum necesse est,” id. Tusc. 1, 23, 54: “si necesse est aliquid ex se magni boni pariat,” Lact. 3, 12, 7.— 2. With habere (class. only with inf.): “non habebimus necesse semper concludere,” Cic. Part. Or. 13, 47: “eo minus habeo necesse scribere,” id. Att. 10, 1, 4: “Oppio scripsi ne necesse habueris reddere,” id. ib. 16, 2, 5: “non verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere,” id. Opt. Gen. Or. 5, 14: “non necesse habeo omnia pro meo jure agere,” Ter. Ad. 1, 1, 26; Quint. 11, 1, 74; Vulg. Matt. 14, 16: necesse habere with abl. (= egere; “late Lat.): non necesse habent sani medico,” Vulg. Marc. 2, 17.—In agreement with object of habere: “non habet rex sponsalia necesse,” Vulg. 1 Reg. 18, 25.— B. Needful, requisite, indispensable, necessary: “id quod tibi necesse minime fuit, facetus esse voluisti,” Cic. Sull. 7, 22.— II. Form necessum (mostly ante-class.). A. With subject.-clause: “foras necessum est, quicquid habeo, vendere,” Plaut. Stich. 1, 3, 66: quod sit necessum scire, Afran. ap. Charis. p. 186 P.: “nec tamen haec retineri hamata necessumst,” Lucr. 2, 468: “externa corpus de parte necessumst tundier,” id. 4, 933: “necessum est vorsis gladiis depugnarier,” Plaut. Cas. 2, 5, 36: “necessum est paucis respondere,” Liv. 34, 5: “num omne id aurum in ludos consumi necessum esset?” id. 39, 5: “tonsorem capiti non est adhibere necessum,” Mart. 6, 57, 3.— B. With dat.: “dicas uxorem tibi necessum esse ducere,” Plaut. Mil. 4, 3, 25.— C. With subj.: “unde anima, atque animi constet natura necessum est,” Lucr. 4, 120: “quare etiam nativa necessum est confiteare Haec eadem,” id. 5, 377. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The may and the must,” “Ichthyological necessity.”

need – H. P. Grice, “Need,” cf. D. Wiggins, “Need.” “What Toby needs” Grice was also interested in the modal use of ‘need’. “You need to do it.” “ ‘Need,’ like ‘ought’ takes ‘to.’” “It’s very Anglo-Saxon.” “Or, rather non-Indo-European substratum!” As it is attested only in Germanic, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic, it might be non-PIE, from a regional substrate language.

abdicatum: negation: H. P. Grice, “Negation.” the logical operation on propositions that is indicated, e.g., by the prefatory clause ‘It is not the case that . . .’. Negation is standardly distinguished sharply from the operation on predicates that is called complementation and that is indicated by the prefix ‘non-’. Because negation can also be indicated by the adverb ‘not’, a distinction is often drawn between external negation, which is indicated by attaching the prefatory ‘It is not the case that . . .’ to an assertion, and internal negation, which is indicated by inserting the adverb ‘not’ along with, perhaps, nature, right of negation 601    601 grammatically necessary words like ‘do’ or ‘does’ into the assertion in such a way as to indicate that the adverb ‘not’ modifies the verb. In a number of cases, the question arises as to whether external and internal negation yield logically equivalent results. For example, ‘It is not the case that Santa Claus exists’ would seem obviously to be true, whereas ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ seems to some philosophers to presuppose what it denies, on the ground that nothing could be truly asserted of Santa Claus unless he existed.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Negation and privation;” H. P. Grice, “Lectures on negation.”

Nemesius: Grecian philosopher. His treatise on the soul, On the Nature of Man, tr. from Grecian into Latin by Alphanus of Salerno and Burgundio of Pisa c.1160, was attributed to Gregory of Nyssa in the Middle Ages, and enjoyed some authority; the treatise rejects Plato for underplaying the unity of soul and body, and Aristotle for making the soul essentially corporeal. The soul is selfsubsistent, incorporeal, and by nature immortal, but naturally suited for union with the body. Nemesius draws on Ammonius Saccas and Porphyry, as well as analogy to the union of divine and human nature in Christ, to explain the incorruptible soul’s perfect union with the corruptible body. His review of the powers of the soul draws especially on Galen on the brain. His view that rational creatures possess free will in virtue of their rationality influenced Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus.

neo-Kantianism – as opposed to ‘palaeo-Kantianism’ -- the diverse Kantian movement that emerged within G. philosophy in the 1860s, gained a strong academic foothold in the 1870s, reached its height during the three decades prior to World War I, and disappeared with the rise of Nazism. The movement was initially focused on renewed study and elaboration of Kant’s epistemology in response to the growing epistemic authority of the natural sciences and as an alternative to both Hegelian and speculative idealism and the emerging materialism of, among others, Ludwig Büchner 182499. Later neo-Kantianism explored Kant’s whole philosophy, applied his critical method to disciplines other than the natural sciences, and developed its own philosophical systems. Some originators and/or early contributors were Kuno Fischer 18247, Hermann von Helmholtz 182, Friedrich Albert Lange 182875, Eduard Zeller 18148, and Otto Liebmann 18402, whose Kant und die Epigonen 1865 repeatedly stated what became a neoKantian motto, “Back to Kant!” Several forms of neo-Kantianism are to be distinguished. T. K. Oesterreich 09, in Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie “F.U.’s Compendium of the History of Philosophy,” 3, developed the standard, somewhat chronological, classification: 1 The physiological neo-Kantianism of Helmholtz and Lange, who claimed that physiology is “developed or corrected Kantianism.” 2 The metaphysical neo-Kantianism of the later Liebmann, who argued for a Kantian “critical metaphysics” beyond epistemology in the form of “hypotheses” about the essence of things. 3 The realist neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl 18444, who emphasized the real existence of Kant’s thing-in-itself. 4 The logistic-methodological neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen 18428 and Paul Natorp 18544. 5 The axiological neo-Kantianism of the Baden or Southwest G. School of Windelband 18485 and Heinrich Rickert 18636. 6 The relativistic neo-Kantianism of Georg Simmel 18588, who argued for Kantian categories relative to individuals and cultures. 7 The psychological neo-Kantianism of Leonard Nelson 27, originator of the Göttingen School; also known as the neo-Friesian School, after Jakob Friedrich Fries 17731843, Nelson’s self-proclaimed precursor. Like Fries, Nelson held that Kantian a priori principles cannot be transcendentally justified, but can be discovered only through introspection. Oesterreich’s classification has been narrowed or modified, partly because of conflicting views on how distinctly “Kantian” a philosopher must have been to be called “neo-Kantian.” The very term ‘neo-Kantianism’ has even been called into question, as suggesting real intellectual commonality where little or none is to be found. There is, however, growing consensus that Marneo-Euclidean geometry neo-Kantianism 603    603 burg and Baden neo-Kantianism were the most important and influential. Marburg School. Its founder, Cohen, developed its characteristic Kantian idealism of the natural sciences by arguing that physical objects are truly known only through the laws of these sciences and that these laws presuppose the application of Kantian a priori principles and concepts. Cohen elaborated this idealism by eliminating Kant’s dualism of sensibility and understanding, claiming that space and time are construction methods of “pure thought” rather than a priori forms of perception and that the notion of any “given” perceptual data prior to the “activity” of “pure thought” is meaningless. Accordingly, Cohen reformulated Kant’s thing-in-itself as the regulative idea that the mathematical description of the world can always be improved. Cohen also emphasized that “pure thought” refers not to individual consciousess  on his account Kant had not yet sufficiently left behind a “subjectobject” epistemology  but rather to the content of his own system of a priori principles, which he saw as subject to change with the progress of science. Just as Cohen held that epistemology must be based on the “fact of science,” he argued, in a decisive step beyond Kant, that ethics must transcendentally deduce both the moral law and the ideal moral subject from a humanistic science  more specifically, from jurisprudence’s notion of the legal person. This analysis led to the view that the moral law demands that all institutions, including economic enterprises, become democratic  so that they display unified wills and intentions as transcendental conditions of the legal person  and that all individuals become colegislators. Thus Cohen arrived at his frequently cited claim that Kant “is the true and real originator of G. socialism.” Other important Marburg Kantians were Cohen’s colleague Natorp, best known for his studies on Plato and philosophy of education, and their students Karl Vorländer 18608, who focused on Kantian socialist ethics as a corrective of orthodox Marxism, and Ernst Cassirer 18745. Baden School. The basic task of philosophy and its transcendental method is seen as identifying universal values that make possible culture in its varied expressions. This focus is evident in Windelband’s influential insight that the natural sciences seek to formulate general laws  nomothetic knowledge  while the historical sciences seek to describe unique events  idiographic knowledge. This distinction is based on the values interests of mastery of nature and understanding and reliving the unique past in order to affirm our individuality. Windelband’s view of the historical sciences as idiographic raised the problem of selection central to his successor Rickert’s writings: How can historians objectively determine which individual events are historically significant? Rickert argued that this selection must be based on the values that are generally recognized within the cultures under investigation, not on the values of historians themselves. Rickert also developed the transcendental argument that the objectivity of the historical sciences necessitates the assumption that the generally recognized values of different cultures approximate in various degrees universally valid values. This argument was rejected by Weber, whose methodological work was greatly indebted to Rickert. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Kantianism: old and new.”

Neo-platonism – as opposed to ‘palaeo-Platonism’ -- that period of Platonism following on the new impetus provided by the philosophical speculations of Plotinus A.D. 20469. It extends, as a minimum, to the closing of the Platonic School in Athens by Justinian in 529, but maximally through Byzantium, with such figures as Michael Psellus 101878 and Pletho c.13601452, the Renaissance Ficino, Pico, and the Florentine Academy, and the early modern period the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Taylor, to the advent of the “scientific” study of the works of Plato with Schleiermacher 17681834 at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term was formerly also used to characterize the whole period from the Old Academy of Plato’s immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, through what is now termed Middle Platonism c.80 B.C.A.D. 220, down to Plotinus. This account confines itself to the “minimum” interpretation. Neoplatonism proper may be divided into three main periods: that of Plotinus and his immediate followers third century; the “Syrian” School of Iamblichus and his followers fourth century; and the “Athenian” School begun by Plutarch of Athens, and including Syrianus, Proclus, and their successors, down to Damascius fifthsixth centuries. Plotinus and his school. Plotinus’s innovations in Platonism developed in his essays, the Enneads, collected and edited by his pupil Porphyry after his death, are mainly two: a above the traditional supreme principle of earlier Platonism and Aristotelianism, a self-thinking intellect, which was also regarded as true being, he postulated a principle superior to intellect and being, totally unitary and simple “the One”; b he saw reality as a series of levels One, Intelligence, Soul, each higher one outflowing or radiating into the next lower, while still remaining unaffected in itself, and the lower ones fixing themselves in being by somehow “reflecting back” upon their priors. This eternal process gives the universe its existence and character. Intelligence operates in a state of non-temporal simultaneity, holding within itself the “forms” of all things. Soul, in turn, generates time, and receives the forms into itself as “reason principles” logoi. Our physical three-dimensional world is the result of the lower aspect of Soul nature projecting itself upon a kind of negative field of force, which Plotinus calls “matter.” Matter has no positive existence, but is simply the receptacle for the unfolding of Soul in its lowest aspect, which projects the forms in three-dimensional space. Plotinus often speaks of matter as “evil” e.g. Enneads II.8, and of the Soul as suffering a “fall” e.g. Enneads V.1, 1, but in fact he sees the whole cosmic process as an inevitable result of the superabundant productivity of the One, and thus “the best of all possible worlds.” Plotinus was himself a mystic, but he arrived at his philosophical conclusions by perfectly logical means, and he had not much use for either traditional religion or any of the more recent superstitions. His immediate pupils, Amelius c.22590 and Porphyry 234c.305, while somewhat more hospitable to these, remained largely true to his philosophy though Amelius had a weakness for triadic elaborations in metaphysics. Porphyry was to have wide influence, both in the Latin West through such men as Marius Victorinus, Augustine, and Boethius, and in the Grecian East and even, through translations, on medieval Islam, as the founder of the Neoplatonic tradition of commentary on both Plato and Aristotle, but it is mainly as an expounder of Plotinus’s philosophy that he is known. He added little that is distinctive, though that little is currently becoming better appreciated. Iamblichus and the Syrian School. Iamblichus c.245325, descendant of an old Syrian noble family, was a pupil of Porphyry’s, but dissented from him on various important issues. He set up his own school in Apamea in Syria, and attracted many pupils. One chief point of dissent was the role of theurgy really just magic, with philosophical underpinnings, but not unlike Christian sacramental theology. Iamblichus claimed, as against Porphyry, that philosophical reasoning alone could not attain the highest degree of enlightenment, without the aid of theurgic rites, and his view on this was followed by all later Platonists. He also produced a metaphysical scheme far more elaborate than Plotinus’s, by a Scholastic filling in, normally with systems of triads, of gaps in the “chain of being” left by Plotinus’s more fluid and dynamic approach to philosophy. For instance, he postulated two Ones, one completely transcendent, the other the source of all creation, thus “resolving” a tension in Plotinus’s metaphysics. Iamblichus was also concerned to fit as many of the traditional gods as possible into his system, which later attracted the attention of the Emperor Julian, who based himself on Iamblichus when attempting to set up a Hellenic religion to rival Christianity, a project which, however, died with him in 363. The Athenian School. The precise links between the pupils of Iamblichus and Plutarch d.432, founder of the Athenian School, remain obscure, but the Athenians always retained a great respect for the Syrian. Plutarch himself is a dim figure, but Syrianus c.370437, though little of his writings survives, can be seen from constant references to him by his pupil Proclus 412 85 to be a major figure, and the source of most of Proclus’s metaphysical elaborations. The Athenians essentially developed and systematized further the doctrines of Iamblichus, creating new levels of divinity e.g. intelligibleintellectual gods, and “henads” in the realm of the One  though they rejected the two Ones, this process reaching its culmination in the thought of the last head of the Athenian Academy, Damascius c.456540. The drive to systematize reality and to objectivize concepts, exhibited most dramatically in Proclus’s Elements of Theology, is a lasting legacy of the later Neoplatonists, and had a significant influence on the thought, among others, of Hegel. Grice: “The implicaturum of ‘everything old is new again’ is that everything new is old again.” “It’s the older generation, knock-knock-knocking at the door!” -- Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Everything old is new again – and vice versa.”

neo-scholasticism: as opposed to palaeo-scholasticism – Grice: “The original name of Oxford was ‘studium generale’! The mascot was the ox!” --. the movement given impetus Neoplatonism, Islamic neo-Scholasticism 605    605 by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris 1879, which, while stressing Aquinas, was a general recommendation of the study of medieval Scholasticism as a source for the solution of vexing modern problems. Leo assumed that there was a doctrine common to Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Duns Scotus, and that Aquinas was a preeminent spokesman of the common view. Maurice De Wulf employed the phrase ‘perennial philosophy’ to designate this common medieval core as well as what of Scholasticism is relevant to later times. Historians like Mandonnet, Grabmann, and Gilson soon contested the idea that there was a single medieval doctrine and drew attention to the profound differences between the great medieval masters. The discussion of Christian philosophy precipitated by Brehier in 1 generated a variety of suggestions as to what medieval thinkers and later Christian philosophers have in common, but this was quite different from the assumption of Aeterni Patris. The pedagogical directives of this and later encyclicals brought about a revival of Thomism rather than of Scholasticism, generally in seminaries, ecclesiastical s, and Catholic universities. Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Cardinal Mercier and its Revue de Philosophie Néoscolastique were among the first fruits of the Thomistic revival. The studia generalia of the Dominican order continued at a new pace, the Saulchoir publishing the Revue thomiste. In graduate centers in Milan, Madrid, Latin America, Paris, and Rome, men were trained for the task of teaching in s and seminaries, and scholarly research began to flourish as well. The Leonine edition of the writings of Aquinas was soon joined by new critical editions of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as well as Albertus Magnus. Medieval studies in the broader sense gained from the quest for manuscripts and the growth of paleography and codicology. Besides the historians mentioned above, Jacques Maritain 23, a layman and convert to Catholicism, did much both in his native France and in the United States to promote the study of Aquinas. The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, with Gilson regularly and Maritain frequently in residence, became a source of  and  teachers in Canada and the United States, as Louvain and, in Rome, the Jesuit Gregorianum and the Dominican Angelicum already were. In the 0s s took doctorates in theology and philosophy at Laval in Quebec and soon the influence of Charles De Koninck was felt. Jesuits at St. Louis  began to publish The Modern Schoolman, Dominicans in Washington The Thomist, and the  Catholic Philosophical Association The New Scholasticism. The School of Philosophy at Catholic , long the primary domestic source of professors and scholars, was complemented by graduate programs at St. Louis, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and Marquette. In the golden period of the Thomistic revival in the United States, from the 0s until the end of the Vatican Council II in 5, there were varieties of Thomism based on the variety of views on the relation between philosophy and science. By the 0s Thomistic philosophy was a prominent part of the curriculum of all Catholic s and universities. By 0, it had all but disappeared under the mistaken notion that this was the intent of Vatican II. This had the effect of releasing Aquinas into the wider philosophical world. 

neo-Thomism – as opposed to palaeo-Thomism --, a philosophical-theological movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries manifesting a revival of interest in Aquinas. It was stimulated by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris 1879 calling for a renewed emphasis on the teaching of Thomistic principles to meet the intellectual and social challenges of modernity. The movement reached its peak in the 0s, though its influence continues to be seen in organizations such as the  Catholic Philosophical Association. Among its major figures are Joseph Kleutgen, Désiré Mercier, Joseph Maréchal, Pierre Rousselot, Réginald Garrigou-LaGrange, Martin Grabmann, M.-D. Chenu, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Yves R. Simon, Josef Pieper, Karl Rahner, Cornelio Fabro, Emerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, and W. Norris Clarke. Few, if any, of these figures have described themselves as NeoThomists; some explicitly rejected the designation. Neo-Thomists have little in common except their commitment to Aquinas and his relevance to the contemporary world. Their interest produced a more historically accurate understanding of Aquinas and his contribution to medieval thought Grabmann, Gilson, Chenu, including a previously ignored use of the Platonic metaphysics of participation Fabro. This richer understanding of Aquinas, as forging a creative synthesis in the midst of competing traditions, has made arguing for his relevance easier. Those Neo-Thomists who were suspicious of modernity produced fresh readings of Aquinas’s texts applied to contemporary problems Pieper, Gilson. Their influence can be seen in the revival of virtue theory and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Others sought to develop Aquinas’s thought with the aid of later Thomists Maritain, Simon and incorporated the interpretations of Counter-Reformation Thomists, such as Cajetan and Jean Poinsot, to produce more sophisticated, and controversial, accounts of the intelligence, intentionality, semiotics, and practical knowledge. Those Neo-Thomists willing to engage modern thought on its own terms interpreted modern philosophy sympathetically using the principles of Aquinas Maréchal, Lonergan, Clarke, seeking dialogue rather than confrontation. However, some readings of Aquinas are so thoroughly integrated into modern philosophy that they can seem assimilated Rahner, Coreth; their highly individualized metaphysics inspired as much by other philosophical influences, especially Heidegger, as Aquinas. Some of the labels currently used among Neo-Thomists suggest a division in the movement over critical, postKantian methodology. ‘Existential Thomism’ is used for those who emphasize both the real distinction between essence and existence and the role of the sensible in the mind’s first grasp of being. ‘Transcendental Thomism’ applies to figures like Maréchal, Rousselot, Rahner, and Coreth who rely upon the inherent dynamism of the mind toward the real, rooted in Aquinas’s theory of the active intellect, from which to deduce their metaphysics of being. 

“Academia Nova” – v. Grice, “Carneades at Rome, and the beginning of Western philosophy.” New Academy, the name given the Academy, the school founded by Plato in Athens, during the time it was controlled by Academic Skeptics. Its principal leaders in this period were Arcesilaus 315242 and Carneades; our most accessible source for the New Academy is Cicero’s Academica. A master of logical techniques such as sorites which he learned from Diodorus, Arcesilaus attempted to revive the dialectic of Plato, using it to achieve the suspension of belief he learned to value from Pyrrho. Later, and especially under the leadership of Carneades, the New Academy developed a special relationship with Stoicism: as the Stoics found new ways to defend their doctrine of the criterion, Carneades found new ways to refute it in the Stoics’ own terms. Carneades’ visit to Rome in 155 B.C. with a Stoic and a Peripatetic marks the beginning of Rome’s interest in Grecian philosophy. His anti-Stoic arguments were recorded by his successor Clitomachus d. c.110 B.C., whose work is known to us through summaries in Cicero. Clitomachus was succeeded by Philo of Larisa c.16079 B.C., who was the teacher of Antiochus of Ascalon c.130c.67 B.C.. Philo later attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy by softening the Skepticism of the New and by fostering a Skeptical reading of Plato. Angered by this, Antiochus broke away in about 87 B.C. to found what he called the Old Academy, which is now considered to be the beginning of Middle Platonism. Probably about the same time, Aenesidemus dates unknown revived the strict Skepticism of Pyrrho and founded the school that is known to us through the work of Sextus Empiricus. Academic Skepticism differed from Pyrrhonism in its sharp focus on Stoic positions, and possibly in allowing for a weak assent as opposed to belief, which they suspended in what is probable; and Pyrrhonians accused Academic Skeptics of being dogmatic in their rejection of the possibility of knowledge. The New Academy had a major influence on the development of modern philosophy, most conspicuously through Hume, who considered that his brand of mitigated skepticism belonged to this school. Grice: “Western philosophy begins with Carneades lecturing the rough Romans some philosophy; because Greece is EAST!” – Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The longitudinal history of philosophy from Carneades’s sojourn at Rome to my British Academy lecture at London.”

Newcomb’s paradox: a conflict, which Grice finds fascinating, between two widely accepted principles of rational decision, arising in the following decision problem, known as Newcomb’s problem. Two boxes are before you. The first contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. The second contains $1,000. You may take the first box alone or both boxes. Someone with uncanny foresight has predicted your choice and fixed the content of the first box according to his prediction. If he has predicted that you will take only the first box, he has put $1,000,000 in that box; and if he has predicted that you will take both boxes, he has left the first box empty. The expected utility of an option is commonly obtained by multiplying the utility of its possible outcomes by their probabilities given the option, and then adding the products. Because the predictor is reliable, the probability that you receive $1,000,000 given that you take only the first box is high, whereas the probability that you receive $1,001,000 given that you take both boxes is low. Accordingly, the expected utility of taking only the first box is greater than the expected utility of taking both boxes. Therefore the principle of maximizing expected utility says to take only the first box. However, the principle of dominance says that if the states determining the outcomes of options are causally independent of the options, and there is one option that is better than the others in each state, then you should adopt it. Since your choice does not causally influence the contents of the first box, and since choosing both boxes yields $1,000 in addition to the contents of the first box whatever they are, the principle says to take both boxes. Newcomb’s paradox is named after its formulator, William Newcomb. Nozick publicized it in “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” 9. Many theorists have responded to the paradox by changing the definition of the expected utility of an option so that it is sensitive to the causal influence of the option on the states that determine its outcome, but is insensitive to the evidential bearing of the option on those states. Refs: H. P. Grice, “Why I love Newcomb.”

Grice, “Oxford’s kindly light” -- Newman (“Lead Kindly light”) -- English prelate and philosopher of religion. As fellow at Oriel , Oxford, he was a prominent member of the Anglican Oxford Movement. He became a Roman Catholic in 1845, took holy orders in 1847, and was made a cardinal in 1879. His most important philosophical work is the Grammar of Assent 1870. Here Newman explored the difference between formal reasoning and the informal or natural movement of the mind in discerning the truth about the concrete and historical. Concrete reasoning in the mode of natural inference is implicit and unreflective; it deals not with general principles as such but with their employment in particular circumstances. Thus a scientist must judge whether the phenomenon he confronts is a novel significant datum, a coincidence, or merely an insignificant variation in the data. The acquired capacity to make judgments of this sort Newman called the illative sense, an intellectual skill shaped by experience and personal insight and generally limited for individuals to particular fields of endeavor. The illative sense makes possible a judgment of certitude about the matter considered, even though the formal argument that partially outlines the process possesses only objective probability for the novice. Hence probability is not necessarily opposed to certitude. In becoming aware of its tacit dimension, Newman spoke of recognizing a mode of informal inference. He distinguished such reasoning, which, by virtue of the illative sense, culminates in a judgment of certitude about the way things are real assent, from formal reasoning conditioned by the certainty or probability of the premises, which assents to the conclusion thus conditioned notional assent. In real assent, the proposition functions to “image” the reality, to make its reality present. In the Development of Christian Doctrine 1845, Newman analyzed the ways in which some ideas unfold themselves only through historical development, within a tradition of inquiry. He sought to delineate the common pattern of such development in politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Although his focal interest was in how religious doctrines develop, he emphasizes the general character of such a pattern of progressive articulation. H. P. Grice, “Oxford’s kindly light.”

New Realism – or neo-realism – as opposed to “palaeo-realism” -- an early twentieth-century revival, both in England and in the United States, of various forms of realism in reaction to the dominant idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. In America this revival took a cooperative form when six philosophers Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin published “A Program and First Platform of Six Realists” 0, followed two years later by the cooperative volume The New Realism, in which each authored an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘New Realists’ for these six philosophers. Although they clearly disagreed on many particulars, they concurred on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance. Procedurally they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems, and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively they agreed on several epistemological stances central to the refutation of idealism. Among the doctrines in the New Realist platform were the rejection of the fundamental character of epistemology; the view that the entities investigated in logic, mathematics, and science are not “mental” in any ordinary sense; the view that the things known are not the products of the knowing relation nor in any fundamental sense conditioned by their being known; and the view that the objects known are immediately and directly present to consciousness while being independent of that relation. New Realism was a version of direct realism, which viewed the notions of mediation and representation in knowledge as opening gambits on the slippery slope to idealism. Their refutation of idealism focused on pointing out the fallacy of moving from the truism that every object of knowledge is known to the claim that its being consists in its being known. That we are obviously at the center of what we know entails nothing about the nature of what we know. Perry dubbed this fact “the egocentric predicament,” and supplemented this observation with arguments to the effect that the objects of knowledge are in fact independent of the knowing relation. New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle “the facts of relativity,” i.e., error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. Dealing with these phenomena without invoking “mental intermediaries” proved to be the stumbling block, and New Realism soon gave way to a second cooperative venture by another group of  philosophers that came to be known as Critical Realism. The term ‘new realism’ is also occasionally used with regard to those British philosophers principal among them Moore and Russell similarly involved in refuting idealism. Although individually more significant than the  group, theirs was not a cooperative effort, so the group term came to have primarily an  referent. 

Newton, -- Grice: “His surname is a toponymic: it literally means ‘new-town,’ but it implicates, “FROM new-town.” – “We never knew what ‘old’ town Sir Isaac is implicating, possibly Oldton, in Cumbria.” -- English physicist and mathematician, one of the greatest scientists of all time. Born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, he attended Cambridge , receiving the B.A. in 1665; he became a fellow of Trinity in New Realism Newton, Sir Isaac 610    610 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1671 and served as its president from 1703 until his death. In 1696 he was appointed warden of the mint. In his later years he was involved in political and governmental affairs rather than in active scientific work. A sensitive, secretive person, he was prone to irascibility  most notably in a dispute with Leibniz over priority of invention of the calculus. His unparalleled scientific accomplishments overshadow a deep and sustained interest in ancient chronology, biblical study, theology, and alchemy. In his early twenties Newton’s genius asserted itself in an astonishing period of mathematical and experimental creativity. In the years 1664 67, he discovered the binomial theorem; the “method of fluxions” calculus; the principle of the composition of light; and fundamentals of his theory of universal gravitation. Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, appeared in 1687. This work sets forth the mathematical laws of physics and “the system of the world.” Its exposition is modeled on Euclidean geometry: propositions are demonstrated mathematically from definitions and mathematical axioms. The world system consists of material bodies masses composed of hard particles at rest or in motion and interacting according to three axioms or laws of motion: 1 Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. 2 The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and is made in the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed. [Here, the impressed force equals mass times the rate of change of velocity, i.e., acceleration. Hence the familiar formula, F % ma.] 3 To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual action of two bodies upon each other is always equal and directed to contrary parts. Newton’s general law of gravitation in modern restatement is: Every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force varying directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. The statement of the laws of motion is preceded by an equally famous scholium in which Newton enunciates the ultimate conditions of his universal system: absolute time, space, place, and motion. He speaks of these as independently existing “quantities” according to which true measurements of bodies and motions can be made as distinct from relative “sensible measures” and apparent observations. Newton seems to have thought that his system of mathematical principles presupposed and is validated by the absolute framework. The scholium has been the subject of much critical discussion. The main problem concerns the justification of the absolute framework. Newton commends adherence to experimental observation and induction for advancing scientific knowledge, and he rejects speculative hypotheses. But absolute time and space are not observable. In the scholium Newton did offer a renowned experiment using a rotating pail of water as evidence for distinguishing true and apparent motions and proof of absolute motion. It has been remarked that conflicting strains of a rationalism anticipating Kant and empiricism anticipating Hume are present in Newton’s conception of science. Some of these issues are also evident in Newton’s Optics 1704, especially the fourth edition, 1730, which includes a series of suggestive “Queries” on the nature of light, gravity, matter, scientific method, and God. The triumphant reception given to Newton’s Principia in England and on the Continent led to idealization of the man and his work. Thus Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. The term ‘Newtonian’, then, denoted the view of nature as a universal system of mathematical reason and order divinely created and administered. The metaphor of a “universal machine” was frequently applied. The view is central in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, inspiring a religion of reason and the scientific study of society and the human mind. More narrowly, ‘Newtonian’ suggests a reduction of any subject matter to an ontology of individual particles and the laws and basic terms of mechanics: mass, length, and time. 

Autrecourt, philosopher, unimaginatively born in Autrecourt, he was educated at Paris (“but I kept Autrecourt as my surname, Paris being so common” – “Letter to Matthew Parris” --) and earned bachelor’s degrees in theology and law and a master’s degree in arts. After a list of propositions from his writings was condemned in 1346, he was sentenced to burn his works publicly and recant, which he did in Paris the following year. He was appointed dean of Metz cathedral in 1350. Nicholas’s ecclesiastical troubles arose partly from nine letters two of which survive which reduce to absurdity the view that appearances provide a sufficient basis for certain and evident knowledge. On the contrary, except for “certitude of the faith,” we can be certain only of what is equivalent or reducible to the principle of noncontradiction. He accepts as a consequence of this that we can never validly infer the existence of one distinct thing from another, including the existence of substances from qualities, or causes from effects. Indeed, he finds that “in the whole of his natural philosophy and metaphysics, Aristotle had such [evident] certainty of scarcely two conclusions, and perhaps not even of one.” Nicholas devotes another work, the Exigit ordo executionis also known as The Universal Treatise, to an extended critique of Aristotelianism. It attacks what seemed to him the blind adherence given by his contemporaries to Aristotle and Averroes, showing that the opposite of many conclusions alleged to have been demonstrated by the Philosopher  e.g., on the divisibility of continua, the reality of motion, and the truth of appearances  are just as evident or apparent as those conclusions themselves. Because so few of his writings are extant, however, it is difficult to ascertain just what Nicholas’s own views were. Likewise, the reasons for his condemnation are not well understood, although recent studies have suggested that his troubles might have been due to a reaction to certain ideas that he appropriated from English theologians, such as Adam de Wodeham. Nicholas’s views elicited comment not only from church authorities, but also from other philosophers, including Buridan, Marsilius of Inghen, Albert of Saxony, and Nicholas of Oresme. Despite a few surface similarities, however, there is no evidence that his teachings on certainty or causality had any influence on modern philosophers, such as Descartes or Hume. 

Cusa – “Roman name for modern Kues, on the Moselle” – Grice.--  also called Nicolaus Cusanus, Nicholas Kryfts 140164, G. philosopher, an important Renaissance Platonist. Born in Kues on the Moselle, he earned a doctorate in canon law in 1423. He became known for his De concordantia catholica, written at the Council of Basel in 1432, a work defending the conciliarist position against the pope. Later, he decided that only the pope could provide unity for the church in its negotiations with the East, and allied himself with the papacy. In 143738, returning from a papal legation to Constantinople, he had his famous insight into the coincidence of opposites coincidentia oppositorum in the infinite, upon which his On Learned Ignorance is based. His unceasing labor was chiefly responsible for the Vienna Concordat with the Eastern church in 1448. He was made cardinal in 1449 as a reward for his efforts, and bishop of Brixen Bressanone in 1450. He traveled widely in G.y as a papal legate 145052 before settling down in his see. Cusa’s central insight was that all oppositions are united in their infinite measure, so that what would be logical contradictions for finite things coexist without contradiction in God, who is the measure of i.e., is the form or essence of all things, and identical to them inasmuch as he is identical with their reality, quiddity, or essence. Considered as it is contracted to the individual, a thing is only an image of its measure, not a reality in itself. His position drew on mathematical models, arguing, for instance, that an infinite straight line tangent to a circle is the measure of the curved circumference, since a circle of infinite diameter, containing all the being possible in a circle, would coincide with the tangent. In general, the measure of a thing must contain all the possible being of that sort of thing, and so is infinite, or unlimited, in its being. Cusa attacked Aristotelians for their unwillingness to give up the principle of non-contradiction. His epistemology is a form of Platonic skepticism. Our knowledge is never of reality, the infinite measure of things that is their essence, but only of finite images of reality corresponding to the finite copies with which we must deal. These images are constructed by our own minds, and do not represent an immediate grasp of any reality. Their highest form is found in mathematics, and it is only through mathematics that reason can understand the world. In relation to the infinite real, these images and the contracted realities they enable us to know have only an infinitesimal reality. Our knowledge is only a mass of conjectures, i.e., assertions that are true insofar as they capture some part of the truth, but never the whole truth, the infinite measure, as it really is in itself. Cusa was much read in the Renaissance, and is somethimes said to have had significant influence on G. thought of the eighteenth century, in particular on Leibniz, and G. idealism, but it is uncertain, despite the considerable intrinsic merit of his thought, if this is true. 

nietzsche: philosopher, born in Rocken. Like Grice’s, Nietzsche’s early education emphasized the two classical language. After a year at the  at Bonn he transferred to Leipzig, where he pursued classical studies. There he happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced his subsequent concerns and early philosophical thinking. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he was appointed professor at the Swiss  at Basel, before he had even received his doctorate, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four. A mere twenty years of productive life remained to him, ending with a mental and physical collapse in January 9, from which he never recovered. He held his position at Basel for a decade, resigning in 1879 owing to the deterioration of his health from illnesses he had contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. At Basel he lectured on a variety of subjects chiefly relating to classical studies, including Grecian and Roman philosophy as well as literature. During his early years there he also became intensely involved with the composer Richard Wagner; and his fascination with Wagner was reflected in several of his early works  most notably his first book, The Birth of Tragedy 1872, and his subsequent essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth 1876. His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner8, was both profound and painful to him. While at first regarding Wagner as a creative genius showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche came to see him and his art as epitomizing and exacerbating the fundamental problem with which he became increasingly concerned. This problem was the pervasive intellectual and cultural crisis Nietzsche later characterized in terms of the “death of God” and the advent of “nihilism.” Traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane, leaving a void that modern science could not fill, and endangering the health of civilization. The discovery of some life-affirming alternative to Schopenhauer’s radically pessimistic response to this disillusionment became Nietzsche’s primary concern. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the Grecians for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to renewed human flourishing for a humanity bereft both of the consolations of religious faith and of confidence in reason and science as substitutes for it. In his subsequent series of Untimely Meditations 187376 he expanded upon his theme of the need to reorient human thought and endeavor to this end, and criticized a variety of tendencies detrimental to it that he discerned among his contemporaries. Both the deterioration of Nietzsche’s health and the shift of his interest away from his original discipline prevented retention of his position at Basel. In the first years after his retirement, he completed his transition from philologist to philosopher and published the several parts of Human, All-Too-Human 187890, Daybreak 1, and the first four parts of The Gay Science 2. These aphoristic writings sharpened and extended his analytical and critical assessment of various human tendencies and social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. During this period his thinking became much more sophisticated; and he developed the philosophical styles and concerns that found mature expression in the writings of the final years of his brief active life, following the publication of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra 385. These last remarkably productive years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil 6, a fifth part of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals 7, The Case of Wagner 8, and a series of prefaces to his earlier works 687, as well as the completion of several books published after his collapse  Twilight of the Idols 9, The Antichrist 5, and Ecce Homo 8. He was also amassing a great deal of material in notebooks, of which a selection was later published under the title The Will to Power. The status and significance of this mass of Nachlass material are matters of continuing controversy. In the early 0s, when he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility  and with it, of value and meaning  that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interpretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the “God hypothesis,” and indeed of all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such “lies” and “fictions.” He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism. What Nietzsche called “the death of God” was both a cultural event  the waning and impending demise of the “Christian-moral” interpretation of life and the world  and also a philosophical development: the abandonment of anything like the God-hypothesis all demidivine absolutes included. As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern; for he feared a “nihilistic rebound” in its wake, and worried about the consequences for human life and culture if no countermovement to it were forthcoming. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, which he took to call for a radical reconsideration of everything from life and the world and human existence and knowledge to value and morality. The “de-deification of nature,” the “translation of man back into nature,” the “revaluation of values,” the tracing of the “genealogy of morals” and their critique, and the elaboration of “naturalistic” accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire “spiritual” nature thus came to be his main tasks. His published and unpublished writings contain a wealth of remarks, observations, and suggestions contributing importantly to them. It is a matter of controversy, even among those with a high regard for Nietzsche, whether he tried to work out positions on issues bearing any resemblance to those occupying other philosophers before and after him in the mainstream of the history of philosophy. He was harshly critical of most of his predecessors and contemporaries; and he broke fundamentally with them and their basic ideas and procedures. His own writings, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of most other philosophers. Those he himself published as well as his reflections in his notebooks do not systematically set out and develop views. Rather, they consist for the most part in collections of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely if at all connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways; and because his remarks about these topics are scattered through many different works, they are all too easily taken in isolation and misunderstood. On some topics, moreover, much of what he wrote is found only in his very rough notebooks, which he filled with thoughts without indicating the extent of his reflected commitment to them. His language, furthermore, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, sharply critical, and highly metaphorical; and he seldom indicates clearly the scope of his claims and what he means by his terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him and to take him seriously  and that some have taken him to repudiate altogether the traditional philosophical enterprise of seeking reasoned conclusions with respect to questions of the kind with which philosophers have long been concerned, heralding the “death” not only of religious and metaphysical thinking, but also of philosophy itself. Others read him very differently, as having sought to effect a fundamental reorientation of philosophical thinking, and to indicate by both precept and example how philosophical inquiry might better be pursued. Those who regard Nietzsche in the former way take his criticisms of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries to apply to any attempt to address such matters. They seize upon and construe some of his more sweeping negative pronouncements on truth and knowledge as indicating that he believed we can only produce fictions and merely expedient or possibly creative perspectival expressions of our needs and desires, as groups or as individuals. They thus take him as a radical nihilist, concerned to subvert the entire philosophical enterprise and replace it with a kind of thinking more akin to the literary exploration of human possibilities in the service of life  a kind of artistic play liberated from concern with truth and knowledge. Those who view him in the latter way, on the other hand, take seriously his concern to find a way of overcoming the nihilism he believed to result from traditional ways of thinking; his retention of recast notions of truth and knowledge; and his evident concern  especially in his later writings  to contribute to the comprehension of a broad range of phenomena. This way of understanding him, like the former, remains controversial; but it permits an interpretation of his writings that is philosophically more fruitful. Nietzsche indisputably insisted upon the interpretive character of all human thought; and he called for “new philosophers” who would follow him in engaging in more self-conscious and intellectually responsible attempts to assess and improve upon prevailing interpretations of human life. He also was deeply concerned with how these matters might better be evaluated, and with the values by which human beings live and might better do so. Thus he made much of the need for a revaluation of all received values, and for attention to the problems of the nature, status, and standards of value and evaluation. One form of inquiry he took to be of great utility in connection with both of these tasks is genealogical inquiry into the conditions under which various modes of interpretation and evaluation have arisen. It is only one of the kinds of inquiry he considered necessary in both cases, however, serving merely to prepare for others that must be brought to bear before any conclusions are warranted. Nietzsche further emphasized the perspectival character of all thinking and the merely provisional character of all knowing, rejecting the idea of the very possibility of absolute knowledge transcending all perspectives. However, because he also rejected the idea that things and values have absolute existence “in themselves” apart from the relations in which he supposes their reality to consist, he held that, if viewed in the multiplicity of perspectives from which various of these relations come to light, they admit of a significant measure of comprehension. This perspectivism thus does not exclude the possibility of any sort of knowledge deserving of the name, but rather indicates how it is to be conceived and achieved. His kind of philosophy, which he characterizes as fröhliche Wissenschaft cheerful science, proceeds by way of a variety of such “perspectival” approaches to the various matters with which he deals. Thus for Nietzsche there is no “truth” in the sense of the correspondence of anything we might think or say to “being,” and indeed no “true world of being” to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no “knowledge” conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all  even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part  that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain. But that is not the end of the matter. There are, e.g., ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to differing sorts of interest and practice, not only within the context of social life but also in our dealings with our environing world. Nietzsche’s reflections on the reconceptualization of truth and knowledge thus point in the direction of a naturalistic epistemology that he would have replace the conceptions of truth and knowledge of his predecessors, and fill the nihilistic void seemingly left by their bankruptcy. There is, moreover, a good deal about ourselves and our world that he became convinced we can comprehend. Our comprehension may be restricted to what life and the world show themselves to be and involve in our experience; but if they are the only kind of reality, there is no longer any reason to divorce the notions of truth, knowledge, and value from them. The question then becomes how best to interpret and assess what we find as we proceed to explore them. It is to these tasks of interpretation and “revaluation” that Nietzsche devoted his main efforts in his later writings. In speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche had in mind not only the abandonment of the Godhypothesis which he considered to be utterly “unworthy of belief,” owing its invention and appeal entirely to naïveté, error, all-too-human need, and ulterior motivation, but also the demise of all metaphysical substitutes for it. He likewise criticized and rejected the related postulations of substantial “souls” and self-contained “things,” taking both notions to be ontological fictions merely reflecting our artificial though convenient linguistic-conceptual shorthand for functionally unitary products, processes, and sets of relations. In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and interpretations, he conceived the world in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end. It ceaselessly organizes and reorganizes itself, as the fundamental disposition he called will to power gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships. “This world is the will to power  and nothing besides,” he wrote; “and you yourselves are also this will to power  and nothing besides!” Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return or eternal recurrence underscores this conception of a world without beginning or end, in which things happen repeatedly in the way they always have. He first introduced this idea as a test of one’s ability to affirm one’s own life and the general character of life in this world as they are, without reservation, qualification, or appeal to anything transcending them. He later entertained the thought that all events might actually recur eternally in exactly the same sequence, and experimented in his unpublished writings with arguments to this effect. For the most part, however, he restricted himself to less problematic uses of the idea that do not presuppose its literal truth in this radical form. His rhetorical embellishments and experimental elaborations of the idea may have been intended to make it more vivid and compelling; but he employed it chiefly to depict his conception of the radically non-linear character of events in this world and their fundamental homogeneity, and to provide a way of testing our ability to live with it. If we are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it even on the supposition that it will only be the same sequence of events repeated eternally, we have what it takes to endure and flourish in the kind of world in which Nietzsche believed we find ourselves in the aftermath of disillusionment. Nietzsche construed human nature and existence naturalistically, in terms of the will to power and its ramifications in the establishment and expression of the kinds of complex systems of dynamic quanta in which human beings consist. “The soul is only a word for something about the body,” he has Zarathustra say; and the body is fundamentally a configuration of natural forces and processes. At the same time, he insisted on the importance of social arrangements and interactions in the development of human forms of awareness and activity. He also emphasized the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the level of the general human rule. So he stressed the difference between “higher men” and “the herd,” and through Zarathustra proclaimed the Übermensch ‘overman’ or ‘superman’ to be “the meaning of the earth,” employing this image to convey the ideal of the overcoming of the “all-too-human” and the fullest possible creative “enhancement of life.” Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by stressing our animality, he sought to direct our efforts to the emergence of a “higher humanity” capable of endowing existence with a human redemption and justification, above all through the enrichment of cultural life. Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath of the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused a “Dionysian value-standard” in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of will to power, Nietzsche framed this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundamental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of a kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the “enhancement of life” and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory. This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed “in the perspective of life,” he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between “master” and “slave” moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as a “herd-animal morality,” well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality as a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger. He further suggested the desirability of a “higher morality” for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic “slave/herd morality” categories of “good and evil” would be replaced by categories more akin to the “good and bad” contrast characteristic of “master morality,” with a revised and variable content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve. The strongly creative flavor of Nietzsche’s notions of such a “higher humanity” and associated “higher morality” reflects his linkage of both to his conception of art, to which he attached great importance. Art, for Nietzsche, is fundamentally creative rather than cognitive, serving to prepare for the emergence of a sensi   616 bility and manner of life reflecting the highest potentiality of human beings. Art, as the creative transformation of the world as we find it and of ourselves thereby on a small scale and in particular media, affords a glimpse of a kind of life that would be lived more fully in this manner, and constitutes a step toward emergence. In this way, Nietzsche’s mature thought thus expands upon the idea of the basic connection between art and the justification of life that was his general theme in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. H. P. Grice, “The mock turtle: Greek and Latin.”